The AI App Doing $6M With 1 Employee

23:41They can't put this in people's water anymore because they were just dumping it in water or dumping it in the environment. And it was getting in our water because the forever chemicals don't go away. Well, last week or two weeks ago, I believe, the EPA, which is the Environmental Protection Agency, basically just said that this is a big deal and that they're banning a lot of these companies. so DuPont, Gore, and a few other companies, 3M, from putting this into water and that they're going to demand that local water companies, your city water, is going to have to start testing for this and getting this out of the water somehow.

24:14And so that was like a landmark case. And so in my opinion, this is a trend that's happening right now. And I think that amongst my hippie friends, do you have any hippie friends who refuse to use nonstick pans? Yes. And I never understood it until now. I never understood it either. They just said it's bad. And if you look at your nonstick pans, what you're going to notice is that there's chips in it. There's like little chips from where you like put your fork or knife on it and like chip that little piece of Teflon and it like went into your food. You're basically consuming this stuff, but it's in plastic water bottles.

24:45It's into everything. And you actually hung out with Joe Gebbia recently, the founder of Airbnb. And he said that he only drinks a certain type of water. And I looked up that water company. What was it called? Aquapana. So Aquapana was one of the few water companies that did not, they did not detect PFAS in the water. And the implications of this are quite big. So have you heard about men having like really low sperm counts right now? And that's impacting fertility. Well, one of the hypotheses is that if your mother consumed this stuff, the studies have shown that the men are likely to have lower sperm counts later in life.

25:18And so there's all these implications where people are getting cancer right now at super high rates. And there's rumblings that maybe this is called from PFAS. And so the reason I'm bringing this out, obviously, this is a big deal. And it freaked me out as a consumer because, by the way, the takeaway of this is basically you can't avoid it and you're screwed. That's basically... Oh, God. That's kind of... I mean, it's in everything. It's in floss. It's in everything. And once it's there, it's there. And so our generation might just be screwed. But the reason why this interests me is there's a common theme of hippie or fringe people being interested in something and it becoming mainstream and popular in the next 10, 15 years.

25:58Hippies are just innovators. They really are innovators. Yeah. Like Birkenstocks are cool now. I mean, they start stuff early. My opinion is right now is a wonderful time to get into this business. And I was Googling which products are PFAS free. I couldn't find a decent website. There's one website called momovation.com. This lady's been blogging about this since 2009. and she does like crazy tests on like different products. So it'll be like, which Ziploc bags are PFAS free? And she basically does all this analysis where she sends these plastic bags to the lab. And then her conclusion is none.

26:38None are PFAS free. I don't have any good recommendations for this product. Mama patient. Shout out to her. How long has she been doing this? 2009. This is amazing. And she has a rabid fan base. Forever chemicals in contact lenses. Damn it. It's in everything. It's in everything. And then she'll do bottled water. And she sends this off to a lab. And she measures all the bottled water. And she'll say, this is the order of least likely to have PFAS. Or she'll do a variety of products like jackets or clothing, things like that. And in my opinion, the same way that Cold Plunge is popular right now, the same way that...

27:16I don't know. Whatever trends are popular. I think PFAS-free or forever chemical-free products are going to absolutely take off and they're going to be a thing. In a few years, we're going to see... Do you remember Thrive Market? Thrive Market was an online marketplace for organic food. We're going to see Thrive Market for forever chemical-free products. I think this is going to be a very popular thing because all of the brands that you and I probably use are really, really heavy in this. So for example, 10 ,000 Shorts. Have you to that brand 10 ,000? No. It's just like an Instagram brand of workout shorts.

27:54That's basically what their product is. It's like this plastic liner that are in your shorts. They're in everything. They're in everything. Not to call it 10 ,000, but they're in everything. It's in your food packaging, everything. And so the EPA actually just announced that food packaging starting, I think, next year can no longer have this. So everything that you order from DoorDash, your Chinese food cartons, everything, This has that shit in it. But starting 25, it's supposed to not have any of that crap in it. Of course, there's a huge issue here, which is the FDA has sat on this for 50 years.

28:28And the damage has been done. And there's new chemicals that you can get around this stuff that are probably just as bad for you. But I still think that this is actually a turning point to make this trend mainstream. We've talked about inflections on this podcast. Now is what I call a regulatory inflection, just like when COVID happened, you could do online therapy and you saw BetterHelp and a bunch of other businesses like that take off. This is a thing that's going to actually get quite popular in the next five and ten years. Wow. This is wild, dude. It's frightening. Not only was this a good segment, you might have saved my life and many people's lives by bringing this.

29:07What a story. I had heard of PFAS because I tried to buy a kid's bed. I was like, how come checkout's not working? I guess at first I was like, why is this not purchasing? It's like, oh, I contacted help. It's like, oh, you're in California? We can't ship PFAS anything that contains PFAS to California. I was like, oh, God, how annoying. What is that? What do you mean? We can't ship it to California. I didn't realize what I was angry at. I should have been happy about. Why are these in beds? Why do beds need these? Why should I sleep in these forever chemicals? Most of the paint you have in your home have it as well.

29:45And so it's like a, it's a sealant is what it is. We need to clip this because I think in two, three years, it's going to be, we're going to see that. Look, I'm looking at these categories. Like, so for example, she, she's testing, you know, contact lenses, makeup, dental floss, toilet paper, uh, tampons, uh, wrappers, um, oils, pans, active wear, all these different categories. You know, that's just like a a minefield of opportunity to go through and build PFAS free, you know, alternatives and popularize the story. The story that you told the beginning is the story that needs to be told more.

30:20Right. I think it's one thing to say has PFAS. It's another thing to say, do you know what that is? Do you know how bad this is? Do you want your kid to be born with one nostril? How many nostrils you want your kid to have? Right. Like that's all somebody needs to say. And if you tell that story well, that's going to be incredibly powerful. Well, this is why when I read this, I was like, obviously, this is bad. But the business side of my brain was like, this is advertising gold. I'm like an HVAC guy during a heat wave. I'm like, this is gold. Is that our version of Kid in a Candy Store? I'm like an HVAC operator during a heat wave.

30:58it was gold when I read this stuff and the reason being is Forever Chemicals, awesome branding they're already branding it for us that's a great brand I feel like that almost sounds like a slight positive twist it'll last forever I kind of want it to be a little more dangerous a little more off-putting well I just think that so there's a lot of research but I think a lot of people actually when I was reading the research, there's some debate over it. And I don't know why there's too much debate over it. I wasn't able to read all the research. But there's some debate as to how dangerous they are and in which setting.

31:35But I still think you can... This sounds manipulative, but you can use fear to be like, just don't have any of it. And so, for example, I remember I was pretty nervous about this shit. And so I was looking just for cotton-only clothing. So clothing that is just plain cotton. But you look at what your clothing is, like Lululemon, And I mean, it all has PFAS in it. And so it's been quite challenging. And if you Google PFAS free products, you're basically just going to come across a bunch of subreddits. And so it's still quite niche and grassrootsy. There's not a good website that refers you to different products.

32:13There's this mom-ovation website. But it's still kind of a messy website and kind of confusing and hard to read. They're not just telling me what to buy and how to live my life. They're kind of telling the science behind it a little bit. but I think that there's going to be a lot of interesting brands that pop up on this trend. I know Patagonia is doing it right now. They've said that 95 % of their clothing is PSA free or PFAS free. I know that Ikea has been on this since 2009 and they try to say that their furniture doesn't have it. And a lot of people are committed to not having it by 2025, but very interesting movement, I think.

32:48All right. I got another trend for you. So this is a cool story. And I would say this is an example of niches and riches, which is a phrase we've said many times. And if there's anything more niche than this, I'd love to hear it. So here's the story. There's a guy named Josh and Josh Dunning. He, his wife is a high school teacher. And when he's talking to her and he goes, maybe picks her up from school, he notices kids are doing something outrageous in schools, which is that they're coming into schools and they're just blasting each other with water guns. And he's like, what is going on? She's like, oh my God, I know.

33:24These kids are obsessed with this game. I said, what's the game? The game, I don't know if you ever played this when you were in school, but it's the game Assassins. And the game Assassins, the way it works really simply is you can play this one-on-one or like free-for-all or teams or whatever. But basically one person is the target and other people have to find them and you have to basically get the target first. So you want to shoot the target with the water gun first. And then after you've got them, you get points because you were the assassin who got them. And then the target moves. And so...

33:56First of all, that sounds awesome. I wish I could have played that game. That sounds great. I can't even believe this is allowed, right? Water guns? Can you imagine the mess? This is ridiculous. But somehow, rather than being annoyed, he sees opportunity. And so he goes, how are they playing this game? How do you know who's it? And they're like, oh, we have this sheet, this paper, and then we have to keep track of this, keep track of the points. He's like, huh. So he goes home and he builds an app and he builds an app called Splashin. And the Splashin app is just a way to like run your Assassin's game.

34:30And so he messages, I don't know how Ben found this guy, but he's messaging Ben and he starts explaining. He's like, yeah, I built this app and I built, I just turned the game into something that would just like keep track of this, like replace pen and paper for this. He's like, it's good because it keeps track of the points and it tells you who's in and all this stuff. But it's like a very simple app. and super, super niche. So he would not think this is how somebody gets wealthy. So he starts texting Ben his revenue numbers. And he's like, week one, pretty small. Week two. Then he's like, week three, he's like, 40K.

35:02What? I was like, wow, you made$40 ,000 on this thing? Next week. We're like, how's it going? Did you stay at 40K or did it kind of fizzle out? He goes, yeah, 93K. We're like, what? 167 ,000 the next week. This week, 250 ,000. It is just like week over week. This thing has gone viral. And so he's getting 5 ,000 signups per day right now. And so in a four-week span, they basically went from no revenue to$250 ,000 a month in revenue on this. It's called Splashin'. Splashin'. Let me show you that. But you can go to their TikTok. Every TikTok they post, they'll post three or four times a day. Each one gets 10 ,000 views or so.

35:41And then people are posting this. And it's also inherently viral. So not only do they do well with TikTok Organic, but like this has something that that michael birch one of my mentors taught me which was playground playground virality which is um when when bibo went viral i asked michael like how did it grow he goes it had playground virality means like literally on a school playground one kid would be talking about it and all the other kids who were out of the loop had to go home and figure out what the heck this thing was and um similarly like if one group of people are playing splashing in your school, you're going to have to go get the app to play or you're left out.

36:16And so this thing goes super viral on high school and college campuses right now. And their content is really good because they'll start with someone running after somebody. The video starts, first three seconds. Somebody's running after somebody else, spraying them with water and the other person's like, oh, no. And then they're laughing and it's like, what app is this? What game are they playing? Is the hook. It's as if you've seen random people running around with water guns, splashing each other and there's a compilation of someone splashing someone in a car, someone diving under the bleachers, somebody jumping through a window.

36:47The trick is to have these videos that from a marketing perspective, you watch these. And in the first three seconds, it shows somebody chasing somebody else and splashing them with water. And it says, what game are they playing? And then it says, if you've seen people all over your feed who are spraying each other with water and it's just a compilation of crazy people diving through windows being sprayed with water. It says they're playing a game called Splashin'. And the way it works is you're assigned a target, you see them on a map, somebody's targeting you, and then blah, blah, blah. And so that's the game.

37:17And pretty amazing to see this thing going viral. And this also falls into a category of apps that is not sustainable necessarily. But who cares? But who the hell cares? Yeah, it's a summer fling. And it's a great summer fling. Dude, we're kind of glossed over the fact that this guy just messaged Ben. And Ben's just like, what are your sales? tell me your revenue and he tells them every week that happens to Ben like 10 times a day it's like in Parks and Rec where they find out that one of the main characters is a nurse and they start sending her dick pics so they can get diagnosed with an STD and she's just like dude my inbox is just full of men's penises asking if they have herpes I guess that's just Ben's inbox it's just all these guys sending people tell him what's going on and then he's like, oh, you should talk to this person.

38:12They will solve that one problem you're having. And then they're like, wow, I love this guy. And then he does it again. And like, you know, because I'll be like a, like two people that don't know each other that we know are talking. I'm like, oh, wow, how'd they meet? He's like, oh yeah, I introduced them. I'm like, how'd you even think to introduce them? He's like, well, he's every week. He tells me like how it's going. And then he said he was having this problem. And so I told him about this other guy who solves that specific niche problem. And now it's like, you know, working out great. And I was like, oh, you're like a router.

38:36he's like a switchboard operator who's able to just like once he knows what you need and he knows what somebody else has to offer he makes connections and he asks for nothing in return and that just works out have you seen Boardwalk Empire the show? No. So the main character amongst other things he's basically a mafia guy he's in the mob and he connects like Al Capone with this one distiller who can make Al Capone's whiskey or whatever and whenever he does that he goes alright where's my cut and he that's how he makes a living and gets rich off that by just making connections or he'll introduce Al Capone to a politician who's going to help hide his whatever.

39:12That's what Ben needs to do. Ben needs... We need to change because in Silicon Valley people make these introductions and they don't ask for anything. Ben should ask for something. He should get... He goes, where's my points? He just needs to start asking for points. No, no. That ruins it. That's why guys like you and me don't have what he has. He just... He just happened to be useful. And then value just comes back. There is a business karma. Value does come back. A few of these people will be like, hey, let me cut you a check. Or hey, if there's more like that, I'm happy to incentivize you to give me more like that.

39:45And he's like, okay, sure. I didn't ask for it. But people come to him with that because they're like, give me more of where that came from. And so he's created a lot of value. And I think that in general, you want to be ultra free or ultra premium. So it's basically like, don't make money on every transaction. Don't be a gatekeeper who stands in the way of the traffic flowing. And it's like, let 99 % of the cars go through completely free. But then on the one where there's a bigger opportunity or something like that, we get to invest or we get to be a part of it in some way. And it pays off for the 99 free things that he did.

40:19And I think he's got the right method. How old is this guy, Josh Dunning? I just looked him up. He looks like a really young guy. I mean, that's pretty impressive. These basically kids coming up with these things that are making very, very meaningful traction as one or two people operations. Well, it's also the magic of software, right? Like software is so different than a services agency or an e-commerce prolet. We have a physical product, right? Like these software things, they build it once, it runs forever. You know, they can have three million, this UMax guy, three and a half million customers can use his thing.

40:51This guy's signing up 5 ,000 people a day because software scales. Software is magic. Hey, quick message here, because you know that feeling when you send a wire and it actually works? No friction? Well, I've used Mercury for years now, and let me tell you, it just works. And that's why I use it for not one, not two, but eight of my companies. From credit cards to invoices, I have everything in one place. There's no janky dashboard. I'm never told, please visit a local bank branch. None of that tomfoolery. And a few months ago, I landed a big client. And the first thing I did, I sent them a clean, branded invoice.

41:24Boom, deal closed, cash in the door. That's the kind of banking experience I want. And that's why I use Mercury. So if you're running a startup and you want banking that feels like it's built in this century, well, go to Mercury.com and get started in minutes. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Bankless services are provided through Choice Financial Group, Column A, and Evolve Bank & Trust members FDIC. That's not the magical part. The magical part, I think, is the psychology behind it. And I think, you know, we have a friend, Nikita, who, frankly, I don't know what's reality versus the story.

41:53but like there's all these people who he claims are coming to him for advice on how to make my app viral and he like says like he he doesn't say it but the the story that i kind of gleaned from it is like beep bop boop you just do this this this you change this thing to this thing that's going to change this metric to this thing and boop done like where's my money uh and i don't know if that's the reality but he's like he's like hey look three of the apps that i advise are now in the top 100 of most downloaded apps in the in apple store and it's just like is amazing how there's a little bit of a pattern and i don't entirely understand the pattern because i'm not just describing expertise right yeah but it just seems like um more than ever before it's becoming like a playbook um and it just it is ridiculous how like i do think that you could take some of this knowledge and apply it to five or 10 other things.

42:47And it works almost as well. All right. Hey, I want to take a quick break to congratulate our friend, Tim Ferriss. Tim's podcast has crossed 1 billion downloads. Billion. That is insane. Especially for a guy who said when he started the pod, hey, I'm going to do six episodes. Just give this a try. See if I like it. And if I don't, it'll just be six. But if I do, maybe I'll keep going. And he, sure enough, kept going. Tim is amazing at the pod. He's a big inspiration for me. In fact, when I started this podcast, I still remember the day I had sold my company. I was walking around San Francisco.

43:18I did a four hour walk with my buddy. We walked ourselves into a frenzy and he goes, well, what do you want? What do you really want to do next? And I said, I think I want to be Tim Ferriss. I said, I don't want to be Tim Ferriss. I want to have the impact Tim Ferriss had. I said, I have listened to so many of his episodes, like the Jamie Foxx one I remember was epic. The ones with Naval are all killer. His ones with Arnold Schwarzenegger were really good. But he's done so many episodes that really stood out to me and shifted my perspective, changed my lens, gave me some inspiration. He was there when I was doing just boring commutes.

43:49And I want to thank him for doing the show. The world would be a worse place if he did not do the Tim Ferriss podcast. And he's done, this is his 10-year anniversary. So happy birthday, Tim, for the 10-year anniversary of your pod. A billion downloads. That is incredible. he is still to this day I think one of the best question askers on the planet which you probably didn't even think was a skill but it is of course and his quote about questions has always inspired me he says that questions are like the pickaxe of the brain you can use a question to just unlock information that's what he does he breaks down world class performers by asking them amazing questions so Tim congrats on the 10 years if anybody's out there you're listening to this podcast just hit pause and go listen to Tim instead you know what I don't mind it is a great move by you.

44:33You can find the Tim Ferriss show wherever you get your podcasts. He's also got a newsletter called Five Bullet Friday with 2 million weekly subscribers. You can find that at tim.blog and you can find the podcast wherever you listen to podcasts. So I'm going to tell a story. I don't know if I can use the guy's name just because I didn't ask him if I was going to tell the story, but I can tell a version of the story. So I met a guy recently, really awesome guy, became friends with him and he is like a growth expert. Not like the Twitter, YouTuber, you know, I'm a growth expert. Hire me for$500 an hour and I'll be your growth guy.

45:07Like this guy actually like the big name Silicon Valley products. He was like running the growth team there. And so like, you know, like in the same way that, uh, you know, Chamath or Javier grew fit, you know, they were the lead guy on the Facebook growth team. And they like, they fought those wars or Josh Elman did this at different companies. There's another guy who did this at other companies. And so he would describe to me, he's like, yeah, he's like, um, I went for a walk with him in Silicon Valley, like the real Silicon Valley, meaning he was walking. He's like, that's Steve Jobs' house.

45:35That's Larry Page's house. That's Mark Zuckerberg's house. And they're like, I don't know if you've ever been here, by the way, in Palo Alto. These are like completely unassuming houses, by the way. They're not like mega McMansions. They're just like small cottage houses in a cool little neighborhood that's open in Palo Alto. And he's like, yeah. And he was like, I was like, how did you get connected with, because he was telling me about somebody he knew. I go, how did you get connected with these people? and he goes well i had built an expertise around seo he's like i just understood seo i had done it two of my companies i just really i was like i feel like i knew seo better than most people and somebody introduced me to um to the guy from quora adam d 'angelo who was like you know co-founder of facebook now was doing quora and quora had quora had a seo problem there uh they were heavily dependent on SEO traffic.

46:24And then some Google update happened and their SEO traffic was dying or was having trouble for whatever reason. And I did a call with him. And he's like, on that one call, I told him, I was like, oh, it's this. You are getting penalized by Google for this. You need to change that and it'll fix it. And it fixed it and the growth went up. And then I told him one other thing after that. They did one more call. I did one other thing. And basically, the Quora growth curve was really impressive afterwards. and Adam called him and was like, hey, dude, can you, can I, will you come work here? Can I hire you as a consultant?

47:00I'll pay you any number to hire you as a consultant. And he's like, also, how did you do that? Because that was like, my team's been working on this for months and like, you just pointed at the thing. You're like, this is it. And he's like, well, it looks like it was just one thing. He's like, but actually the skill is that there's a thousand needles, there's a thousand straws in a haystack. and the trick is just to find the one straw that matters. And it looks like, oh man, you only had to move one straw, but it's like, because I knew the 99 % of things to ignore. I knew which ones were not the answer, which told me it's got to be one of these two things.

47:33And then I pulled that out. And he's like, that's what expertise looks like when it's done well. It's not that you come up with more ideas than anyone else. You can quickly eliminate the 99 wastes of time and try to find the one or two that matter. So I love that principle. Then he said another thing. He goes, so when he offered me that, I was like, so did you go work there? Did you take the consulting gig? That'd be awesome. I bet they could have paid you a ton or whatever. He goes, I had a better deal. I told him, I'm going to do this for free for you. But when the time comes, I know you're super connected to Silicon Valley and I just moved here.

48:03I would love for some introductions. Like, you know, if I do come up with something, I'd love for you to make an introduction. And at the time, Adam's like, done, easy. You know, that's the price. Amazing. I got to steal here. He's like, but actually, I got way more value out of that trade. He's like, because then when I cashed in that chip, he's like, people would say, he's like, I could get an intro to anybody. And the intro would come like with extreme vouch of this guy's like the magic man. And he's like that. And Adam doesn't make many intros. So as soon as they would intermede, the person would say, not only did Adam vouch for you, Adam never makes any intros.

48:36This is the first intro he's ever made because he knows like to the intermede is a, you know, kind of a high bar. So you must be really something. And that was kind of that business karma. That's so badass. Coming back. and he's like, I didn't do it in a manipulative way. I just thought that that was a better ask. And I was like, wow, that's a great, great story. That's awesome. That is a really good story. I want to get him on. I think he's got some good growth stories and growth advice. So I'm going to try to get him on. I'll ask for his permission. I think today was a 10 out of 10. I feel hyped.

49:05I want to go and learn about some of this stuff. I want to look up Splashin'. I want to play Splashin'. First, I need friends that are immature enough to play a water gun game with me. We need adult Splashin'. throughout Austin. I guess I'm not going to go buy a water gun, but Texas, you guys just play with real guns. Yeah, we're going to call it bleeding instead of splashing. That's great. Is that the pod? Well, we have one more thing. One more thing about expertise, and this is also the thrill of the shill. I was watching one of the podcasts that I recorded when I went to Austin, and the guy said something.

49:40He goes, this is a guy who's Joe Lonsil. and his claim to fame. I think the title of the podcast is going to be the guy who's created more billion dollar companies than anyone else. Great title. Which is just an incredible claim to fame and an incredible title. And so he goes, he was saying something and he goes, he almost paused me while I was saying something. He goes, oh, by the way, that's always a good idea. I was like, what is he talking about? And what he's saying was, he goes, anytime a company that was successful doing one thing had to build internally their own tool, that's not their product, but they like hired engineers, that engineer is working on something and they were like, that's the tool, like some internal homebrew tool that they used.

50:21It was like part of their secret sauce for their success, but it wasn't their main product. He goes, that's always a good idea, which is basically to, I call this the export framework. You export something that was built internally and you make a product that's available to all. And so he was talking about this, for example, with Palantir. He started Palantir, now a$50 billion company. Palantir, you know, the genesis of it was he was an intern at PayPal fighting fraud. And so at the time, PayPal, because PayPal was getting popular, basically what he said would happen. He goes, somebody would, you know, if somebody, you know, some cashier at a gas station is having a bad day would kind of steal your credit card number and they could go sell, you know, 50 of these on the black market to the Russians.

51:00Russians would pay$100 a pop for these credit cards, stolen credit cards. And then they would go charge up this thing and then the customer would be like, I didn't buy any of this stuff. And so they would charge it back. It's like if PayPal was left holding the bag of that chargeback and that to the tune of like millions of dollars. Like it would have put us out of business. It put out, most of our competitors went out of business for this one reason. And so fighting fraud was like a really important thing. And we had to build a set of tools to be able to do like data detection, fraud detection, and like fight the bad guys.

51:29He's like, and then when I started Palantir, I was like, what if we took all that fight the bad guy stuff and we made it available to the government to be able to fight the bad guys for counterterrorism and stuff because this was after 9-11. And so he was given that example of like, Anytime you see the homebrew tool that spins out, becomes a product, that's a successful business. Well, today's sponsor is exactly that. And that is Beehive. So Beehive was basically the origin. Great plug. Great plug. The thrill of the show. I guarantee you that nobody does ad reads like I do ad reads, right? I'm going to teach you something, tell you a story, and then I'm going to give you the value too.

51:58That's a great thrill. And I'll give you the shill. Now, the shill part is these guys were inside of Morning Brew, which is probably, would you say it's probably the most successful newsletter business outside of Agora, right? The most successful mainstream newsletter business. Nearly$100 million a year business. $100 million business grew really fast. And both of us have tried building newsletter businesses. And these guys grew it faster than both of us. We were successful. They were even more successful. They grew their newsletter to about 5 million subscribers. And the secret sauce of how they grew their newsletter, their growth engine, was this internal tool that they built, which let them write a newsletter easily, format it, get it all ready to go.

52:36Baked in the growth stuff. So like referrals and, you know, like recommendation things at the bottom of an email when it's like, hey, send this to a friend and you can get a free sticker or a free mug or free t-shirt or whatever. That all of those little tools that they built internally, this guy Tyler basically spun out and created Beehive to do that independently. So now anybody like me, when I built the Milk Road, I didn't have to build any of that shit. Milk Road, Morning Brew has like, you know, I don't know how many hundreds of employees. We didn't need any of that shit. Literally, it was me, Ben, and one other guy.

53:05and like the three of us built a newsletter that we sold for millions of dollars because we could just use Beehive off the shelf and so if you're looking to build a newsletter either personally or you want to start a newsletter business like me and Sam did Beehive is the way to go they basically took all the secret sauce that was inside Morning Brew turned it into a product that you can use off the shelf on day one 10 out of 10 I was thrilled I just imagined Joe Lonsdale just holding up his finger to your lips and saying just shut up just shut up just shut the fuck up beehive it's hilarious too because I'm trying to connect with Joe and he's like this billionaire who's created like you know spy technology for the government 50 billion dollar company you know tools that all the asset wealth managers use at a par 3 billion dollar company open gov which sold to governments and basically sold for 1.8 billion he's got a like weapons company that builds like EMP pulses that will you know knock drones out of the sky war tools.

54:03And I'm like, yeah, yeah, me too, man. I'm an entrepreneur too, just like you. Me and you. Same, same. Yeah, I built the newsletter company. Yeah, I did it kind of part-time for a year and then sold it. Not for a billion dollars, just a few million. It was great, though. And then what else do we got? I got a podcast. Talked to my buddy Sam a couple times a week. That's pretty dope. I'm working hard out here, man. All while you were wearing camouflage sweatpants. You and I are the same. This was while we were at a cold plunge together and I was just like also hyperventilating and being like, how long do guys like this stay in the cold plunge?

54:37I think it's longer than I'm used to, but I cannot get out of this plunge until he does. I die an icicle or I live with all the glory of this. And you're like, oh, you did a multiple billion dollar companies. I got a 69 on you hot. So

54:59what'd you get? So are you with the look maxing? No? I didn't think so. I just was curious if that was a priority for you. That's a typical 49 %er answer, bro. So check it out. Beehive. That's with two I's, by the way. B-E-E-H-I-I-V. They're H-I... Yeah, that's weird. By the way, they post their revenue? I don't know what... Dude, Tyler, the CEO, for the next time we give this shout out, we'll focus on Tyler. Tyler's a great CEO. I thought he was a loose cannon. And I think he sort of is. No, he's just good looking. That's what you thought. You were like, nobody this good looking and cool is going to be a good operator.

55:39He actually is. He's just, I thought he was just too loose of a cannon. And then I realized that his aggressiveness is actually awesome. And I did not invest in them. And it's one of the things that I'm like, oh, I should have done that. So I almost didn't invest. So I did end up investing. Actually, I think I passed the first time. And so what I did was I passed the first time because I was like, I don't know how big this can get. And then we started using it for the Milk Road and I use it for my personal newsletter. So I became a customer first. And then I would just see like, anytime we'd have a problem, they were so fast to fix it and they kept releasing stuff.

56:11I was like, oh, okay. I called him back. I was like, I want to invest. He's like, well, you changed your mind. You think the market's bigger? I was like, no, actually, I think the market's the same size, but you guys are like relentlessly shipping and I'd rather just bet on somebody like that than not bet on them. And like, you know, I'm often wrong about market size. Markets can trick you. markets can look small and be bigger. But founders or teams that operate like this, that's always a good signal. And so I'm like, let me just bet on the known versus not bet because of this hypothetical unknown thing.

56:40But I almost didn't because when I did the call, he had a surfboard behind him. And I was like, ain't no way I'm going to invest in a CEO who surfs regularly enough with the surfboards behind him in his room. But I was wrong. Next time we talk about him, we have like four or five more stories about Tyler. Tyler's an interesting guy, and I respect the hell out of him. He's a good entrepreneur. I want to see what their revenue is at right now. So they... I think it's at like 12 million, isn't it? Dude, look at this graph. We got to put this up here. 7 million in ARR was February 1st, so two months ago.

57:12And this graph is literally shaped like this. It's pretty crazy. And he goes, this doesn't include some revenue from the ad network. Oh, no. March 19th. Quickly approaching 10 million ARR. So they're probably just under 10 million in ARR now. Yeah. It's an amazing company They've taken off Is it just Beehive.com Or is it like a Beehive.com slash No it's just Beehive.com Go there if you want to start a newsletter Alright Is that the pod? That's the pod Alright that's the pod I feel like I can rule the world I know I can be what I want to I put my all in it like no days off On the road less travel Never looking back

57:52Alright 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.

58:20It'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, you know, 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. Highly recommend you check it out. And thank you for sponsoring the show.

58:46For more information, check out mercury.com. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Check show notes for details.