#22 - Cloud Kitchens, Kava Bars & Religious Products

Okay, million dollar brainstorm. We're back. You've been in Hawaii. Tell us about that. If you guys Google lobby conference, you'll see it. A lot of people write about it as if it's this douchey event. Right. Which is it? Okay, what's douchey about it? It's expensive and it's in Hawaii and it's a bunch of tech people. I don't think that's douchey, but it definitely checks many people's boxes. to fit that stereotype. It's called Lobby Conference. So how'd you get invited? Narandra, he referred me. Okay, so it's this uh you can Google it to learn about it, but it's this event hosted by David Hornick, one of the partners at August Capital of V C 150 or two hundred people, invite only. They've done it for thirteen years now. And The guys who were there on the first year, many of them are still there. And it's like internet OGs like Tony Shea, the founder of Zappos, was there. Kevin Rose. Kevin Rose, dig I had dinner and hung out most of the time with Tim Lestergen, founder of Pandora. Like all these guys who were like maybe my age now, but are in their forties. Right. Who were still trying to have a hit and have now had some hits. It was awesome.

It was great. Two takeaways. Yeah. Number one, Gen Z totally they're fucked. Okay, why? I don't think there's a No, there's like we're we had these like little meetups about uh like and we would talk about interesting things. Gen Z, I didn't realize it. They're having very little sex. They're doing a lot of drugs, but they're not drinking and a lot of them have depression and mentality. Gen Z is like twenty one and then younger right now?

Uh maybe four, twenty four. Twenty four and younger. Yeah. Suicide rate's high. The depression rate is like astronomical. Who was talking about this? Who was like the Gen Z. So it was very much like well here's what the cool kids think. Like I realized that at that time I'm like an old guy who's like, Well how do they use it? Yeah, exactly. Old people talking about young people. Yeah. It never fails. funny I w I was like the youngest guy there. People had Gen Z children. And they were talking about it. Right, right. Okay. Fair enough. The second thing. There was tons of like rich ballers there. Like really wealthy. And a lot of them seemed just horribly like Down, depressed and not like that. If you're young or if you're rich, you're depressed. That's what I'm learning. Everyone who's young hears this and no one believes it, which is that money will not make you as happy as you think it will. Right. I saw this first hand very clear. What made you say this that they're at this conference and they were just kind of recluse or what what made you feel this? Or they were sharing like look, I'm not

Feeling great. First of all, yes, a lot of people there was this one gathering it was like a bunch of small sessions that people would complain about stuff, like say, Here's what I'm struggling with. And you think that these people who have it all figured out they definitely don't. Right. People brought their families. And you see like the interactions that people have had with their husbands or wives or kids, and it's like this guy on the surface appears like this baller, but he just has he's going through the normal bullshit that every family man is going through. Right, right, right. Um I have a I have a friend who's I don't know how wealthy he's but close to a billionaire and he basically he was talking about this how he was feeling this way and he's like the problem is no one wants to hear about an unhappy billionaire. He's like you will get zero listeners to that Like talk. So you end up just sortling it up and going on your way. I have a few friends that just sold your friends too, just sold big companies and I was with one of'em and we went to the ATM 'Cause he was like wanted to have like a celebratory where he like printed out his receipt. Yeah. Two hundred million dollars on the ATM receipt. Wild. Wild about and then we went and had dinner at like a Whole Foods like uh Seven dollar. Yeah, like we went to a grocery store, I think, and just ate on the patio and he was stressed out. He was like what am I gonna do with this? And I was like, dude, when are people gonna like chill?

There's a Jim Carrey quote where he goes, I wish everybody could be rich and famous so they would know that that's not the answer. Yeah. This podcast is like all about building successful businesses called million dollar everything. I feel like half the conversations are like, Yeah, money's not the thing. I think we need to reiterate that, which is that it's not. It's just like if you're training for an event or training for l l weightlifting, you are no different from one hundred fifty to three hundred pounds in terms of like bench press. Right. It's just the active pursuing that is is fulfilling in itself. And the other thing is when you have money you have freedom. And but you don't need less jobs of money. Yeah, you need less than you think, but that freedom is very powerful. Okay. So let's do it. Ideas. What do we got? We promised the people some ideas, talking about different trends, talking about different ideas that we find interesting. You wanna go first or me? You okay, cool. All right. I have one. Have you heard of made bathrooms? No. Okay. May uh these things called made renovations. All right, so I saw this ad on Facebook and basically it was like a before and after. And a before after is, in my opinion, the best sales pitch I've ever seen. Always, right? If you split screen on the left, it's like this is you before, on the right, this is you after. And so the left and right in this one were Left was like a normal, ordinary, kind of crappy looking bathroom. And on the right was like this really slick looking bathroom. And it basically said, We will come renovate your bathroom for X dollars and it'll look exactly like this. I was like, This is interesting. Like they're I've never seen somebody advertise a bathroom renovation on Facebook. So I clicked it. And basically what this company does is they have three stock designs.

And they're all look great. And so there's like a super modern one, there's kind of a old school Victorian looking one, but again, very clean. There's like another one that's like Made. Yeah. And so all you do is you say, Yep, I want that bathroom. Like you don't have to hire a contractor, go through ideas with them, figure out what you want for the sink versus the toilet versus the walls. It's like no, this is the bathroom. Do you want this in your house? Silicon Valley thing or like uh I don't think that they're super Silicon Valley centric. They are available here, I saw, but is this like a new startup? It is a startup, yes. It is a startup. So it's it's a direct to consumer turnkey renovation. And so most people who do home renovations want kitchens and bathrooms. Clearly they're starting with bathrooms will probably expand to kitchens. The second thing, they're taking all the thought out of it. I love that. This is a beautiful bathroom. Do you want this one, this one, or this one? We have three models. And then I thought, wow, because they only have three models, they're probably getting phenomenal prices, uh, you know, economies of scale on buying the the materials they need to do this. They're training contractors to like deliver the exact price.

bathroom. And so they're probably training staff that's like just has to learn this one thing. And for the buyer, they're taking all the complexity of this kind of tangled project, like Oh, do I want to do a home renovation right now? Elimination of choice. Elimination of choice. Okay. That I think that should work for haircuts, men haircuts. Like barbers. Yeah. When I go to the barber, I want to choose like I'm at Subway and be like here's the fourteen, I'll take the number twelve large. They say short on the side, a little bit off the top. Right. Okay. Yeah, I don't even know why they ask me. I'm like just look at it and just make it shorter. Okay. So what else could that work for? Where like you eliminate choices. your design and renovation is like a great idea. Yeah, it's just so complicated. I think travel is another one. So turnkey vacation. So if you knew not just the flight at the hotel, the whatever people do this, but like flight hotel and activities, bundle it up, give you a price and be like, Okay, you've heard that the Bahamas is great. Here's Bahamas if if you want to just hit the buy button. And just email people every week being like Here's Aruba buy button. Here's

You want to go to Venice, here's the buy button. And I think eliminating the choice and the planning required to set up a vacation. I think that's a cool concept. I'm gonna think about that. for a little while of what's at the start that y where you eliminate choice. I mean uh look it goes both ways. Like the more products a company launches, the more money they make, typically. But also a lot of times when you just sell one or two or three things, it makes life better and you can deliver on that service in a way that You can't if you have this like larger variety of choice and customizability. And so it won't work for everything. But if it does work for one thing and I th I think it'll work for something like bathrooms and kitchens, that's a such a high ticket price. So I'm excited about that. Okay, something we covered on trends and I experienced this weekend because people were talking about it. Kava bars or cava? I've heard of it. Okay, I've done I lived in Australia for a little while. Fiji's like Australia's Mexico. So it's like we're like it's like the Caribbean, like Yeah, of course. So I went to Fiji for two weeks and we hung out and we

We drink Kava. It's like a a root. It tastes like dirt. And you mix it with water and we would just sit around a circle with the folks who lived in the Fijians. And we would drink it and it gives you a mild high effect. If it kinda felt a little bit like weed. Yep. Where you're like chill and people loved it. Immediately when I went home from Fiji I wanted to buy some more and it was really hard to buy it. And but what's the experience? You said tastes a little bit like dirt. It tastes bad. It's a drink and it's a communal thing. You sit around. Definitely gives you a small high. Gives you a small high. It's just like smoking weed with your friends. So on a on a scale of like I don't know, is it like a cigarette? Is it less than weed? Is it like molly Less than weed, less than molle, more than a cigarette, less than alcohol. Okay.

Gotcha, thank you. Okay. We discover that in trends. That's I think that's our I don't think that's gonna ever gonna be huge, but it's definitely like a a niche popular thing that you could make a business out of. But hallucinogenics, man. I met this guy who At that lobby, he was like I just got back from thirty days in Amazon doing ayahuasca. Right. There's this idea that whatever is popular among elite Silicon Valley people Fifteen from now will be mainstream. Right. Because they're like the rich nerds who like have the time to like try stuff. Do this experimentation. I've never done a hallucinogenic. Right. Me neither. I'm super into it though. Like the idea of it, and I want to explore it. What stops you from doing it? Because you're super into it. I'm not that into it. So it makes sense that I haven't done it You're super into it. Why haven't you tried? Because I don't know who to trust. But even your buddy does, right? Yeah, but he's a weird name. And I and I and I tell him I don't know if I could trust you because you're extreme. So like I if I could find like a normal person who could be like yeah, this one's a little checked. Like if you could go into a clinic and you're like, Great, under supervision in this cool environment, if it looked like a spa. Yeah, and so I would you want that? Yeah, I would love that. And I went to a session where I was I met with a guy who was going to take me through the process and I got into an argument with him because he was talking to me about I was like asking what he did for work and he like was a former venture capitalist, but then he was talking about how capitalism was horrible and I was like, Well that that doesn't so like why are you charging me? And so anyway, we got in a fight over like values so it kicked me out of the group. Okay. But

I was almost on the verge of trying it. So I'm really interested in uh we discovered Kava or we talked about Kava and Trance. I think the ketamine crazy interesting. Right. I think these things are gonna be much bigger. And there's a related trend of this like kinuphorics. Have you heard of this? It's a basically there's a trend of non alcoholic Oh yeah. So they're non alcoholic drinks and what they are is I think kin euphorics has like some I don't know what chemicals they put in, but it's supposed to give you some kind of buzz. Without being alcohol. Yeah, we covered the non alcoholic stuff as well. So non alcoholic beverages. I've drank non alcoholic beverages now for about eight years. I drink non alcoholic beer regularly. I like it. Like what, like a ginger beer type of thing? No, O'Dul's was for the longest time, has been the only one, but over the past three years Heineken has introduced some Japanese brands have come about popular in Japan, so the Japanese brands have come to America. Right. There's been a lot of new variety. And that's a growing trend that we actually

have already written a report on is non alcoholic beverages and interestingly Gen Z is drinking significantly less than millennials and Yeah, I exactly I think I've seen that trend firsthand and then when I saw you guys write about that it made a lot of sense to me. But Heineken, the CEO of Heineken said that the fastest growing category is they call it zero point zero. It that's the name of their brand Is these zero point zero beers. Non-alcoholic beers. Non-alcoholic beer, but they even have some that are non-alcohol and no calorie. And no drink. All right, I got another one. All right. So what if I told you that I could give you some IP? IP intellectual property like Star Wars, Pokemon. Hello Kitty, whatever. I could give you globally famous IP. Billions of people recognize this IP and I could give it to you for free. And I could let you build a business around this IP at no charge. Would that be something you're interested in? Yeah, of course. Okay. Religion. So I sort of had this realization the other day. Wanted to buy a gift for my niece and I was like, What did I used to like when I was little? I loved Where's Waldo books. And I was like Where's Wallet? I was just went down the rabbit hole of like, who the hell made that? What is this? How was this so popular? Blah blah blah. Sort of thought.

What's the modern day Where's Waldo? Could somebody create a new Where's Waldo book, right? So same premise, just finding pictures in a book. So this picture book is actually pretty cool because it's like active. You don't just like flip through the pages. Probably like So I I read about the guy who made it, I forgot his name, but yeah, he, you know, whatever. Our publisher owns it. Like crushed it. And they crushed it. And I was like, What if you made a new Where's Waldo? I was like, Well, part of the magic was that Waldo was this character that just worked. And I was like, What character could you use? And I was like, What if you did this with religion? Because the other thing my sister always wants is to introduce to her kids in a way that they like, that's playful, that's That's fun. That's interesting. And so I was like, My family is like Hindu, right? So they have Hindu's like a hundred different gods. Oh, this would be cool. You basically have this page with a bunch of different little you know, drawings like stories. And you're trying to find Yeah, you're trying to find Hanuman and you're trying to find this god and try to find out. Can anyone know can anyone own anybody can use God's images, likenesses, and names. Because nobody owns uh the religious IP. Hence my starter of what if you could use globally famous IP for free for profits. So I believe that there's a set of businesses. The Where's Walder one is just a goofy version of this, but the better version, the version I've thought about starting was to do calm, but for religion.

I don't know if we already talked about this, but like daily prayer, daily sermon, daily Bible passage, daily whatever. These apps are quite popular. And so if you use the calm model of audio, premium and freemium audio. And every day you could have five minutes of faith where you would just listen to a prayer or a sermon found revelation. So I think this could be a really big business. I was very close to going and starting this one, but it's not a founder fit for me. Like I'm I don't even believe in religion. So if somebody out there wants to do this, I will help you do this. I I put a lot of thought into how you would do this, how you would grow it. But I think religion generally as a free source of popular IP is like a untapped opportunity. That's awesome. Uh two comments. There's this set of Googlers, ex Google people, they either I think they emailed me the after our podcast who were Christians and they created like a Christian meditation app. Have you heard about this? A Halo or something. Someone messaged me after our podcast and they told me the numbers and it was astronomical. Yeah, I've seen I've seen their numbers. They are really good. It validates this idea. They're doing it for Christians. Somebody else can do it for Catholics. But is it just a Christian meditation thing? Uh it's exactly what I just described. It's a daily Christian meditation, which is basically like a prayer.

And uh you hit the Amen button when you're done and you can sh you could share it. And people love sharing religious shit on Facebook anyway. So it grows some or somewhat organically through that. So when I think of like business ideas, I like to think of from a distribution first. Yes. So how do you get users? The advertising rates on Christian and w without judgment, but let's just say conservative websites stupidly low. Right, right. Engagement is stupidly high. Right. Because mainstream brands don't want to associate with some of these super popular conservative. Yeah, and the people who typically'cause I've bought ads on like religious websites and right leaning political websites. Where do you even go to do that? You just go direct or there's like an ad network for that? Direct. Yeah, you could do direct, but like So like Bright Bar. Yeah. Their marketing I send them to everyone's emails to understand how they're what they're doing. Breitbart has the most aggressive like they'll let people buy their or their email lists. They're the most aggressive

And the most effective. Like they s they sent one email to me that said like from the desk of Nancy Pelosi and it was like a letter written about and it said like we're gonna come for your guns. So you better donate now. Like whatever. I was like, Oh, this is gonna kill it. So anyway You can get distribution there. Oh yeah, I think I think that there's a lot of undervalued distribution but a lot of like the young techies who build this stuff are t typically on the opposite end of that, so they don't even think about that. But it's there. Yeah, I like that. I think traditional ad buys, that's a smarter way to add buy. I think that works because again, you're charging on the other side through people who pay for that seventy nine dollars a year subscription. The other thing is I think through churches you could get distribution. So you give the church the ability to make their own group in this thing and and let them distribute it. And then it's like hey for the people who are not coming to church on Sundays or who want it Monday through Saturday. Here's A way they can engage. And the market size for this is like two hundred million people. Only uh in America and only the Christian one, let alone the other religious. There's like four billion i Islamic people in the world or Muslims in the world.

Hindu is kinda cool. It is'cause you have more characters. But I think that yeah, I don't know. I don't know. For some reason I don't feel like that's a starting point, but maybe. Although when it's like Mormons, like how do you go for the most devout, even if it's a smaller number of people, but like Very accurate. I think m uh Mormonism, though, that's the fastest growing religion in the world. Yeah, I know, but it's like a small base, but Yeah, but that could be a good one to attach yourself to. Exactly. So anyways, religion. Okay, what else? That's not really an idea, but something to talk about. So ghost kitchens or cloud kitchens. Are you familiar? Yeah, DoorDash, I just saw a photo. Someone drove by place in Palo Alto and DoorDash had just opened up a kitchen. Yeah, so f to for those who don't know, a ghost kitchen or a cloud kitchen is basically a restaurant that doesn't have the sort of brick and mortar storefront where you can come in, sit down, and get a meal. You can't go there and order. It only exists to make food that gets delivered on Uber Eats, Postmates, DoorDash, and all these delivery apps that are out there now. And Travis Kalanick raised a well, I don't know if he raised it, he'd probably use his own money, but he allocated something like five hundred million dollars to creating ghost kitchens or services for ghost kitchens. So the founder of Uber was like, Hey, what's the next big thing? And he was like, These cloud kitchens. And so he his new company is all about he's basically going into a city, he's buying up this like real estate that

Nobody wants, but they're very centrally located and kind of useless today. But what he's doing is converting it into kitchens and letting sort of food entrepreneurs come in, make food, create these little digital restaurant brands that only are optimized for delivery. So you would do things differently, right? So like you would want to make food that is, you know, you'd think delivery first, like French fries. Yeah, exactly. You'd package it, you'd put a lot of more money into packaging because you're not spending money in other areas. And you don't need to buy all the furniture for a restaurant. And you can make money by partnering with delivery companies to say, Hey, you should actually pay us. to be on your network because we bring this awesome set of delivery optimized food to you. So in fact you should be paying us per order To be on your network. We are great supply for your network.

You know who I originally saw was doing this was like a Chinese restaurant owned by a family and they were clearly just like hustlers and they're like, Well, let's offer like hot dogs. Like I could tell because it was like the same there was just a bunch of ways that I'm like, Oh, holy crap, they they just it's like these are this is a Chinese family and they're making Mexican food. So anyway, I saw them doing that. But w what I'm curious about is is there one brand that is like well n like a there isn't today yet. But there will be. There will be. Exactly. So it's still at that early phase where all the fundamentals are there. So what's changed? These delivery apps have spent, I don't know, probably upwards of a billion dollars paying to get installed on a bunch of people's phones. And they're training people that hey, Don't go out to restaurants, order in. And because ordering in is now super convenient, really easy to do on your phone. And so anyways, they're training people and they're getting installed. That's your distribution. They need restaurants that are gonna plug into their networks because they wanna offer their customers better food. And so you have a good value proposition for them. You say, Hey, wouldn't it be great if you had a central pickup point We could pick up from all these different providers and we're centrally located in the city, so you could provide really fast delivery. What if we optimized our packaging and our foods that's traveled really well? Wouldn't we be a good partner to work with over

you know, a restaurant who's doing delivery as like a second thing or a side thing. The next thing you could do is you could test different concepts really quickly. So you could see, should I just make a hot dog only brand or a mac and cheese only restaurant? And like you try the brand and if nobody's ordering from it You just take it down and you just do new quizzing the next day. I had I talk stand and what I did was I would like I don't know what people want So I would have an idea going by Right. Exactly. And so and a lot of people who are great at making food are really bad at running business. And so they don't they're not great at picking the right location for a restaurant, running the operations, managing the cash flow and all the stuff. A lot of them flock to food trucks for this reason. Yeah, and way more lucrative. Way more lucrative. Because you can be

Nationwide. Exactly. Any concept that works in one city you want to take to other cities because Someone who owns these cloud kitchens will say, Great, you want to expand? I already have infrastructure in twelve different cities. Just either you staff up or franchise your concept to other people. I'm incredibly interested in this. If anyone is actually good pursuing this, I would like to know about it. people pursuing it that we know of, but I bet that there's a lot more and I I bet there's other angles to this that I'm not thinking about. So if anybody's really interested in this, uh reach out because we want to talk about it. Doing it. So Travis is like the kind of the main one that I know that's doing this. Right. And he saw the Uber Eats numbers early on and was like, Oh shit, this is gonna be really big business. And so And I just saw an interview with Tillman Fertita, you know Tillman Fertita. And he was saying his restaurants are hurting a little bit because of the how big delivery is. Exactly. And I think he's like the convenience. He was like, I was shocked people actually are ordering because he owns Morton's Steakhouse. He goes, people aren't coming into our restaurants as much, but we're still doing really well because they're buying it and bringing it home. Right. So I I actually ran a restaurant like this back in the day. This is my first article of the sushi, sushi restaurant, and we got famous because we were the

restaurant without a restaurant. Where we were delivery only. But th this was before Uber Eats, before Postmates. They didn't exist. So we were trying to get people to come to our website to order. And that was just very hard. Whereas every night Me or my wife opens up Postmates pretty much and we've kind of scroll through and it's like, ah, do you want to order or should we cook something? And so if our sushi restaurant had been on there, we would have been getting free customers. Delivered. Uh sushi is actually pretty good delivered, because sushi is meant to be served room temperature. It's also packaged in a very like tight wrap. So it doesn't like sort of get loose and messy and stuff like that. But anything potato based is not have you ever I know someone who worked at Uber Eats and they had a phrase called Keep your Eye on the Fry. And they had a whole team dedicated to McDonald's for the French fries. So the the main one is obviously pizza, right? So pizza's the most delivered food. People love pizza. So you really want to work backwards from that, like what do people order the most? And so the question is like the dominoes, pizza huts of today like of tomorrow. I bet we'll get started here. Either those brands will start delivering and and make this a big part of their business. Or somebody will create a new Pietz brand optimized for this. Maybe they don't sell full pies, maybe it's half, or I don't know. You'd have to think through what would it what should pizza be, you'd have to think back from scratch, but I think this is Pizza Pizza's the biggest delivery I think. I'm gonna post this in the group. I think it's actually bigger than I I ever would imagine.

We recently wrote about this. If if you invested a dollar in Domino's IPO versus Google's IPO, you would have made like five times. I saw that chart. You you posted that chart. It was like Domino's is the is the line that's up and to the right. And Google, Facebook is just'cause they were valued really high right off the bat. Or higher. Do you know what's causing that? Why has Domino's stock been going up so much? Are they just They're crushing it on marketing and they do they are quite innovative for the space like they do like little cutesy things that is they're like we're testing this new mobile oven, so it's gonna show up even hotter. Which who knows if that works. But it makes you want to buy it. Yeah, they're pretty forward thinking. Yeah. I love it. I had the app and their app is phenomenal. It's like so easy to order. The tracker is amazing. It's in the oven, it's coming, you know, five minutes from now. Here it just left the store. It's gonna be at your door in seven minutes. Yeah, they're great.

So this is interesting to me. I'm incredibly interested in this. This sounds and this sounds kinda like a fun thing. You and I both owned. Food businesses. Right. I found that to be almost more rewarding than traditional internet things. I found it to be way harder than everything I've ever done. I don't know about rewarding. Made the least money of anything I've ever done. I learned the most, but it was also the hardest. Yeah. And I also feel like when we're in this tech bubble, it's very easy to like lose touch with like reality and how most people's job works, how the sausage gets made, all that stuff. And there's like a different level of respect, appreciation, and like understanding because you know, working in service industry for a bit. I have a question for you. So do you use any of these book summary apps or anything like that? I was thinking about that today. What were you thinking about? I think those are stupid. Tell me why. Blankest. Blinkest, right? That's cool. I think they're cool companies. They'll do really well. So what's stupid? You don't like it as a user. I'm not like that artistic of a guy, but sometimes I think like you gotta read it to understand like the the new like you gotta like really read the thing to get it. But the efficiency part of me is like oh it's kinda cool. Right. So

Uh I m I have mixed feelings on it. But I do think I would invest my time into it or money into something like that'cause I think it w can work. Yeah,'cause I'm thinking about doing this for fun. So I started reading more because Ever since our company got acquired, there's these hours of the night that used to be like grind mode that I'm like, Well, I don't really need to put that into my job. I'll put that into this podcast. I'll put that into like reading and learning and things like that. So I'm reading these books that I'm like If I could summarize this for people, would that be useful? And so the answer is definitely yes. There's something kind of like off about it, right? Like why did you say it's stupid? Like how do I make it less stupid? Well, I think there's a few things. The first thing is so Otis Chandler, the founder of Goodreads, spoke at our event. Yep. Cool company. Really cool company.

I think it's actually bigger than uh they sold for a hundred million dollars. I think it's actually s way bigger than Amazon. Yeah. Yeah. And then Book Bub. You know Book Bub? No they advertise with us and they spend a lot of money with us and the results are really great. And what they've done is it's a huge company now, or it's a startup. It's like basically an email for people who like Kindle books and they set out some free ones, some paid ones, and they're just an aggregator of cool stuff, and then some publishers will pay money to get their free book. Like when a new release happens, they'll make it free for like a d a day. Just to get the get a bunch of ratings. The book space, I think that's growing like crazy. Anything book related is I would put my name on for sure or or want to be part of. Right. That's one of the things we talked about with the whole Gen Z thing was that they're reading more than ever. But it does feel weird. I found myself whenever I read books particular uh I've always wanna look up the characters significantly more. And you told me about

with what you're doing with Blab, you were trying to do the same thing where you wanted to create communities around T V shows. I have found myself wanting to do that for books. I've not found a a solution for that. Right, right, right. You read what you read like you read a lot of biographies, right? I read a ton of biographies. Do you read anything else? Yeah, I like to read fiction, like c American classics. Okay. Catcher in the Rye, things like that. I don't know what I'm gonna do, but I'm gonna do something here, because I'm reading these books and I'm like, oh, a good way for me to even just digest this is to try to like distill it down into the most interesting bits and be able to explain it. Like if I can teach it that That means I've learned it. And so I'm gonna do that and I'm gonna experiment and I'm gonna see if I can make something that I would want if I was the reader. Like I The make it or break it though is the model that you choose because there's like the affiliate model. But you're gonna be earning four percent on a eight dollar thing. That's silly. Oh, I'm not even thinking about the business right now. I just wanna put uh put the content out there. And see if people like it. There's this guy named Nat. And I came across his blog. He's always popping up on my Twitter feed, and he just started doing what you did, where he summarized books, and then he just said you could buy all my summaries for a hundred dollars, and I think he's selling a ton of them. Yeah, there's something to this. I don't know what it is. Okay, that's like a

Half baked idea. But I'm gonna do something there. Do you have anything else that you've been seeing that's interesting? No, but follow ups on Follow ups, yes. Okay, so last time we talked about Shopify. Yes. So I got a lot of criticism. People said the reason why WordPress is why you can build up theme businesses around WordPress and software stuff around WordPress is because WordPress makes up thirty five percent of the internet. They told me in the I multiple people ceded this, they go, Shopify only makes up two percent of the ecom like store market. And WooCommerce is actually significant. Which is crazy to me. Which crazy to me. One hundred percent crazy. Yeah, what is that? So I got a lot of criticism for that. But the uh I know that's what the numbers say, but that doesn't sit right. Yeah, something seems off about that. The second thing is agencies. We talked about agencies, so a friend of mine who has a fifty million dollar a year agency hollered and he wants to Ad agency, creative agency. Creative agency. Okay. Which sounds like a miserable thing to do.

I think that sounds like a horrible company. Yeah, he wants to come and fill us in on all the uh on the economics. And what do you want to know? So here's why agencies are interesting to me. One, I think they're easy to start. Like it's like a straightforward thing. Someone needs a service and you say, Okay, I can uh here's my portfolio, I've been able to solve for this And they say, Okay, we'll give you a shot, we'll pay you money. And then you just go out and find talented people who can execute on the work. Super straightforward. It's actually interesting because if you start an agency, you actually will discover there there's way like I know a guy who has an agency That does fifty million in revenue. It's quite profitable, twenty million in profit, and with all the profit he invests in cool things that he's discovered with the agency. That's this guy or this. A different guy. The guy who I'm talking about who invests in that's called Meta Lab, his name is called Tiny Capital. Oh yeah, you talked about that. But I'm talking about Brendan, my friend Brendan, who has he sold his company to an a an agency where he's now a partner and it's Okay. It's a three hundred person agency. And it seems hard. It seems really hard. We'll get him on. We'll check it out. We'll see. Because it's like there's like a few things that everyone starts when they're first getting going. The first thing is like they're like how do we create like roommate matching thing. Everyone has that idea. And I've done list. Yeah. To do lists. And then like

A college invoicing. How do we sell our products to college kids? Like okay, like all this is like Uh social media agency. Common ideas, yeah. So I want to hear more about this agency stuff. Uh the other thing that came to mind for me with dogs was I was like, okay. Given that 44% of people own a dog, what problem am I having as a dog owner? Maybe somebody could solve it. It's not a business I would want to start, but a product I want to buy is I take my dog for a walk here in the city. City's filthy, dog comes back in, my wife demands that we wash the dog's paws. So we're gonna make socks? I don't know. It could be anything. It can be socks, a little jacuzzi that I put her feet in to like wash her feet real quick with it. No it's obviously socks. Yeah, it's gotta be some kind of easy thing because I'm so sick of this like mini bath I have to give my dog twice a day.

I haven't Googled dog socks. I don't know. I would like to see what is on top. Yeah, and I just want something that's like I don't want to put shoes on my dog, so like, yeah, maybe more like socks or like even just like a really thin, like tr you know, transparent little plastic thing that I could put on her feet and just tear away when we're done. I don't know. I need something because I'm sick of washing my dog's paws. So you just interviewed the guy who started Barkbox. Yeah, that's coming out in a couple weeks, yeah. Okay. Are there any stats that blew you away? Doing two hundred fifty million in revenue for year. I believe they're profitable, yeah. They raised fifty th fifty something million bucks and total lifetime. And they've been doing this for a while. So I I th I think they're probably doing well. Probably I think at that Stage is more of a choice. It's like do we have good ideas to go invest in or do we want to optimize our profits? A bunch of stuff. They do a bunch of different things, yeah. So they do the they do these subscription boxes and then off selling stuff. I mean they they have a bunch of little things. The other part I really liked from his story was they kind of invented the dog influencer on Instagram trend. So he was like you know, it's kind of unclear, but it was definitely early when it's a little bit of a ton of those. cute dogs that like are like my dog. My wife cried the other day when one of her dog influenced. Yeah. I've had literally the same experience. It's crazy. And so they kinda they basically started promoting all those dogs. They were like, hey, you're cute dog, we will promote you and in turn

You promote our products and they started this like affiliate thing early on and and it just became great content for. That sounds like the greatest company to work at. To be able to do that all day. That sounds awesome. Yeah, if you're like a pet lover, they're hiring. So anyway, we'll see when that comes out. All right, we should wrap up. Anything you wanna leave people with? No. Okay. On that note, we're done. See ya.

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