BREAKING: Shaan Sells the Milk Road - A Conversation With the Buyers

When we were getting to know you guys to decide like Do we want to do this? We want to actually partner with you guys and and do a deal together. Um We would ask you a bunch of questions, like at dinners or or at the bar or whatever, and

Your guys' stories and answers were so entertaining That I was like D these guys need to come on the podcast. If th I was like, if I had just recorded this dinner This would have been like one of the best podcast episodes we've ever done. Prob probably the best. What's up, y'all. Sean here. Uh this is a special episode.

My company, the Milk Road, just got acquired, so the news is out. And um I can finally talk about it. I've been kinda hinting at it on the podcast for those who were listening. And um yeah, if the news is out. And this episode is me and the dudes who bought it. So you're gonna meet these guys and you're gonna see who uh wh why would I sell, right? Like

We started this thing, it grew like crazy, it was profitable, like The thing was working. So why sell? And I talk a little bit about that, but the biggest reason, honestly, was These guys. Uh these are people that I wanted to be able to work with and get to know better. And there are people that I thought if I give them

You know, this company and I own I still own a minority stake in it. That minority stake in five years is gonna be worth a lot,'cause I believe in these guys and what they've done. They've done it before. They've Built and sold companies worth, you know, over Hundred million d hundreds of millions of dollars. And I think they're gonna do it again here.

Um The s the the episode is is a little funny. It starts off a little slow. Uh but then around fifteen minutes in We're Done talking about the acquisition and I'm frankly, I'm done talking a little bit.

And I let these guys shine and they tell stories about Yeah. How their early projects like How they you know, d all the different projects they worked on, some that failed. Spectacularly and some that succeeded.

um you know their philosophy around business and negotiations and stuff like that. It gets really good after that. So Definitely stick through If you like this podcast, like if you like my first million You will like these guys.

Uh I'm gonna just I'll build the characters. You got Mike. Who is this like workhorse. So anybody who likes, you know, a grinder Somebody who's scrappy, somebody who

Can bounce back from defeat. He tells a ton of stories about like Basically getting his ass kicked, almost failing, and then somehow pulling it off. Um so Mike is this workhorse of a guy. I've gotten to see him in action with the milk road. This guy is like lives In the details and in the weeds. It's amazing.

Uh and then Kendall is the opposite. He's like How can I work smarter, not harder? He's the Mr. Shortcut. He is the guy who finds a way Um to make something happen, right? Like, you know

He yeah, he's the guy who hacked the Tesla referral program and ended up getting multiple Tesla Roadsters and he's the guy who did the same thing with Uber and Lyft and has like, you know, Uber credits for life and Lyft for credits for life. He's just a guy who's gonna solve The puzzle. And uh and get the shortcut solution. He'll he will find the clever the clever way to get it done. So these two guys are awesome. And um and I think you guys you guys will like'em. So enjoy this episode.

Um all right, so we should we should do this. So Welcome to the show. I've been telling you guys you gotta come on uh for a couple of months now. And I'm glad we're doing this. I think we should frame this in a couple of ways. We got together because you guys just bought my company. You bought the Milk Road. And so We're gonna talk about that. We're gonna talk about

How that happened how that went down, why you guys decided to do it, good stuff like that. Ven We're gonna talk a little bit about You know, what's the plan? But really the thing I thought would be the best out of this conversation. My sort of secret plan was

When we were getting to know you guys to decide like Do we want to do this? Do we want to actually partner with you guys and And do a deal together. Um

We would ask you a bunch of questions, like at dinners or or at the bar or whatever, and Your guys' stories and answers were so entertaining That I was like These guys need to come on the podcast. If th I was like, if I had just recorded this dinner. This would have been like one of the best podcast episodes we've ever done. Prob probably the best. And so then I was like, All right.

My job here is to somehow recreate that dinner. Cause actually there's a lot of pressure. I know How good this episode could be. If I do my job. And uh Usually with a guest. You know.

Hey, they show up, they do whatever they're gonna do, but in this case, I've heard the stories myself, so I gotta find a way to to recreate that. So that's my challenge. You guys, it's it should be easy. It's you know, um Just You're gonna you're gonna tell your stories. And I think at the end of this people will know a little bit about what happened with the Milk Road, but also a lot about You guys,'cause I became a fan of you during the process of doing the deal.

I think a lot of other people are gonna become fans of you guys too during this.'Cause you guys are pretty Low key and why is that? Why are you guys like so under the radar? And I asked this as a guy who like I'm constantly on the stage being like look at me You know, I'm great and then I meet people who are really, really great and they're Not try to do that. So what's the is it

Don't have time, is it shy? What's the reason that you don't do that? Well let's start with you. I think it's probably shy. And it's just something that I never thought I needed to do. And then when I met you, I'm like, I'm doing everything all wrong. Well we had a hilarious day. Where I don't know how this happened. But somehow when we were hanging out uh in San Francisco, where I I usually don't the joke on the pot is I don't leave my house. Uh but when I do leave my house

I'll once in a while get bumped into and be like, Oh hey, love the pod. For some reason that day, something was going my way and like I don't know, like six or seven people Stop this in a row, and you guys must have been like The hell's going on? What was your reaction to that? I was like, did you plan this? I could not believe how many people were coming up to you and you know. I'm a big fan of the pod. I'm doing this project. I did a MFM search engine, like

It was insane. Yeah. Pretty crazy. Yeah. Like the guy from the hospital. He's like, I just came from the hospital working for Sean. I was like Do you have security cameras? He said he goes, I just came from the hospital And then We're like oh okay, yeah.

And then later somebody was like, Why did he come from a h hospital? Like did anybody catch that? Yeah, we had no explanation. Uh'cause he had like a you know, like the patient has escaped, you know, sticker on it on his shirt, basically. Um but I'm glad you guys are doing it. Uh so let's start with The milk robe. People wanna know uh You know, the news just came out today. This pod will come out right after that.

Um We sold it and People want to know how that went down. I can tell from my perspective, but Maybe I don't know. Let's do it from your perspective. Wha how did how did this all happen?

Yeah, for sure. So Carter. Who is our finance Was a big fan. And he shared it with us, Mike and I, and we Subscribe to it.

And every time we'd open it, we're like, Oh They're doing it so well. This is six months ago. Okay. And You know, every time we read it, we we talked about it, we talked about the memes, how funny it was, but also how informative. It was. And that's kind of what we're trying to do with Bitfo is just like make the best content.

And actually have people read it. I feel like you know you could have the ten thousand words, but That doesn't mean much to people. It's like how do we get that seven hundred and fifty uh words that really punches. And I feel like that's what you guys have done. And uh, you know, it came to a point where I'm like, We should talk to these guys.

But at that point we hadn't. Yeah. And I think we reached out to you guys. I remember having a conversation with Ben about growth. And it was like Ben, you know those like sites that are just like I don't know.

What's the price of Bitcoin. What's the price of Ethereum? I was like, what if we just go on there and like I don't know, go I don't know, I was like I've told I was like Probably just like some nineteen year old kid like just offer them like a dollar for every email subscriber. Let's just see if they'll put it up put our ad up. And I think that's how he reached out, right? He got in touch with one of you guys about that.

Ben reached out to I don't even know who somebody and got back to us and Yeah, it wasn't something we were gonna do. We weren't it was like offering a dollar per sub or whatever. Turns out you weren't a kid. Actually thirty two, we weren't seventeen. Um But we just wanted to meet you guys, so we're like, let's take the meeting and uh Yeah, about ten minutes into that. We were messaging on the side. It's like we gotta buy this thing. Like we've gotta figure out a way. The funny thing is I don't know if I told you this, but that same day Uh like we have just been full force working on Milk Road. This is the best. It's gonna be awesome. Dude, we're just every day and like I'm a big like pat pat on the back, self pat on the back kind of guy. Every day I'd basically tell Ben

This is amazing. We've launched this thing and only in this many months. We're already growing this fast. It's gonna be so good. This many years in, you know, it's gonna be great. And then one day I just hit Ben with a curveball and slack, and this was the same day. I go I go, how much would you sell this for right now? And uh He's like what? Like I don't know.

Do you want to sell it? I was like that's not what I said. I said how much would you sell it for and now he's like uh maybe this number. And I was like, Yeah, I think my number's like, you know, that plus one. And he was like And he's like Okay. Um what do you mean do with that? I was like

Let's see if we can sell it. And I was like I'm very impulsive like that. Like I'll wake up one day That's how I got my dog. I just woke up one day and I just Hey, get in the car. We're gonna go, let's go find a dog. And we were like Craigslisting in the car to find dogs. And we've got a dog that day. And that's kinda what happened with this. And so literally he tell calls me back later that afternoon, he's like Dude, so weird.

I just talked to these guys and they mentioned on the call If you'd ever be interested, blah, blah, and I was like, Oh Who are they? I you know I never heard of these guys. And he's like, No, they're legit. And I was like, What? He's like, Yeah, I googled them and whatever and like He's like one of them built like

The largest I don't know how you describe it, like the largest gold website. Gold e commerce, precious metals e commerce. Precious metal e commerce site. So basically Jam Bullion is the name of it. If you want to Go buy, sell gold, silver, whatever. You can go do it there and I knew that name because my brother in law buys from Jam Bullions, right? So he's so he had been telling me, you know, uh as he's like stashing away little like coins in his safe. I'm like all right, good for you, man. Um screw up his orders. Yeah, yeah. He gets there every time and he's like, you know, whatever. He's hoarding gold. So

You guys you'd built that that was a Couple hundred million dollar company. And then You had done the same thing on the sports betting side. Same thing like

roughly a hundred million dollars worth of exits and I was like, Oh, these guys are actually Super legit. Okay. Uh scratch the whole 19 year old kid offer him a dollar. Let's see what we can get these guys to offer us. And then that's sort of how the deal Yeah. uh evolve from there. And so So that's like

How we met. Yeah. Then actually making a deal. Uh Somebody said this the other day, they go.

The rule of they call it the rule of five. They go in any deal it's gonna fall away fall apart five times. If it's gonna get if it's gonna get done, it's gonna fall apart five times. And I think we kinda did that, though. We did. Every three or four times at least. Um along the way. Not Just how it all happened.

But it's a question I've been wanting to ask and I get to put you guys on the spot here. How could we have negotiated better? So I asked Ben, I go, Wh where can we ask these guys on the pot? He goes He goes, Yeah, ask him about the deal negotiation. I go, Yeah, I should ask him. Could we have gotten more? Because that was the the my first acquisition. That was the question I asked uh the CEO and he was like

You couldn't have got a dollar more. And I was like That feels good, but it feels like a lie. It's never actually the case. So From your guys' perspective, how did we negotiate? Give us a grade and uh Tell us how we did. I would say it was uh

A minus. I was gonna say a B. Okay. Yeah. I mean I mean I would give everyone almost a B around, you know, the table. I feel like each one of us at one point Kinda we're like, uh, this isn't gonna work. And it wasn't as kind of straightforward as you'd like a deal.

But as you said. Both my deals. Every time I was like, it's not gonna work. You know, for one reason or another, you get to the point of They're over here, I'm over here, and we're not getting anywhere close.

And then you know, you figure it out or you walk away. And you know, we had those walk away with you, I think twice. Yeah. I think you guys did it one time and we did it another time. Yeah, I said A minus'cause at the end, like When we made that final, you know, the last little chunk. Yeah. We were that was it for us. We just said

Um, we talked about this last night. I think one thing that would have helped a lot So he has a non compete on gambling, as we talked about. And You know, one of the times it fell apart was we got to end of the diligence after we'd already d agreed on a number and there was a degenerate There was a little more gambling revenu gambling sponsor revenue there than we thought. And I think that if that had come out a lot earlier.

You guys probably could have guided us better to like, Hey, well for next month we're gonna target this stuff. Yeah. Yeah. We didn't know that was a problem. We were like'cause it's not we we don't have a non compete, so we're like, this is great. Um Yeah. That's all right. That's that's good. We did talk about it at dinner. You did? Yeah. The when we met you. Yeah, yeah. Oh yeah, yeah. Um

You know. how this deal kind of evolves. Why do you buy a business like this? What's the What's the thinking, what's the rationale and You guys have been on the seller side. You've sold your businesses. What's the difference in in the mentality there?

Mike, you wanna take this one? Yeah. So you know, reason we bought you guys, we felt like everything we were doing was just gonna work a lot better on their brand. And so like the SEO play, which is our thing, you know, we're building these content driven sites that we want to rank in Google for, you know, money terms in crypto. Like buy Bitcoin, lend Bitcoin, all those sorts of things. Yeah, we we should explain your guys' magic, your superpower. Your superpower is

Somebody goes to Google And they say Buy gold online. Best place to buy gold. Best place to Um you know bat You know, on whatever.

And your guys' whole career basically is ranked number one for that. And you did it with the sports betting and the goal, but before that you did it with poker. Before that you did it with other stuff and like we'll go into some of those funny, funny stories in a second. Um But that's your guys' secret sauce.

I was like, why do they need a newsletter? The newsletter doesn't do that. That's that's not that's not the answer. But there is some I don't know. Synergy there for you. Yeah. So it's you know, just this brand component of like Google has really moved towards rewarding brands that users are actually going to Google and searching for. Like Milk Road is being searched hundreds of times a day, and that's such an indicator to Google of like humans are interested in this brand. Same with JM. Jam's getting thousands of searches a day for JM Boolean. So like w when we were building our sites like DeFiRate.com was the one that we merged into Milk Road. No one's out there really looking for this site. You know, we're just trying to figure out how to get it in Google. So eventually it will become a brand. So for us it was like hey, we're we get to jump forward, you know, a year in this journey if we buy this. Right. A newsletter by the website, roll it in and then you know, reap these benefits forever more. You're gonna continue to get really amazing backlinks because you do all these awesome interviews. Um

It was you know, that was mine. My piece. And I think too, it was really complimentary. You know, like the newsletter content could go on the website. You know, we'd be able to be in the inbox of our users along with, hey, you know, there's a different segment of our users that are gonna go to our website. And so you know

those type of uh ways to, you know, reach people. are like really exciting for us. And so that was kind of like Wait, they have the brand. They have a voice. And you know, they have

uh you know, a really complimentary uh You know. And it was working during the bear market. Yeah. Our business was still growing and generating revenue and and profit during The crypto winter, which is hard for 'Cause if you're not like you know,

When Bitcoin's price goes down, there's a lot less people sort searching, How do I buy Bitcoin right now? You know? And so uh or like, you know, DeFi implodes or whatever, well then people aren't looking to borrow or or land at the same rates. So I think that also helped because it was like Oh, this is a business that will work even in the winters. Yeah, and you had diversified advertisers. They're not all crypto. So we're like, Yeah, this can work even if crypto's dead for a while. And so the question on our side was, do we want to sell? Right? Why sell? Do we want to sell And

I think you know there's Three pronged answer to that. The answer is First, uh

A lot of decisions just get made through Like who your your nature, your personality, and I've gotten to know my nature a little bit over the last few years and it is Very much a I'm good at

Starting things. I'm good at finding the the the something from nothing. But taking the something and just Fine tuning it day after day, making it better. Which is Where most of the value's created in business. Is uh

Not something that I just get super excited about. And so that was always hard for me because I could Create something, get it off the ground, get it to work. And then as it worked, my interest would fade. And you know. So that was like a personal thing. I was I k I sort of knew that. So I said if

If I'm getting a good deal now But I know it'd be better if I held it for four years. Great, but am I really gonna have this same energy I have today? Four years from now I can't know that that's true for me as a operator.

Whereas about you guys and I'll I'll go into why I thought you guys should be much better owners of the business was You're like that. Mike is a absolute animal workhorse. I I actually uh Like we've been working together a little bit now, and I see your level of detail attention to detail is crazy. Like you are looking at this email. Yeah, like in the morning, in the afternoon, in the evening, then the feedback and then do it again the next day. I love it. I was like, wow, this guy is this guy's an animal. Um and I thought okay, maybe he's just doing that at the beginning

No, that's just kinda who you are. Yeah. I mean that was you know, with J M same thing, like myself and the the other partner who I ran that with. We were probably like the biggest readers of the Gold and Silver Sub Reddit, like on the planet. If we just wanted to ingest all this, what are the people thinking? You know, and that's really We got so many wins just Observing that, implementing those things. So I asked you guys some questions before the pod to get to like uh I made a Google Doc.

And I was like, what do you do like, I don't know, for fun or something like that. Like Are you like and your one of your things was uphill. Skiing or something? Yeah. So I I've I've got a I've got a buddy that's gotten into backcountry skiing. So that's like instead of you know going to the resort riding the lift up. You're just sort of in nature and fun, nice thing everybody likes. Yeah. You have to, you know, manually get yourself up this hill. So Um a few years ago he convinced me to go do one of these things and it was in um I think we're in Yellowstone Park. We didn't see another human the entire day. You're truly in the middle of the year. Uh for this, this was fairly tame. So basically it's it's a it's called a split board, what I use. So it's a Looks like a snowboard.

But it breaks down the middle and the bindings rotate. So it basically turns into skis. And then you put these things on the bottom called skins. Which originally I think used to uh be sealed skin is is where it came from. Now it's just like some fancy fabric. And it'll only slide one way. So you can kinda like slide up the hill with balls. You're like cross country skiing up the hill. And then it won't slide backwards. Right. So yeah, you like fight your way up the hill. It takes several hours to do this. It's like a five minute ride down. So there's not a huge payoff there. Just like little children coming down as you're like brutally climbing inch by inch up this hill. And then the cool thing, you can do it at resorts too. So our trip this year, we were at um Whitefish, Montana.

And I was doing this in the resort. And you do get a lot of respect from people coming down the hill when you're like trudging up the hill. So it's a good feeling. Yeah. No respect from me. I'm good showing. You're making your life hard. You are doing the wrong thing. Sean's riding the lift up and down. I don't even get off. This is But that was like to me when I heard you say that, I was like Checked out completely. The way you exercise or the like the way you Vacation, basically, is the way you work. Which is just like

maniacal grind. And I love that. Because That's if I mean if you do that in any business, you're gonna increase the outcomes. And so that was'cause we still own like a a a good size chunk of the business. And so You know, I wanted to know that that was gonna be worth something someday. And so that that would be the only way that I could make this deal worth it was, okay, there's the upfront cash and all that good stuff.

That's great. But um Your boy's gonna spend that. I'm gonna blow through that through, you know, some some way. Um so I need to know that like The what if, what could have been. will actually get played out. And like that way I'll just by curiosity, I'll know what would have happened if we had kept at it and focused on it.

Well let me just handed it to these guys who are super focused and let's uh now we get to know. Uh and then also there's you know, uh you get the reward of it too, if it if it ends up working out. Yep. So that was one on your side that's like that's Mike's superpower. Like this guy is literally willing to climb up the hill. Like with his like you know, like he doesn't understand how skiing works and enjoyment works, which is great. And then it's like all right, so what's this guy Kendall? Is he the same way? Is he also just like this? Absolutely not super grinder? No. Kendall's Mr. Shortcut. And I love this. So

We were talking and I was like, All right, um What you guys do before this? Before this, I kept digging. Tell the story of I don't know, let's pick one of them. Let's do the uh the Tesla Well and the Tesla hack.'Cause when she told me this story, I was like Like this guy's super clever. He's gonna find a way

Like he's just gonna find the shortcuts. That we would need to like, you know, g make this thing super successful. So tell tell that story. Yeah. So I had a Tesla. And at the time they had the Testel referral program. So basically they gave every owner

A unique code. And To get you know five thousand supercharger miles, you actually had to use it. So people were searching for it.

And I was like perfect. You know. That's what I do for a living. I rank in Google. So when you search Tesla referral code. My side was number one.

I said what was it called? Like trust referral code.com? No, it was actually fair estimate.com. Okay. I basically made like for just a fun side project. Uh a Lyft versus Uber comparison. So you just put like I'm going here, you know, what's the difference between the two? Right. And so I just made a slash Tesla on that. By the way, that itself Right. That was another one of your little shortcuts. You didn't want to ever pay for Uber again, right? Like or Lyft.

'Cause you would just get referral credits from that too, right? Exactly. So basically on that site The way I monetized it was here's my referral code when you sign up for one or the other. And uh literally had unlimited Uber and left for years. Literal years. And I shared it with some friends. They'd be like, Hey, you know, I I want some, can you put my code for a little bit? Yeah. So I'd, you know, do it for a month for them and they'd be like

I don't need to be able to do it. I am done. And then it would just be like the next friend, the next friend. That's hilarious. But then you know What happens is like these programs are like okay This is kind of weird. The you know, yeah, exactly. So they kinda cut you off after a while, but until then You kinda can reap the benefits of the Uber lift

Shortcut, which is getting you free Ubers and Lifts. Then you were like, Oh, Tesla So you made a slash Rode store slash Tesla. Yep. Like extension, basically. And you were ranking for when people were looking for Tesla.

Referral code. Exactly. So I sent like hundreds of people to buy cars. And you needed to send like I think fifty six. To get a Tesla Road, sir? Uh is that like the peak prize of the full program? Yeah, exactly.

But you know Roast like what, like a hundred grand or something. It was two hundred fifty. Yeah. Oh yeah, two hundred or two fifty depending on like the market. They never gave they never gave it to you? Well, they haven't released it. What do you mean? Oh the new roads. The newest. So they were like, Hey, when we do it, you know, in twenty nineteen, you know, we're gonna give everyone to win. I mean how much did you earn? So I earned like one point seven five. I had sent more referrals, but I think Tesla was like, All right, you know, we're gonna give you one point seven five. And then um what do you do with the point seven five, I don't understand. I think you have to pay the you know the difference between them when they do. Um send it to me without the trunk. I'll take the the three fourths card. I'll take the convertible, thank you.

And then um you know, I I did that and I was like, All right, well Hey Dan, you have a Tesla. Do you want a roadster? Sure, son. I want that. And so I put his code

And then did it with my brother in law. So, you know, we have a lot of roadsters that might be coming. We'll see. It's like the Oprah thing. You get a rest. You get a rest. Yeah. Yeah, that's amazing. So you did that. You also did other ones too. Let's do some of the other ones. You did uh I was asking you how did you even learn that there's like this a like SEO affiliate game, right? So SEO is just People are searching for stuff on Google. If you can get to the top.

You're gonna get a lot of free customer traffic. Um and then affiliate is well what do you do with that free customer traffic? They want something. You can pass that. kind of qualified lead that that high intent customer.

And they have affiliate programs so you'll get the kickback. That's how you got the roadster, that's how you got the Uber credits and all that. So How did you even figure out this was a thing? Uh I wanna hear that from both of you guys because this is y this is y'all's game. And it's a game I didn't know about till much later in life. But you guys discovered it kinda early. I wanna hear the origin story. How did you guys even get into that? Yeah. So this was like during like the moneymaker

You know, world series of poker was a big thing. And you know. All of my friends and I were playing poker. Just around the house and then online. You know, there was a bunch of poker sites and I saw one of the poker sites had like a poker chip set.

And they would give it to you for free. And I was like, Well how does that work? Nothing in life is free. And I figured, oh They're giving it for free because they're getting like two hundred and fifty dollars. per person they end up sending.

So at that point I was like perfect. I've got a lot of friends. And I'm just gonna kinda make the difference. I'll give them fifty bucks to deposit. I don't make, you know, the two hundred dollars that I get paid. From the uh, you know, casinos and sports books and Poker at that point.

So you do that with like Six friends. And ran out of'em at that point. Right. You know, it was like it was it was great. And then it was like okay, well now I need to actually figure out how to do this. Um And that's kinda how I got into like, Oh, I need to figure out how to create websites. I I can do this with just like random people. And you're you're a teenager at this time.

I'm in college, yeah. Yeah. So I was in college. Mike was actually a teenager at that time. And uh, you know, just had to figure it out. And I mean like my first big break. was actually misspelling paradise poker. W what do you mean? So how did that go down? Yeah, well so at the time

When you searched in Google, they didn't have autocrack. So basically you misspelled Paradise Poker and you'd get misspelled websites with that. And so I was like perfect. I'm not a very good speller, so I can come up with a lot of variations. I couldn't tell you to spell Paradise Poker right now, actually. And so I came up with a lot of variations. And you know, got them to rank in Google for like every misspelling. Right.

And it was crazy because like all of a sudden I just started seeing traffic. I started sending them obviously to the real Paradise Poker. I made a cut of them. And literally my last year of college. It was like paid for. I was basically like parents like I've got this, you know, I've got room, board. You know, the education because I'm making

Free money basically online. Were they like well what do you mean? Do they know about this the whole time or not really? I had to kinda like tell them they were like I was a little worried because I was like poker, gambling, you know, they're gonna be like, Oh, what's my son into? Is he doing this? But my dad was actually like He looked at me and he was like Pretty proud'cause he was like, Oh, you're kinda like you know, the picks and shovels. Of it, right? You're not actually doing it. You're enabling people to do it. And the people that choose to do it. Yeah.

And you you said you said something real quick, like Yeah. We got to the top of Google. Did you have to do anything interesting to Get your misspelled Paradise Poker. To be the number one, or was it just like

That was your domain name. So it automatically was gonna be number one at that time. Well, the beauty of it was there was just no competition. No one else was actually trying to misspell Paradise Poker on purpose. Maybe they would misspell it once. But I would have it like eight times. So I was the best misspeller of Paradise Poker. And literally was number one for most of the Kia. Essentially the thing that's going on right now with the Kia car, where the Kia rebranded their logo. It looks like K N Here. and Google search for KN car.

Is like suddenly spiking'cause people see it on the road. They're like, Oh, that's a cool qua what is that? What is the K N car? And I was like This feels like a Kendall thing. And I was like, Kendall, what would you do with this? What what was your answer? So I you know, I had a buddy in fleet sales and like that's where they, you know, sell a ton of cars via online and I would make a deal with someone like that at the dealership, I would say look

I can get you a lot of traffic. And So I would create websites that would literally, you know, go for all the newest cars, right? The you know, the twenty twenty three, you know, Kia, whatever it was, but obviously spell it with the Knight. And then, you know, make a deal with them. Like, I'm gonna send you this, you know, I want twenty percent of all those leads. And what is your what would your website look like at that time? Would it be like Hey, this is the Kn car. Go ahead and go buy her. Would you like?

You know, he would you just make it look like the Kia website? What would you actually do? I think I would just, you know, explain it like hey, you know, it look it's it says Kn, but it's actually Kia. And you know, here's the reasons why this car is really cool. And here's the form to actually buy this car and I can get you a great deal on it. Right. And then, you know, obviously send that lead over and you know, everyone's happy at that point. They actually find the car that they wanted. You know it wasn't Kia, but you know, it was The uh CN card that they had found. H how much do you think somebody can make if they they did this? What's your range? What's your estimate of how how that would play out. If you if you did a good job of executing that. I think if you did a good job, I mean the problem now is Google autocorrect.

So Google now, I even did the searches myself. Right. It's goes to the actual Kia, like, hey, I know what you're trying to do. Right. So you'd have to kind of find that like Where doesn't it do that? Is it the app store or is it some like other You know, place to do that.

When you get like a really good misspelling of really high priced items With a decent margin. You know, you could make Hundreds of thousands of dollars. Mm-hmm. That's awesome.

kinda had a similar Origin story. Playing poker and then Discovered the poker affiliate game. Yeah. Yeah. So I was Basically a degenerate gambler when I was fifteen or sixteen. Um

My friends and I would play, you know, poker in home games, just five, ten bucks, whatever. This was when poker was on TV all the time in like two thousand five. And I just kept losing all my money. So I would have to go to you know, the local grocery store to the Western Union or whatever, give them the hundred bucks cash, they would send it to, you know, Cambodia or wherever it was going. Um And then I would just lose that. So I was like I need to find some other way to reload my poker account because I'm I'm busted. Not I need to stop. No, I didn't exactly where am I getting reloaded faster. Yeah. So then I saw that they had like the refer a friend thing on the website and they would pay you like Seventy five bucks or whatever.

So get your buddies to sign up, so I had all my friends sign up, same as you. And when I ran out of friends, I was like same as him, like I gotta figure out a way to get strangers to do this for me. and ended up coming across this uh forum called I think it was called Poker Affiliate World back then. It was basically a lot of people who were doing this that would share, you know

What was working, what wasn't. It was a very friendly community that I I was kinda surprised, like I don't know why people are telling me this, but Because they're kinda competing, right? Yeah. We were all comp like we were competitors and just ended up becoming friends as well. Um so just learned through doing that, start a website. Uh my I convinced my parents to lend me like a couple hundred bucks to buy a domain and set up, you know, web hosting and everything and I I told you this or I put in that document that like when I've sold my first site, which was probably nine or twelve months after that, it was for thirty two hundred dollars. Nice. Which was like a billion dollars to me back then. And I got all

It was like a check. I cashed it. I took all the cash home and you know, spread it out on the desktop. Spreading it out in the spread money. That's the the big noob boob for sure. And then took the you know, repaid my parents and that was like a Uh Very sentimental moment for me. That's amazing. Didn't you have something where your neighbor did something for you? Your neighbor like lent you some money or something like that. Um was it like a lemonade stand story something like that? Well, I like the first thing I did for work, m one of my neighbors needed some like landscaping work done. Like we'll give you twenty bucks or whatever to come over and do it.

And it was on a Saturday and the night before I was, you know, out with the boys, had a had a few sodas and uh was a little hungover that morning and I made it to like Ten AM before I had to tap out. Like I just can't do this right now. That was the that was the first and probably only job you had. Yeah, I just had you know, random stuff like that. Um Did that I had a w I lasted one day on a another neighbor had a A bread company, so they would have to deliver the bread every morning to restaurants. Right. And my dad was friends with him, so he's like, you know, I'm sure trying to get me to do something. You need to go work with uh Mr. Anzevine for the day. It was like a four AM wake up call to do that. So it lasted one day at that as well. It's like just no way.

Shoveled snow for one day. Uh a one day. Neither of you really had any real jobs, it sounded like. So you never had like a corporate go and like, you know Here's your first day at the the new company. You didn't have that. I I did not. I basically had like a summer job. It was like a temp job agency that kinda places you different places. And one of them was like Dell warranties. And then I I realized then I was like I can't work for someone else. Like this is just not me. You know, I wanna work for myself, I wanna set my own hours and I wanna make a lot of money. Yeah. Like my mom always was said, like when you were younger

All you said is like I wanna be a millionaire. I wanna make a bunch of money. And she's just like all right, sure, you know, let's see what happens. But um you know.

That was just kind of my general sense of it and I was like I need to figure out a way to make it like To make it. I don't like the idea of working working really hard and someone else making money off that. Exactly. I want to make the money off that. I mean that's what you know, like being an employee, right? Like you're making the owner's money. And I just like I couldn't get like around that. I was like I need to be the owner of the business. Dude, I find it hard sometimes to recruit people.

'Cause I'm like, I fundamentally don't want To do this. Trade. Of like I get some security and certainty and Experience.

But you get the upside, you know, like you know. I get my salary, but you get the the the upside of my Might. Work. I I almost find it sometimes hard to even recruit people to work at this point'cause I'm just like

I don't know, man. I just I I philosophically don't love this path. But then I also need to hire employees all the time. So I'm like, you know, it's not very productive. Do you ever have that product? Oh totally. And I feel like Actually, it's been actually one of the most rewarding things of my company is like watching the people grow. You know, we would hire them and I'd say, like, All right, I just need you to kinda You know, write a couple pages of contact.

And then they do a really good job. It's like, oh, do you want to be the editor of this website? And then oh, do you want to manage other people? And so like You know. The businesses I sold, I made sure the people that I was working with got really great jobs because I feel like, you know. Sure, I made a lot of the money. But I wanna make sure that like your career is set and you are in the best position possible to really, you know

crush it where w you know, with what you're doing. What did you do after your first sale? You did a A retirement party. Yeah, so I had this idea. I was like, Okay, you know what? I did it. I'm done. And you were like thirty something, thirty. Yeah, I was like thirty three, I believe. And

You know, I was telling all my friends like I'm gonna rent out a restaurant And you know, we're just gonna like celebrate my retirement and you know, it'll be great because you know, I'm not gonna be sixty five. I'll be like thirty three and it'll be great. So we rented out lazy bear in San Francisco. And I had all my friends and my family and it was Awesome. We then had a party bus. They didn't even really know about your business. No. I mean, that was another thing for me. I've always been, you know

Not one to brag about it. I feel like what I do is kind of just what I do and there's no reason to kind of be, you know, boastful about it. Yeah. So for the actually the first year after I sold the business, I didn't tell anyone. And and then after a year,'cause I just wanted to live with it and I just wanted to kind of be comfortable with it myself. Before I then told other people.

Um And so I had a three year earnout. So after the three years is when I did my retirement party. And so you sat on that news for a long time. I did. Yeah. Well yeah, I sat on it for a year, told people, but then I had two years left with them. Once I was done with that

I was like, it's retirement time. Like I'm done. Let's do it. So rented lazy bear, rented a bar, had a party bus. And it was awesome. But then literally like three months ago. Were you at this party? You were supposed to come. Why did I not call it?

This guy's almost hung over. I don't know what he's talking about. No, I can't remember why I didn't come. But I do remember that when he did sell that one. I had left the gambling space, so I I knew he was doing well. I didn't know like what was really going on. And he was in Dallas for something, I can't remember what. And I went over to their hotel room and him and his wife Tess had a ball of champagne. They're like, We're gonna open this, celebrate the sale, whatever. I was like, Oh you know, congrats, that's awesome, man.

And then I went home. Google booked it up. And I was like Oh, and I text him, I was like All right.

I really mean it'cause that's now like Well we can say it's in the news, right? Like that one sold for I think forty five million, forty million. It was actually fifty million total, but I kind of sold it twice to the company. Yeah. Which was kind of a weird thing. Explain that. How does that work? So first time you sold it for what? So first time I sold it for like Fifteen million plus, you know, a bunch of equity. And what happened was like At that time, New Jersey was big.

And that was like the first legal state. That had, you know, casino and poker. So we focused on that. We did really well. Let me explain because I think people won't know the the context here. So You go from po online poker then online poker collapses. And now that whole affiliate game is kinda dead'cause

Do you US just shut down online poker. Yep. Mm-hmm. What most people did was

They went. offshore or international,'cause it was still illegal in certain places or in certain ways. That's where most people went. You did something different. Like that was the obvious market. You went for kind of a non obvious pivot, which was

In the whole United States, one state Was gonna legalize Uh, I don't know if all gambling or just sports betting or wh which one they basically at that point didn't have sports betting? But it was poker, it was casino. And casinos are like the big players, so that's kinda the one that was really exciting. So so gambling was was legal in New Jersey. And only New Jersey. And I remember at that time It was like well

How do you build a business around one state? Like it didn't sound big. And I don't think it's not a big to most people. So most people didn't do that, right? You kind of like Found the The hack that nobody else was really competing for this like

Uh, what was the what would be the search term people were looking for that you wanted to rank? New Jersey online casino. was that was like the big one. And you're right, like all of my competitors were like perfect, you know, like we still have forty nine other states and the regulators at that time said. If you choose. to promote in New Jersey, you could not do anything else. They didn't want you know the the offshore plus the legal regulated market.

And I was like, that's perfect. I wanna be you know A Big fish and a small pond. So I started that business. It was going well, but there was one competitor.

Chris Grove. And he was really good at content and he had like, you know, his game figured out. I was much more into the kind of revenue side of the business. And so I talked and we I w you know, we both talked for a while and we're like, you know, this is what I'm doing, this is what I What I'm doing and like we were like we're the only people in this market.

If we combine We basically own this market. Right. And so it was an easy decision. Then you have pricing power. Exactly.'Cause otherwise if you're an affiliate and The company says, Oh, instead of giving you two hundred dollars, I'll give you twenty dollars. You're just like, Well, you're my revenue stream and you just changed the price on me.

That's not great. I think that's one of the problems most people in the affiliate game fall into is you're You're at the whim of your your affiliate partners. But if you become kinda like almost more important, you're like I'm the only Acquisition source for customers. So this price is the one I'm comfortable at. Exactly. And

It it was crazy because, you know, we We're able to get a thousand dollars. Per player that we sent. Uh through New Jersey online casinos. Wow. And uh so yeah, it worked out really well for us. Literally the first month we partnered together, we both made way more money than we did apart.

And you know, within two years contain the media. The company that purchased us. uh you know, came knocking and we're like, we have to buy you. Uh,'cause we've heard at conferences, we've heard from you know, people in the industry that you guys are the biggest And we want to own the biggest. Right.

So they buy it once. So they buy it once, and at that point it was just New Jersey. And when I told them I was like We're not gonna sell. Like, why would we so we've we have forty nine other states that eventually will legalize. And

So I came up with the idea that All right, we'll sell you New Jersey. And any future state. We'll get fifty percent up. So we'll be kind of fifty fifty partners for every stay. Right.

And They said sure. They didn't really care at that point. I think they were just more focused on New Jersey and being the biggest affiliate in the US market. Right. Um so It was great.

We started running it, you know, I had a three year and uh as I mentioned, the first year was good and that's when sports betting actually got legalized. And then the business, you know, started booming in terms of You know, New Jersey had it. But then a lot of other states were really excited.

about offering it to their you know, to the people in their state. So They Um started legalizing and all of a sudden Basically we had like Ten states coming online and the company was like Whoa

We can not Give you fifty percent of this. This is just too much liability. And so we're like, Okay, yeah, no problem. With You know, here we just need a big check.

Right. And and they did. And they were like we have to we have to come up with a situation that, you know, works for us and works for you. And so, you know, it was part stock and part cash. So in total it was around fifty million. Yeah. That's amazing. And that company uh is publicly listed, right? Yeah, they're publicly listed uh in the Swedish stock exchange. Swedish stock exchange. Um

Did you go ring like the bell in Sweden? I wish. That would have been cool. And so so that's kind of like your kind of like The big win story. Let's do Mike's big win story. So How does one Go from I'm gambling and losing money in poker. I get my friends to sign up for a referral program to

I own Just company that does like I don't know. Multiple billions of gold sales every year, right? So it's like how does that happen? Where where does that come from? Yeah. So basically I was in the gambling industry like he was, and when the shit hit the fan

I sold. So I made like the wrong call where it's like. No, so this was this was later on. I sold I was further into it. I sold for five hundred sixty five thousand. I was I think nineteen then. So that's a to sell a business of five or sixty five thousand, what was it doing at the time? Like A lot but the the future was too uncertain. It was doing like thirty to forty K a month, but it just I didn't know what was gonna happen from that. So I sold that.

And then you know, I'm on top of the world. And you're how old you're like I'm nineteen at this point. Drop out of college. Yeah. I'm I'm going for it. Like I figured it out. Figure it out life. Yeah. So I'm like, all right, I can do this affiliate thing in any space. So I try a bunch of different plays. I did it in the dating space. I tried to do it like selling business cards online. That was a complete failure. And just really like Was this where the Spirit Off Ice thing happened? Uh that was around that time. So um

When I w you know, around that age, I was out I was at Penn State, I was having some fun. Uh, and there was this trend that was like icing people. So like smear off ice. If you present it to someone, yeah. If you present it to someone, they had to get on a knee and chug it. So like guys I knew at college and high school, they were into this. By the way. Most genius marketing campaign ever. Yeah. It was so much to just redo that. Enough time has passed, just replay that same thing. Do a milk milk chug. Yeah, lay on your back. Chug a gallon of milk. Um so

I there was a website called bros icingbros dot com where people would send in like their best pictures of this happening. So there are all these creative ones like W there was one I remember where Guy was super hung over in the morning and went and opened his toilet and they had put plastic over the toilet and there was a smear off ice sitting there. Yeah, like chug it at seven AM So we me and my buddies would send these pictures back and forth, like we thought it was funny. And then I just somehow ended up reaching out to the guy that ran it. I was like, I think this is cool, you know, any interest in selling it or you know, do anything with it.

Ended up uh working on a deal to buy it. And I gave him twenty five thousand dollars for it. There was no monetization at all. It was just like I think this is cool. I it has a lot of traffic. I can figure something out here. And I'm really excited. I tell my buddies like, I just bought that site. Right. Everybody's like, Congrats. Yeah. We wanna get our pictures up, whatever. And um the next literally the next day.

Uh, got an email from Smare Offices and we were infringing their, you know, trademarks or whatever and like you have to take all the pictures off the site. And the the the point of the site was the pictures. It didn't work without the pictures. So Basically just shut that down after twenty four hours and just wrote it off. Didn't you try to blur it? Weren't you saying you were gonna blur it? I talked to the prior owner because I told him I was I was just like, you know, any ideas? And he's like, Well, you could try blurring them out or whatever. I mean just to seem a little coincidental. Did this guy make a phone call? No wonder, but it's a nice loss for me. Nice learning. Okay, so y you're the world's trying to humble you. Are you getting humbled or not really? You're just like Teflon. Very successfully humbling me. Yeah. It was it was kind of like a two year period where just I went from everything worked really well to like nothing was working at all. And especially having ha uh you know, I have left school and my parents very much were against that decision. So it was it was a dark time for me. Like, you know.

Is this gonna work, is it not? Am I gonna whoop get egg on my face, have to go back to college, whatever. Um so One of the guys I knew from the the poker affiliate world. He was doing some affiliate websites in the the Gold and Silver space. And there was this company that had just spun up an affiliate program and a Jerem Yankee, a guy we know, was managing it for him. So he's like, You guys should look at this, whatever.

Um, so I decided to invest in uh this guy's business. His name was Jonathan. And I was just gonna help him like build these sites, let's see if we can turn it into something. And over like maybe six or nine months we build up some traffic. It was making like five grand a month. Yeah, it was it was a side thing for me. I was trying to do other stuff.

And um kinda out of nowhere, the company we were sending everybody to just killed their whole affiliate program. So we went from making you know five Kmart to just zero. You know, this looked like another just completely flown. Got iced again. Yeah, got ice. Just getting iced. Yeah. Um And then my partner, like credit to him. I was I was again viewing it as like, Well, there's nothing to really do here. There's no other affiliate programs. Um, we had actually gone to that company that cut us off and And offered to sell them the website. Like, you know, this thing was sending you I don't know, two hundred buyers a month or whatever it was.

Yeah. just kinda backing into what you're paying us on an affiliate basis, just give us forty grand for it and we'll you know you can have lead gen for a long time. And they just never replied to us. So we Yeah, we had no path to to monetizing it. So I was yeah, I was writing it off. And They're my partner.

It's like we should just sell this stuff ourselves. And that sounded like you can imagine how much of a nightmare that sounded if you're an affiliate,'cause you never talk to customers, you don't like there's no employees really, like it's a very simple product. Yeah. Like you're like in between people and the product. Yeah. So I I was like, This is crazy. I don't want to do any of this but he's like, I'll do all the It's like gasps in the affiliate form real business. So he's like I'll I'll do all the inventory, shipping, customer phone calls, all that stuff. I'll do it all. Like you just help with get traffic and put some more money in. Yeah. So I was like, All right, let's give this a try. And so yeah, I mean, credit to him, it wouldn't happen if you hadn't pushed so hard. This is this is Andreas or this is W this is Jonathan. So that was the J M was Jonathan and Mike. Okay. And kind of a funny story on that. Sounds very

Regal and official. Great story. Jonathan and Mike's gold shop versus jam bullion. Like that's a So step up. We knew so little about this space when we started. That we named it J M Boolean using our initials. And We had no idea that like one of the largest refiners of gold and silver in the world is Johnson Matthew. And so we actually got a big boost early on because people thought we were their retail art. Like it was a nice little accidental win and we didn't get any cease and desists. So that was nice.

Um so yeah, we spin this thing up. Uh It went live, I think, October of twenty eleven. And the idea was we're just gonna point all our old traffic at the new e commerce site, jmbullium.com. And it was it was crickets the first few weeks, like zero or I don't think we got an order for three weeks, and I honestly think that was like my mom's friend who she like told him to go do it or something. Um But you don't give up at that point.

We didn't give up and you know, just kept trying to figure stuff out. How can we make this work? What's that conversation like? You're three or four weeks in You go to the office. Like, does anybody say anything? Like, hey guys, uh Yeah, well there was no office, so that was easy. Yeah, no office. My partner had all the gold in his little desk drawer in his basement. It all fit in like the the tiny little bit. Yeah. No gold is leaving the drawer right now. Um It was so early that it w I wasn't really worried at that point.

what we're doing right now. It's early. You know, you're you know it takes years to build these things. Um but We the kind of a funny story on this. We eventually out of nowhere start getting like Big orders. And we didn't change anything, so we're very confused as to what's going on here. Big credit card orders.

Uh repeat customers over and over and over. We're like all right. We've we've We've hit it, like this is gonna work. And so for like two months this goes on, we're getting like a hundred, two hundred K of revenue a month. Or no, I'm sorry, it wasn't that much. It was probably thirty or fifty grand. And

Literally on Christmas morning, my partner text me, he's like Kinda weird. Have you seen the The checking account. No and I Go and pull it up on my phone like

Christmas morning with my family around. Negative forty thousand dollars. All of it was fraud. Every single order was like credit card charge back fraud. We were just we we just didn't know anything about any of this stuff. So we had so many of those moments along the way where it was really just two kids, you know, figuring out how to

run a gold business and there were a lot of pitfalls that we fell into and Fortunately didn't kill us. All right, so you recover from that. Yeah, so I had to put more money in. I was pretty much on the ropes at this point. It was it was like everything it was going in now. This was this was it. This was gonna work or stressing. I'm stressing at this point. Yeah. And this is where you start uphill skiing and start uphill skiing. So the really the turning point for that company was

I just took a really honest look in the mirror and I said, Here's J M. Here's like the five biggest companies like If I look at these various, you know metrics or whatever, you know, how good's their website, how's their pricing, product selection, how fast do they ship, customer service, whatever. And I just basically like did a little scorecard for everybody. And

I was like, there's no reason anyone would ever buy from us. We're just we're sitting everything. We have less selection. We didn't even we were so small we couldn't get a wholesale account. Right. So we were just buying from the cheapest retailer and marking it up. Um, you know, me and Jonathan were answering the cell phone that was our cellphones were the eight hundred number. If we were available, we'd answer. It was just Again, like why would someone buy from us? So What I landed on, I was like the only lever we can really pull here is We're just gonna undercut everyone,'cause this is a commodity.

And it's like buying gasoline. If there's a if there's a store here and a store there and that one's a penny cheaper, you're gonna pull in there. Like, let's just cut it. And see what happens. Because'cause if we can get volume and, you know, make that work and and see the top line grow, I know we're gonna be able to figure out margin as we as we go, you know, you're gonna get economies of scale. Um so we did that and that did work, and then we start to see the revenue really grow. So through twenty twelve.

We were starting to do like Yeah, a million plus a month in sales, which back then we were really pumped about. And The problem with this company was it was super capital intensive'cause you had to stay ahead of the inventory. So like if you were gonna be able to ship fast, it had to be, you know, in the drawer uh when they order. So I I did another round. I put I think my last hundred K in basically.

And then we outgrew that. And I was like We need someone I no bank's gonna give us any money. We put a deck together and send it to like Sixty different You know.

uh angels or VCs and just zero responses. Absolutely nothing. Not even like a no thank you. Um so I was thinking like who could I get to invest in this thing and I uh called him. And so he was our first angel investor. You knew him personally at the time? Yeah, so'cause we were competitors in the in the space and we went to all the conferences together and we were both around the same age and you know, just like to you know go out and have dinners and stuff at conferences. Um, so we were friends, and he had told me after I sold my gambling business. He's like, you know, whatever you do next, let me know.

I would like to invest. So I was like you get the call. I was like, Hey, cash that in. Now what happens? You get the call. What's your did you even know he was doing this in the meantime? I did. You know, I got it. I was excited about Being able to be a part of it. But I was like I don't want to be operational. Like

You know, for me I was just like I'm trying to do this gambling business, you know. And But I'm excited about Mike. You know, Mike made really good websites.

And I was like If anyone's gonna figure it out. It's gonna be Mike. And so basically I invested in him. And um, you know.

It was I I feel like we had a quick negotiation. It was like twenty four hours. Yeah. You did a great deal. I mean he had all the leverage. It was like we were either gonna go under or he was gonna write this check. It's always like we got an A plus for that. And it was like just speed. It was affiliate. Uh you know, we always call it like affiliate speed. Where it was just like we had kinda had a handshake agreement. And then I just wired him the money. We probably didn't sign anything. Yeah. Yeah.

But it was like I trust you. D you put you put in what, like a couple hundred K or I think a hundred K. It was it was a hundred and then you this was another eight plus move. He negotiated like another rider of like I get to do another fifty at this same valuation at my option, which he then did a few months later as we were growing. Okay. So you put in a hundred fifty K. Yep. That ended up being a good return for you? W what's the multiple on that? I think it was at what, twenty million? Yeah, like twenty three million. Yeah. You that's what you've w net it out? Yeah, twenty talk about the valuation. No.'Cause like in Silicon Valley it's like oh you invested the seed thing, oh is that a twenty million valuation. No you're saying

It was Maybe a million things. A million or two million. We said it was worth a million. No, I don't know maybe seven hundred K or something was the valuation and sold it for one seventy five. So you got amazing return there. He turned a hundred K ish into two twenty million bucks. Thanks, Mike. Yeah. Yeah. Do you uh And I'll t you know, we can do another business together. Right. I'll actually help this time. There you go. Yeah. There you go. That was good. Our software's the worst. Have you heard of HubSpot? See most CRMs are a cobble together mess, but HubSpot is easy to adopt and actually looks gorgeous. I think I love our new CRM. Our software's the best. HubSpot. Grow better.

So you okay, so you do that, that's amazing. You get the phone call, you do that. You get this uh more money. But it seems like you're just gonna have this problem again. And we did, like three months later. So we get his last, you know, fifty or whatever it was, and then We were really s this it was starting to grow pretty quick at that point. We were up to probably four million a month in revenue and it was starting to hockey stick. So I was like, you know, what are you doing to get so much traffic? It's SEO basically. Yeah. So that's when the SEO really started to kick in. So initially it was like we're gonna we're gonna price cheaper, we're gonna make this appealing to people. And then people start, you know, we get the return customers, get the back link going, the site. What do you call this exercise you did where you're like

I took an honest look in the mirror and I said It's kinda like Why would it yeah, I want a date a ten. Why would a ten date me exactly that's basically what you were saying. They have all these websites they can choose from. Why would they be choosing us? Yep. Shouldn't more companies do that? I feel like most companies don't actually do that exercise. The mirror doesn't look that. So uh that's you know.

Something I've tried to use over my career and it's been helpful. That's amazing. Um yeah, I think more people should do that exercise and and also When you do that I think it Uh It forces clarity. Where are we gonna be great? You know, where we're what are we gonna be great on? And you decided we're gonna be great on price first, and then we're gonna be great on these other things later.

Okay, so you do that. Grows, grows, grows, you do this for eight years, you sell. Hallelujah. Um so that's kinda like your your your big wins. I wanna know Give me some stories.

along the way on e either of the big wins. Maybe a story of uh You know. Something that you look fondly at in the early days of like, you know, one of those like wins along the way that felt really good. And then maybe a moment that felt Bad. I don't know. If you have any stories on on either one of those, I'd love to hear them.

Yeah. Um This was kind of a mix of good and bad, but so that first year, I think it was before you were in We had gotten an order from a guy, it was for like twenty thousand dollars, which was a a big order for us back then. And she pays us, we ship it.

You know, it w it's delivered, everything's fine, we go on our way. And then we hear from him like a week later that, you know, I was out of town, uh there's no gold here, you know, I don't know what happened here. And again, we were so naive we didn't even have like shipping insurance back then. So there was just nothing there. Um so we dug in pretty far and we're like, you know, GPS has the GPS coordinates on your doorstep, you know, the driver has signed an affidavit that he delivered it there, you know, all this stuff. But this guy just kept digging in harder. And he he

Did this like There's a site called ripoffreport.com where anyone can go on there and file like hey, this per company or person screwed me. And he did that. And we were so early that like there were no Jamboy and reviews anywhere. So when people searched that, that was the number one thing that came up. And it it immediately hit us like probably thirty percent of our sales just fell off. Because every in the gold space, everyone checks. Right. Like they're always worried about getting, you know, road pull. Yeah. So it was really hurting us and

Um this guy then went into like this kind of sob story of, you know, that was My kid's college fund. If my kid's not gonna be able to go to college, you're you're gonna ruin his life unless you make this right, whatever. And I was really starting to stress about this. You know, that's not a good feeling. And I don't know this person, but you wouldn't want anyone to to feel like that. So

As this draws on and we're not finding a conclusion, UPS basically is like, We delivered it, you know, we're washing our hands of this thing. Um I had cave down. And I was like, I'm gonna personally write this guy a check for twenty. And that that would have been like the end of my checking account right there. And'cause I I couldn't even sleep at night. I was feeling so much guilt about this. And so I had I drafted the email that I was gonna send to him.

And I was like, I'm gonna sleep on this one more night just to be sure. And that morning I woke up and UPS had gone with the police to his house, and as soon as the police were there He found it in his closet. So that one had a uh you know, a happy ending, thankfully. But uh that was another learning moment for us of like, Okay, well obviously we need to figure out the The delivery insurance. Painful painful lessons learned, but you gotta do it. So I think uh one would be uh

Space boom. And face the er. FacebookCom dot com. Wait, well okay, so what are these? So at the time originally

It was the Facebook.com. That was You know, Facebook's domain name. And you know, I was in college, so I was part of it. And

Eventually they drop the the. And I knew like right away. I was like I'm in a domain squat. on things that they're gonna type wrong. You know, Paradise Poker, you know, same thing, but I'm gonna do it for Facebook. So I got the K is by the M. So that's why registered face on the keyboard.

Wow, you're a man of science. I didn't even realize the precision that you took to this. And then, you know People forget the doc. So they you know, they you know, end up putting the com and then dot com again. And the crazy thing about it was I got to see basically Facebook slight growth. Crazy hockey sick. By the way, I just went to faceboom dot com. Here it goes? I have no idea. Facebook. It goes to Facebook now. They they also figured this out. Yeah. So th they might have figured it out one way, but

At the time I actually ended up selling Faceboom dot com. For like twenty K. You know, someone came and was like, Hey, there's a lot of traffic coming here. You know, at that time you'd have just like

You know, P P C type ads. Just like really basic text link ads and you'd make like, you know, a ten cents per click, but there was enough traffic where it made it worthwhile. Um so I sold it to them. And I was like Sweet. I still have

You know, Facebookcom dot com. I'm excited to sell this one. But little did I know, like Big old packet of papers comes from Facebook. And they're like, Hey

That's our trademark. Right. Do you want to fight this? Or do you want to hand it over? And it was a very easy choice to give them the domain. So at least I got to sell one of them. That's pretty good. Did you uh gotta tell the iTwitch story. What was that one?

Well I almost went blind. Or at least I thought I was. I thought this was gonna be a misspelling.com. Hi Twitch. So like on my first company You know, the regulators said, as I mentioned You can't do offshore. If you're gonna do regulated, you have to do regulated. And one of my competitors, I think

told on me and said, I think Kendall's joint both. And So I was like hmm, okay. So I didn't know any of this. And I was at a industry conference and one of the regulators was like Hey, I'd like to meet you for coffee.

How's it? All right. Is this something I should be worried about? He's like, No no no. Just just come. It's like when Chris Hansen's like Pizza's inside. Come on in. You don't go for the pizza. So I just you know I I walk up there, we sit down, and I think this is gonna be like a really friendly conversation, and he's like So

We can do this the hard way. Or the easy way. And uh I at that time I'm like stunned. I'm just kinda like, Oh no, do I run? And so then he's like, You know what? You know, we we've had reports that we think you're doing the offshore. And you know, what are you gonna say about this? And At that time I was like I'm not gonna say anything.

You know I'm not gonna incriminate myself, but I But it it was wrong. You know, all all like these pages. We're basically um algorithmically updated. with these offshore ads that I had no control over. Right. But he didn't know that because he wasn't really familiar with domain parking pages, et cetera.

But at that time I was like I need to talk to my lawyer. Yeah. And then we can talk to you and we'll have a lawyer figure out. I did not have a lawyer. And then people tell me that I need to say these words. Exactly. So then I mean that was a you know terrible feeling, but I was like, okay, you know what? I'm gonna talk to a lawyer. we'll be able to kind of outline

You know, why You know, what he thinks is not actually happening. Um But then I get a Email from them.

And they're like We need you to come to New Jersey. And I was like, Oh no. They wanna arrest me. They wanna get me in their jurisdiction and they are going to arrest me. Um and at that time.

I was like I was like talking to my wife. There's something wrong with my eye. And she's like, Oh, you know, it it'll be fine and I was like, Yeah, I think it'll be fine, but I'm like kinda seeing a little specks. And

It like got worse and worse, and at one point I was like, I can't read a menu. Yeah. Um and I went to a then so I went to a specialist. An eye specialist and he thought I had a detached retina. And he was like, Oh my gosh, we gotta get you into surgery and all these other things. And then so then he kinda looked a little harder.

It was like No, no actually. Have you been stressed lately? Very stressed. Very, very stressed. And he's like, Yeah, you know, we've seen this. You know, it it's just a common thing. You're just stressed. You'll be fine.

So to end the story. I had to go to New Jersey, talk to the regulators, and I wanted to bring a lawyer. And they're like nope don't bring away. Yeah, exactly. You blinded me with your hard way, easy way bullshit at the coffee shop. And then th they're like, Do not bring a lawyer. 'Cause we'll make it hard on you.

And I was like, Oh my god, they told you that. Yes, they told me that. So man, I wouldn't know what to do. Okay, am I Are they just is this a play? Is this a good cop, bad cop type of are they pushing me around or It's real. Yeah. I had no idea, but I was just like All right, no lawyer. Like I mean I'm gonna Listen to them this time, but which is funny because the first time they, you know, hey, everything's all right and just come see us. And

I sit there, I'm at the office, I'm looking around, I'm like, Okay, I haven't been arrested yet, which is good. They sit down and they're like, Okay, well Talk us about, you know, being an affiliate. And then it was like the super cordial conversation. And I ended up saying like okay, yeah, the these few things Weren't what they seemed. And here's why and then they're like okay, you know, that's fine. But you know, we just want to learn more about affiliates.

Because they were like, you know, the first regulators in the United States. And they had never really talked to a large affiliate and'cause you know, we were the only one at that point. Right. So then they just kinda wanted to, you know, do a fact finding mission and it all worked out. I didn't go blind and you know I'm here today, so I feel like it allows me to be a little bit more. Not blind and not in jail. Did you like pack a jail bag? I did not, but my wife was in a hotel and I was just like, Okay, well, you know, we have enough clothes if we need That is amazing. You guys are also kinda like Life hack life experimenters. I feel like you got

Just like the you like finding the the clever angles in business. I feel you do that with with life of like You don't just do things exactly the way others do. They'll be like Well why don't I just Do this, you know, instead. Uh and you've done the s I feel like you do the same thing with Certainly, you know, like

I don't know, lifestyle experiments. So Tell us about some of those. What are some things that you guys do with your day to day life that is maybe just not standard, not exactly what anybody else is doing? Because I think. For the people listening they And myself included. I love hearing when people don't just like

Follow a uh you know, a very standard playbook. 'Cause it makes me wonder, Oh, what's the thought behind that? Why do they do that? And nine times out of ten, I don't do it myself, but I like hearing those. Do you guys have any uh kinda like interesting lifestyle choices or experiments that you do. Yeah.

I think the first one for me was, you know, I was having twins. And I was telling my wife, like, look, we're having twins. This is insane. She's like, Yo, I know. She's like I'm having twins. And I was like, we need to get some help. Like we need experts. And so what I did was, you know, I talked to an agency and I just kind of

You know, cast my net. Wide and far and I was like, I wanna find Someone that can help us raise these kids. So you took this seriously. Like on your to-do list was like I'm going to do a search. I told Tennessee. You're doing the hard part. I'll do the easy part and just try to find someone that has done this before that can really help us along the way and really like kind of make our lives easier.

And I found this twin expert. She actually lived in New Jersey. And we ended up hiring her for four months for the baby's first four months. And she basically worked with them like night and day, eighteen hours a day with them.

And you know, part of it was training us. You know, with like a dog, you know, they're like, Oh, you know, you don't train the dog, you train the person. And it was kind of the same with us. And really she put them on like an insane schedule where if one was sleeping, the other's one's one was sleeping. If one was eating, the other one was eating. And now they're like super trained. So after four months.

They slept through the night. And you know, they were just like very schedule oriented. We'd like look at the time, it's like two o'clock. Okay, they need to eat right now. And they were like ready for it. They were both just Sleep at the same time. At the exact same time, like always. So they really kind of synced up. And that l made life So much easier. Because I couldn't imagine Yeah, yeah, exactly. We basically have like one kid that that ends up being two. That's amazing. What about you?

Yeah, I mean I followed him on some of this stuff, so he after he sold, he Um one of the spurges was he hired a chef. So I cook for him? And when I heard that I was like, Oh, that sounds really like bougie. I don't you know, I don't know. Yeah, that sounds cool, I don't know. And then Um

He was telling me about it and I was like, Yeah, this makes a lot of sense. Like why would I can eat healthier, you know, I don't have to think about it. I don't have to think about what I'm gonna eat, et cetera. Um so I ended up finding somebody as well. And then I've come out to see him a few times the last few months and when we'll be eating I can like see him looking at me. Because I he's so competitive, I know he wants to know. Like is this better than what I'm eating at home?

Sadly the answer is yes. But you'll never give them that satisfaction to just pass. Yeah. That's amazing. Yeah, you uh you're foodie and you so for you it's like oh you're foodie, that makes sense. But actually you're more of like a efficiency. Yeah, people don't really realise how much mental and physic goes into Feeding yourself three times a day or feeding in my case.

Kids also. And so we have a chef as well, and it's the same same thing. It's like all right. I just don't have to make decisions. And I eat healthier. And it tastes better because I'm not good at cooking. This person's great at cooking. I was like

Any money I could spend on a car, a nice nice whatever. Um I would way rather do this. I would rather have One less employee at work and do more myself than than like sacrifice on this. For sure. Yeah. And it's like I think we've both gotten a lot better at

You know if you have a problem You can Think about how can I fix this problem, like how can I solve the problem tactically or whatever. Or you can just think about who can fix this for me. And and that path is, you know, we've so much more efficiency for you. You can focus on your superpower and you know. It's obviously been

What we've done. And you guys. You guys are different in uh from most people who come on the show and also most people I hang out with,'cause I'm you know, we're here in San Francisco. It's mostly Tech, Silicon Valley

And tech is not like like yours, like we build websites. But Anybody who works in tech here would be like What do you mean? Like you're you're making a WordPress site with a a referral link. What do you that's not like software. Uh you know, it's not a software startup in the same same vein that most people consider.

Um And you guys also don't r go raise money from venture capitalists. You don't like You don't do a lot of the shit that like Silicon Valley companies do. What do you guys see as like What do you like about that that you're like, Oh, maybe I should start doing some of that.

Yeah, what parts are you like? No, my way is different, but I think it's better for these reasons. Do you guys have any opinions on that? Yeah, for sure. Um so I like I grew up in Buffalo, New York, and I just was never exposed to any of that stuff. So I I didn't know what I didn't know. So I was just trying to figure out how can I do what I'm trying to do. Um Actually meeting you and spending more time out here has opened my eyes a lot to that side of the world. I think you know, for us the benefits of finding it ourselves are, you know, obvious. We control it.

There's there's no one else that's asking us, you know, do this or do that, or where's this revenue target, et cetera. So we can think really long term about the business. And I love that, you know, we're the decision makers. And we move fast. So it's like once decision needs to be made, it's like Hey, what do you think? Here's what I think. All right, let's go. Um, I think one thing you probably lose though is It's

In my opinion, it's harder to have like the really big outcome. If like the things we're doing or historically have done, it it's hard to be be like a ten billion dollar company from that stuff. I think going the other path, you know, it's still very, very rare, but it does happen. Right. You don't hear a lot about They just self funded this the whole way and then IPO'd it for a hundred billion dollars. Right. That doesn't really happen. So and I think too, you lose time. Like for us it was always like we always wanted to operate the business efficiently and profitably. So Things would take time and you'd you'd watch another competitor.

You know, raise a bunch of money and do some really exciting things. And you're like That's really cool. That's not me at this point. But I can see the merits of it. But I think for me I've always been like I'm just again a control freak. And I was like, I don't want to work for someone else. And I think with V C

It's kind of the same thing, right? Like That is part of it. And you know, with this acquisition, I feel like You're on our team. Like, you know, you're it's I don't feel like it's kind of you know, you're gonna be on the board and we're gonna be able to make really big decisions together rather than, Hey, I invested in you, I just you know, are we ten times yet? You know, like that type of thing. Yeah, yeah, totally.

And what about um You know. I guess I business philosophy. So Uh I've heard as we've been talking some like some of your guys' like

Isms. These are Mike Isms of a sort of like But I've I've only worked you for a very short amount of time, so I don't know. A lot of them, yeah, but I'm sure you have'em, right? Nobody goes through Years and years of building businesses without coming up with some operating philosophy of like you know, here's how to work, here's how to negotiate, here's how to build, here's how to like

Stay the course or whatever. Do you guys have any that stand out to you as like You know, these are my like These are kind of my pillar ones. This is this is like I just really believe this and I can kinda tell a story that

Maybe goes along with that one. It's a bit of a hard question, but it's I find these things. If you do have an answer, I find this to be a really valuable one. Yeah. I mean for me I feel like

You're gonna be right a couple times in your life. And If you think you're gonna be right. Swing bag. Um, you know, for example

With domain or with um Bitcoin. I you know, I saw it, I was super interested in it. I was like this could be Really cool. Or what time frame are we talking about? This is twenty thirteen. Okay.

You know, it could this could be really cool or it could go to zero. But I have this like inclination that it could be, you know, way bigger and I think it has a chance too. And It kind of brings me back to my dad.

And this is in the nineties. He was a computer programmer. And he was like Telling our family like domain names are gonna be big. And I was like, Oh, that's cool, Dad. Yeah. You know, and he was like, No, they're they're gonna be big, every person or company are likely gonna want one. And he bought our last name, Seville.com.

But didn't really buy anything else at that point. He could have bought I looked it up, like poker.com, home.com. So he was right, but didn't swing hard. Exactly. Looking at Bitcoin, I was like, This is my You know, domain names. Um, so I just started buying Bitcoin.

And I was like, I am just gonna like, you know. Hold it and just see what happens. What you know, no matter what. I don't want that, you know, I wish I didn't sell. Right. So I'm still holding it to that.

And you you You bet bigger at at that time. Um Or I I shouldn't say you bet big, because you don't often have to Put a hundred percent of your chips on on it to'cause it's like

This is one that it can go big. So I don't even need to put my you know my entire stack in it. I just need to put enough Or if this works, it means something. Exactly. Yeah, no. I I mean I really didn't. I probably put a couple hundred thousand dollars in at that point. Yeah.

But I was like You know, I'll just wait it out. At that point I think It was around eighty to ninety dollars per Bitcoin. And then now you've seen ups and downs and ups and downs. Along the way, did you

feel tempted to sell or to Yeah, like Get out exit either either'cause I got a bunch of profit or Oh man, bad news, bad news, bad news, bad news. Bitcoin's crashing. Maybe I should just get out. Not really. I feel like, you know, it was always like oh this is gonna be a huge tax set.

And you know so when it was really high, you know, that's what I feel like. And then as it's low, I'm like It can still you know, I still think It's got a long way to go. Right. So I for me, I'm just like this is a long hold. And uh, you know, we'll see when that changes. But I mean, that's why we started this company, you know, we're really excited about crypto.

And we think there's a big future here, so at this point I'm just gonna, you know, I might die with it. Wh I remember when um So I discovered about the same time, twenty thirteen, twenty fourteen. And um I won't tell you the whole story, but like let's just

Fast forward a little bit so I buy a little bit of Bitcoin. I'm like, All right, great. I'm in the game, maybe. And um There was a run where Bitcoin went to I was buying it like four hundred.

Four hundred was like my average buy price. And then Bitcoin runs up to Uh three thousand. At the time. And

I go to a wedding. And I go to my cousin's wedding. And my aunt. So imagine like an Indian auntie. Like you know, she's like not who you not Somebody who I would think would say the word like Bitcoin. Or Ethereum. She's not the word Ethereum actually. So I I was like, what the hell?

Um And she was like Oh yeah, Bitcoin's very good. How's it? Oh, why do you why do you say that? And I was like Immediately my face just dropped because I was like

There's no way that she is like the one who's on the trend. And she's like, Yeah, it's very good and uh I was like what and yeah it goes up. And I was like, That's the whole thinking like Yeah, last month it was this, now it's this. And before that. It was even lower. It was like

Oh my God, this is like a bubble. And I was like, I had read about this bubble shit. Like I graduated twenty ten, so I missed the whole Dot com bubble by a long shot. I missed two thousand eight. Crisis. I was a sophomore in college, I didn't care.

What's going on in the world? And so I was like, I think this is one of those bubble things and I was like You know what, maybe I should take some profits. And so I go and I try to sell everything on Coinbase, but Coinbase said limits, well how much you could sell at a time. And so I like maxed out the limit for one week and I think I did it for another week and I was like ah getting exhaust like by then the like the fear had like dissipated or whatever. And then Bitcoin runs up to twenty K and I'm like you know, I'm like oh my God on the biggest and then it crashes back down and I was like wow.

I have to really have a Bit more of a of a plan as to what I'm gonna do with this. Am I gonna hold this forever? Am I going to hold it to a certain point? What is driving my belief in this?

So that I'm not just at the whim of like, Oh, I hear something and I it scares me. The taxi driver told me something and it made me bullish or bearish or whatever on it. Um We're at a point right now where Probably sentiment about crypto is like I don't know, at the lowest it's been in Maybe ever.

But definitely. Uh Lowe's has been in a wall a while and for a lot of people They don't they weren't around for the Fourteen crash or whatever this eighteen crash it was like This is their crash.

Where they're like Oh, crypto. Turned out to all be a scam, I guess. F T X is a I don't know. Wha what was wrong with all this? So that's kind of where people are at. Um

What gives you What is your belief based on for crypto? Like Why do you think this is gonna be a thing? I feel like digital money needs to be a thing. Like we were literally trying to wire money into this company.

And it wouldn't work. And it was just like what you know, like what do you mean it wouldn't work? What was happening? Well it was Mike had the real issue. But it took you a week. So we we both use the same exact bank. We're with City. I'm gonna call it a shot out on it.

Same exact wire instructions. There's just a PDF. We both send them to our, you know, people there. Said I want to wire whatever it was into the company. The next day I get the notice from Mercury, his hits. And I sent mine like four hours before his. And I the whole day I never saw mine come in, so I'm like that's weird. They had called me You know, I did voice yeah, d answered all the questions, I had to do the docusign, like text, you know, two auth all this stuff.

Where it never goes. So I finally have to reach out to them again and I'm like, What's going on with this? And they come back to me and say The wire instructions are wrong. And I'm like Whoa. Same bank with the same PDF sent the sent the money. So that was an example where like on crypto, that would have been a ten second, you know, transaction. So

I I agree with him, you know. I'm probably even more into the Yeah. don't we have the government control over all of the fiat currency stuff. I think we're seeing you know, we're we're starting to see and we're probably gonna see more of the ramifications of that with You know, debt, inflation, those sort of things, and you know, having another option, I think is nice. Right.

Yeah, so in in the same way like uh Uh government makes all the rules of of where you live, great. But if you don't like the way that the government makes those rules, you have a you have choice. You can move to a different jurisdiction, you can operate by different rules. Uh If you don't like the way that the government manages the money system

By printing more money or Uh whatever it may be. Then You can opt into a different monetary system. That's not controlled by the government. That's controlled by

Yeah, a set of uh source code and the code Yeah. Lives and runs on its own and anybody from anywhere in the world. Can say, you know what, I don't like my country's monetary system as my base system, I'm gonna opt into this one. That makes a lot of sense to me.

Why do you think people have like such a like what do you think are maybe Well put it this put it this way. What do you think are the fair criticisms? So Well um If you've heard the the phrase steel banning, but like, you know, it's like when you argue the other side in good faith, you say, Here's the

Here's the best argument I could see against it. What would that be for for crypto? I think like a big one is there are a lot of scammers in the industry. And you know. They're able to do that because they don't have a lot of the checks and balances.

Of the current system. And I think there's a lot of good reasons why that's the case in crypto, but also allows these people To do these kind of nefarious things. Um, you know, I was telling people recently I was like You know what, crypto does look really bad. Like there's no you know

You can't really argue that fact. But cryptos look really bad. You know, a lot of times. But then it's at other times it looks really good. You know, there aren't Bitcoin that did something bad. Exactly. You have to sort of separate the two, right? Like um If somebody Runs a real estate scheme.

It scams their investors and you're you think you're investing in some property. they're just pocketing the money and running away with it or they You know, they do something bad to the property, whatever. It's not real estate that was the scam. It was the scammer that was the scam. And I think that's the hard part is that crypto Has

It's such a playing field, right? It's a money business. So many people that can scam. So it al almost associates You know it's like a rock. It's it's not doing anything.

It associates that with the scam, even though it was the human being who decided to trick people in order to make that happen, right? Like that that's the I think that's the The hard thing to disentangle. Yep. Do you um What was your reaction to like all the shit that was going down, right? We're in the Slack channel talking about you know the daily edition and it f feels like, you know

Bad news bears for like, you know, thirty days in a row. Mike, what you were living each of those editions. Yeah. Were you w did you get were you surprised with the FTX thing? What was your reaction to that? I was stunned by that. I mean that you know, I like a lot of people viewed them as you know almost like a Coinbase. Blue chest. Rock solid, you know, feel good putting your money on there. I would have recommended them to anyone. So I I I was really shocked. Same with Genesis. Yeah. We have I have money on Genesis that I don't know what's gonna happen to it, but that one was pretty stunning too. Um what's been interesting for the Milk Road in our business is You know, this has actually been

For growth. A good thing, right? We cover the news. And there's certainly been a lot of news. So we're seeing, you know, record subs coming in, that the reader scores have been really good. People seem to be very interested in following this, despite the fact that it's been very, you know, negative. So that's another piece of why we like your business. It's less correlated in our minds directly to crypto prices. Yeah, yeah, that's true. Yeah. Um Amazing. Uh did we leave anything that we should have should have talked about?

We miss any good stories or uh More facts did you guys cover? I don't think I have anything. Nothing comes to mind. Well where should people find you guys?'Cause I think a lot of people are gonna listen to us before, Yeah, these guys are cool. Obviously Milk Road, but like where do they find you guys personally? I know Mike, you congratulations. Did you tweet for the first time today? I had my first tweet today. First tweet, yeah. First tweet about acquiring the milk road. Yeah, my Twitter handle is Mike Whitmaier, which Kendall helped me acquire earlier. So last night. It's like the ac the news is coming out t this morning and Mike's like hey um

Uh anybody can help me every round to help me. Figure how to tweet? Uh A th I've never really tweeted, let alone a thread. He's like, is there a button for the thread? Yeah. All I did was just laugh. I provide him zero help. I was like, This is hilarious. And like you're the expert. I'm not doing anything. No, this is hilarious. He sends his out this morning, he misspelled Milk Road in the first three. Ha ha

He's trying to get that auto-correct. Exactly. I'm trying to, you know, figure out a way. But yeah, I I totally misspelled it and then I t deleted the first tweet. The friend's still there. And I did I didn't realize it for like twenty minutes and everyone was like, What is wrong with your Twitter profile? I'm like I don't know, I think Twitter's messed up. But you at least use Twitter. I do use Twitter more than Mike, but I wouldn't say not prolific. Mike, I think you should actually make your Twitter bio because you have no picture or you had no picture at the time. So I added a picture, I did the bio. You should keep the no picture, no tweets, just the thread, and your bio should be Um

I don't tweet, I do actual work. And everybody should follow that. And that's actually you asked earlier about why we don't do that stuff, and something that came to mind for me was Do you remember back in the day in the poker affiliate world where All the like Mid tier to small affiliates had their like blogs. Yes. Like the personal blogs. So everybody like I had like Mike Whitmaier.com that you had something, I think. Yep. And we would all, you know, muse about what we were doing in our businesses, this and that, doing these posts, feeling good.

And then we were at one of these conferences and Who was the the big jam investor and he was like the biggest poker affiliate. probably in the world back then. And this other guy. It was similar.

Neither of those guys did any of that stuff. Every night we're out in the clubs at these guys' tables, you know, hoping they'll give us like their drinks and It was kinda eye opening for me. I'm like there's probably a correlation here. Maybe I should do it with those guys. Maybe I should do the work and do the work about the block. The stories'cause this guy sounds like a legend. Who who is this person? What are some of the the crazy

Yeah, yeah, he's a pretty private guy, but he um He's he's got a great story. We can also by the way, we could bleep his name. Yeah. Okay. So then it could just be like you can tell the story without the name. We can tell all the good stories. Uh crazy story. He's from He grew up there very uh not well off, very poor. Had a leave school in eighth grade.

Um, so like go start making money for his family, whatever. Um what did he do in the eighth grade, huh? He was like working at a hotel or something like that, bar bar. Um And I think his family worked there or dad owned it. Yeah, something like that. Um and so I think the first thing he did was he was like the biggest eBay power seller and he was selling like

C D stuff on there, he became pretty big, made a bunch of money. Um And then Was he just early or is he really good or the same time as us? He was smart. Like he was basically kind of roll up all the smaller affiliates because he had better deals with all the operators. So he'd buy someone and you know, it'd be a small affiliate and like oh I'm making like five times. And he for him it was like this is two two years earnings or one year. He bought my site is how I knew that. My uh we we have one super smart buddy who

Is it has like dominant position in his game. I can't say who otherwise it'll give it away. But he has the same strategy where he's like He's like, Yeah, now it's unfair. He goes, I just go to them And They quote me some multiple.

But I have a better deal with the payment providers or the affiliate partner. So I they think they're selling at four times earnings, but it's actually two. The moment I sign the deal They'll go into m it'll go to my payment terms and my payment terms are just superior. And so he's like I can just buy these all day. And I don't have to like come up with a genius idea to even grow them because like it's baked into just

The fact that I have more scale. Therefore I have better terms. And therefore like what they think costs X or drives Y revenue. is actually a different nut variable for me. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, yeah, so he that's why exactly why he bought my business. My poker my poker affiliate business back then. Yeah.

And so he was smart and that he was rolling these up. No, but was that w were other people not rolling them up back then? He sort of started that. Yeah. I feel like he was kind of pioneer in our small industry. He's he's just like a if you give him a business and like an Excel sheet and a few weeks to like look at it, he's gonna come back with like here are the three things that this could be doing that would like 10x it. And that's really what he did for us at J M to was I learned so much from him. Like I I'm a completely different business person, you know, after ten years of working with him than I am now. Like what's an example that he did a jam? Maybe that was a One thing he helped me Yeah, one thing he helped me a lot with was um I especially early on, I would really ro ride the wave of like, you know

All the credit card chargebacks hit. I'm In despair on my deathbed, you know, we have our first hundred thousand dollar day, like I'm rate IPL. But it was just this very he he used to joke with me, he's like, If we were publicly traded and you set the stock price. It would swing like a thousand percent a day. Um one thing he really helped me with. Was Zooming out.

And thinking like into five to ten year increments. And and if you frame stuff like that, nothing really ever seems like that big of a deal. There's very few things that happen to you or your business that are gonna materially tr change your trajectory over five to ten years. So an example to his credit. Before he put uh a million into JM shortly after Kendall did his first angel investment. Like a week before it was gonna close. We had we had done all the documents, it was ready to go.

our credit card processor throws us out. And that was like half of our revenue. It was just gone. And and it was like a visa thing. It wasn't just them. They're like this is the underlying market. Yeah, they're growing too fast. Like we need a big cash reserve. We're gonna work with these guys. They asked us, they're like, Can you send us your financials? We need a P N a balance sheet. We didn't even know what a balance sheet was. Like we could there was nothing we could send to them. So unsurprisingly, they threw us out. I w I had to go back to him sort of hat in hand to be like so uh Yeah, this happened, you know, are we Still gonna do this or not. And uh he was just like we really need the if you would, though. And he's just like, you know.

We're gonna figure this out. Any We still cut the check and we did figure it out. And there were probably ten more of those times along the way that he Just help me think about things and yeah, the longer incremental. Yeah,'cause with crypto right now, like I mean, people would have said Oh, impossible to sell milk road during this time. And with a good deal. You could sell with anything with a bad deal, but It's impossible to get a good deal right now.

And I think As a general rule of thumb, that would have been true. But I've always I I hate uh Anything that's like, you know, there's like sort of conventional wisdom.

Because it's like, dude, I'm in the outlier business. Like Creating a successful startup is an outlier. Uh I'm trying to be like You know, super happy and super rich and super fit. That's an outlier. Like so I don't really need any advice that is about what the general outcomes are. Instead I need advice on

How to create outlier outcomes. And so With this, I was like, Okay, well What would have created an outlier outcome? Okay, crypto's gone, you know, e industry gets shook.

All the big companies They gotta freeze. They can't make some flashy acquisition right now. That would be impossible. Okay, so I need Basically independently wealthy individuals. That's that's the first criteria. Second A lot of people are gonna say, Oh, bad news in crypto, Oh, I I maybe I shouldn't do this, maybe I should see how this is gonna play out.

And No, I need somebody who's got long term conviction, thinks in this five to ten year increments. And uh believes in the you know, the fundamentals and understands that there's gonna be the ups and downs and actually during the downs is the time to like Make acquisitions and do things like this. Like this is the time to play offense, right? I feel like everyone on Twitter, there's a lot of Twitter threads about this is the time to build. It's like I agree, I'm not on Twitter, I'm doing that. The builders aren't reading your thread. Yeah, so so and then that's how we ended up

finding you know basically the perfect partner at that time. Um to do this. And so I feel like the uh The outlier. You know, if you're gonna play an outlier game and you're gonna you know, you have to If you want an outlier outcome, you gotta like

Play only by w we'll only have to think in terms of what creates that. Not What's the average outcome, right? Because the average outcome's not the thing you want anyways, so Sure. Yeah. Um Cool guys, this was amazing. Uh

Kendall, you didn't throw up. I I did it. I did it. Kendall was really nervous before we started. I was. I was like, uh do we have any booze around or Yeah But you did you did great. Uh so that was awesome. What's your Twitter handle with At Kendall Saville. Seville S A V I L L E Yep. And then Mike. Mike. Give him a follow. How many followers you got? I'm over two hundred now. Over two hundred. Uh Yeah, Mike Whitmore, W I T T M E Y E R.

You guys might get recognized now when you walk on the street. You might get a little hit of that thank. Actually, you know what was funny? Right when we had met The last time before we did the deal. Um We were walking out of that coffee shop and

I was like, all right, see you later. And you went to go get your Uber. Right then there's a guy who was sitting right there the whole time, he was waiting. I just kept looking at us. It's like hey, uh It's like you know. Love the podcast, man. I'm I'm traveling from Pittsburgh. I'm just here for the day. Can't believe Mump into you, blah, blah, and I was like,

Dude, you should have said that when the guy who might buy the company was that might've helped a little just you know a little juice to message. We were joking about that after. I'm like, John probably just paid all these ass to go. Yeah. I was like, it worked. Great job. When when we were selling our first company, I did stuff like that where I was like, um I knew the qu it was like It was to larger comp it was like the the big fang companies, so it was like Corpdev was like the who's b who's paying attention to you at that time. And so they would follow me on Twitter and Instagram and stuff like that.

So I would just post like a Ticket to like Seattle One day trip. Anybody around in the evening? And it's like okay, why would he go to Seattle? Who's in Seattle? Why would he go for a day? That's gotta be a business meeting. Oh they're they're talking to them. All right, come back and be like You know, when it rains it pours. And it's like and I would just post these cryptic things'cause in my mind I was like I'm just planting the seed, baby. I have no idea if this did anything, but uh

In my head, I was like, I'm really playing everybody off of each other. I thought I was just like, you know, Leonard Catch me if you can type of guy. That was awesome. Yeah, we're good. Thank you. Thank you so much. And one thing is uh Milk Road's hiring. Yeah. Oh yeah. We're looking for like, you know, those A players that have done it before because, you know, we want to scale this. And uh do it as quickly as we can. And I should actually say I Um

Like when we were looking at this deal, we we actually had a of higher offer. that we turn down. One of the reasons why I told Ben I was like I went to your Twitter feed and I saw Your tweets from back in the day.

That were like Crypto punks. Cool. I think crypto punks are cool actually. And I look looked at the date. I looked at what the price was then, like what would the what were people thinking then? And you were like ahead of the curve. Then you had another one this exchange that you had invested in rain and I was like Oh dude, I've been trying to get into uh you know, to rain at that I tried to invest at a point in time.

I was like he was in there early? And I was like I feel like If I just hang out with these guys more. I'm gonna get more value out of something completely unrelated to Milk Road.

Just there's gonna be some random You're gonna be like, Oh, dude. Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Kind of like just throw me a roadster. I was like, there's gonna be something like that I'm gonna get just out of hanging with like I'm a biever in that. Like If you find exceptional people who You don't even have to have a plan. Like just hang with them. Find some routine or value exchange where you're gonna be in each other's orbit.

all the time because something good's gonna come out of that. And so similarly if Somebody wants to work at the milk road. I would say like Cool. It's gonna have good pay. It's a cool pro project. People really love the product. That's that's all true.

But also like the same reason I wanted to To sell and work with you guys is the same reason really anybody should want to do that. Like if you heard the stories on this podcast, you're probably like, God, these guys are awesome. Like they they went through a bunch of shit but they figure stuff out and they play their own game. Those are the type of people who you want to like Work with.

Right, someday I want to be all more entrepreneurial than I am today. You wanna get a job where you're kind of in direct proximity with people who are very much like that'cause it'll change the way your own brain works. For sure. You wanna get in shape, hang out with fit people. Yeah, for sure. Yeah.

Yeah, when we w what was the body fat challenge? Did you win? Yeah, I gotta know. Um so What was the challenge? You were at the end of a challenge behind. Yeah, I'm in a group called Entrepreneurs Organization. I'm in a forum with seven other uh Dallas entrepreneurs. We meet monthly, um, we do a retreat once a year. In in advance of the retreat, everybody sets themselves a fitness goal and everybody puts in like five hundred bucks that if you hit your goal, you get your money back. If you don't it goes towards finding a retreat. So no win. Just a

Just to not lose. Yeah, just to not lose. And avoid the shame. Um, so maybe three months out everybody sets their goals and I thought I was like fifteen percent body fat at that time. So I was like, I'm gonna get to ten. I've never done that before. I'm gonna go for it. Let's do it. So I you know Slam it down on the table, I'm like, Boys, I'm doing it. And then a

I I start working really hard the next two months and A month out I'm like, I'm gonna go get a Dexida C. Like I think I'm probably eleven somewhere in there. Like I've got to be really I'm almost there. I'm almost there. And I had like leaned out in the mirror materially and I'd go look at the Dex when I was fifteen seven. So I was nowhere near where I thought I was. And then I really like killed myself that next month and I ended up getting down to like twelve more. Twelve one. But lucky for me Some of the guys didn't schedule Dex, so the body fat guys were like

We're gonna consider it acceptable to use those scale things. And on the scale I was like eight something, so I got my five hundred back. Yeah, the good guy. But the reality is I did not uh hit my goal. Yeah, you were like really hardcore about it. No, it's trying. And you were like not eating any of the carbs. It was just like really sad. You were just kind of in the corner. Yeah, it was definitely sad. Oh man, like the chef just made this really cool thing and I can't eat any of it. Does Mike really need this five hundred dollars or much? It's like No, Mike needs to not lose. Mike does not like to lose anything. And he set himself a stupid goal that he has to hit now. Next year, though I'm gonna get it. Yeah. What I would have done is I would have been like, What am I now? and just like do done like one percent under that. Just like make sure I weigh. Mike wants to make his life hard and go up though. No, last year I I was I probably weighed like one hundred seventy five pounds or once eighty or something like that.

And everyone at the table did. Like a weight loss thing. So I just thought That's what these were. It was like one of the I think it was the first year we did it. And so I was like, Well I wanna get down to Yeah, one seventy five. They're like, Well where are you now? Like

one seventy eight. Yeah you need to write a book called Going Up Hill. Going up Hill. I feel like that's gonna be your your book. That'll be the bias. Done working, then you can start tweeting your your uphill about your uphill book. I actually have one last uphill story I'll like. Yeah, give it a in Whitefish this year, I mentioned we were doing uh I was doing this in the resort. And they would open it like an hour before the whiffs ran, so only the people going up hill I guess just'cause it's safer, there's not a ton of people coming down. Yeah, so there was one morning.

It was like negative ten windshield. Uh they actually never even opened the the resort that day. It was too windy. It was just miserable out. So I was like, all right. Optimal conditions. Optimal conditions. So I suit up. You rang? I suit up and get out there. And uh I had just gotten like I had never done this in a resort and I really had only done this Maybe five times with my buddy who always was like

The shirt butt. He was like, you know, helping me figure stuff out, whatever. So there's this route you have to take up the hill. And I was the first one going, it was like six AM and I'm just I'm going straight up that path. I'm like marching, doing well, feeling good. And then there's this one section'cause I'd done it a few times, so I knew there was this one section that was pretty steep and there were a few times going up that the skins would like start to slip a little bit and I was getting really scared because I don't ski. So like if this thing turns around I'm like I can't do anything. I'm gonna

And so I'm going straight up this thing like marching, the winds blast me, the ice is blasting me. And I I'm one step away from the top. And I take the step and it slips in the whole Skis go flying off that whole thing.

So I'm at the bottom and I am very humbled now because there's like twenty I realize there's like twenty people behind me who just watched that. And I'm gathering all my stuff, like they're helping me out. And I work. Up the hill'cause they're starting to go. And all of them are zigzagging back and forth. So it's not as steep. And I was going straight directly up the hill. I'm like Oh, that's why they're not far Wouldn't have it any other way. Yeah, there you go. Metaphor of one Awesome. Well, thanks guys for doing this. I I know a little out of your comfort zone, but I'm glad you guys did it. Thanks for having us, yeah. Appreciate it.

Okay. Right.

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