Tiny Desk Awards: 13 Companies Making $1M+ With 0 Employees

24:45You're like, what? Yeah, sure. Why not? I'm here. And they take you down to the basement. And then it's just like they've recreated like the city of Vienna through their like, they're just tinkering on this like one thing. You're like, how many hours? How long have you been doing this? and they're like, oh, I just come here every night. I love it. And this is what I do. It makes me feel so good. And you're like, holy shit, this is like the most intense hobby. That's how I feel. I'm not that type of person, are you? You're definitely not, I think, right? Come on. I am not. Yeah, I envy those people.

25:17That's an amazing willpower. All right, let's do another one. Let's do on the other end. Easiest to recreate. So which of these one person, one or two person businesses do you think are easiest to recreate that is the opposite of the highest degree of difficulty? Go ahead. So mine would be anything that sells information or service. So I put just any course creator. But you and I know a bunch of these people, of which you and I are both of those people. We make hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars a year from a course or two. And I think they're fairly easy to recreate. Another one is there's this company called Design Joy.

25:55You know what they do? I believe that... Design subscription, basically. It's him. He's a design subscriber. But the way that he positions it, it seems really hard to imagine that that's the truth. But basically, it's just this designer that you pay thousands of dollars a month for and you ask them to make small changes to different design-related stuff. And he claims that it's just him. But I believe he claims that. Yeah, he says it's just him. And he does$100 ,000 a month. So he does$1.2 million a year or so around that range. And it's basically, you buy a subscription plan. So you pay and you buy like the five, it's like four or 5 ,000 a month.

26:28and then you basically get one request at a time and that's it. You get to just say, I'd like this design thing done and then he turns around in some, I don't know what his SLA is of how long it takes to do this, but it's like, it's cheaper than hiring a full-time designer, probably, unless like in the US. But yeah, that's the... I think that's the easiest to recreate, but also the worst to run, which we'll talk about later. But that's probably the easiest one. It's like a bunch, do you know any other course people that do like, like I know Sam Ovens does 10 million in revenue, 5 million in profit.

27:01And for a while it was just him. I met these guys. I met a guy recently who does like a product management course. And I was like, Oh my God, who's taking a product management course? He goes, no, no, no. It's how to ace your job interview as a product manager, like how to get a job as a PM at one of these tech companies. And I think he was doing, what was he doing? But like 2 million a year or something like that. I think they were doing like two, what? Two, 2.5. Yeah. 2.5 million a year, roughly in revenue, I think with like 80 %-ish margins. And what they would do is they would basically say, they would give away free content that was like, how to get a job as a PM, how to interview as a PM, how to prep for this interview, what it was like talking to a Facebook PM, blah, blah, blah.

27:42They give away free content to get you kind of on the email list and get you to the website. And then they're like, hey, do you want to like get a job as a PM, which will pay you, let's call it$120 ,000 a year. If you want that job, buy this course and join this cohort course or whatever and they basically sell this course for a couple thousand dollars that's going to help you get this job that's going to pay you over a hundred thousand dollars and that's like a very simple value proposition for somebody who wants to do that with their career and it was just him it was him and three it was three of them three pms that kind of like got together and made this thing another example of an easy one to start I think I told you about this it's called Cyberlead so you go to getcyberleads.com So it's C-Y-B-E-R leads.

28:26So getcyberleads.com. It's this guy named Alex West. And basically, it's a newsletter where I think it costs$4 ,000 to$1 ,000 a month. So$400 to$1 ,000 a month, depending on what you do. But basically, he goes and he handpicks different companies that have recently raised money and based off a bunch of attributes he thinks are about to hire an agency. And then he gets all these agency owners to sign up to his service. And he emails this list out once a month, along with the contact information, the hiring decision, or the hiring, whoever's managing ad spend, whatever. And you can just contact him on...

29:02He's got your face and quota as a testimonial. Do you use this? No, I don't use this. But I talked about it on the pod. I talked about it on the pod like two years ago. I've never used it. You've never used it? But he sure used you. He is using me. I don't know. Is there anything... Can you say anything about these people who do this? I talked about it on the pod. I said, it's so freaking simple. The value is so clear. I guess I said that on the podcast and he uses that as a quote. Is there anything I could do to stop people from doing that? You can tell them, hey, take them down. You can always say that.

29:33Oh, sorry. Let me wrap up. My thing, selling information. So anything that you sell information, that's the easiest thing to start. Yeah, I think. So I went the same route, but I'm going to give more detail because I think when you tell somebody selling information is the easiest way, they're like, cool. What? So what do I do? Bitch, I gave three examples. Yeah, but I think you have to break it down a little further. So, you know, this guy, Lenny, Lenny, Russian last name. I like Lenny Rogowski or something, something along those lines. I like Lenny. So Lenny, I think he used to work at Airbnb or something.

30:04He was like a growth slash like product guy. And so he's got Lenny's newsletter. He's got Lenny's community. He's got Lenny's job board. And basically he was like, I'm going to become, he's like, I'm going to put out tons of free thought leader content on a specific super niche topic that only certain people are going to care about, but they're going to care a lot. And that's kind of the key with this stuff is how do you put up free content to establish yourself as an authority in a niche so that you can then monetize that through either consulting services, job board, paid community, or paid content, paid newsletter, right that's that's the formula and you can look at the design joy guy he does exactly this he puts out free content examples of design work and then says you can hire me for design work lenny does the same thing he puts out free content he's got really good stuff like you know how did these 10 huge marketplaces how did they get their first thousand users and he goes deep and he's like i'm going to interview them i'm going to talk to them i'm going to get the real answer on this specific zero to one question that's going to be highly relevant to other people going through that same challenge.

31:09I think he has a podcast too. He's got a podcast. At one point, his job board was doing a couple hundred thousand. I'm sure the newsletter does a couple hundred thousand in sponsorships. Are you talking about monthly or annually? Annually. At least. I bet you it's more. I bet you it's way more. I know at the beginning his job board was crushing. I don't know what they're doing now, but I would bet his entire roll-up of job board, content, sponsorships, so podcast plus newsletter, and then he's got a paid thing, right, Ben? He's got a paid community. What do you think Glennie's total thing is? 2 million, 3 million?

31:42Yeah, for sure. About 2 to 3 million a year. And he did that, I would say, in a period of like two and a half, three years, it seems like. I think he has a fund too. He kind of put his foot down on the content side. He appeared on the scene, I would say, like two-ish years ago. Obviously, you had to know your stuff, right? So he's like, you know, spent time learning, you know, a decade being awesome inside these companies in order to do so. So I don't mean to make it sound overly simplistic, but there are people who did it without that too. So another example is Harry Dry, one of my favorite content creators in the whole world, a guy I'd try to recruit like a hundred times to do something with me because I feel like we could do something great.

32:19Me too. And he keeps bullshitting and not saying yes, but he's going to say yes eventually. So he's got marketing examples. He does a great job with this blog called Marketing Examples. Now, I don't know how much marketing examples makes, I would guess, quarter million to half a million as just him making content there. I think he's young. He's very young. he didn't do the put in 10 to 15 years become an industry like do the job cut your teeth then go make content he's like no I'm pretty sure I could just look at what's out there and like give my opinion on it and it'll work I'll study this shit and that's how I feel like you know a lot of people also can do it you can be the curious novice approaching these topics and become an expert just by studying them intensely and so I think Harry Dry would also be one of the easiest to recreate not because he's not talented he's super talented but I think that's kind of something anyone can do.

33:08Anybody could just say, yo, I'm going to study what makes TikToks go viral. And I'm going to put out content about viral TikToks. I'm going to become the expert of breaking down content TikToks going viral. And then brands are going to know me as the guy that they should talk to about TikTok consulting, right? Or like advertising on TikTok. And like, you could just build your niche audience and your niche authority in that space. A lot of people are trying to do this with AI right now. And the thing about Lenny and Harry was people were doing... So first of all, like a newsletters, community podcast, that's existed since forever.

33:38So it's not a unique business model. And also, people have been talking about that type of stuff for a long time. But what's interesting is that they were both early-ish, where there was only maybe... I don't know how many, but they felt like they were early-ish talking about it to this customer, to this community on this platform. So both of those guys, I think, got popular on Twitter right before the pandemic started. I think I remember seeing Harry in 2018, 2019, which I wasn't even really using Twitter as a power user back then. But they all seem a little bit early. So I think timing matters for a lot of these things.

34:10Speaking of which, that Facebook threads thing, no idea if that's going to be a thing or not. But that's an example of like, hey, there's this new thing right now. If you want to, you could pounce on it. If you got nothing to lose, you better be there. Yeah, just go be around there. See what's going on. Yeah, that's one of those things. People did it with Clubhouse. I don't know if that worked out or not. The way I say it is like, most entrepreneurs were actually surfing waves. You don't get to create the wave, but you do have to paddle out. You got to be on your board out there in the water. You got to paddle out, which takes effort.

34:38And then you got to wait. And sometimes it's a dud. Sometimes it's just a small wave. You're going to have to paddle back out again. Well, when you catch a good one, that's what you got. And we'll see how good you are at surfing. You might wipe out the first couple of times you try it. But that's your job as an entrepreneur is to paddle out, be out there and start trying to surf these waves and get a sense for where are the big waves and how do I not wipe out when I do find one. So this episode, you're giving a really in-depth surf analogy. Last episode, you gave a slow, a baseball. What did you say?

35:06A fat, a slow, a small swing. Fat pitches. It was fat pitches. Have you ever played baseball? I got a fat pitch prediction. Have you ever played baseball or surfed in your life? Bro, I was starting right fielder for my high school team, which anybody who knows baseball knows that means you're the biggest scrub on the team because that's who they put in right field is the guy who's, you know, The ball never comes to right field. Yeah, but didn't you play baseball in China? They were just learning. I might have been in China. I might have been in China. You went to high school in China or Australia.

35:39It was the scrubs. It was like, we play the ball as it lies. There, I got a golf analogy for you too. I was in China, well, that's where I'm going to be. All right, so let's go to the next one. Most fun one-person business. So the one that seems like the most fun to work on, I'll go first, Joe Rogan. so I'm pretty sure Joe Rogan's media enterprise is bigger than all the late night talk shows combined so forget the Tonight Show Letterman and any of these guys whoever the new guy, Conan, whoever these guys are Dude, Letterman's been retired for 10 years, man Jimmy Fallon, I don't know bro, who's watching this stuff?

36:16His audience is bigger he makes hundreds of millions and he's made hundreds of millions doing it and I'm pretty sure it's just him and young Jamie mean? I've heard from a few of my friends who have been on it, how it works. So basically, they told me that it's Jamie who produces it, and it's Joe. And then they have one other guy named Matt, I think. And I forget his name exactly. I think it was Matt. And basically, Matt sends Joe a list of 30 people. They're like, Hey, I can get these 30 people, these 30. Let me know who you want. And sometimes he just ignores it. Everyone's smile and say, that person and that person.

36:51And that's all he says. And I've heard that it's just those three people. That's amazing. So I think most people just think, oh, Joe Rogan, he's just a podcaster. Yeah, he is a podcaster, but that thing is a juggernaut. It is a media juggernaut. So Spotify obviously paid him hundreds of millions to be there for a couple of years. But even before that, just off the sponsorships, off of the AlphaBrain product that they built off of it, Joe Rogan, I think, has the most fun probably of anyone on the planet, is my sense. He took all of his hobbies. He's like, oh, I like UFC. He gets to be the UFC commentator doing exactly what he would want.

37:30He gets to go sit ringside, commentate for these fights and analyze the fights. But he only does it for the ones in Vegas that are an hour flight away from him. He doesn't do any of the ones that require a bunch of travel. And so he does all the best ones. He does none of the worst ones. He was like, I want to do stand-up comedy. So he does stand-up comedy, sells out theaters all around the country and gets to make people laugh for a living. He does this podcast where he's like, I'm going to have conversations with the people I want. And people are like, oh, Joe, three hours is too long. He's like, that's the type of conversation I want to have.

38:00So I'm going to do it my way. And it worked. And so I just think he just dictated how he wants to live life on his terms. I think he has the most fun. I think his business is absolutely a mighty business in that it's just, let's say, one, two to three people that is building a thing that does over$100 million in revenue, which If you just valued something like that traditionally, which is not apples to apples, but if you have a thing that can do$100 million a year in revenue. For multiple years. For multiple years. Typically, that's a billion-dollar property. Obviously, it's weird. You can't really sell the Joe Rogan experience because you need him.

38:38It's tightly branded with him. But let's say at least he's built something worth$100 million. I think we can agree on that because it's generated$100 million of profit for him. and so he's built you know with a very small team a multi-hundred million dollar business at the minimum and he has this new thing called the comedy mothership it's like a mile from my house in Austin and there's always a line out the door to get into that place yeah it builds his own comedy club why not if you drive by it at six o 'clock there's every single night there's been a line out the door to go there and it looks awesome right who you got most fun alright it sounds like I'm trying to like promote Hampton I'm not it's just that when I had to prepare for this episode I just went through our database and like picked out people and we had just written a blog post about this guy.

39:15His name is Joseph Mambre. And he started this company called Gymstreak. And this guy is super fascinating because he has all the attributes of what a lot of these tinkers have. But basically, he's from Zimbabwe, moved to England when he was 12 or 13. That was the first time that he experienced the internet. He taught himself how to code. He taught himself design. And then he launched this thing called Gymstreak. At first, it was just an app for tracking your workouts. And then what he did was he went and got his buddy to wear one of these suits. And that way, he could do 3D visualizations of all the exercises and what they need to look like.

39:49So he has hundreds of them. And so his app, it's free to use. And they have some premium thing. And basically, you track your workouts. He uses AI to suggest which weights you should do for the next workout. And if you don't know what the exercise does, and they'll suggest workouts and exercises to do, he has hundreds of these 3D models of what a proper bicep curl or what this other type of exercise looks like. In year one, he did$300 ,000. That was in year 2021. In year two, he did$2.5 million. And his goal, he says, in the next two years, I want to get the$15 to$20 million a year in revenue.

40:23And he's the only employee. I don't believe he has any contractors. I think he told me that he got most of his users from Facebook and TikTok ads. And he hired a consultant in an agency to help them learn how to do that. And right now he said, I'm taking the summer off. So our growth this year might still only be 2.5 or 3 million a year in revenue. But I don't feel like buying ads or staying on top of that. So I'm taking the summer off because we just had a kid. But it's super fascinating to see a guy who basically came from Zimbabwe, didn't use the internet until he was 12, 13 and taught himself how to do all this.

40:54He's like one of those really cool tinkers. And on that blog post, you can see pictures of him arriving from Africa and learning how to work the computer. It's super fascinating. You'll see pictures of him with his iPhone and a laptop at the gym, filming people doing the curls so he can use his AI or whatever to get the 3D imaging. Really fascinating company. I think Jim Streak is awesome. If this could get to$15 or$20 million a year in revenue like he thinks, that would be a monster business for one person. Yeah, that's an amazing story. Wow. Love that. Good for him. That's really, really cool.

41:24Next category. Business we most want to own. So this is, I think this is specifically a good question because for us, a business we'd want to own would be the lowest maintenance business because neither of us want to really run an extra business right now. So it's like, which business would you want to own because it is very much autopilot? So it's not design joy. It's not people are paying you and you're providing a subscription. It's not one of those content or course businesses where you constantly have to create new content in order to stay relevant and get more customers. I think we both have the same one.

41:57Let's just do the same one that we both are really interested in. You explain it. No, you go first. All right. Milled.com. So most people don't know Milled.com. It's M-I-L-L-E-D.com. And it's a really, really simple website. It's just a compilation of email marketing that different companies do. So if you want to see like, what are my competitors sending for their 4th of July sale? You just go to Milled.com. You search the brand and you'll see. okay, here's what Ridge Wallet sent for their 4th of July email. It's the top one on the site right now. So it says, you just click and it shows you the exact email that they sent.

42:35So you can see the design, you can see the offer, you can see the copy. And you could use that to get inspiration for what you should be doing for your email marketing. And this guy built this site, I don't know how long ago now, but he's posted on Hacker News a little bit about it. And it's one person. It's a side project. He does a million dollars a year on it. And he said, I was doing email marketing for a brand, I noticed two things. One, it took us several days to create each email blast. And two, I had to subscribe to dozens of other competitor emails just to do research for them. So my hypothesis was I could create a site that would just sign up for all the brands' email newsletters and then make it easier for anybody who's trying to do email marketing.

43:14That's the core pitch for it. And he's just been running it as a side project. Doesn't take much maintenance. He could just do nothing on it for a little while. And it makes money through ads? Yeah. So they use ads. On the left side here, you can see I have it open. And he's basically got a link to the brand itself. And then he's got a cybersecurity ad here popped up. Below it, he's got a skincare ad. Yeah, it's just display ads. But here's another way how he makes money. So basically, you're a marketer. You go to Mild and you want to see... It looks like some shoe brand. They ran this campaign and you want to check out the email and you read it and get inspired or whatever.

43:51you click that ad and it takes you to the shoe company and it's using an affiliate link if you buy some of the shoes this is a horrible way to monetize this is a really amazing product under monetized website for sure but good for him for getting the traffic in the first place but that's a horrible way to monetize yeah yeah I agree but I think the guy doesn't care he's just like this is easy low maintenance which is why I put it in my one I'd want to own because it's low maintenance and I think it still has a lot of upside left I'll do one for one I want to own. So I said anything that is like marketplace-y, sort of like a marketplace, because sometimes if you do it right, they don't run themselves entirely, but the community kind of handles business.

44:31BuiltWith. So BuiltWith was started in 2015 or 16, probably. BuiltWith is like the most niche shit ever, but it's a really big niche. So you go to BuiltWith in order to see which plugins a website is using, if they're using WordPress. And the reason why that's important is you go to a website that you like and you go, Oh, I love this feature they have. Let's go and see what they're using. By the way, not just WordPress. Shopify also. That's new. It started with just WordPress, I think. And so you're like, just tell me the plugins and tell me everything that they're using. Shopify and built with.

45:00Shopify and WordPress. It has something like tens of millions of people going there a month. And does at the time when I first found them, I think in 2020, I think they're doing 14-15 million in revenue with just one person. So I think that would be a really cool company to own. because I think it's super valuable. Once you get all that traffic and those people coming back to you all the time, I think it's a really valuable site. Do you know anything about BuiltWith? Yeah, just what you said there. I've been using it for a long time. Basically, if you see a website and you want to know what they use for whatever they use, just go to BuiltWith.

45:29It's pretty great. It's kind of like a data... It's almost like a data index, right? It's more like a database than it is a marketplace in a way. But I agree. It's kind of amazing. All right, let's keep going. We got a couple of categories left. We have a rookie of the year. So a new one. A new one that we found. I think you might have already covered yours in here. Dude, it's boring. I didn't want to say the same thing twice. But this guy, Joe Mambre, this Joseph Mambre, I love his story. I think that this guy is going to be a big deal. And I take a lot of pride and try to find people before they're really popular.

45:59I think he's... Read the blog post that I have linked up there from the Hampton site. It's really good. I think this guy is going to be a winner. So that's my rookie of the year. What's OnlyFinders? OnlyFinders is mine. So this is one that... I don't know how old it is. Maybe a couple of years old now. Now, so OnlyFinders is a search engine for OnlyFans. So if you want to find a type of model on OnlyFans, so you're into blonde Asians or whatever, good-looking midgets, whatever you're into, you can search on OnlyFinders, and it'll give you a list of top-ranked profiles for that thing. So as you know, I've been down the OnlyFans rabbit hole where I'm like, I think there's a lot of potential in the OnlyFans world of businesses.

46:44And this was one of them that I found. And OnlyFinder is run by one guy. He's awesome. He listens to the pod and he crushes it. So he crushes the SEO game for OnlyFans. If you search for a bunch of different popular searches. And in fact, actually what he did was smart, which is he didn't want to just rank for the general searches, like best OnlyFans or something like that. He wants the high intent ones. so he wants the person who's searching for like whatever I don't know what people search for but like redhead yeah redhead if you go to his site if you go to his site you click the button on the right hand and it says like what the top searches are so it's like Indian girls with boyfriends whatever yeah I don't even want to read half of this stuff stuff that people are into so it's what he categories what he did was he ranks really high for the categories that people are that's like clearly people's thing and it's like I don't know what your thing is but I got If you got a thing, I got it for you.

47:38And because of that, those are really, really high intent searches. And then what he does on the other side is he goes to OnlyFans models and agencies and he says, hey, if you want more traffic, I have tons of people searching for your exact thing. Pay me per click for every person I send to you. So he's basically recreated Google. It's a search engine where you get paid per click to send somebody with intent to your site. He does a really, really good job of it. And OnlyFans does not have a Discover section on purpose. They decided they don't want to be in the discovery business. They want to only be in the underlying tools underneath these creator profiles.

48:14And so he does this. And this site, OnlyFinders, generates like a million dollars a month because this is an incredibly lucrative business that he has. And so... This is insane. And it's just been surfing the growth of OnlyFans, which has grown exponentially. OnlyFans a few years ago was very small. Four or five years ago, it was very small. and then it got bigger and bigger. It's like sort of like, I mean, the curve looks unreal. Like OnlyFans is bigger than Twitch. It's bigger than like some of these massive websites now. And it generates a lot of money. They pay out billions to creators on the platform.

48:49And so if you can be part of that ecosystem, it's valuable. That's insane. I have now met multiple people on OnlyFans that you've never heard of. Girls that are doing between one and two million a month on their profile. no way it's all a month because their body is the cogs it's all profit basically they have like you know usually they have like they'll have like some of them as you get bigger you have like an agency that manages it and the funny part is by the way like the only fence works is like okay so the money is made in basically like the chatting so it's not you pay for a picture it's actually you pay to like kind of like have some personal connection with them, some chat with them.

49:35And it's like the conversation and the stuff that happens when they're upselling them in the conversation is where the thing happens. And so they just have like a call center. They have like a farm of people in the Philippines that are doing the chatting for them. And they pay them like a rev share for the revenue that they generate during the chats. And so it's basically lonely dudes in America talking to lonely dudes in the Philippines. it's like that's what only fans you know you know sort of like boils down to in many cases for these like really popular accounts because no one person can handle the amount of volume that they get so what are they doing with this money they're just they have huge income and how long do you think can they do it for five years three years yeah and it's funny they kind of kind of exit they burn out and they'll just sell their name likeness and photo library and be like you run it and just give me a rev show.

50:23Give me 50%. It's like Bruce Springsteen. That's what he did. Same thing. The boss. This is insane. I don't know much. I don't know much about this shit. This is absolutely insane. The engagement on these things are wild. If you have an OnlyFans business, reach out to me. Sean at SeanPourri.com. I want to invest in OnlyFans businesses that are just cash flowing. Are they cool? Like when you met these? They're cool. The problem is they're very hard to sell and they're very easy to be killed. And so they need kind of like strategy on like... No, I mean the girls. Oh, I don't know. I don't know. You said you hung out with a couple of them.

50:57I didn't hang out with them. I just talked to them. Yeah, they're nice people. I don't know. That's insane. How did you get in touch with them? It's the internet, bro. What do you mean? How many times on here have I talked about OnlyFans and then people basically are like, oh, you're into that. So then they email you. Well, they probably have a million Indian guys like DMing them. I mean, that's insane. this is insane I don't go through you know when you see a big line at the front door you don't go wait in that line you have to go find a side door and the side door is generally you know some dude who listens to our podcast that runs their business or is their manager and that's kind of like the way it alright let's if we do alright the last category is worst to the best I have a different one but I would have to say OnlyFans would be up there but I have another one so worst to the best is these are all cool businesses but which one is our least favorite so Are yours going to be OnlyFans?

51:51No. I mean, it would be, but I already had something else. Kevin Van Trump. So Kevin Van Trump, I met this guy. Sean likes him a lot now. I met him in 2018. I was at a conference. And Kevin Van Trump is like six feet tall. And he's like really big. He's like a very, very large, overweight guy. And he walks up to me. And he's got this super thick accent. He goes, hey, what's up, man? How are you doing? And he just starts talking to me. And I'm like, this guy is so confident. it. And he starts talking about all my newsletters and the hustle and all this stuff. And he's got this thick accent. He's wearing a Ramones t-shirt.

52:24And he's got Converse on. He just looks like a Walmart guy. And then he drops one or two lines where for some reason we talked about art. And he was like, Oh, yeah. That Picasso, I got one of them some bitches. He said something like that. I was like, What? So I let it slide. And then I go, How many subscribers are on your newsletter? And he goes like, Oh, 60 ,000. And he goes, Hey, how much you guys charge for yours? And I go, Oh, it's free. We make money on ads. You charge? He goes, Yeah, we charge like$300 a month. I forget exactly what it was. And I do the math in my head. And I'm like, Wait, that's$20 million a year.

53:00He goes, Yeah, something like that. I don't even know. And I started hanging out with him. And he basically this guy's name is Kevin Van Trump. He's got this newsletter where he talks about agriculture and how it impacts commodity prices. And he's brilliant. And I get to know him a little bit more. And you're like, Oh, no, you just have a southern accent he like was a wall street like trader the guy's brilliant he's amazing and he lives in kansas city and i've done a zoom call with him and you see like he's got like these custom-built motorcycles in the back of his like house and he's got like all these picassos and shit the guy's killing it but that same day when i hung out with him i was like hey do you want to go get dinner he's like yeah i can go get dinner we hang out at 8 30 he goes hey man i gotta run i gotta go write tomorrow's newsletter and i was like what he goes i do it every day i've done it every day for 10 years i go what do you mean every day he goes six days a week i send a newsletter and it's 2000 plus worth.

53:46It's really long. He does it every day and he was making all this money. I don't think I would trade lives with him though, just to have all that money. I had the same answer. I think he's amazing. You put me on to him. I met him and his son. Such awesome people. They're awesome. Super fun. Just fun to be around. Smart. Really nice. Just kind. People don't like, you know, no pretense about them. And same thing. He was hosting FarmCon. I went because you had told me about him and introduced me to him. And when I go there, he's... He has a conference called FarmCon. He's got FarmCon, which is like the biggest farming conference get together.

54:23So I go to Kansas and I... Was it awesome? Yeah, it was amazing. And I'm there and we're talking. It's like 11 at night. It's like the whole event's done. Everyone's at the bar. Every single person is drinking a beer. Every single person is drinking a beer. And he's like, I got to get up to the bedroom. I got to go back to my room real quick. Write tomorrow's edition. and I was like, wait, you write it yourself still? And he's like, yeah, I write it. I've written it myself by hand every night. And he started this thing more than 10 years ago. I think he'd said like almost like 20 years, basically, that he's been writing this thing.

54:5618 years or something insane. Every day almost. Yeah, and it's long too. It's not like just some cookie cutter, like here's three links that are interesting. It's like, you know, Jerome Powell came down, said this, and he said this, said that. you know here's how this is going to affect corn futures and here's what i'm i'm betting over here and blah blah and then there's a bunch of memes it's amazing it's basically his market analysis for like crop you know crop and commodities and then it's a bunch of memes underneath it and he's like nope never do ads i think i just wanted to build as much trust as i can in this community so i never advertise i i charge for it that's why we have farm cons why everybody shows up is because I build a lot of trust over the years.

55:40And I learned more about business from that guy in like one hour than I did in my entire four-year education at Duke. He said to me, he said a bunch of things that I loved. I put this in my newsletter. I did a feature on him. I wrote a bunch of the lessons. But one of them that he said was, he goes, yeah, content's cool, but he's like, he goes, being an investor is the best job in the world. You kidding me? And he just said it so matter of fact that he's like, There is no better job in the world than being an investor. It is the best. And you sort of think about that. You're like, all right, well, that sounds whatever, I guess kind of obvious.

56:12And it's like, okay, if that's true, then how do you get into that job? Like, if that is true for you, how do you architect your life to get there? Because he was basically just like, look, this newsletter is great. Yeah, it makes a lot of money. But I wish I was just an investor. It would have been a better choice, blah, blah, blah. And he talks about investing because I think he was on Wall Street before he started doing what he was doing. Yeah. And he goes, I was early into Bitcoin. I was early into Facebook. I was like, really? And he's like, yeah. He's like, I wasn't as early as I could have been.

56:40He's like, I got into Bitcoin like in 20 years. He's like, we started hearing about it at FarmCon like in 2013, 2014. I didn't buy it till 2015, 2016. I should have been in it right when I first heard it. He's like, same thing with Facebook. He goes, two lessons for you in investing. Number one, the best trades are going to be ones where you buy them, you put them in the drawer, you never think about them again. He's like, that was the best thing I did about Bitcoin. I bought Bitcoin, I put it in the drawer, never thought about it again. heard all the news didn't care it's in the drawer and i was like damn in the drawer that's a cool concept of like what investments can you just have the conviction and you put in the drawer you say i'm not gonna react to the daily news cycle about this investment i'm gonna let the 10 years play out on this investment because it was a let's see what happens on the long-term type of bet second thing he said was he goes you always get a second chance to get on the train with the best investments there's always a second chance on the train he's like with bitcoin you You think you missed it, and then the price will come down.

57:32That's your chance to get back on the train. And most people, by that time, they spend the whole way up wishing they had got on the train. Train comes back around, and they get scared. They don't get back on. Same thing happened with Facebook. Facebook, we had our chances when it was private. Then it goes public. It goes up, up, up, crashed back down to$19. I got back on the train. That train came around. I got right back on. And he's like, that will happen for the best investments. And I sort of look for this now, like, how do you override the psychology that most people have, which is when it's going up, you wish you had gotten in earlier.

58:03Then when it crashes down, you're too afraid to buy in because you feel like, oh, shit, is it over? Did it pop? Did I miss it? Was I wrong? And it's like, well, then you lose, lose. You know, you want to buy on the way up and you don't want to buy on the way down. That's a recipe for being poor, right? Like, you know, buy high, don't buy low, right? That's not going to work. And so those two little lessons were ones that stuck out for me. But this guy's business is amazing. He's an amazing guy. And the reason he's amazing, among other things, is he breaks all the stereotypes. You'll think that he's just this like hickey guy, just like people used to think about me.

58:37And like, I grew up around people just like him. Turns out he's like brilliant. He'll like, you're like, you're gonna talk to me about Facebook. And he knows way more about it than you do. He'll probably knows all about Bitcoin. I mean, the guy's brilliant. and I love hanging out with him and his friends because it teaches you I'm a fucking idiot for judging people a certain way. These guys are all badass and they're fun as shit. I did a call the other day with another guy from FarmCon. Same sort of guy. He's this white guy maybe, I don't know in his 50s-ish something like that. Was he super rich?

59:11Because so many of those guys are loaded. I think this guy I don't know how rich this guy is. Like private jet rich. I don't know how rich this guy is, but the guy who introduced me to him is just like, yeah, this guy's worth, you know, 300 to 500 million dollars personally. And I was like, wow, OK, that's crazy. Because I was like, I was like, do his deals like he's always talking about these deals. Like, does he actually make money on these? Like, has he had a track record of success? He's like, yeah, he has. So this guy, this guy's got phrases for days. So I have this doc that I keep on my phone.

59:40I call phrases. Anytime somebody says something that's just like funny or worded well, it just sticks out to me. It's a punchy phrase. I write it down at farm con. I filled out my phrases thing, like, because there were so many. So this one guy, I don't want to say his name to put him on blast, but he, he was at a dinner with, so it's Kevin Van Trump. And then this guy was at the dinner and it was like a private dinner at the, at farm con. And he stands up and he goes, everyone on the table is doing introductions. And so I'm like, Oh, how I am Sean. And I work in tech and just fucking kill me.

1:00:11I guess I'm boring. Like, you know, like that's basically how I felt during the introduction. This guy stands up, he goes, you know, my name so-and-so he goes exactly he said he goes he starts i don't know who won the world series i can't tell you how to get six-pack abs hell i don't even know where the remote is in my house but i know one thing i know how to structure deals and today i'm gonna tell you guys about a deal that i'm doing and he like gave this intro and i was like what an incredible i was like what an incredible way to introduce yourself i don't know where the remote is but i know one thing i no deals.

1:00:43And I was like, that is incredible. Then he's talking about how old he is. He goes, you cut me in half. There's going to be a lot of rings. That's the best. And then he goes, and then I did a call with him the other day and I get on the Zoom call and I had just finished my workout and my trainer was like insisting because I was like, dude, I got to run. I got to be on this call. He's like, all right, just take a call, but let's do your like kind of like we try to do like this, like myofascial, like you're rolling like a foam roller type of thing. Like you're kind of like foam rolling out at the end.

1:01:11So we were doing it and he's like just do it while you're on the call foam rolled with this guy on a call I get on the call I turn on the video and I'm like yeah I'm going to show him what's going on so I'm like sorry this looks weird I'm doing like some stretching and he goes so he's a big dude and he goes okay cool if it looks like I'm stretching call 911 because I'm having a stroke

1:01:34dude why would you take a call like that incredible wit like to have that line immediately ready when I say that I'm stretching. Sorry if it looks weird, I'm stretching. I was like, wow, that was literally so fucking funny to me. I was blown away. I was like, I don't even care what else happens on this call. That was so impressive, so good. What state did he live in? He's in Tennessee, I think. What the hell is a deal struck? I don't even know what that means. He does private equity, so he buys companies. But he's like, I just know how to find a great deal, how to put the financing together and how to structure it so that like I get the maximum value out of these deals is kind of like what he does.

1:02:16And like, you know, I'm like, so I was like, have you done any deals like that I would have heard of? And he's like, you know, Disneyland, a lot of windows in Disneyland. We do all the windows in Disneyland. Oh my God. They bought a window company, got them a Disney contract. We do all the windows at Disney. Do what with the windows? Like clean them? We got to have this guy on the pod. This guy's incredible. What's yours for a world's worst of the best? I had both Design Joy and the Kevin Van Trump just because of the time thing. So I love that Kevin Van Trump has built like this, this amazing power niche in the farming industry.

1:02:54But I would not want to be the guy who has to write the newsletter every night because the pressure is it's got to go out tomorrow morning. I felt that during Milk Road for a month and I was like, nope, not doing it this way. Although I think if I was him, I would just find a way to hire somebody to do that. I can't believe he hasn't done that yet. Does Ben Thompson still do? I haven't read this in a while. Ben Thompson is my version of that. So he does Stratechery. And every day he writes a newsletter about basically the same four things. And I don't even know how he does that. He talks about Facebook, Google, Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and the business and strategy of what they're doing.

1:03:34They're so long. These are so long. He does this daily long form. His audience is like has the highest bar. His audience is like the smartest people in the tech industry. Like, you know, VCs and all that. That's who reads him every morning. So he's got to come with like original content. That's super smart about the same topics. He's been doing this for like a decade and he makes$3 million a year roughly doing this off his paid. And he only charges$120 a year. Yeah, I think he upped his price. I don't know what it is now, but he like did raise his prices at some point. 120. It's$12 a month. I think it was$100 and now it's$120.

1:04:09Oh my gosh. This guy is insane. $1 ,000 a month for this thing. I think Ben's awesome. So I don't beat it as a knock for him. I'm saying I would hate the pressure of the daily, super insightful thing that I have to write every morning. Original content about the same 10 companies. I literally don't even know how he does it. If somebody had told me they're going to do that, I'd be like, what are you saying? This makes no sense. He does it every day sitting in Taiwan. This is the worst. This is the worst. It is amazing. But yeah, I would never want to do this. So what do we think? I want to know the listener if they think that these one, all in depth on one topic, if they dig this, if they dig the award category style or the award style, what do you think?

1:04:55Yeah, this is an experiment for us of like doing a few focused episodes, themed episodes. Today's theme was these one or two person businesses that crush it. do you like this or do you like the freestyle freestyle is a lot easier this one takes a lot of work but if people love this you got to go in the youtube comments and show us if we should do more of these or no we're cool either way but this is an experiment so let us know in the youtube comments i think we should do some takeaways all right so here's my my quick takeaways the most common industries you see these one to two person businesses that crush are just like thought leader on it on social media so just putting out free content on social media e-commerce we didn't do any e-com ones in this, but there's a bunch of e-commerce businesses that could do a million dollars a year in profit that are run with one or two people.

1:05:40And then you can do agencies for everything else. Games. So we talked about Stardew Valley, Minecraft. There's a bunch of games that are built like this. Apps and plugins. So plugins on top of things like a Figma plugin, a Google Sheets plugin, a Gmail plugin, that sort of thing. And then data aggregators like built with, which are basically compiling data like mill.com, compiling a bunch of things that are of the same thing. So it's, you go search and you find what you want because they've aggregated everything. Only finder, same thing. It's a data aggregator. Strategy. So here's a couple of strategy points.

1:06:10You need to be either amazing, 100 % awesome at distribution, meaning you're the influencer, you're the content creator, or you need to be 100 % awesome on product. You're the guy coding the game and you'll hire a publisher to do the publishing. And so I think that if I was going to do this, if I was going to try to make this happen, I would say, where can I be either incredible at distribution or incredible at product. And I want to just like put all of my emphasis on that in order to make this happen. The next one, you need attributes. So a lot of these we made sound simple, but you got to have some attributes, some skill, copywriting, design, you know, the ability, like investment judgment, market analysis, like you got to be expert on one of these things if you're going to make this happen.

1:06:53And so, you know, you got to get to that expert master of your craft level if you're going to do this. The last one, it's all about leverage. So the way you can get a one or two person company to get to millions, tens of millions, or even some of the examples we gave were hundreds of millions of dollars was leverage. So you need to be using code, build it once and then it runs as software. You need to use media like podcasts or newsletters or whatever, or you need to use capital because you're not going to use labor, right? Like most companies use labor. That's why they have hundreds of people working for them.

1:07:25but if you're going to not have hundreds of people working, you got to use these other forms of leverage. Code, capital, some money, or media are your tools of choice. So you got to figure out which of those three can I use and that's how I'm going to do it. And the beauty of it is because of the internet, if you're the best at X, you now get to sell to the whole world. So like we didn't give an example, Miss Excel. So Miss Excel is this girl who goes on TikTok and she in a high energy way dances and teaches you how to use Microsoft Excel better. and she's the best in the world at teaching Excel.

1:07:57It turns out the best in the world at teaching Excel is you know how to do the useful stuff, and you can dance. Turns out that's what the best teacher of Excel looked like. And she now gets to teach the entire world Excel. Like the best of anything gets to provide that product, service, or education to everybody. That's the beauty of the internet. And so you need to figure out how to become the best of X and then just make it available to everybody. And the last thing I was going to say was it's fucking lonely. The best times that I have in work is when I'm... Whether it's in the trenches and it's a shitty day or it's a great day, it's celebrating with co-workers.

1:08:34These jobs are lonely. I'm actually surprised when I hear about this about how they are able to push. I push myself because, oh, I have mouths to feed. Or I want to be held accountable by these other people and make them proud. It's really hard to push yourself this hard and to think big when you're by yourself. And it's just hard to do this every day alone. So hopefully you have like a good spouse or a significant other or something because it's just challenging when you're by yourself. 100 % agree. I mean, when I started this, I was like, oh, I want to be a solo solopreneur. I wanted to be a solopreneur or they call it a solo capitalist.

1:09:07I raised a fund and it's like, I want to be a solo capitalist. And I was like, oh, this isn't fun at all to do this by yourself. Yeah. And not only is it not that good to do things by yourself because, you know, a little bit of help can go a long way. a complimentary person who's good at the things you're not good at is really, really useful. But on top of that, it ain't no fun. And like most of life is the journey, not the destination. And you don't want to have the shitty journey for this awesome destination. And so very quickly, I was like, yeah, this is a duopreneur. This is me and Ben doing this or in the fun.

1:09:37It's me and Ramin doing this. And I basically immediately was like, I'm going to do this. Even my econ business, I gave a chunk of it to a guy who was smarter than me and had done this before and would give me some money. And I was like, why? Just because I don't want to be reporting into myself and only have myself as a thought partner to be sparring with on ideas about this. I want to have somebody awesome just to do some idea jousting on this. And so I think doing it by yourself is honestly a terrible idea. And you should definitely try to get one other person to do this. I think two people is the sweet spot where you get sort of the most autonomy and the least management headaches, and you still get the most shit done and have a lot of fun along the way.

1:10:17All right, that's the pod. Whether you're listening on iTunes or Spotify or whatever, go to search My First Million on YouTube and go to the comments on this video and actually let us know. We'll read them and see if we should keep doing these. That's it. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel, never looking back.

1:10:45Hey, let's take a quick break because there's a quote that I love I want to read you. It's that we shape our tools and thereafter they shape us. And as an entrepreneur, if you're using a bank that was built in the 90s, you're operating like you're in the 90s. And trust me, I've been there. Clunky portals, random holds on your money,$50 wire fees, and then being told, please visit your local branch. Well, that's why I switched to a different type of banking solution, Mercury. It turns your financial chores into a smooth workflow. You can do wires, invoices, cards, reimbursements, two clicks, and I'm done.

1:11:15If you're already using Mercury, respect. If you're still using one of the old big banks, I got questions for you. So go visit Mercury.com and give it a test drive. Mercury is a financial technology company, not a bank. Banking services are provided through Choice Financial Group, Column N.A., and Evolve Bank & Trust members, FDIC.