Business Brainstorm: AG1 For Dogs, Sexy Sweaty Startups & Luxury Newsletters

0:00And I'm really obsessed with these types of opportunities because it's easy to get press. like you can see the headlines now idiot creates water brand for dogs I can see it now

0:18yeah great headline formerly respected individual Greg Eisenberg disgraces himself with good water

0:31I feel like I can rule the world I know I can be what I want to I put my all in it like my days off. All right, we're live, son. What do we got? What's up? Greg is here, friend of the house. One of the original, one of the original friends of the house. You said something on an earlier pod that has always stuck with me. You were talking about, I think, names. You had your iPhone out and you were on the Notes app and you go, I just got banger names for businesses that don't have a business yet with them. And you were just spitting off names and one of the formats was anything with the word bueno at the end.

1:09And I can't tell you how many times I've used this when somebody's asking me about a name and they're like, yeah, we do medical imaging scans. I'm like, scan bueno. And they're like, what? And they never pick it, but goddamn if it doesn't break the ice. Greg, welcome. And do you still have that note with all those names? I've got all the names. I've also got, I don't know, 150 startup ideas in a note file. but before I started I got to get something off my chest I got to be real with you all right what we got producer Ari you stole my producer did we we don't know about this yeah fill me in yes so all of a sudden you guys send me a text and you go what do you think about Ari as a producer I see you work with him with her and I go she's amazing she's the best you know there's nothing wrong, nothing wrong about her.

2:04And then all of a sudden, I'm getting a text from Ari being like, dude, thank you so much. Thank you so much. I've just got the craziest job at my first billion. If I ever call you for a reference check, just know it's Mr. Steel, your girl coming at you right there. I thought she worked on it in the past. I thought that was over. Yeah, that's what I thought too. I thought there was an end date. It's okay. Is it? It happens. it happens is it okay it's not okay well uh sorry and thank you okay moving on from that one um greg you uh people should know what you do you have late checkout which is badass you get one of the best websites um of any like i don't know company you make really amazing landing pages uh so you have late checkout which is combination studio agency see how do you describe it holding company building businesses that have audiences and communities part of them and you are kind of becoming this like greg the community guy i feel like that was like a phase of your life is that still the phase we're in are we are we is this making fetch a thing or is a did it stick did the greg the community guy happen or what's going on with that i think so man i think so um i feel like if other people are calling you that it's a thing.

3:27If you start calling yourself the community guy and you're just, you know, so yeah, it's definitely working. I feel like that's a mistake I've made many times, trying to call myself the guy. Even actually today, I was thinking about Gary V. I was thinking about one of my favorite YouTubers, Cody Co. And I was like, why am I not Sean P? What is Puri doing for me? I gotta drop the rest of the last name. I just need to be Sean P. And I really wrote a note to myself. I said, go all in on Sean P. No, that's stupid. No. We're workshopping it still. You've got a weird enough first name. S-H-A-A-N. I think you're good.

4:05You're good. The only reason why Sam is saying that. Yeah, jealous? That he's, well, no, you know Sam. He wants to be Sam P. No. He wants to be Sam P. Come on. No, man, I'm happy. I've got a two-syllable first and last name. I'm good. I don't need a nickname. When it's that short, you're good. Sean Bueno? Dude, great. LateCheckout.studio. I hate your website. It's such a designer website. I can't click anything. I got to scroll around a map in order to find what you do. What's going on, man? Yeah, I think there's two ways to create a website. One is to be conversion-centric, convert as many people as possible.

4:47The other way is you're building a brand. and this is unlike any other website on the internet, I think. So you'd be surprised how many million dollar deals we've been able to close because people like our website. You've done something that I think a lot of people were trying to do, but you've done it well. So let's talk about this kind of personal hold co. Because you went the venture path. When I met you, you were raising money from all the big name VCs. You were building a social network. We were both playing that, it's not even a lottery ticket game. The analogy I give is somebody handed us a bottle or we picked up a bottle and started running around trying to catch lightning.

5:29And that was our stated game plan. It was like, ah, yes, I shall create the next hit social network now on demand, which is not how any of them got really built in the first place. So you played the VC game. You have backed off of it. Give us your kind of two-second philosophy on how your mindset changed going from Silicon Valley, Venture Path, to what you do now. There was a group of us now in our 30s who watched The Social Network, that movie, and we all thought that we could become Mark Zuckerberg, if we're being honest with ourselves. I mean, I would have been happy with Winklevoss, too. But like, yeah, I wanted to be Zuck, yes.

6:07We saw that movie. It jazzed us up. there was a whole generation of us who moved to Silicon Valley to go and raise a bunch of money to build social apps. And, you know, we tried. We tried. And the truth is, it's, you know, I remember meeting one of the world's best investors and he once told me that a third of our deals fail, a third of our deals, we get our money back. And a third of our deals, we make 1x to Google Times. So that got me thinking that what he's basically saying is that the best founders in the world, because he's only backing the best founders, two thirds of them, basically, the founders and their teams don't see any money from acquisitions.

6:53That means a third of companies are basically seeing any profit. It's just so difficult to win in that game. and yeah so that's why i've been focusing more on profitable cash flowing businesses are you making more money now doing the cash flow thing versus when you sold your company absolutely yes absolutely yeah do you like your life better yeah and do you do you have a goal like uh like cash flow goal you're like okay my goal is to get to 10 million in cash flow or whatever like is that how you were thinking about is that the game that you're currently playing no the game i'm playing is i'm playing for style points baby

7:35what does that mean is there anything else to say no that explains everything next question what is what's the style point we were talking about when sam was uh working at hubspot he was like i'm an artist baby i think that's what greg's talking about when he talks about style points the other part of StylePoints is like the lifestyle so in Silicon Valley this idea of a lifestyle business is like a it's a backhanded compliment so it's a way for people in Silicon Valley to pat you on the head and be like that's cute that's a cute business good for you that's swell but like to me I'm like that's crazy the point of these businesses is to give myself and my team awesome lifestyles like what else are you what are you trying to do if not that i didn't i don't even understand and so i feel like one of the kind of arbitrages right now is in especially if you're from the tech industry is the whole tech industry is so brainwashed that it's all about creating multi-billion dollar companies that um a lot of people who would actually be super happy if they created a lifestyle business that gave them two and a half million dollars a year of cash flow um won't ever go that path because it's seen as kind of this like lesser, lesser thing to do.

8:50We all have friends who do that. You know, I tease or we tease them on air, Andrew Wilkinson for doing that. But you know, what was funny is, do you guys see Chamath from All In? So Chamath for the listener, I would assume he's a billionaire. If he's not a billionaire, many, many hundreds of millions. Very, very, very wealthy. The other day he announced that he was starting a paid newsletter and I think it was$100 a year. and what's funny is there's two things that I've found to be true is I've talked to someone who says they don't want to be public and then they get on Twitter or they get on YouTube or something and they taste that dopamine and they go ooh this is nice I'm gonna do this again and they love even though the people who are like oh I can't do it I don't want to do it I don't want to be a public eye they get in the public eye and they love it the second thing I've noticed is even people who have big companies that are maybe venture backed companies and there's a very likely outcome where wildly wealthy, even making$50 ,000,$100 ,000 a month, that can be addicting.

9:49I wonder what Chamas plays with that, but he has a paid newsletter now. Even worse, he's like, yeah, we're going to have it be paid, and so that's really cool because the revenue from that, it makes this whole thing sustainable. We can use it to hire more researchers and do better research. It's like, hey, why don't you take the 0.1 % interest on your savings account that you have with JP Morgan right now and use that to pay for seven researchers. It's fine, actually. It's crazy to me that people say, what's the point of fucking money if you don't say fuck you? What's the point of being a billionaire if you're going to do a paid newsletter?

10:29What is happening right now? The point is, it's addicting. My point being is where a lot of people who would make fun of lifestyle businesses once, and I was that person, I was like, I want to go big, and then I started tasting a monthly income that's good. I'm like, oh, this is awesome. I was texting Andrew Wilkinson, making fun of him too, because he was doing a paid Twitter subscriber thing. And I was like, dog, you have a foundation. You're signing the giving pledge. What do you care about this 10K a month subscriber revenue that you now have to go tap dance for to perform and give them their value?

11:09But it hits for him. There's something to it. that's giving him that value. I couldn't believe it to the point where I told him, I was like, the only explanation for this that makes any sense to me is you're using the Twitter paid features so that Elon is like, see, this guy's doing it. And he starts retweeting you because you're promoting his thing that he's trying to make work. And then you end up becoming friends with Elon Musk. I said, that's the only reasonable explanation for this. And he denied it. He denied it. I actually get Andrew doing his premium X thing a little bit more because he's having interaction with his fans.

11:47But the Chama thing around putting up gated content makes absolutely no sense. Greg, did you have any other ideas or niche businesses you wanted to get off your chest? Let's just rapid fire. All right. Give us one. This one's a happy idea. So it's a crazy one, but a happy one. it's listen to me now athletic greens for dogs okay okay keep going go on ag1 athletic greens came out of nowhere started sponsoring all these podcasts youtubers uh and i don't know if they're what do you think their revenue is sam 600 million 500 million i think they kill it but i'll do the homie move and say 100 million yeah okay more than 100 million they're they're really really crushing it using that model now dogs are similar to humans in the sense that they drink water they drink tap water and the question is what if dogs drank something that was better from them better for them than plain old water okay so uh here's the playbook you find the andrew huberman for dogs you sponsor every top dog creator and animals lover podcast you give packets to to restaurants and and bowls that say this brand for their dogs and then you profit the name we call it the name we call it good water and our slogan we do good dogs deserve good water now we have to figure out what we can put in the water so that it actually is better than water itself but this is a good example of how do you create a category of one how do you build something where you're building something where no one else is playing and I'm really obsessed with these types of opportunities because it's easy to get press like you can see the headlines now idiot creates water brand for dogs I can see it now

14:06great headline formerly respected individual Greg Eisenberg disgraces himself with good water yeah go bend there Sean P says it's really better than water I swear is Gatorade for dogs the next great thing yeah like

14:30this is some stupid shit Greg we're gonna good water more like bad idea this sounds like something uh misfits or what's that called what's that what's that company called that mischief I gotta tell you when Craig Clemens came on the pod one time many years ago and he was like guys uh we're like what ideas you got he's like vr for dogs and this is the guy who's made like 10 hit products so he's not like some one hit wonder he's got 10 he's had 10 great ideas and on our pod he comes on and says vr for dogs and both of me and you were like we didn't know him that well to be like roast him like we just did greg but we were like tell us more um but you know we were not in on it but then i swear every time i leave that because he was like look he's like i would pay anything if my dog could be entertained when they're alone like or just you I just don't want them to be bored.

15:15And now I swear every time I leave the house and my dog's sitting there just going to stare at a wall and I'm like, I bet your ass I'd strap on a pair of Oculus for dog goggles if it actually kept my dog entertained. So I think he was right in spirit. Great. I want to talk to you about some of these ideas because the first one you talk about Ryan Holiday, who's been on the pod, he's my buddy, I'm a huge fan of. and you seem like you're in a spicy mood. I'm always in a spicy mood. I just want to put that out there. The record is set. The record is set. Okay. Yeah, let's talk about the first idea.

15:56So Ryan Holiday, incredible, incredible guy. He's built such a huge brand around stoicism. Stoicism was basically the dead unless you were studying philosophy at Columbia. these people like Seneca, Aristotle. Maybe you'd see quotes here and there, but it was basically dead. And what he did is he introduced Stoicism, the great name, by the way, Daily Stoic, to millions of Gen Z and millennials. So I think that there's an opportunity to do exactly what Ryan Holiday did, but in the fable space. So do you remember Aesop? Aesop Fables? No, what is that? Okay, so Aesop is just one of the most well-known storytellers of all time.

16:54Of humanity. He did the tortoise and the hare or the wolf in sheep's clothing. So it's basically these little stories that use animals to tell you know the moral of the story and it's got a lot of great stuff in there just like uh seneca had a lot of great stuff in there so um i think that if you you know got the handle the daily fabler uh and you started telling these incredible stories and quotes from it uh you can build an audience really quickly through that um and similar to how ryan holiday you know Ryan Holiday for those who don't know monetized via courses but he also monetized via his book but he also my favorite part of how he monetizes is he literally sells it's a coin he calls it a medallion so he's got this medallion called Memento Mori hey I have one okay why did you get one because he gave it to me and I thought it was awesome but I do think it's cool I carried it around with me for years I thought it was cool I forget what is moment it means uh like you're going to die or like live the day or something like that yeah it basically means uh like seize the day right like you're gonna die and if you know you're gonna die and you're and you're facing mortality then it's greek for yolo yeah it's greek for yolo memento mori is greek for yolo so that's a and people pay 30 for this and i'm sure that he's making millions of dollars selling coins to his audiences via Twitter, TikTok, and Instagram and YouTube.

18:39It's the same model, but for fables. He told us this on the pod and it blew my mind. He came on and he was like, yeah, I sell this coin. It's like, you know, cost me whatever. I don't know what it was, but like, you know, let's call it a dollar. Just be generous. Assume this coin costs a dollar. He partnered with this mint in the US. They mint the coin. he sends it and he's like yeah you know I've sold shirts before I think he worked at American Apparel he was like the head of marketing at American Apparel he's like you know apparel sucks merch sucks shirts t-shirts suck because there's so many sizes and colors he's like there's one skew it's one coin I sell it in a two pack I sell it in a two pack it ships in an envelope because it's the lightest weight thing so like shipping is easy making it is easy selling it is easy because it's a single SKU product.

19:30He's like, it was the low headache way to have a merch store for stoicism. And I was like, this guy's genius. I remember, I don't know if he told us or I was doing some math when I was thinking about it. I'm pretty sure he's made over$20 million just selling this coin. I think on the pod, he said he's sold tens of thousands of coins. Yeah, and then if you do the math, it's like, whatever. I think that, you know,$20 a coin or something like that. Yeah, I mean, he told us and he's killing it. But what did you say here? You said, it's harder to be Seneca than it is Sahil Bloom. It's harder to be Aristotle than Alex Hermosi.

20:04Yeah. So there's a bunch of tailwinds with this business. So first of all, creating content is way more difficult than curating content and distilling content. And I want people to know that because there's a ton of businesses that you can create where you don't need to come up with any original ideas. You can just curate amazing ideas that other people will have. Hey, you're talking to two of the guys that did that. The Hustle did that. Milk Row did that. Exactly. It's way easier to get your own podcast producer than to steal your podcast producer. You know what I'm saying? Also, my newsletter, The Five Tweet Tuesday, it's the highest rated newsletter I've ever made.

20:45It's high open rate. get the most feedback on it. And it's also the easiest thing because I'm just curating five of the most interesting tweets versus trying to create my own original blog post every Tuesday. So yeah, it is easier to be Sahil Bloom than Seneca. And it is easier to be Alex Ramosi than Aristotle because they could just take other people's concepts and curate it. So this Daily Fable idea has that tailwind with it. And it's got a few more tailwinds to it. Another one is that Gen Z basically doesn't believe in God. Almost 50 % of Gen Z is either unaffiliated with any religion or does not believe in God.

21:31But they seek out, it's just human nature to seek out some greater meaning and purpose in life. So that's why they're filling their time with daily stoic and could fill their time with, you know, something like the daily fable. And this is what I call like the unbundling of religion. What is this pink pinks thing? Pink. So pinks, someone I work with, a partner of mine, Jordan, he, you know, he's rolling around Austin and he sees this pink truck outside a house. and outside this pink truck is these men you know with mustaches and mullets uh with these pink shirts tucked in you know he's thinking to himself is this a porno shoot like what is the what is going on over here and then he sees this logo pinks pinks window cleaning and he he finds out that it's a new window cleaning service based in Austin.

22:42And it's actually a franchise business. And if you go to their website, thinkswindows.com, they basically, you know, they've got this boring business, window washing, and they jazzed it up. And they even have like a merch store where they've apparently sold thousands and thousands of hats. Oh my God. Look, I was at dinner the other night and Bar Shop is wearing this hat and I look at it and I go, I think I even said, I go, what's this? There's something cool. What is this? I know you're doing something cool. What is this? Because Bar Shop is one of these guys that like, he knows the indie bands.

23:21He knows the cool restaurant to eat at. He knows cool shit. And so he's like, because I'm like, why else would he be wearing a window washing hat? this makes no sense and he's like ah it's this brand called pinks they're really cool i'm like they're cool window washing how do you even like compared to what i can tell you one window washing brand let alone the coolest one and he's like yeah i'm like so you bought the hat he's like i bought the hat style points baby and that was the that was the end of that story i went back home and i ordered a pinks hat because i was like if it's cool then i will be the follower and and try to do it too so this is a part of a bigger trend which is that i think this is kind of like the uh dollar shave clubification of boring businesses so i think a lot of people younger people are going to be buying some of these businesses you know boomers are retiring you know the story there but i think what they're going to do is they're going to make it feel like an indie band.

24:23You remember the Dollar Shave Club video, right? It was funny. Yeah, it took something boring, razors, shaving, Gillette, and made it super cool and fun and that's what Pink's is doing. That's actually super smart because that actually kicked off a huge wave of DTC brands. Sam always jokes, Sam, what's your joke about DTC brands? How do you know a DTC brand when you see one? Well, because they it's always lowercase it's the same font they always use millennial pink yeah exactly so Dollar Shave Club kicked off this wave of DDC brands from Casper, Away Luggage just one after another there's hundreds of them at this point which was basically like take boring category do best in class kind of branding around it, put a shit ton of money into or creative effort into the branding and then sell that kind of commodity product online.

25:26And what you're saying is people are now going to do that for these sweaty startup businesses. So instead of doing the boring, like if you go look at self-storage or U-Haul, these are some of the worst looking brands you'll ever see. And maybe instead of the lowercase block letter font with that millennial pink, maybe it's this like vintage retro indie band look that's going to become the like the go-to thing for window washing trash haul removal um you know hvac all this stuff that is that what you're saying because i think that's actually kind of brilliant yeah i'm gonna call my shot here and say that pinks is the beginning of this whole new generation over the next five to ten years you're going to see pinks for x uh you're going to see pinks for uh lawn care pest control car wash catering pet grooming uh snow removal and i think it'll it doesn't necessarily need to be like nostalgia bus design but it could also be just it's just different interesting and unexpected.

26:36So the guy, it looks like the brand behind Pinks is called Resi Brands. It looks like they own three or four things. They own one called Garage Up, which is like making your garage look cool and clean. Then there's Pinks, then there's that one painter. And then if you Google it, you can find the guy who owns it is this guy named Steven Montgomery. And he's young. He's young with like sleeve tattoos. He looks maybe 30. He looks like a kid. It's pretty fascinating. this is a really interesting find do you know what their revenue is for Resi Brands? is it going well? first of all he is young I think he graduated college like five or six years ago Resi Brands started recently and within the last couple years and their painting brand that one painter is the fastest growing painting company in the United States so this is a model that's starting to work and if I'm like a PE fund.

27:33This is what I'm doing. I'm basically acquiring boring businesses. I'm hiring an agency like Late Checkout. And I'm building brands, not boring businesses. He's like, I'm joining Hampton. Then I'll find some talent on Shepard.

27:56I used to be close with Brian, the guy who started 1-800-GOT-JUNK. And he was telling me all about franchises. And so 1-800-GOT-JUNK was its own thing. He started with just one truck and grew it. And I think now he owns 100 % of it. It does like$200 or$300 million in revenue, a really valuable business. But he was telling me that they took off when they did franchises. That's when they really started kicking ass. But dealing and working with franchise owners, he said... I don't know if he said it or a CEO Cameron. He was like, it's very, very, very hard. And I think it's sort of like the agency business where you're like, Oh, it looks so simple.

28:37You just do this, you do that. But doing it every single day, I think is a huge challenge. It's almost like working in the restaurant industry. You know, your server won't show up because they're hungover or you got to deal with fights every once in a while. I think it has a similar type of headache. You know what I mean? It's probably hard to manage. And yeah, I want to be clear on this. Pink's is actually now it started as one location in Austin and now they're you could franchise your own pinks like if you want to bring one to New York or wherever so they basically charge a 2 % marketing fee a 7 % royalty fee and a franchise fee of at least$49 ,000 I think it's$49 ,000 to$100 ,000 and they actually share some of their revenue numbers so for their one of their Austin locations they've got seven employees they're doing 742 ,000 in revenue and they're making 36 % profit on that so$268 ,000 so it's a pretty good business and yeah you're right that it's a pain to manage some of those employees but there's something here I gotta say the disclaimer we don't know if this is a great business it's not advice and also you know franchise headquarters tend to share the numbers of the best performing thing, not the average or the medium.

30:01Because we talked about a business that has a franchise, and I was like, oh, this is a cool idea. I think this thing, just looking at the traffic, it looked like it might have... Here's a guess at how much it was making, and then their franchise calendar got booked out. The meetings got booked out for four months after the pod came out. So definitely can't say... I personally don't endorse this. maybe Greg is, but I personally do not. It's not my first million sponsored. Okay, so what I was going to say on Pink's is I didn't know anything about franchises until, like any internet entrepreneur, I didn't know anything about franchises until going down the Pink's rabbit hole.

30:40And I didn't realize that franchises are regulated by a franchise board. So that's also just an interesting thing to know about if you want to do a franchise you have to go to these portals you have to apply there's only certain uh information that they can disclose so i found that quite interesting and then the other thing interesting thing um that got me thinking about pinks and franchises is i started thinking about like what is franchise model what does that look like for the internet so what is a franchise a A franchise is basically a set of, it's a business model in a box and a brand in a box and support in a box for an entrepreneur.

31:28How can we bring that or is there an opportunity to bring that to the internet? I had the same thought when you were talking earlier about your agency, about how scaling agencies is hard. And maybe, I don't know why, but franchising was on my mind. And I was like, I wonder why, if I'm me and I have a big audience. I have a large ability to create a brand and get customers. The painful part is the operations. What most people do is they partner with somebody, they run the operations, but they're going to run into the scaling headaches and bottlenecks along the way. And I was like, what if I franchised it?

32:02Meaning you could spin up, you could become one of my operators or a partner in the business. I'm going to hand you customers like automatically. You don't have to know how to do internet marketing. You'd have to build your own brand. You just have to fulfill the demand that I generate. And we kind of like, let's just say it was, I don't know, design or web development or something. I don't know. I don't know what, what category makes sense, but like you could just have a three person team that's going to bang out high quality work and do as much work as you're able to generate. But like, we don't have to create a hundred person agency headquarters.

32:36That's going to like have managers and managers and ensure the quality of work and then have to increase prices because of all these layers of management. Maybe there's another way. Maybe there's a way to do it. I don't know if that fully makes sense, but it was a thought that came to mind earlier when you were talking about scaling agencies. Yeah, maybe what we're saying is the next generation of creator-led agencies actually look more like franchises than they do what they are now. Right. Because normally a franchise, the reason you franchise is because you can't geographically expand. So why did Chipotle initially franchise out?