#166 - Why a Sudoku Company Sold for $640m, "Opendoor for X" & Franchising Tech Companies

The very bottom it says the stone no. This domain is not for sale. Please do not inquire about purchasing it. All emails from anonymous or unknown companies asking me a price will be ignored. Sorry. Last updated July two thousand seven. Right. So I emailed this guy and I was like Hey, uh saw your w website.

Um Like I think it's awesome that you're not trying to sell this, but I'm curious, like why aren't you trying to sell this? And he's like refuses to monetize it, refuses to sell it. I think it's hilarious. What? What is this? Yeah. I feel like I can rule the world, I know I can be what I want to

I'll put my law in it like a day song. Let's talk about business ideas. Um First of all, let me give you an update. Did you see someone in the Facebook group? um launched a pickleball newsletter because we told them to uh a few months ago. And it's now it's now their full time job and they traveled the country uh getting their products into stores and things like that. So it started as a pickable newsletter. Right. And then they partnered with the Pro Tour of Pick a Ball, which

I didn't know I was a thing. And then they started selling their own stuff out of a van, their own pickleball equipment, and now they're in retail stores. Thomas Shields. Good job, Thomas. Thomas, um Looks like a young kid. He looks like a a younger, better looking version of me. Uh Let's see. Well, I can't uh yeah, he look he looks young. He looks real young. So congratulations, Thomas Shield. That's great. I think the CEO or the founder of Pickleball.

either listens to the pot or he messaged once being like, Yeah, I'm down to come on. So we we can have him on if you ever want to Um, we could do an episode about kinda like alternative sports, basically, and do some research and have'em on as well. Great. And speaking of alternative sports, do you want to talk about chess? Yeah, so I have a follow up there. I don't know if you have one or or or just what I put there. Um, go ahead. What what were you gonna say? So

We talked about ch the background is we talked about chess.com last episode. I tweeted about it because I was even more interested in the game. People love that tweet, dude. That tweet had tons of engagement. Um, it was good. And the the summary of this is that I actually we underestimated it. So Chestercom gets around two hundred million monthly unique. They have sixty million registered users. They uh traffic has grown significantly. If I had a guess, they do at least a hundred million in recurring revenue, subscription revenue. Uh Potentially is worth a billion dollars. Super fascinating company. Um Go ahead. What were we going to say? So we were trying to hype it and we actually were underhyping, even though we were trying to hype it. Um And by the way, the guy who started is like a ex Stanford guy or the guy who owns it, uh two kind of thing Stanford guys

Uh, which is cool. Like You know, they didn't go the same track probably as ninety-five percent of their classmates, and they're gonna outperform ninety-nine percent of them just by by doing something really simple that the world wanted. So I started thinking about this because We talked about it. You brought it up. Cool topic, cool bit really cool business.

It really fits the what we call the New Zealand type of business that Andrew Wilkinson kind of coined that that phrase which is It's this independent thing. It has like a cult following, it's profitable, it's simple. It's not nobody competes with it. It's like New Zealand. Nobody's going to war with with chess.com.

Uh, you know, the biggest competitor, I think it's called Lie Chess or something like that. It's basically like an open source Free You know, like kind of like alternative and it's also doing extremely well. Those are like the two. Uh, but it seems like people kinda prefer chess dot com. So I started thinking, Okay It's the next chest.com. What are the others? Is it is there a whole slew of these guys? Cause I think that's where we didn't talk about last time that we should have.

And so I wanted to double click in a little bit. So I started and that was that's a really, really hard question. I've been thinking about it too. I only came up with like dominoes. I looked into solitaire websites. They a lot of them crush, uh, but yeah, that's a hard question to ask. So I I spent 10, 15 minutes on it, but that was enough to tell me something very interesting. So the first one that came to mind was because here's the characteristics that you need. You need a game played by tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of people. That is not owned by a brand. Chess works.

Checkers also work, but the problem with checkers is it's so simple that it's not as like uh There's not as much depth to it, therefore, not as much of a like kind of like uh money made and passion around the the sport. Uh Sudoku was the second one that came to mind. So I went to Sudoku.com. And Sadoku.com.

It's just like chess.com. It's like You you go to Sudoku.com and there's already a Sudoku board waiting for you with the clock going and it's like, Oh, play, here it is. You don't need to download, you don't need to sign up, you don't need to do anything, just play Sudoku. I love that. Then they you scroll down a little bit and you see like this advertisement for like a mobile app, a mobile Soku app. So I clicked that, I'm like I bet this app I bet this is amazing distribution for this app.

App crushes. So there's a company called EasyBrain behind it. So the Sudoku app that they have Has Fifty million downloads. the uh on just Google Play.

Forget about iPhone. That's just Google. That's just Android. Um, so probably 100 million total lifetime downloads. The website itself gets, you know, ten to twenty million visitors a month. Uh, so they're getting free tr like basically free traffic to their mobile apps where they're able to monetize. And easy brain basically makes they're like a mobile app developer. That makes these apps, they've had over seven hundred fifty million downloads lifetime of these little simple number game apps, starting with Sudoku, then like a remix of Sudoku, then like another number game if you like that one. And they just cross promote them within each other.

I bet this company is crushing it. They're based in Europe, it looks like I have information on on them. I just found some interesting stuff. When I Googled them and went to the website There was something amazing about them that immediately stuck out. I'm wrong. But Yeah.

Is based in Cyprus. Anytime a company is based in Cyprus, it it's like R it' dou turns out these guys actually are uh from like the Belarus. They're actually from this area, but they're based in Cyprus. So I'll I just Googled it real quick. So Uh, do you know that it was they were acquired? Um

Three months ago? No, I did not know this. So that's the that's another piece. I have their revenues, I have their profit, and I have the uh all their user numbers and I have can I guess how much of it I'm gonna be totally wrong, but I'm I I like to guess. G by the way. Little tip. Always guess before you hear any number. That's how you get good at knowing numbers because you guess and then when you're wrong.

Your brain remembers that shit and you're you start to hone that gun instinct. Okay, so here's here's my guesses. I'm going to go. How much were they what was what's their revenue? I'm gonna guess that their revenue was four hundred million dollars a year. Okay. What's their um

Profit. Ninety million dollars a year. Pretty good. Um All right, how much were they acquired for? I'm gonna guess that they're required for eight hundred fifty two million dollars.

Okay, and how many um How many daily active users do they have across their fifteen games. I'm gonna say they have twenty five million DAU.

Okay, so You didn't do horrible. Okay, so Easy Brain was acquired Uh last this most recent February. Uh they were uh acquired for six hundred and forty million dollars in stock and up to a hundred and twenty five million dollars of additional consideration if they hit it. So six forty

Yeah, what is that? That isn't that exactly eight fifty? No, what's six uh what six forty plus a hundred is seven forty plus twenty five is seven sixty five. Seven six. So great job. You guessed eight fifty. Great job. You're almost there. Um, they w their revenue is uh in two thousand twenty revenues were two hundred and ten million dollars. Okay, so you were off there by half. You guessed four hundred million, but their profit was seventy million. You guessed ninety. Right. Pretty good. Um, they've had seven hundred and fifty installs over the course of their the lifetime of all their all their things, all their uh games. They have uh fifteen live games with twelve million daily active users. You guessed twenty five million. Okay, not bad. Not bad.

Um, what a company. So okay, so that was the first one I thought of. And by the way, I think that there's Other versions of that, like, you know, I don't know, go look at like Yeah, s Sudokuonline dot com.

I don't know, what's that? Like you know, like all the things people are gonna Google search, if you can get the top level domain for those, that's really interesting. Um so then I started looking at some others. Poker.com So I went to poker.com and poker.com is like Kinda like this crappy, like just describe what you're looking at when you go to it.

Let me look at this. But you can't act this is an actual poker, right? This uh you're not betting? It's not even a as you can't play there. It's just like Reviews here's a it's like an affiliate site. So it's like oh here's a place to play poker, here's where you can go because they get big kickbacks for basically sending a a player to poker SARS or wherever if they deposit. And so horrible website.

Um, crappy kind of like affiliate and reviews site. Dude, you could do so much more with this website. Like if somebody was like, dude, I'm gonna I have a if you have a mobile poker app that's like good. I would pay like ungodly amounts of money for poker.com. I think that that's a and they they also if you like do their traffic search, see what they get. It's nothing.

So they should be getting a lot more traffic having poker.com. Um okay, so then there's some other ones. Crossword puzzle dot com. Crossword.com. The go to those like They don't even like crossword doesn't dot com or something doesn't even like render. It's like a there's like five asterisk on the screen. Yeah, like what's going on here? Because crossword is the other game that's like Sudoku, it's like chess.

That people played religiously. And they love we talked about how how much the New York Times makes off their mini crossword game. I can't guess. The number was uh Ninety million dollars in subscription revenue from crossword puzzles for the New York Times. So so I am surprised at Crossword Puzzle, crosswordpuzzles.com.

Crossword.com, I can't believe that these sites are not being like leveraged. So I was very surprised to see this. And uh yeah, that was my follow-up from this. So you go to Crosswoodpuzzle dot com. It says please email suggestions to DKW nine nine at yahoo.com. Right. So I I emailed the guy. So so so so so you see this the website's basically like a white page with a bunch of text.

And it's basically just linked into things. The very bottom it says the stone no. This domain is not for sale. Please do not inquire about purchasing it. All emails from anonymous or unknown companies asking me a price will be ignored. Sorry. Last updated July two thousand seven. Right. So I emailed this guy and I was like

Hey, uh saw your w website. Um Like I think it's awesome that you're not trying to sell this, but I'm curious, like why aren't you trying to sell this? And uh what's your you know, what do you want this to be? Why do you believe like why do you believe that it should be done this way? Uh you know, I'm just super curious, like what's your thought process? So we'll see if he replies. There's another website that's like this. And Bray, see if you can find the name of this. I don't remember calling the top head, but Sam, you might know this. There is a website that's like

It's like a misspelling of Google.com or gmail.com. I think it might be gmail.com or something like that. And it's the same thing. It's an all white web page. That's like Yeah, Frank and Susan. Yeah, we were married in nineteen seventy seven and like blah blah.

Uh no, if w we're not gonna put ads on the site. No, we did not we own this before Gmail came out. It's like They basically just have this web page that gets like and they have a counter of how much traffic they get. Uh, and they just show that they're getting like hundreds of thousands of hits a day and like He's like refuses to monetize it, refuses to sell it. I think it's hilarious. What is this? What uh Brady, did you find it? Try to find it. I'll find it after the pot otherwise. Uh I I have this in my like things to tweet about. Uh, you know, folders. That's actually such a funny idea. Uh so like if if we just looked at the most visited website and find out what the typos are for each one. And go and look at what those are. So like if you go to goggle.com, so G-O-G-L E, Google owns it. So it redirects the most of the time the the company owns like their plurals and their misspelles, but sometimes they don't. And then those are hilarious. Oh my gosh, I just uh

I was looking at Bing. I change it to Bang. Don't go there. Yeah, don't go there. Um what else is there? That's like a what what's a like a like a YouTube spelled wrong. Like you can do like Facebook, uh but you could do like I don't know, like you you lose the A or something like that. I don't know, see what see what that is. God, that's so interesting. Um that that's actually an interesting thing. Facebook owns Facebook with one oh pretty interesting. That's actually an interesting thing. I'm gonna research that after this. I don't know if you know the guy who owns Bitcoin.com. So this is a guy, Roger Van Der or whatever. I don't know his name is, but he's like, kinda hated in the Bitcoin community by like

eighty percent of the people because She tried Create his own fork of Bitcoin. So they fork Bitcoin. I think it's Bitcoin Cash or Bitcoin Satoshi's Vision BSV. I forgot which one he's associated with. I think it's Bitcoin Cash. He created his you know, they force Bitcoin and they have their own.

But this guy owns Bitcoin.com. And uh and so he's like a billionaire guy from Bitcoin and like He refuses to give up Bitcoin dot com, but it's like f it's like points to the other version of bit the not popular version of Bitcoin, you know, it's like the the the fifth Jonas brother who's not in the band or whatever. You know, it's basically like a waste. And but nobody can sue him because it's there's no company behind Bitcoin and nobody owns the trademark.

Oh, that's a pain in the ass. I hate that. Yeah, I'm looking at it now. Um Let's talk about um Well which one do you want to go to? We have a bunch on the agenda here. Um

Okay. Does this interest you? Well, first of all, I want to tell you about a company I just invested in. Um, and I want you to criticize it or tell me if it's awesome. Okay. Oh, you actually read it. Okay. So I'm doing we just did a podcast a second ago and Sean talked about angel investing. I've been doing a little bit of angel investing now. And my whole thing is I'm doing this thing called a syndicate. I almost did a rolling fund like you, but I didn't really want like a full time job. So I was like, I'll just do this so it's deal by deal. Or not a full time job, but whatever it is for you. Right. Um

And My premise is this. And you confirmed it a little bit by your reaction. What I'm trying to do is find interesting deals that other angel investors who I think are smarter than me or other like firms who are smarter than me are also investing in. But I try to find them where they're explaining the company really poorly, and I'm spending time with the founder listening to them, and then I'm rewriting. a memo about the company and I'm sending it to people to invest in and it's kind of working. So I sent you one deck.

And it was really bad. It was confusing. Um And then I just rewrote it and you're like, Oh, I wanna invest in this company, maybe. Um and it worked. I was kind of gushing. I was like, dude, did they write this memo? Like, who wrote this memo? I was like, This is the best investment memo I've ever written. You were like, dude, shut up. I just wrote this in 20 minutes. I was like, no, no, no, trust me, I read a lot of these things.

And I was like, I it's all the memo was so good. That I had to separate The writing? Which was really entertaining and persuasive and likable. From the business.'Cause I was like, dude, I don't want to just like

convince myself this is a good business. I want it to be a good business. I w you know like I love pitches where the founder can just barely explain what the hell they're doing. But then I'm like, Oh, that makes total sense. And I'm like, Yes, that's like You you get it, you're not like a salesman. So I'm not like gonna invest in this like

hand wavy shit. It's like no, it's real and it's working. And you're explaining it in kind of this nonchalant way. But it's actually super legit. You just don't like get really excited and animated and you don't have great Words to describe it yet. Uh and actually I can help you with that. It sounds like you're thinking about the same thing.

Um I'm actually d thinking, I'm gonna simplify my thing, which is like Just helping them with their landing page and their communication. Because almost every company invests in their landing page kind of sucks. Landing page is really hard to make good.

But um They need a lot of help and it's like Something that not every other investor is offering to do for them. And they actually are not that good at doing it. And so Uh anyways, as I got off topic, but your memo was really great. I actually want to like publish it in some way without like I don't know what you can do, but like I feel like that should be public.

Uh I want to point to that and be like, this is great writing. Here's why. You can go to uh you can if you like go to Angeless Hampton V C and you can invest if you wanted to. Or you could even just say you're gonna invest and then like look at it. Um and then once it's done, I'll publ you can publish it or I'll publish it. But they uh this company, it's lobby.com, L-O-B-I-E dot com. Uh Th it's so funny'cause th he actually did something really good. Basically And this kinda sounds like simple and negative, but it's it's it's a cool company. I've I've invested in it. The it's basically software that helps doctors

uh schedule Appointments or patients a schedule appointments with doctors in a in a in just a good way. And it's kind of like an archaic space. But he was like We're making the lobby digital. And like And I that's so much better than creating than say we are creating

software that's just a CRM for a doctor's office. And I'm like they're like, no, we're making the lobby room the lobby digital. We're gonna save people so much time. And so basically the software what it does is uh it you can you can schedule an appointment online and they'll alert you if the doctor's running late. And when you get in the parking lot, you can tell them so you just wait your car and they'll tell you when to come in. Yada yada yada. Um I mean it's like The interesting thing about it is the guy has already started and sold the company in the space, and uh it's at at worst gonna be okay. At best might be big.

Right. Um Anyway. I just thought it was so interesting how it was digitizing the lobby or the waiting room of healthcare. And I just wanted to bring that up because I think it's so cool how they repositioned that. To make something s that isn't that cool sound kinda neat. Right. Yeah, you know, that that's that's a skill. That's like a superpower in and of itself. Uh I don't have a ton of thoughts on the business itself, so I don't have too much to add there, but

I agree with you. Basically the most interesting part of t talking about lobby was And I think we should uh show it to people so that they can see How do you expl how do you make a business seem really juicy to be a part of, uh, to invest in? Because I think you did a good job of that. Well, that's what And that's what we're gonna do. So w I'm doing it with Joe and I'll you and I will probably do a bunch together, I hope where I'll invest in yours and you mine. And the whole thing is I'm not trying to sell people, I'm not trying to convince people to do it. Um, you either wanna do it or you don't. Like I'm not gonna try and convince you to do it.

because that's I that's kind of unethical. But I just wanna paint the business in the most positive light. Or at least What I believe it to be accurate. Like an accurate it is cool. And I want to make sure you know it's cool. And I think that this whole copywriting thing. For angel investing. might end up being a

Yeah. I I think it'll be it'll be easy for you to c to get people into your round because people like you And the memos are good. So I think I think those will be those will be good. I am a

company I wanted to tell you about that's a cool company um that I think you're gonna have a good opinion on. So Uh, have you seen what Keith Reboy is doing as his new startup? No. So you know who he is? Yeah.

So he's the guy who uh Uh he was like ex PayPal, then he was the COO of Square. He's kind of a known investor at founders fun. Then you started over total asshole on Twitter. Super hilarious to follow because he's a just absolute jerk to people. Um you know his like number one tweet is just like Wrong. The period.

And he won't tell you why, he won't argue back, he just calls you an idiot. And then if you like try to argue, he's like This is why I'm I was more successful at the age of twenty seven than you are at 40. And it just like rips people like that. And like who does that? That's no nobody does that. So I think. That's just like really crazy and entertaining to me. Um But anyways, he's doing it. So he did open door. And what open door is is now like a publicly listed company because it did a spa.

And Open Door is a multi-billion dollar company and basically it was like Selling your house is a time consuming and stressful process. What if like the day you want to sell, you could just sell your house right away. Give you a price, you say yes or no. And uh that's what open door did. So they basically would just buy your house. And then they had a lot of data to know how much to buy your house for.

And then they were the brokers. They could keep the broker fee for themselves, buying and selling. And then they would sell it within like ninety days, hopefully. And they do this in a whole bunch of markets like Arizona and stuff like that. And so they've done very well, you know, kinda like on paper. And like Zillow now like does the same thing to try to compete with them. It kinda changed the way that the the business model of these big

real estate companies worked, where now like the money to be made is in Basically like auto buying your b auto buying your house. And then reselling it for you. And using a bunch of technology to do that. Anyways, his new company he's starting uh with with Jake Jack Abraham is uh called Open Store.

And so you have open door and now you have open store. I no they haven't released a bunch of details, but I think I know what it is, which is It is open door for buying businesses. So it's the same idea for buying. I think it's gonna be f specialized in online businesses, but maybe not. Um Where basically you just say, Here's my business and then they say, Here's your offer.

We'll buy it off you. And um and so I don't know if this is gonna be specialized like e commerce roll ups like a thracio. Um I don't know if it's gonna be all online and offline like Um where did you learn about this? And what what can I go? Is there a website yet? Uh they announced it so I heard about it a few Weeks ago, like six weeks ago, maybe. And I was like, Oh, that's super interesting. How did you hear about this?

So somebody told me about it because their friend interview at the company. And so that's like the only way you could know about it, because like when you're interviewed, they like kind of tell you the premise of the company. And that guy was like, Oh, dude, you know, boys doing a new thing. It's basically open door for bit my businesses. And I was like, Oh, that's sick. Uh that's a great idea because buying a but selling your business is Also, just like is even more than buying a home in terms of time consuming, stressful, uncertain on what price you're gonna get, uncertain what price it even should be.

And um And the marketplaces to do that online, like buy biz Buy this cell or whatever that website is like dot com. They're so like old school, you know, like on how they do that. And so um so I think there's like room for improvement there. So I found that to be really interesting.

Let me bring this up real quick, which is it's so crazy how often Internet marketers who often are accused of being sleazy. H and many of them are. I mean they're they're accused of being that because they are. But They're

Often ahead of the game. So for example, email marketing. Email newsletter are all the rage right now. Uh scammy guys like I don't think this guy's actually scammy, but David D'Angelo used to sell dating books in the 1990s by having these long emails I just stole and copy from him. Um, the other thing is paid memberships. Paid memberships have been a thing for decades. Now, guys like Greg, your friend, our friend Greg, is doing a paid community thing, and Greg's like a cool guy. Um and so it's like it's it's like cool to do it. Um

And there's so many more, and this is another one. Buy and selling businesses online has been a thing that internet marketers, so for example, Flippa, where you can buy affiliate websites, that's been a thing for years. Empire Flippers is another one. Empire builders, yeah. Empire Builders and if you go is Empire Flippers or Empire Builders. I think those are actually two separate things. But they but if you go to those websites, you're gonna A lot of people are gonna be immediately turned off. You're gonna think what the fuck is this? And Fucking startup guys like us, we just come in I guess that's what we are. We just come in and we take the stuff that these guys have been doing for years and we just say put some lipstick on it. Yeah two point oh make it a flat beautiful color.

Uh, it's so funny'cause like Cool. This sounds neat. But this isn't unique. Right. Uh yeah, I I I think you know

There's no unique ideas really. There's you know, remixes of ideas, there's old ideas that you make new, there's new platforms. But But I think it's cool and I think it could be big. Uh it's one I'm gonna keep my eye on. Then I saw another business like this. So I started to put together a little bit of a pattern here and I said, Oh What is open door for X? So what other parts of life and and uh and and the world could use instant liquidity? Cause that's what this is. It's basically taking something that was kind of illiquid, like your house and

Takes a lot of time to get liquid where you actually sell the thing. And takes a lot of pr you know, you gotta like You gotta move out, you gotta stage it, you gotta repaint it, you gotta get a broker, you gotta list it, you gotta do tours. No. Instant liquidity. We buy your house today. Don't do any of that shit.

Um, same thing with your buying your business. What else needs that? And then I saw another one. And this business is called, um, I grabbed the name, but it's basically doing this for used electronics. It's called Backflip. Just got funded. And backflip is basically saying, We'll instantly buy any of your used electronics. And uh'cause that's not a new thing either, and and I think it's awesome.

And so It's not that it's new, it's basically that there is a Big swing being taken by people who are gonna try to do this at scale. Using like the modern kind of internet marketing b and models to do it.

And so like You know like We buy gold or whatever. What else those billboards? Giards. You know, like gift cards. Yeah, exactly. Like Um and there's like a gift card, there's actually a gift card startup that's crushes uh that that basically took the old model and just doesn't do it. What's it called? Raise, I think. Raise. Yeah. I'm at I'm on their website right now. I'm looking at raise dot com.

Holy shit. I can look at the traffic and just tell you these guys are printing money. Yeah, Raze is gonna be like I don't know a billion dollar plus win. Uh and nobody even like hears about this company. Nobody talks about this company, but you know, super simple business of like, Yeah, gift card the gift card business. Re resale of uh of gift cards, essentially. And so uh So anyways, I'm interested in this open door for X, which is basically instant liquidity for things that were pretty illiquid before. All right, let's play off that. So houses. Okay, there's equity zen, which I think is badass. Uh so equity zenets equity zen?

Kinda looks l more like Flippa than it does like open door, meaning like It's kind of hard to get in. It's kind of obtuse. You got to like sign up to see shit. Not everything is there. It's like A ten step process to do an investment. It's like Equity Zen is not like

It's not Robin Hood on my phone where I could just like Do my thing. And so like secondary shares. Yeah, it's like a shitty name. Like, I don't know, like it's just bad all around. And Forge Global was the other one. It's like Also bad. I don't know, I feel like somebody should do this better. Carta's trying Carta X is trying to do this better. um right now, which is like secondary shares of s of private companies.

Yeah, I'm not a fan of carta, but Um I could see them doing well, but I'm not a I'm not a fan of cartists, so I don't know if I want them to be the best at this. Um Angelus is also trying to do it. Yeah, there's a bunch of people trying to do this. Second trying to do open door trying to do what they're trying to do is a little bit different. They're just still trying to do the marketplace. What open door did was different. It wasn't Like open door wasn't just another housing marketplace, it was

I will buy the thing off you right now. Because I know what I can sell it for. Um and I'll all I'm comfortable with this five percent spread that I will g I will keep so You give up five percent of your upside. But you get the certainty of it being done now. And um and I'm comfortable in that five percent spread. So somebody would need to do this for secondary shares where they just go.

You wanna sell your your s your company's stock? Done. And then I will figure out how to re-flip this thing on the other side with my own spread. So there's a few people that have done this with furniture and furniture is really hard because furniture doesn't ship well. Yeah. Um But there is

If you I don't I don't know if you know, I mean I buy I like buying used furniture because you can get like ten thousand dollar couches for like three grand. Um and so oftentimes they're really nice. Use furniture is not really a thing on the internet, uh, or at least it's not hugely popular, but you could I think there is still an inter interesting way you can do this with used furniture. Right. Um so I think training cards is one. So I know a lot of people that have Sports cards they collect it as a kid, it's in their attic somewhere, it's in a box. They kinda heard oh cards are worth something, but they don't like they don't know what they have, they don't know what it's worth.

They don't have them graded. They didn't send them into PSA and pay the money to get them graded. So I think if somebody basically did the shoe box model where you basically say Put it all in a shoebox and mail it to us. And we will pay you for it. Uh, we're we'll do all the work of figuring out what it's worth and then we'll pay you

You know, seventy cents on the dollar for for what it's worth. And like today you're getting nothing for it. And like That that's the and if if you don't like our offer We'll send it back. And I think that if somebody do that, they could s just hoover up all the long tail of like trading cards that are out there.

Um, that people are not doing anything with that they want to monetize. That's interesting. Okay. So uh we've we've we've Mm furniture is not that good. Trading cards are pretty interesting because it's a lot easier. Cars, everyone a lot of people do cars. Carvana does cars, and I think that that is so sick. They're a multi billion dollar public. Is that the same model they they use where they'll just instantly buy your car off you? Yeah, like they'll buy it in a matter of minutes. Which if you told me this like years ago, I'd be like, No way, that that can't be done. But they made uh five point six billion dollars last year in sales. So it works. Okay, so it's working. Oh open door for cars is working, yeah. Yeah, it totally works. Um, what else is interesting? What's a huge thing, like what's what are some of the bigger assets that you possibly have in your life that you want to wow, Caravana's market cap is forty five billion dollars.

Holy shit. Yeah, it's working. Um What else is there? I don't know, there's gonna be some obscure shit like oh like life insurance policy payouts or something like you know, like something like that that I'm like uh I I don't even know that space, but

That makes sense. It takes you know, it's something that you get or like social security. Like I know like my parents are getting to the age where they can collect social security. Like would they take a lump sum of all their social security? Now You know, at s at seventy cents or seventy two cents on the dollar.

And then you know, this company just collects the the payments over time, like Probably. I don't know. Like there's a lot of people who would make that trade. Dude. Did you know this? So there's a s uh a company. I have to go and look at what it is, but you guys could probably Google it actually. But I think some banks do it, like Goldman will do it. But if you have a winning lottery ticket. They'll buy it off you. Right and they'll give you the money up front.

And it's structured in such a way where They're they're still able to make their profit. But they'll buy lottery tickets from you. Like we're talking like ten million dollar lottery tickets or or seven figure uh I I uh it's kind of interesting. People buy winning lottery tickets off of people. That's actually kind of an interesting one. Um, I would actually need to do some research. How many people do you how much money do you think is won in the lottery per year? Oh, dude, I have no idea. I mean, I feel like the weekly lottery, the Powerball.

Every week is like You know, between fifty and like two hundred million dollars. It's like it's like that's that's like on a weekly basis that it's uh now it doesn't get one every week. That's how it accrues and that's how it gets bigger, but like You know I don't know. I don't know. No, I I Uh no, I I can't find it. There there's sixteen hundred lotteries created each year. So there's at least sixteen hundred unique winners.

Um No, I don't. I don't have the numbers, but lottery tickets is might actually be kind of interesting. Cause you said the life insurance. I'm like, what do you wait to get paid for that you would take a discounted upfront payment? Lotteries is kinda is actually kind of interesting. Um, and I do know that some banks actually do that.

Right. Uh does that? Is Whitey Bulger. You remember Whitey Bulger? I've never even heard that. Those words in my life. Do do you know the movie The Departed?

Yes. You know Jack Nicholas's character? Okay, yes. It's modeled after Wadi Balger. He was a gangster in uh Boston. He was an Italian or an Irish mafia guy. He uh or a uh mobster guy. He ended up going to jail recently. They found him. And they um

Um He got beaten to death in jail, so it was like a a cr crazy ending to the story of him. He is he was America's most wanted man for like twenty years. And um anyway, he as part of his story, he won the lottery three times. And the way that he did it is people who had won the lottery the in the neighborhood

They would have to go to him and he would buy it from you and he would go and cash the ticket. And uh so this is like a famous like m the numbers game, they call it. That's like a famous mafia thing. Wow. Okay. I had no idea. Um yes, I don't know. Uh maybe maybe if people have good ideas on what what part of life could use instant liquidity. Uh I'm curious to see to see what that that would be.

Um okay, so a couple other things I wanted to to bring up. One is A pain point or kind of a business opportunity. Maybe this exists. If it exists, tell me because I want to use this service. So In e-commerce, most e-commerce brands are just local in their own geography. So most are let's say most US e-commerce brands basically just sell in the US.

And then it takes time, and then you start selling in Canada, and then you start selling in Europe, and then you you know, but it takes a long time. And The reason it takes a long time is because of the like international logistics. So for example, you want to ship something to Canada. They have to pay like a pretty heavy duty, like a import duty.

On the product. So you sell like a fifty dollar product, they're gonna have to pay like twenty dollars of import uh taxes in addition to the shipping. So it just becomes like Irresponsible to buy. Uh, and still some customers do because they can only get the product from a the US based company, but it really sucks. And then the company has to like fill out this form. That says the these goods are worth fourteen dollars and then you submit that at the thing and then It's just annoying, right?

And so I think there should be a company. So there's a these brands trying to do these e commerce roll ups. I think you should do it differently. I think some enterprise entrepreneur can basically say, look, I will boot up your Canadian operation today. I'll boot up your

UK operation, your France operation. Yeah, I'll do Europe. I'll do UK, I'll do um Australia, whatever, right? So basically say, I'll import your brand today. You do no work. So all you have to do is you need to ship me this product to this warehouse. So here's the address, ship me your products. Uh I need like, you know, whatever your normal inventory is. Ship ten percent to me and let's see how I do. And basically you create one giant warehouse. where you're warehousing for all the brands that you're gonna work with.

And you just say look Uh in exchange for doing this, you pay me no money, I will start generating sales for you. But I want a royalty. I want a royalty of Ten cents or fifteen cents for every dollar that's But what's your point? What like how's this how's this interesting or new? Uh because I don't know of a brand that that does this that exists. So

You know. My wife has an e commerce brand, we sell in the US. I would love to be making more money by selling in Europe, but the time and the operational overhead to go to Europe right now is just crazy. So why aren't there more people that are reaching out to e commerce store owners? And basically saying, I will run your international operation and make it a low risk to no risk proposition for them.

In order to do so, and I think there's a lot of money to be made. Given the number of e commerce brands in the US. And how you could if you're in Brazil or you're in Australia or you're in Canada or wherever I think you could become the leading trusted like kind of like We're we are your Canada.

Go to Canada, w go to market plan for Canada. And we just do all the work for you. This is actually quite common in media. So there's business insider India. There's business insider Australia. There's business insider Germany, I believe. Um, and then uh Um Well

I think I believe the Wall Street Journal does the same thing for those s same countries, but the the it's it' uh there is BuzzFeed France, uh Huff Po France, HuffPo Australia. It's actually pretty common in media. Um and I those so so d is it run out of the US or they Hire a team there or it's A local team there that just licenses the brand, basically. When they report the revenue, it's under licensing.

And so I don't exactly know what that means though, because I was trying I was thinking about us and I was like, Man, we have a lot of people who are uh English as a second language folks uh in Germany. So like uh I got Germany, I guess, is one of the most populous uh I don't I don't I don't know the numbers. I guess is one of the most populous places in Europe. It's uh very business focused. So You know, the Germans liked us. Um same with Australia. Australians loved us and I was like yeah, let's go do it. But what the

Fuck do I do? Do I just fly over there and just start recruiting? Like It's it's crazy. I would love to partner with someone. And then another thing is in particular China and Japan. And there's actually a whole word for this. There's a word I can't remember what the word is, but there's a word that describes why it's difficult to break into Japan. Um, and the reason is is that the J once uh it it's hard to break into an island, in particular Japan. And I would love to have paid someone to be like, Hey, can you be my Japanese uh

Consigliary, like my my capo on the ground. I'm that's those are all mob terms because I'm I'm into the mafia now. Uh can you be my my guy on the street of Japan and let me know is this good? Am I getting the right people? I think that's incredibly interesting. Yeah, exactly. So I'm I'm I'm not saying that this doesn't exist. I'm saying There's still a lot of room there because I know a lot of people, I have a lot of friends who are doing e commerce, right? We we host Club LTV. There's, you know, seventy five to a hundred e commerce brands each doing over a million dollars a year in there.

And every single one of them, I think, has the same problem. Which is that We're all US focused. And why are we US focused? Because It would be too much of a lift. Too much of a lift to go figure out how to do Australia. It's too small of a pie to like Stu man power on or sprint brain power on?

But if somebody in Australia was like, Hey, look, this is what we do, this is our business model. We Help you get sales here. And we just take our cut. And uh and so I just think that like There needs to there's there's more opportunity for this. And that's cool that in media it sounds like there's

Also an opportunity to do it media too, or it's being done in some way by the big players. It's being done in some way, but like I remember when BuzzFeed uh like were going through some troubles, they had to lay off like their whole French office. And I was like, BuzzFeed has a French office? What the fuck? Well that's the opposite, right? That's we have a French office, and then you have to do things like that when it's like not working out. I'm saying No investment. No consulting fees. You just take a royalty on sales. And these are all incremental sales that I wasn't getting otherwise. And you take care of the whole operational headache in this case for e commerce about like

I just ship your goods to your warehouse, you ship it to local customers, customers don't have to overpay, customers don't have to do import duties. Uh for every order they make. And so I just think that there's a pro opportunity in e commerce to like be the the go to brand for every D to C brand to partner with in each of these locales. What Country would you go to next?

Um, I think Europe is probably the best because you want um w the you know the next wealthiest High populous place. Um, but really it can work anywhere. It's just like the biggest market is doing it, you know, throughout Europe. Now Europe is made up of so many countries, maybe that's a pain in the ass. If not, like Canada is the no brainer. Australia next. Japan is a good one.

Um, those would be the ones India maybe like for example, I know a bunch of people in India who did this, so Um My dad introducing these guys and I was like, Oh wow, why is these guys how their house is humongous? How you know what do they do? It's like, oh yeah, they um they partnered with jockey underwear.

And they just became the jockey like seller here. They have exclusive rights to sell jockey in India. Next guy at the dinner table. What do you do? Oh, we're the dominoes guys in India. What? Yeah, we're the exclusive franchisee of Dominoes for India.

Um Okay, what does that mean? Well we have like Indians didn't really eat pizza before this, so we're like teaching people to eat pizza. They fucking love it, turns out. Uh and so we have like, you know, nine thousand dominoes throughout India now. Like, oh my God, what is going on here? Uh like you know local franchisee, but for e for what's this called? What's the terminal what's the term for this? I don't know. Uh you know, maybe I should have gone to business school. I think it's probably just called like in brick and mortar, I think it's just called franchising.

Um franchising was the way to sp spread geographically. you know, when your brick and mortar can only scale so fast. uh that's how you would do it. You would franchise out and then the franchise would pay a royalty back to the back to the Master. franchise the the brand.

of their sales. And they're they're the local operator. But with e commerce or with digital media It's a little bit different. But it kinda has the same problem, so I don't know if there's a new word for it.

Man, I think this is wildly fascinating. This is uh I didn't think it was that interesting at first, but now I know what you're talking about, where Uh I've heard so many stories of the same thing, but not of maybe not of India, but I am the official Uh Importer of X, Y, and Z. Yeah, we're the distributor of X. Or like for you, just think about for your business, right? Like W could you have sold for more if you had like

Two hundred fifty thousand, you know, or like five hundred thousand subscribers in Japan and like I think there's a world where I would have been where I could have made more money in those markets than I did in America because even though America has more people Um, I don't think the French or I don't think that the Germans Um I don't think Facebook kicks as much ass over there as it does here with Instagram and everything. And I so I think the ad markets because I I do think that Europe

Sorry, Europeans, if you're listening, I do think that you guys are five or ten years behind when it comes to some technology stuff. Um and the ad markets suck because of Facebook and Google. So like if you could still capture a little bit of that revenue, I think you could. Well, I I don't know if any of that's true, but I what I do know is that it's true, trust me. As you're building well, I I think like everybody uses Facebook everywhere. So that that's the part I'm saying, I don't know. Um Well sorry, but what I mean is like old media. Still does quite well.

abroad. Okay. That that's fair. That's fair. Uh the thing I'm just saying is like If while you were building your US business and all your employees are focused on your US business, if somebody said, I love your product, I'd love to license the brand from you, or or I'd love to be your partner and in the UK or in Japan or in Australia, and I will build I will use the same playbook. It'll be under your company. I just want my cut for building this for you because I'm saying you would have done it in a heartbeat, right? And so the fact that you didn't means there was an opportunity for some entrepreneur.

That should have been reaching out to you saying This is a no lose proposition. You still own it. You still make money off of it. Still your name brand. I just get to go I get to basically take your brand, take your head take your product.

And localize it or distribute it here where I'm from and I know the market. Yeah. And my product's way easier than yours. It was'cause it's pixels. It's not anything real. And I would have loved to have done that. And I used to have people emailing me all the time. And then we had a bunch of people in Russia, some people in Mexico who would just verbatim copy our shit and I would I would have to I'd find it and I'd be like you guys stop this. You're not allowed to do this. And then I'd have other people who would email me and be like, hey can I try to Could you stop anyone from doing that? I feel like you can't do shit. If somebody takes your newsletter and they just word for word transcribe it in Russia and they're like We're called whatever h hustle R U. No. There's nothing you could do. The only thing that I was able to do. the only thing I was able to do, we had someone do this in uh Italian, we had someone do it in Russian, and we had someone do it in Mexico uh yeah, Mexico. And I basically shamed them. I said like I'm just gonna I'm just I'm just gonna call you out. And so I would tweet at them or I would email them. Uh I I would just would make it well known and my network was large enough that someone

of someone knew them and they were embarrassed. And they yeah, and they stopped doing it. But No. I think you should. Yeah, and I had people email me all the time saying, Hey, can I do this for uh Spain? And I would say, Yeah, but I don't really know anything about you. I don't know if you've got good taste. I don't like I don't I know nothing about you.

And I will just throw it off to the side and just kind of forget about it. I wish I would have. I'm surprised this doesn't happen more. I'm surprised there's not just like free media.com based in Cyprus that basically takes all the content from behind the paywall of Wall Street Journal. And just Says cool if If you ever hit a paywall. Come here, look.

Like input the input the URL you're trying to go to. Here's the article for free. I'm surprised somebody hasn't just tried to do that. Like it's totally bootleg is piracy, right? But like It is so hard to enforce that stuff. I can't believe that somebody internationally isn't doing that. That seems like the way to do it. Do you know what outline dot com is?

I know about it. I know. I don't know what I could say publicly about it, but uh yeah, I know. Explain it. I don't have any insider information, so maybe you do. Uh I don't I've been explain what So outline dot com it's uh the tagline is read and annotate without Distractions.

Frankly. I have No idea what that means. But the way that I use it and the way that everyone else uses it is when you come across a paywall website. You put the URL into outline dot com. And you can see the whole article.

Um it just It doesn't work for everything. I don't think it works for New York Times, but uh You can get you can get I think only a bunch of a bunch of sites they they kind of stopped working on, but initially it worked on everything. And uh the person behind this is somebody we know that's like uh

Well known kind of tech person that works at one of the big companies and was like They had to like distance themselves. It was getting like millions of hits. Like people were using this thing and they had to distance themselves from it because they were like, ah yeah. Like I I was kinda told I had to knock it off. He's like I didn't make it for that purpose. It just it works that way. But uh yeah. Is it a Brazilian

Now site. Oh my god. Oh Okay. I uh yeah. Yeah, I see.

Uh yeah, I know who you're talking about. How interesting. Outline dot com. What the heck? It's that big. I just Googled it, uh or I just looked at Similar Web at how big it was. Outline.com. Crazy fascinating. Yeah, so so I think that one's cool. Um All right, I'll bring you how did we do on these. Just a quick question. Does Outline.com make money?

Uh I don't Think so I I don't know, I have no idea. Wow. This person is so interesting. All right. Uh That's it. That's the episode. Uh by the way, for the people listening, we actually just did like a QA before this.

It was uh Sean, I think it was too much talking. We'll we gotta do the Q and A on the second half because Oh yeah, I'm fucking exhausted right now, but like I feel like the blood is drained from my body, right now. No I'm tired from listening. I'm so dead. I can't if we're gonna do two hours again, we have to do the heavy lifting in the front. I tried to keep the energy high, but like in my br brain and my I also haven't eaten anything today, so I'm just like dying on all fronts right now. I'm hurting. I'm hurting. Yeah, no Q and A's gonna be a separate episode too.

So we are we're getting two episodes out of this. Yeah, we gotta I can't do it next time. Yeah, I thought we would be able to But uh this was this is painful. Maybe This is hard and staff, by the way. For another one tomorrow. Yeah. I can do another one tomorrow.

I can do I can do one a day, easy. Uh I think. I think I can't. Yeah, we'll have to try something else if we want to keep doing the Q and A. I like that one. I thought the Q and A was almost better than the actual episode. Maybe'cause you guys were tired, but the Q and A came out a lot better than I thought. I think people are gonna like both of those. Yeah.

No, the whole thing is good. So Good job, guys. I feel like I can rule the world, I know I can be what I want to

I put my all in it like my days off On the roadless travel never looking back

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