Business of Trend Forecasting, Pickleball, And The Lucrative Virtual Gaming World

But I actually think there's an interesting business where you can look at anything that Someone is having to spend a substantial sum today for something that's gonna happen in twelve or thirty six months. And you help them uh guess the right prediction. You can build an interesting business and I'm gonna give you an example. Okay. So let's do it. What uh what topic you got today?

Alright, I've got one idea based on something you sent me. Oh wow, rich. Yeah. But you tell Sam for t having one idea based on something I sent you. Look, I'm in the final interview stage for my new researcher. Um but you told me last time you you had a lot. And uh just hear me out. So you sent me this thing called exploding topics, right? Yeah.

And you said the traffic's killing it. And exploding topics do you want to explain what it is? Yeah, it's basically like a if you go to the website, you'll see a series of charts. And the charts are basically saying Hey, this um this thing, this trend is Is growing in um in popularity. I think it started by which keywords were growing in popularity, because Brian Dean, who owned Back Linko, a popular SEO blog, uh got involved with it and then it kind of changed to what it is now.

Okay. Yeah. So I didn't know what the underlying what are they looking at to tell you what's trending or not, but they'll be like, um You know, hey, there's this thing called Power Dash. It's a vacuum cleaner for pet owners. It's grown three thousand percent right now. Right. There but you know, the volume of that key of that search is three hundred twenty. So not not huge. Regenerative agriculture, right? Uh growing six hundred fifty eight percent with twelve thousand

Searches. And you can look at that and be like huh. That's cool. I'm interested in that topic. Maybe there's something I could do here. So I think it's similar to what Trends was, which was I will tell you about Things that are getting more popular before they're fully.

In order for you to take advantage of them with content, business, that sort of thing. Right? That's the idea? Yes, and the people wondering trends, so basically I used to own I sold it, I used to own this thing called trends.co And it was a weekly email and an online community that people would pay three hundred dollars a year for, and we got it. I forget what it was when I sold it, but I think it was at like six million a year. But it very easily could have been like a million a month.

Or so in revenue. But um Basically we would send a weekly email and we had three or two researchers and they would comb the web and five interesting things and they would write interesting reports and they would also include one to two graphic that showed like here's based off of Reddit searches or based off of Google searches or based off of like twenty different data points, this topic is growing quickly. Anyway.

What tr uh exploding topics is doing there's another another company called Meet Glimpse. So I think it's Meet Glimpse dot Co or dot com. I don't know. And this is just called Trent's forecasting. And these versions of it, including my version, they're what I would call pro Sumer. So people who just want to spend Ten to three hundred dollars a month on it. They're not that big of a deal.

But there's this whole other industry of people willing to spend twenty five, a hundred thousand, ten million a year, all on trends trend forecasting. And I think it's a very interesting business model and I think it's a very underdeveloped industry. And so the one that I brought up a whole bunch is called WGSN. WGSN it's basically a monthly report that comes out and it helps people pick which colors are gonna be popular. Which sounds trivial, but that's a really big deal. If you're Starbucks and you gotta go and buy uh

10 million name tags or something like that. And you want to make sure that you've got like a good color that is like hit. Or for example, WGSN. Do you remember, Sean, how Pineapple was popular? They helped predict that Pineapple, the logo, is gonna be popular. Their next one, I think is the lemon. I think they said lemon is gonna be popular. Maybe you told me that actually. And so anyway, that's what this does. But I actually think there's an interesting business where you can look at anything that Someone is having to spend a substantial sum today for something that's gonna happen in twelve or thirty six months. And you help them uh guess the right prediction.

You can build an interesting business. And I'm gonna give you an example. And uh let's just say that it's like HR or uh like work styles. So what do we think we're gonna predict? Um the w the the the this particular age group, what are they gonna want for working from home in the next thirty six months? And if you're Google or someone that employs ten thousand of these workers, you're like, all right, I kinda need an idea because we're gonna be making an X policy. We wanna know how they're going to react. The way it could work. And this is the way WG S N and this is the way Trends and a few other things work.

is you do a combination of surveys. So you survey like you need a pool of like a thousand or ten thousand people you can survey and get intel from and make predictions. Then you look at like different data. So like you look at sentiment, you look at uh like what people on Reddit, on TikTok are saying, just what trends are saying. And you consolidate in that that into a Fairly easy to understand, one thousand to two thousand word email that you send out monthly. And then you have a consultant on staff who you can call on a regular basis and be like, hey, we're thinking about doing X based off your research. Is that a wise decision? And then you have monthly calls as well as a community and a conference. And I think you could wrap this up and do it in most any industry and have something that you could charge. twenty to fifty thousand dollars a year for. And this is something that uh what's his name? What's the bald head guy who I like? Scott Galloway. He did this with uh

He did a little bit like this with uh his company that he sold for three hundred million dollars. What was it called? It was called uh L two. Uh But anyway, this is my model that I think not enough people know about and take advantage of that I think could be pretty big. And uh I wish you had let me guess which bald guy you you like. That could have been that we could have gone on for a couple of hours on that one. I have so many that I could that that could have been the answer. Stone called Steve Austin.

Um what uh so what would you do? So you what was your what was your idea here of like how you would create kind of like a trend that is prediction type business? I what I would do is I would that I I would package my product in the way that I explain. But I think that most industries that you work in You can figure out some type of thing where you can look at your the buyers of your company and be like, Or look at any any different roles in your company and be like, hey everyone, um, can I just talk to you and like figure out like what decisions are you making that's gonna impact us in like two years? Yeah. And what type of data do you wish that you had today that would make your decision easier? And I'm sure this exists, but

One version of this I could think of that's pretty valuable would be If I could Cool. Like hey, I you know, we got a we're able to survey every You know, CIO in the Fortune five hundred.

And you know We surveyed seventy percent of the CIOs in the Fortune five hundred. Here's what they're thinking in terms of their software budget for next year. Well here's what they're thinking in terms of you know whether they per you know we it HR people at the at the you know top thousand companies.

Here's what they're thinking in terms of remote pay. Or here's what they're thinking in terms of the XYZ. And I think If it's sort of like what GLG is, uh, where GLG is an expert network and people will pay People like you and me Two thousand dollars for a one hour call.

Because they're making investment decisions and they need to do research and they need Actual industry input. To say, Hey, what's the deal with this? I'm not an expert at this. You are. But I need to make a ten million dollar bet. And so as part of my research and diligence, I'm gonna pay, you know, you and ten other people like you two thousand dollars an hour, twenty grand, no problem, that's a

That that m helps me make the right directional bet here. And so I think rather than GLG being a one way Um I think you could do it as a as a you know kind of like pulse survey to as long as you had the right key

key audience that was bought in. Now how do you get them to actually answer this? I think you could. A just Do it as part of a broader, like media thing. Like if you already have an A newsletter for HR people or whatever, you could do it, like industry dive could do this.

Um I also think you could pay them and so I think there's some some version of payment rewards that that could go with this'cause you're Probably charging a lot of money, thousands of dollars, for these reports. Um But there is another business I want to tell you from a listener here.

What's it do? It's called Eureka Surveys. So Google Eureka. Yeah, I l the Bootstrap company. Yeah, so these guys if you go to your survey, right? It just says get paid for taking surveys, right? Make money online, here's how you do it. And it's like These are the small small time version of it. So basically you go You download their app, um

You download the revenue. Did he say did he say we could say their revenue? He told me it, but I don't remember if it's I think we we should just say it maybe generically, but like, you know, seven figures in revenue. bootstrapped off this um off this product idea and You know, kind of amazing. Uh kind of amazing that they are Um

doing so well. And I and I think that this is like a really great business. He acquires, I think in his case I think he's going for kind of younger audience, sort of like, you know, Gen Z, millennial, college students, maybe stay at home moms, like You know, more of the average average Joe type of consumer. and able to survey them and they offer gift cards in return. Like the brands who want to run the surveys offer gift cards.

And it's a great way to um It's a great way to You know. Get insight, you know, quickly. Like for me, if I have a brand, right? I have a brand, I want to run a survey like this. Um that's pretty

That's a pretty um time intensive for me to go do. So I would need to go to a service like this if I want to get an answer. Well So that's my idea for for trends forecasting. I think the survey one's interesting. There there's a lot of competition in that space, but I still think it's interesting. But That's like a simple this is like a fairly simple, straightforward thing. It's a lot of work, but

Huge business, I think. Um all right, what do you got? Um okay so I'm gonna tell you um

A couple of names. I'm gonna throw a couple of names out at you. You just try to tell me the pattern. Leonardo DiCaprio. Kevin Durant. Ellen De Generis.

Luka Dodich. George Clooney. You might be thinking movies. Yeah, sports. It may be celebrity investing, where are we going with this? No.

They all play pickleball. Pickleball is this crazy, crazy thing that is exploding it's not Gonna be new to most people here. But I'm just sort of late to the party. I played for the first time the other day when we did our kind of weekend getaway for founders things. And we played

It's a lot of fun. And I was like I get it. I totally get why you guys haven't been able to get you that long. Yeah.

I don't leave the house. So y it's not an in my house activity. So therefore It this is the first time I got exposed to it, right? Like Yeah, like I I'm those people that Th that like, you know, came out and they're like, COVID? What? They don't know what's going on. Um, that's what happened to me with pickleball. And so I started looking into it and

I think there's something. I think there's a bunch of little interesting things. I wanna hear kinda what you you find interesting in this, but I'm gonna throw some stats at you. So my my my overall take is Pickleball's exploding. Um

Here's some opportunities I see and I think it's gonna be huge. It already is getting huge. But I don't think I but I see some potential traps.

And I'll tell you what those are. Okay. So first of all Guess how many people in America This is a tough one.

Yeah, so many people in America played pickleball in the last year. Twenty uh no. Uh Uh five million. A good guess. Thirty six million.

So thirty six million is a crazy number, right? That's um twice as many people as go to like Disneyland every year. It is that's the population of California, right? So thirty six million is like Kind of crazy number, right? That's like Fourteen percent of the of the total population.

And um And you can see this trend growing, right? So like it went from five to thirty six. That was in a one year jump. You can see on Google Trends it's just an up and to the right line. Um you have celebrities, like I said earlier, billionaires, buying teams, leagues. That sort of thing.

Um, I personally know two people who have built Multi million dollar brands in this space. I'm gonna tell you about them. One guy, I can't say his name, but he built a Amazon FBA store. And this was

Two or three years ago he sold it. So He actually sold way too early. At the time I met him. I was like Oh, gr you y you built a store doing what? I've never even heard of this sport. Um, and he was like, Yeah, I just got into it.

Um You know, got really into it and so I just thought oh let me just see if there's much competition on Amazon for this. There wasn't. So I built a popular FBA store. And sold it for about eight to ten million.

And so the guy sells it for eight to ten million dollars, and I was like, wow, you know, you know, ro highway robbery. Um you know tell that guy to lose your number uh now that he owns the now that he spent eight million dollars on this You know, pickle what? You know, what the hell is this? I bet you if you had that thing now, that'd be a forty million dollar brand. You know, like this thing has exploded in popularity. Whoe bought it knew what they were doing. Um, the second is there's a guy doing a newsletter called The Dink.

So he's doing the hustle or Milk Road Pickleball. And we talked to him and we were like Uh we talked about it. Oh, I see it. The dink, like D I N K.

And uh Cool guy. He's doing a bunch of really smart things on the growth and kind of like content side. And He was making more money. per reader than we were making on Milk Road.

We're in the crypto like finance niche. And he was making more money per reader in pickleball than than we were because he was A, he's Executed well. Um and B, like turns out you there's like you know

There's a lot of people who wanna advertise and people who wanna buy stuff. And there weren't really m very many mediums for them to meet each other. And this newsletter was uh Was that so this guy was yeah, I think this newsletter is probably worth three, three million, four million dollars today. Um So

Two people I personally know that have d that have done this. Okay. And I got a couple ideas here on I want to talk about why this works. Um, where this is going and also just some of the interesting characters that are involved here.

Um You've played. I seem to play it. Yeah, but hold on. Before we uh looking stuff up while you're talking. I've got a few I told you so's that I want to bring up. I was I was looking this up as you were talking.

Episode number one forty seven. This aired January nineteenth, two thousand twenty one. So almost exactly two years ago. Let's go to the listener notes. It says uh Sam brings up pickleball.

A booming sport in Austin. And it talks about all the opportunities there and why he thinks it's gonna be big. Sean brushes it off. So never going anywhere. Sean gives Sam wedgie tons of F off. Ha ha

Then You talked about dink. I was like that sounds familiar. So I wish I could sh can I share my screen right now? I don't I won't share my screen actually. Uh I look up Dink Founder. It's a guy named Thomas Shields. I Google Thomas Shields Twitter. I go to his Twitter, I click his DMs. And there's an unread message that he sent me in

September eighteenth, two thousand twenty. Hey Sam, Thomas here. Nice to meet you. Um I uh uh and he sent me a video on YouTube where it's a custom video of him talking to the camera saying, Hey Sam and he's explaining to me about this newsletter that he wants to start And he wants to know if I want to participate in it or something like that.

This is the first time I've seen this video, by the way. I I've I've not even uh I'm I'm watching it for the first time ever. So I was I take full credit for telling you about pickleball. I take Not full credit, but it it is cool that this guy hollered at me and this is four three years later and he's absolutely doing what he said he was gonna do. So Man, you responded to the personal video, huh?

I Well, this is an unread Twitter message. I never saw it. But anyway, uh that so that's my story before we get to the I Yeah. Well, I remember seeing it, but Twitter's actually great because you can open up a message

And they don't know. And they don't know but until you hit accept. And you can read the whole message. And so be like, Hey, you never saw it. I'm like, yeah. Never so anyway. That's my story. So you're asking me, have I played picklebore?

Pickle ball before. And my my response to to that is does Doll does Dolly Parton sleep on her back? Yes. I've played pickle pickleball before, dude. Of course I have. Have you seen me? Have you looked at me? I'm a I'm a tall white guy from the Midwest. Of course I play pickleball. Do I like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches? Sure do. Am I taking a swing of a of a of an old school Coca-Cola classic right now? Sure is.

Um do you know how Pickleball started, by the way? Uh old people. Uh it was like a senator or something, right? Yeah, dude, you know your shit. This is crazy. That's crazy you know that. Um It was a congressman. So there was it was a board congressman who created this. It was Nineteen sixty five. It was in the like the uh the Pacific Northwest.

And they get back from some trip. Him and his buddy. They have nothing to do. They're at this house. They have nothing to do. They're bored. The house has a badmint. Great, let's go play some badminton, I guess. They go down there. There's no equipment for badminton. They're like, Oh fuck. What are we gonna do? So they're like well

We got ping pong inside, but we kinda be out I kinda wanna be outside. So they take the ping pong paddles. A wiffle ball. And they go to the badminton court. And they start inventing this game.

And They're just born, they invent this game and they're like and they call it pickleball because I guess there's this phrase called pickleboat, which is like a Hastily assembled crew for a boat. And they're like, Oh, it was a mashup of we just grab The paddles and play badminton and

Lower than that. This mashup thing, we'll call it pickleball. And so they create this thing. It's like, you know, just a small regional game. Nobody's really playing it. And somehow I I couldn't figure out the link, but like Somehow about

The last five years. This thing has gone like very, very mainstream. To where now there are professional leagues. There are um, you know, tons of celebrities own teams that they're people are buying team. Gary Vee is buying a team, Kevin Durant's buying a team, Tom Brady's buying a team. Patrick Mahomes is buying a team. These teams cost a million dollars now.

Um There are billionaires that are trying to buy leagues and merging the leagues to try to make this like an official thing. It has become Kind of real. And Um

There's People are trying to create like top golf for pickleball. So there's a place called Chicken and Pickle. Uh and Camp Pickle that's trying to like basically create venues where you can come, drink, eat. And play pickleball.

And so There's like this uh you know mini gold rush that's happening right now in the world. In the world of pickleball. And I started thinking, okay, where do I think this goes?'Cause I've seen this now a couple of times. I've seen this with

MMA? Right. Going from Super fringe to more mainstream. Esports. Um and even some other things like the drone racing league. You ever seen the drone racing league?

Yeah, quite. Yeah, I that one hasn't picked up like I thought it was going to, but it maybe it will. Same. Same. Um

And so you see these happen and you sort of think, Okay, what does it take And I'll give you I'll give you what I think pickleball has going for it. And then I'll tell you what I think. So here's what I has going for. By the way.

We had a writer at uh a a freelancer at the hustle who quit for a year And she became uh she wanted to compete in pickleball and she did and she started traveling to competitions. Yeah, like it's like an intense thing. People love it. What did you say to her when she told you what she was planning here? What do you think I said? I said that's awesome. Yeah. Give me your laptop right now, and then get out. And that's awesome. Yeah. But it is awesome.

Text me a pick, go after yourself. You're like objectively this is awesome. Emotionally, I feel a little wounded. And I'm rooting for you to fail.

No, but she did. She's doing good. Um Okay, so here's what I think it has going for it. So Why uh like less brainstorm. We've done this with food. Remember you had your food thing that was I think like low key genius.

And nobody really respects you for it except for me, but like Look, people don't get it. I do, but no one else does. No one else does. Your parents don't understand, but I'm okay with your lifestyle. We've talked about it two or three times just to say the joke again to see if it hits. And it just doesn't seem to hit. But like let's do it again. What's your food thing and then let's Plus do the equivalent for the sports world. So for food, I was like there's like a handful of categories that you need to check off in order to make your food go viral. So it's either gotta be like a side food where it becomes the main thing. So it's like instead of like Ice cream that has cookie dough in it. It's like only cookie dough. The other thing is it has to be uh a different uh color than normal, so green ketchup.

Or Rainbow Bagels. Or it has to be a different uh size. So like a huge pizza or a really small thing. Or the last one was it has to be the combination of two things that are related, but you wouldn't normally have done it, like the Cronut. Right. Yes, exactly. Again.

Genius. Uh finally hopefully you hopefully you get your two this time. Um so I think there's sort of a similar thing when it comes to creating a a hit game. Or hit sport. Because when I played pickleball I was like, Okay That was fun. And here's what was fun about it.

Um There's zero learning curve. Like we literally the no nobody even really explained anything. They were just like stand here and when the ball comes to you, hit it. And then they were like There's two rules. Don't go in the kitchen and like, you know, whatever, you know, here's how the scoring system works. They they told me that as we were playing.

Uh It was very intuitive. It's like okay, cool, got this paddle, similar enough to tennis, similar enough to ping pong. I I kind of already know how to move my body this way. All right, this'll this will work. Uh so zero learning curve. Uh, we were playing and the age range of the players that we were playing with, if somebody had their son there.

uh, you know, who I think is like, you know, eleven or twelve. But I I think you can basically play this game from Age eight. To like sixty five. And so Everybody does.

My mom's the close to seventeen. She goes to her pickleball league twice a week. Okay, we m we're we might push it just to eighty. Uh yeah, I don't know how how but this is Super broad range. And how many sports can you really say that for? Very, very few. sports can be played by extremely young and extremely old people. Um, you could just play it with two people, so you don't need like

five on five or like you know a full football team or basket baseball team. Um It picked up during COVID because it was kind of like a outdoors activity. That anybody could do that was sort of socially distanced. And so I think that was like a big factor in why it grew.

Um and it's basically like a lightweight version of of tennis, um, or even maybe even a lightweight version of golf in the way that people use it,'cause you can talk while you're doing it. You're not like Just huffing and puffing and running the whole time. Uh and lastly, and most importantly.

You can play the game drunk. And so this is like, you know, if I wanted to create the perfect game, those would be my my criteria. And then you know, out would come would come pickable. So I think it's it is kind of a perfect game in that way. So I think it has legs for that reason. I think it's gonna keep getting more and more popular. The fact that the whole state of California worth of population plays this game.

has played this game in the last year is crazy. Um And you also see other things going for it, like The founder of Lifetime Fitness. You know, like the gym chain.

Got really into pickleball. And then put five hundred million dollars into building pickleball courts in all of his like locations because he's like, I love pickleball, people are gonna love this. And so he then deployed half a billion dollars into building infrastructure. Dude, I love that. And people are converting tennis courts, all this stuff is crazy. There's thirty five thousand courts in the United States now. Dude, tennis sucks anyway. Only like a couple people know how to play it. You know what I mean? Like my wife took lessons on how to play it and I would go and play with her and she would serve it at me and I would basically just try to hit it back. And that was how we played. It it sucked. It sucked. And then I would serve it to her. Tennis is stupid. So

To anyone listening who wants to capitalize this, we can brainstorm, but I'm gonna summarize this in two simple words, okay? Vince McMahon. If you are in this business, remember those words. Vince McMahon. Who's Vince McMahon? Vince McMah is the owner and current or former CEO of the WWE, the World Wrestling Entertainment. I don't know what it is, but it's it's uh any time that we grew up, you know, Stone Cold, The Rock, this is WWE. Back then it was WWF Dude.

When you think about it. WWE is just a bunch of ripped dudes in their underwear having a soap opera in front of fifty thousand people and then the rest of the people on TV. It's all it is is a soap opera and there's a little bit of rip dudes in underwear wrestling. That's all it is. And it's

Awesome. You've got grown dudes who are like the most like homophobic guys ever and yet they're like sitting there watching two G oily rip dudes just rolling around. It's like You know, they get past it all because all they care about is the story. The drama. This is all you need to do. So if you're interested in this, uh you just go and get a picture of Vince McMahon, you put a a picture of him on your wall and you just say

What would Vince do? Yeah. What would Vince do? WW uh V D. What would Vince do? That's all I'd care about if I was entering into this because that's exactly what happens. With tennis I only cared about what's her name, Serena in that last like tournament that she was in because it was her last one. You know what I'm saying? Like I only care about this Naomi Namasaka lady. I only care what's her name what's her name sorry, sorry Osaka. I only care about her because like I hear that she's kinda like going a little like she's having some mental issues and I'm like oh okay now I'm kind of interested. We got a train wreck? Yeah. Yeah, like I'm into it. Like th that that's like what I get I get hooked on it or like You know something's like

sports that I don't think are mainstream. I get it. Like Lance Armstrong guy gets cancer, maybe it's on drugs, killing these Europeans. Alright, cool. You got my attention. Like I need a story. And that's what anyone who's interested in pickleball needs to understand.

This data is wrong every freaking time. Have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform where everything is fully integrated. Whoa, I can see the client's whole history. Call, support tickets, emails, and here's a test from three days ago I totally missed. Hotspot. Grow better. So I think

As funny as what you just said is I think you're totally right. I remember when we started working on um an esports product, right? Like that's what got bought by by Twitch. So we were building basically an esports company. And I met with a venture capitalist. Exact. We he goes love esports, um, but

Esports needs it's Dana White. Which is basically Dana White was the Vince McMahon of the UFC. And he goes. Dana White. He's like there is no UFC without Dana White. Right, because

Literally the company was going bankrupt. Uh so so you know, I I don't think literally there would have been a company without without Vincent uh sorry, without Dana and his And the Fertita brothers coming in and buying it. And putting in they bought it for two million dollars. And then they burned another forty or fifty million. Trying to make it successful at a loss.

before it finally turned around and started to become a thing. And so they put in Years. Millions of dollars. And expertise at promotion.

Um and willing to just run through walls to make it happen, going state by state to get this thing licensed. So they can even host events. And then hosting an event, figuring out how we're gonna sell tickets. And once they sell tickets, how are we gonna get this thing on TV? Once it gets on TV, how are we gonna build these characters and the storylines? Oh, we gotta invest in All of these documentaries and reality T V shows and things like that.

Before smartphones were even a thing, Dana used to give his guys I remember you remember when the the they first came out, there were these video cameras that looked almost like an iPhone looks now, but it was like a flat Flip cams. He ga he goes, Hey everyone, we're having a meeting. You UFC fighters, everything you do, here's your flip cam. Record it, post it on like I forget what was popular. I think it was YouTube. But we're he was like one of the first guys to do that. Totally. Totally was the first one. And he had to do it because he no mainstream channel would let him in. He couldn't get a you know, now they're on ESPN. It took twenty years to get onto ESPN as a sport. That's how crazy this was.

And so You need somebody like that. Which basically just saying you need a World class. One in a billion entrepreneur. If you're gonna make this work. And there are some interesting characters that are involved in this thing. Do you know who this guy is, Dundum?

If you hear this about this guy the search Dundum pickleball. Um There is this billionaire who is like really try to make pickleball a thing. Like so this guy made his fortune

Doing Subprime auto loans. Which like You didn't I didn't even have to say the Yeah, Tom Tom Dundum. Yeah. Yeah, some prime mortgage loans. Uh like you don't even have to say he made his fortune. If I just said

Yeah, he worked on subprime auto loans. You'd be like, Oh, so he's filthy rich, huh? Like you know, like there's no you don't put those four words together without being a billionaire. And so he's super rich. He takes a bunch of big wild bets, so he put I think like seventy million dollars into an NFL competitor.

Um called the AAF. that like basically folded before it even had its first game and he lost seventy million dollars trying to do that. Um Now he's basically he owns pickleball dot com. He bought the major league. Um, you know, the biggest uh league for pickleball or like you know, there's two competing leagues and he bought one of them.

And um This guy's like trying to make pick a ball happen. And he's dude, he also owns the majority of Top Golf. He owns the majority of top golf. Yeah, he he does a bunch of stuff like this. So he is uh

Pretty fascinating guy. There's a bunch of like really like interesting characters that have like kinda pushed this forward. So he's one of the guys who've pushed this forward. Um there's another guy named Seymour Rifkin. You ever heard of this guy? No. Why would I have heard of him? Here's some things about Seymour Rifkind. Self made millionaire by creating a marketing company. All right.

Check. Uh does Iron Man's check? Does ultra marathons check? Taekwondo black belt check. He has bicycled solo coast to coast. Check.

He He created um The first rating system for pickable check? He did all of this after the age of fifty. That's pretty baller. That's a that's a pretty baller post fifty resume to have. So

uh you know pushed pushed the the the ball forward and kinda helped Legitimize it, make it make it more popular as well. And then obviously there's all the players and the people who have been playing at the grassroots as well. So so I feel like with pickleball there's just like this tremendous

Brownswell and here's a couple of My quick takes. Uh first of all R I P Badminton. I knew I knew for the first time I saw Bad Bad was a little bit of a big sport. I could tell I saw it coming and I avoided it like the plague and

It just needed a little Little tweak. A little tweak there for Badminton. And You know. Pretty sad for Badman did. It was like sitting there the whole time and missed miss this wave. So Uh yeah, that sucks.

Um Second. Could this happen again? Like I need to go start playing all old people sports and just sniffing around like What's up with bocce ball? How you play this shit? Is this good? Is this the next thing? Like I there there might be another old person sport that could be translated down.

Um third. You may not know this, but I was on the cusp creating the next pickleball. Back when I was in h uh middle school, me and my buddi created a game called Golf. You might be wondering what's golf, Sean. And golf was basically the combination of golf

And ping pong. It was an extreme version of Ping Pong. And shout out to my guy Steve ADB who was there with me in the in our game room and we created golf and it I g I guarantee this is the most fun game ever and we invented it. We just didn't know how to commercialize at the time. Um incredible game. My version of that my version of that was in eighth grade. We came up with the game called Nutball. Or you It's bloody knuckles with other parts of your body. Oh no, it's better. It's called nutball. You sit twenty feet apart and you sit on the ground with your legs

And you open your legs. Loses get in trouble. Yeah. My my the sister Mary came up to me and said, Sam, no more nutball. So I I got bad Which is a win of itself. Uh funny story. Um So I left, yeah, I we did that weekend kind of retreat founders thing where it's like, Okay, we're gonna brainstorm, we're gonna really make plans, we're gonna, you know, think about what's next, we're gonna give each other great business advice. Um I left

early the on the last day. So I missed the last twenty four hours. And so I hit up Ben and I was like, Ben, how was the how was the last day? What I missed? Anything good? Anything really you know, do you have do you have notes you can share with me? He goes. No, we basically just played pickleball for seven hours because uh Sully really wanted to beat me in po pickleball and um he couldn't, but he wouldn't let me leave until he beat me, but he just couldn't beat me.

And so we just played four and a half five hours. And I just nonstop. And then after that we didn't talk. And I think like that's the sign of a great game. A game that could take over your life and make you a bit of a degenerate. So I am all in on pick a ball. Dude, they need a leader with a good name. When I was in San Francisco, I got into competitive ski ball and the guy who ran it was called Joey the Cat. And he do you remember Joey the Cat? He braided himself in San Francisco as Joey the Cat, the ski ball guy, and people would rent ski ball machines for him like startups.

He was just like renting out skeeball machines to bars or to offices? What's he doing? Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he was making good money doing it, right? He was making great money. He owned buildings in the mission. Yeah. He owned like any where where he had like a little warehouse with all of his ski ball machines and it was Joey the Cat.

And all of his uh ski ball machines had like a tiger stripe on it. And uh Oh you got you you got a Joy the Cat machine? That's great, man. You you this office is like you guys you guys must be doing well. You're having you have fun in your office? Oh cool. Yeah. Like oh you're into like local shit? Nice. Right, right, right. Oh you still yeah, you're supporting this local guy? Joy the cat. You have kabucha here. Wow, you guys got it going on. So this guy needs a the leader of uh of uh pickleball, they need a cool name, like Joey the Cat.

I feel like there should be like a tiger sound every time you say that. All right. Um Okay, cool. We let's do one more topic. Okay, I wanna give you one more Uh interesting.

Um that That I think is worth talking about. Okay. So have you ever heard of virtual gaming worlds? No, dude, whenever we talk about this, what's my answer? Yeah.

Well it's just kinda like a rhetorical question, really. I play sports. That's what I play sports and I eat meat. No, I'm too busy having fun. Like I beat up the last guy who said those words to me. So go Google Google this company. You're gonna be kind of interested in this. So go to this website and I just want you to guess their revenue. Just say we're playing game called guess the revenue. Uh well, it's just like a little square space rinky dink site looking I don't know, five million? Uh close, close. Three and a half billion a year. Oh great. Uh with five hundred million of profit.

And They did this in ten years. So what they do is they're basically the they're one of the only legal online casinos in the United States. They own one of the largest poker sites in America called Global Poker. And Basically, it's casino games done via sweepstakes and trade promotions. That's kind of like the legal Arbitrage here to make this work is that they do it as

It's not gambling, it's basically sweepstakes. Um And they have a patent on it. So they have like very he has very little competition at the moment, apparently. Um And I gotta give a shout out to the guy. So there's a guy who sent me

this message and a bunch of notes on this. I'm gonna shout them out real quick. Um It's kind of uh He was like, Dude, you gotta feature this guy. He's basically a billionaire He pays like you know, basically he He just dividended out, you know, in the late latest like whatever year or quarter and just bought a private jet off the off the dividend. It's like

Uh so shout out to this guy Ansel who um Who told me about them. So crazy Crazy crazy business. He's he's Ansel on Twitter. Um Alright, so

Here's what here's what's interesting. So the guy who started it, he's an ex financial planner. Yeah. Basically was not a builder or a seller, right? Like the typical startup archetype is like You're a great engineer.

Or you're the great growth marketer. And he was neither. He was a solo founder. He was a financial planner, didn't know how to do marketing, didn't know how to do coding. He was basically just a badass and he recruited awrence? Yeah, Lawrence. Exactly.

Uh he paid a developer agency to handle the build out. So didn't have a technical CTO, just hired a dev shop. Um You know, uh it wasn't perfect. Like they basically the code was so buggy, like The slot machines would accidentally just pay you out a bunch. And this happened several times. They had to like survive that.

Um, and this is built out in Perth, Australia. So this is like M built in the middle of nowhere. So kinda violates all the rules. Single founder didn't have the skill set. wasn't in a big city where, you know, oh you gotta move to Silicon Valley or New York or wherever to do this. Uh he came to Silicon Valley once, couldn't raise any V C because they can invest in uh gambling opportunities. But the good news is

This that means this guy didn't take on any investment take on much investment, didn't didn't get diluted. So he still owns sixty six percent of this company that's doing five hundred million a year in profit. And um and does you know, three and a half billion in revenue. And so, you know, it's a f you know, basically started fully remote. They they got their first office eight years in. Uh you know, eight years into the business. It's pretty crazy. Dude, it it says he um

Wow, this is amazing. So He said th they uh increased their profit and they made four hundred and fifty four million a profit and it paid dividends of four hundred and thirteen million dollars. I actually have a question. So does that mean that the company only needs uh forty million dollars uh or whatever the d yeah forty million dollars in cash to operate. Either that or they have enough cash reserves already there to for whatever the let's say their burn might be a hundred, they might have already a stockpile of cash reserves. So they just divid out the excess. That's wild, man. This is wild. So it's all based around this workaround, which is that the US law lets you do sweepstakes.

Um and y so they offer sweeps coins that can be redeemed for cash. And uh they have a trademark around patent around sweepstakes trade promotions. They say they worked with the US lawyers to build a system where Um like customers can basically buy virtual gold coins, use it to play the games. They have no value outside of the game. Um

But they'd When you buy the gold coins, you get these sweep coins with it. And uh And yeah, basically like they found a like a it was a regulatory insight, not a product. Or marketing insight that allowed this.

um to happen. So And sweepstakes are regulated basically like state by state. So In order for something to change, every you know, different states each individually would need to change something. In order to make this happen. Um

And uh yeah, there's basically like uh you know, brands that will use multinational company, like there's like sweepstakes companies that you can use. Uh dude, whenever whenever people tell me Hey, I have an idea. Should I hire a developer or should I hire one of these agencies to make an app?

Ninety nine percent of the times I say No, you're wasting your money. You're never gonna do anything with it and it's just gonna go to waste. Right. This is the guy. This is the guy. Tot tell needs to jump on this guy as like a story of how these things work. This is this is a really fascinating story.

Yeah, exactly. And there's a video of him in twenty twelve. He's pitching at the launch conference to Jason Calicanus. I don't know if it's this exact idea, but basically you know similar similar sort of uh gambling idea. And all the judges are basically like, Oh, you know, the opportunity is outside of the US. It's too hard in the US. And uh You know, didn't listen. Like knew his knew his shit.

understood that there's like a regulatory moat. And a uh a patent mode that he could create that would allow him to do this And basically create kind of like a small A not small, sorry. A large cash cow um That's essentially like un you know, n nobody's really competing with them on this, which is kinda crazy.

It's it's surprising to me that a patent would be this is powerful at a at a at um stopping somebody from competing. Because in tech Patents usually do nothing. Um I don't care about patents. At all. Yeah.

Whenever they say someone has by the way, what do you con McGregor? Nice I like that word. You should bring that back. Yeah, little y little Brit and Yeah, you gotta call me mate. I like that. Uh that was pretty good. Um They uh whenever I hear someone say they have a patent uh like in a pitch, I'm like I I think that means nothing.

I'm not sure. I'm usually like That means you think it's something and it is nothing, which means you don't know anything. Yeah. It's like asking me to sign an N D A to hear someone's pitch. I'm like, Oh, you yeah, you're this is a joke. We uh I remember at one of our startups it was like um or like when we bought back We we got the patents with it and it was like oh there's a patent for um Like the idea of like going on a social network and whiteboard like there's like a whiteboard feature where one user can draw anything on this virtual whiteboard.

Oh. I was like, Oh, you invented that? He's like, Yeah. And I was like, Cool, but like I use that on Facebook. He's like, Yeah, because this means nothing. This piece of paper means nothing. And it does nothing and like you know, impossible to Really use this or enforce this or like you know. Just way too hard in the world of like internet innovation to to make this work. It's that was my m that was my belief coming in. So this is a bit of a frame breaker here for me on uh

on like why this guy has no competition doing this. And it might be some other reason. There might be another reason which is It might be that this is actually shady AF and like most Entrepreneurs don't want to do it or Yeah, too many lawsuits or whatever.

Definitely that one. By the way. Definitely I I I think it's definitely that one. Without like knowing anything about this, it just going strictly off uh like A guest with zero information other than I see this guy uh owns a bunch of Ferraris. Uh probably that one. Oh his Instagram is prolific. And you speaking of uh Uh

Of names. This guy's got a name. Lawrence Escalante. Like the tell you can't be Lawrence Escalante and not have a profile picture as he does. Where he's like this at a poker table and he's just looking over.

Yeah. He's them boys. That's what his that's what his his Instagram bio needs to be just I'm them boy. This guy's the this this guy's the guy. Uh well congrats to him. That's a interesting find. He uh this is a crazy story. So uh that's uh he knew he's like dude, I got something that's

Great for M FM and sure enough it was. Yeah, that's juicy. That's what that's called. That's called a that's called a big juicy burger. It's a good find. By the way, we forgot. Oh. I totally forgot. Speaking of Legal agreements, patents.

Hm. Important. There's one more. Look, if you've made it this far normally we put this in the beginning, this one's for the for the real OGs who are into this. There's a thing called the MFM. My first million gentlemen's agreement. And by the way, Sean, in our last video, you called it a gentleman's agreement, and then you actually said

Shoot, we have four women listeners. We have to call it A woman's agreement. And did you see the our four women listeners actually comment in the YouTube channel? And in fact many said ac no, you have more, I'm number five. But what they don't know is that actually There can only really ever be four for whatever reason. It's just like a law of physics or something like that. One in, one out. It's like a nightclub and so We really appreciate all of you. All four of you are f like

Near and dear to our hearts. Um we look forward to getting to know you personally,'cause we can,'cause it's four. And so um and actually they don't even need to sign the gentleman's agreement. They're in. Their grandmother.

There's two requirements here. If you've made it this far in the video, and also if you've ever listened to more than one video, Sean and I dedicate like dozens of hours a week to making these videos. So now you are in debt to us and all you have to do to repay your debt is click like. If it doesn't matter if you're listening on Spotify or iTunes. I always call it iTunes, but you know what I mean. It doesn't matter where you're listening to, you go to our s uh our YouTube page, type in My First Million, and then click subscribe, and now we're even and we work for you. It's called the Gentleman's Agreement because we're not there. I can't see your computer. So you just have to do it. Just don't lie. So please go and do that and that's it. Yeah, it's like um, you know, Biden was was thinking about canceling student debt. Well, we're gonna cancel your debt.

You're going to cancel all your podcast debt if you just do this one thing. Like I mean, i I couldn't couldn't think of a better deal for you, honestly. So Um honor the gentleman's agreement, go to YouTube, My First Million, click subscribe. And uh turn the notifications on too, why not? Dude, by the way, this part of the pod has become a fan favorite. Yeah. This is really and I and I have to say, I stole this from someone, Jesse on fire, I stole this from him. He's another YouTuber, but this has become a hit. Don't know why you're admitting that. I would s just steal everything and say that he stole it from you.

Um and let the head. He's a UFC podcaster, so maybe he can kick my ass. And how does it have you heard it? Uh he goes, Look, the other day I went and I saw the dish at seven eleven. It was for Alzheimer's or uh like muscle something dysropy dysrophy. And I left a quarter there. And I didn't steal the other quarters. I just left that one quarter there because that's called the gentleman's agreement. And I stand by it. And that's the same thing with this. I edit the video, I come up with the content, I do all this work, I do it for you. What you're gonna do for me is you're gonna click subscribe. That's that's our agreement. This is how society works. And right now everyone's doing it. And if you haven't done it, you're you're you're being left out. So please do that. And uh that's his pitch. It's pretty good. It's good. And it's tough to come up with it each time and I feel like

In doing so, we also earn our our part of the gentleman's agreement just by making it interesting, right? Uh we gotta we gotta earn it. Uh um We should uh we should wrap it up.

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