5 TikTok products that could print money for you

All right, Sam, in the next hour, I am going to flood you with business ideas. I am going to create an absolute lunchroom food fight slinging business ideas at you. You are going to be drenched and covered With ideas. Are you prepared for this? 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 day's all on the road, less travel, never look at it.

The lunchroom one. Did you just pick that up? Yeah. That was very good. Yeah, by the way. All of these ideas. Very half baked came to me, you know. I would say seventy five percent of them I thought of this morning because we had a guest cancel.

And we said Let's record anyways. And how about we do some business ideas? Let's give the people what they want. Tis the season of giving, and we're gonna give the people what they want, which is Fun business ideas. Well, the first one, you actually have a lot of Intel on right? You actually use this.

I have some Bet on horses. Those horses are are currently pay out. And I haven't been talking too much of about it, but I think It's time. So TikTok. Let's talk about TikTok.

TikTok right now, if you open up your phone, do you have TikTok on your phone? No. Okay. If for some of you you might have trouble opening the app. Because there might just be millions of dollars jammed in the app and it's a little bit like stuck. So it might be hard to open up because there is so much money. Available in TikTok right now. Do you use TikTok as a user?

Of course. I'm I'm a TikTok addict. Oh, that's why I don't use it. I I had it and I deleted it. I I love TikTok. I have a lot of fun on it. Um But I also have a couple of business bets that are doing really well in this space. And I think right now people are sleeping on it. When you say Business bets. Do you mean things that you own or investments of other people?

I own. Equity and Companies that are doing this. That's what I'm asking. Okay. So you invested in companies that are doing this. Not something you fully own and are operating correctly to operate anything at this point. Yeah,'cause that like insight is a little bit different. Yeah, yeah. But these are all like uh there is something in between. So there's like angel investing, which is right the check sort of passive.

Uh, you're on the outside, I would say you're on the other side of the fence. They lob you updates over the fence. And then there's things where you own, you know, ten, twenty, thirty, forty percent of the company and you're active. You're more actively in in the loop. You're not active day to day with your hands, but you're active with your ears and your mouth. All right. So anyways. Right now on TikTok, um, TikTok today is a little bit like Facebook was maybe twenty twelve to twenty fourteen. And if you remember, you at that time were working out of a place called Founders Dojo.

And um There was a guy who used to work there. Name Moise Ali. And Moise Ali today is more famous because he started a brand called Native Deodorant. Um You wanna give the like two seconds of what it was like being at the Founders Dojo when he was creating Native?

Basically it was this guy who went to Harvard, Harvard Law, I think. And so he was like clearly smart. And he had a small econ startup that he sold for like four million dollars or something like that. So very promising but still like w you know he he was young and he's like what am I gonna do? In the founders Dojo, which was like my little uh 10 person office that I shared with some of the guys, he was looking for something to sell. He thought mattresses, he thought a few other things. Eventually he landed on deodorant and right in front of us, literally every day, he learned how to use Facebook ads and in a very short amount of time scaled his deodorant business from zero to just an idea. to something like thirty or forty million in revenue in literally eighteen months, eventually sold it for a hundred million dollars in cash in like twenty four months, all right in front of us. Yeah, two and a half years end to end.

Uh, from time of start to time of exit, a hundred million dollars sold to Partner Gamble. Okay, so wh why did he do that? One, he picked a uh interesting category, but he was doing something that not every not a lot of other Harvard graduate smart people were doing. And at that time on Facebook you could get traffic for very cheap, you could get sales for very cheap, and he was able to build up a consumer base at the right place at the right time. Basically, by the way, I saw his sheet. Uh we wrote an article on it and he like sent it to me. I think he was spending four dollars And the each customer who we spent four dollars to acquire was then spending sixteen dollars with him. I believe that was the numbers. So it was like a money making machine.

Okay, yeah, I'm not sure on the math, but it was something like that. It was sort of like you know, four to one, five to one, six to one payout on on every dollar. Okay. So which is very hard to achieve today. Today Yeah, you know, one point five is the new Four to one, right? So basically you put in a dollar, you get a dollar fifty. Oh, that that same machine used to give you four dollars for every dollar. Man, those are the good old days. Well, the good old days are right now on TikTok. And so what's actually happening? So here's the breakdown of how this actually works. So you

Create a product of whatever type. It could be digital, could be physical. Great. Project. Now I want you to look at something. Go down On our sheet. There is uh on page four.

There's an infographic. And it's from a brand called Goalie. You know what goalie is? It's apple cider vinegar gummies. So they just sell gummies, like gummy vitamins.

But specifically A C V apple cider vinegar, which was kind of like a health wellness Trend and craze. Now goalie First of all You could put anything in a gummy, I guess. Like in a uh like it started with weed, understood. Then like I do creatine that way. Now you could do the the last thing that I thought you could possibly do in a gummy, which is vinegar.

Yeah, yeah. And actually if you drink apple cider vinegar, it tastes horrible. Golly gummies taste great. Yeah. It's like you know it's apple cider vinegar without the pain. Okay. So Goalie itself was a business that grew like crazy. From zero to hundreds of millions in revenue. I think they ran into financial trouble. They think they had to sell bankruptcy, something like that. They were like they got way ahead of their skis. The group that bought it. has basically restarted it. And one of the main things that they're doing is this TikTok creator method that I'm talking about. So look at this infographic.

This is a rewards program. for TikTok creators. So if you're a TikTok creator, not only do you get a little kickback on what you sell, But if every month you hit a certain sales target, you can get something. So low tier. You know, fifteen hundred GMV?

You can get an iPad. All right, cool. 4,000 GMV, meaning you sell four thousand dollars worth of product, you get an iPhone. All right, let's keep going up. Fifteen thousand in GMV.

You get an all inclusive trip to Aruba. Fifty thousand. You get a Rolex. Two a and more. You get the Aruba Trip, uh the iPad, and you get the Rolex, right? They're stacking. Now let's go to the high tiers. There are people that have done a million dollars.

They get a condo in Miami. If you do a million dollars, I think this is in a month, um, of your your GMV target. And so y they're going to creators and say, Hey Do you want this condo in Miami? It could be yours.

So creators is one way that you can make money on TikTok. So you don't even have to do the brand or service. You could just say, I am going to sit here. And figure out. How? The fuck. To sell.

Apple cider, vinegar, gummies. And I'm going to get a little bit of if you get a mu if you get a million, they give you a Lamborghini. Yeah. Oh my God. And and there's people who've achieved these targets. Okay. So this is their program right now. So this is who you're competing against if you're going and trying to recruit these creators. It's like you're a division one college basketball program. You're trying to go get McDonald's all Americans to come play at your your program. Like there are guys that's like oh man, there's this kid in Wichita.

This guy's just a creative genius. He's he just sits in his bedroom and he just figures out the best hooks, the best angles. And brands are putting them on retainer, ten, twenty, thirty thousand dollars a month. In order to get this guy to create for them. This is what's happening right now in the creator space.

How many views do the big videos have? Millions, tens of millions of views they can get. They can get like a million likes on a video. So you get a million likes, you might have had five million views or six million views. This is crazy. Like there's a guy dressed up in scrubs talking about it. I have no idea if he's uh actually works in the medical industry, but because he's wearing scrubs, I'm like all right, I'll what do you what do you gotta say. Okay, so Goli did this.

Uh Guru Nanda Uh teeth whitening. Are you familiar with this? I think the teeth whitening area is full of scammers. And I think that You are not a scammer for using TikTok shop.

But I think a lot of these scammers used this shit, this like TikTok thing like this way. And so it doesn't surprise me that a teeth whitening company would be using it. I'm not by the way, I'm not saying these guys are scammers at all, but you know what I mean? Yeah. But I'm also not saying they're not. No, no, no, no, no, no. I have no idea about this brand, but I know I've seen a lot of like bullshit teeth.

whitening companies and I like looking into the research and I'm like, Oh, this does nothing. Yeah, I I don't know the effectiveness of any of these things. All I know is that these uh they're selling a lot of product. I think the Guru Nanda teeth whitening is the number one selling product on all of TikTok. And TikTok is Big number like kind of the most used app. In the country, basically, right? So you you have this like

top selling product on the top selling network. Uh it's pretty insane. And so if they're the top on TikTok, how much revenue do do you think they do? I have tried to back into this. I don't I don't know the exact I don't want to say a number that's gonna be way off on this podcast. Like would it be crazy to say like five million bucks a month? I don't think that would be crazy now. Okay. Let me put it that way. The brands that are doing this strategy well are doing really well. And you and the and the by the way, this creates a halo effect, right? So you you sell the products directly off that one video, but then people hear about it, and then when they see their ad, the ad performs better because I've heard about this product before. Oh yeah, I've seen ten videos of this product. So now when you put the paid ad in front of me,

Those ten organic impressions. Paid off. Or I go search for it on Amazon. Amazon then takes that signal and says, Wow. People really are searching for this name. Maybe we should surface it higher. Or Google says, Wait, we should surface this higher. People are searching for this keyword brand. So uh with that product category. So in that product category, give it more rank.

So there's this multiple of multiplier effect of this. I have to imagine this is fairly mainstream though, because marketers are like Piranhas like when there's like flesh in the water. Like they all like one person tells one person and they all flock to it and they eventually. So how much life does this still have and how mainstream is this amongst brands? Um let's say It's in the red zone still. So basically

It's not as good as when I first discovered it. And I didn't want to talk about on the pod'cause it's too good. Right. Like when something's just like absolute gangbusters, right? And unfair advantage. You feel like you know a secret nobody else knows. It's not there. However, more importantly,

It's still at a spot where you could go do this today. It would still work if you just go and do this today. So Still works. But you're not the only one doing it. Right, both both are true.

I have you and like ten other friends in the econ world and every business, they complain about a variety of things with software, it's churned, whatever. Uh with ecom the complaint oftentimes is cash flow and inventory. You're saying huge numbers, let's say hypothetically five million a month, sixty million dollars a year. But is that actually a good business when you're doing this? Or is this one of those things that if you get big, you still are broke? Look, if you're bad at business, you'll find a way to lose money in any business. Even the goalie example I gave you, right? Hundreds of millions of dollars and basically Went bankrupt along the way.

So there are ways to lose m to to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Um There are also people that are absolutely printing profitably with this. And so I've seen both. I've seen both examples. I don't think it's about the model. I think it's about how well you actually run your business and how much common sense you use. One of the great things about this from a cash flow perspective is. Normal. Econ business.

You put up the money for the ad, you put up the capital at risk. In order to get users. With this, you only put up free product at risk. So you send inventory to the affiliates. The affiliates create the content. You pay nothing for that ad until it the s sale is generated. Dude, so if you're a digital product, you crush it here. Exactly. So I have a couple of examples of of digital products as well in my list. So okay, here we go.

That's a long Set up. For Five ideas that I think you could take on to TikTok. A crush with right now.

Number one. So I want you to watch this video. It's uh go scroll down and look at this link that says Botox. So the video starts and says, face taping is my jam. And then the other podcast goes, Tell me about this. And she goes, If you had told me 14 months ago, that I would not be doing Botox and I would be taping my face instead. I would have said You're effing out of your mind.

It's a what a hook, right? So this girl's basic is saying I used to bo use Botox and now I use this. And I would have thought this is crazy. And then the other girl's like Tell me more. So this video itself has a quarter million likes. Um how many views has By the way They have it. So usually it's like bros, it's dudes like discussing stuff in a podcast setting that that becomes like the meme. This is like two pretty women. Is this even a real podcast? This one is a lot of people fake these, but this is the well the wellness process podcast. So that video has five five point four million views. Okay. So and they're not selling a product, to be clear. A lot I mean, look at the comments. Every single comment is what's the brand? Anyone know the brand?'Cause she says

There's this Japanese Face tape. And anytime you say Japanese face tape versus Just face tape.

Already elevated. And Everybody's asking for the brand. Nobody knows what the heck's going on. Some people are criticizing. It's a polarizing thing. It's a visual thing. These are good things when you want to sell on TikTok. So idea one is Botox FaceTape. I think you can make fifty million dollars.

In top line revenue. Pr I'll say Fifteen percent margins. So, you know, whatever that comes out to. In the next eighteen months. Okay. Okay, let's be more conservative. Twenty four months.

If you hit this well. So you can make you know seven and a half dollars of profit. You could build a brand because There's one If you look at the market, there's a lot of people that are Um on TikTok that obviously care what they look like, a KA everybody. There's a lot of people who are Botox curious, but never gonna pull the trigger because it's either too expensive, like individual Botox treatments are like

Thousands of dollars. Or they just feel like it's too extreme and they're crossing that threshold into plastic surgery and they don't want to do it for that reason. Maybe some s maybe they'll be judged, maybe self respect, maybe they have to go somewhere, it's uncomfortable. It's like hymns, right? There's just a bunch of barriers, reasons why you wouldn't do it. Dude, I looked up if this works on chat GPT. The answer is no. Who knows, right? Health and wellness is like

One of these things, right? Like I don't know. Fa uh jade face rollers work? You know, does putting cucumber slices on your eyes and um and doing a Like w uh Ari came on here the other day I was like, Ari, you're glowing. She's like I did a chemical peel. And I was like, I don't know what that is. Tell me more. There's a whole world of beauty treatment that like Have some

on the spectrum of effectiveness and cost, they you know, they land somewhere. All I'm saying is that I think this could work. I don't know if red light therapy is gonna change your skin and your hair. But Yeah. It's selling. And that's kind of my point right now. I'm not a doctor. I can't make health claims. I have a friend who is uh went uh is a doctor. And anyway, she

does Botox for people. And she was at my house and she had her kit with her and she was like, I need to like test this out. And we were like Did you get Botox curious? I was like looking at her, I was like, Whip that whip that sucker out, baby, let's do this. And so she gave me a little injection like six weeks ago. Where? In my forehead. Uh like like I was like, you know I was like I don't even know if I wanna do this, but like

I'm a guinea pig. You know, you got a needle, you got drugs, like I'm gonna try it. I would love to hear this excuse you're about to make right now. You're like I like science and I just thought, you know, I wanted to be a supportive friend of hers and I want to support small businesses. What are your other reasons that you did Botox? Tell me. But besides, I wanted to look better. Go ahead. Looking dope naked. I mean, there's like that's the only reason why you anyone does anything. Uh right. Uh uh But it was I got so many compliments afterwards. Really? Yes, I got so many compliments, and it was free. They someone says, You look really young. People kept saying I look young and I was like and I it made me self conscious on how I used to look like and Have you ever you would never do that. You're not into that, right? No, dude. Come on. Would you what would you say if your wife wanted to do it?

I think my wife does want to do it, but she's in that that boat where she's like, Uh, I don't really want to do it, but I wanna do it. I'm curious. Like it's the same I bet you if somebody was at the house and had the kit and was like, Yeah, I can do it right now, I think she would be like you and I I think her forehead would start looking smooth or whatever it does. Yeah, like she was right here and I was like Yeah, I mean if the needle's right there, like stick it in me. Like let's let's do the damn thing. So it was awesome. But DoorDash, if it brings it to me, I wouldn't not eat it. If it's there. So uh yeah, I guess you could say I'm Botox curious. Yeah, I think it's beyond curious. All right, what's the next one? All right, next one, uh another one in the beauty space. And there's a theme here. Beauty things are Tap into a core human desire.

They are visual by nature. They can have before and afters. And they obvious are, you know, high margin, great businesses when you can build'em. And so I wanna take anything that worked In the D to C in the l in the prior waves Of e commerce.

And I wanna see if I can build a TikTok native distribution strategy around it. That's a lot of fancy words to say. If it worked with Facebook ads, I'm gonna see if it worked with TikTok videos. Okay. So one of the big winners, I think she spoke at your conference, was it Madison Reed. Dude, there's uh a location right down the street from my house, and I think they do really well. Yeah. So Madison Reed has built a real empire around hair color. And I don't know the full story, but basically, you know, hair color's not a new idea. They ex you know, there were many brands that existed. My mom has been buying this ever since I was a little kid. You know, she would go to Target and buy, you know, dark brown because she didn't want grey hair, or she my sister if she wanted to try it. Damn, you're gonna do your mom like that?

Oh d dude, if I'm grayed up, you don't think my mom's great up? Like obviously. Obviously. And so, you know, my sister would if she wanted to try having lighter hair for a season, whatever, go buy hair color. So Madison Reed basically built in you know, kind of online first distribution strategy. So a bunch of Facebook ads. It built a huge brand in this space. I think Madison Reed I I don't know what they're worth, but I would not be surprised. I just looked it up. Top line revenue grew twenty percent last year to uh hundred and fifty million dollars in revenue.

Yeah, so the valuation something like five hundred million plus. So Huge success. Um, I think you could do a new Madison read on TikTok. I think that's just a bet worth taking, which is same idea. Maybe you have some new novel angle, maybe it's that it's easier to apply. Maybe it's that it's less messy in your cleanup. Maybe it's it's uh less harsh chemical, so it doesn't damage your hair the same amount. Whatever. Come up with your your reason why this is new.

And Build the brand off of TikTok. And I think you could do this again with creators who are gonna Use the product, show the customers, build trust, build your brand, get people searching for your brand because There's not

There's always gonna be a new wave of people who are interested in this, right? So there's either people who are whose hair It's starting to gray. Um there's always gonna be a new generation. And so whatever the old whatever m whatever media they u consume Is where you need to be in order to sell that, right? Like Remember like Touch of Gray or whatever, like men's the whatever the men's hair color one. Yeah, they did it on TV ads and the Madison Reads did it with Facebook ads. Whatever the next generation is, they're probably gonna get sold to over TikTok and Instagram reels.

And you know what's funny is uh you said there's a new generation that wants this stuff, but you know what has not changed and will always be the same is the hooks that worked. in nineteen ten will still work today. So for example, there's this Wall Street Journal ad That tells the story of two young men, one young man when they both when they both graduated college, y one young man got a Wall Street Journal subscription and because of that he got a better career, whatever. And they tells the story. There are so many ads. that replicate that story or that idea successfully because if you Google like best Wall Street Journal ad of all time, they cite that ad. And so what I like to do, um

is fine. Old ads from as late as the thirties, the forties, like it could be like uh print magazine ads and just see like what's like an interesting line or literally yeah what's like the human nature vibe of this And just Rip it. So like for example, there's this one very famous ad where it says, They laughed at me sit when I sat down, but then when I started to play the piano

Dot dot dot. And that's called the Curiosity Gap, which is do you remember the brand you know, uh BuzzFeed and then What was the other one called? Upwardy. It was like it was like uh you know Ten reasons why blank you're not gonna believe number seven. That's the same hook as that piano ad. And so it's really fun to find old ads and just be like, what's the human nature element of this and just replicate it on TikTok.

Exactly, exactly. Great way to find hooks. Okay. Here's a here's a different uh different category. So I did beauty. Let me give you a different one. Self help. So one of the top selling products in the last year is something called The Shadow Work Journal.

Have you heard of it? This No, but uh that's a great name. Shadow Works. So you get a if you if you go look on Amazon or T. I've seen this. I have seen this. Yeah. The Amazon listing for this currently has over five thousand ratings. And this is like a self published type of book. And the th this journal on TikTok has sold over a hundred thousand copies. You know?

You know how rare it is for a book to sell a hundred thousand copies. in like the first year that it ever existed with no other promotion. Um so this was a it was a huge success. And basically it was like

Um people on TikTok would They'd have the book open, they'd be like Like The gasp I gasped when I read this line. Anyway, all right, what's the line? And then they'll read you this like

Kinda heavy emo-ish quote from this And then it's like You know, um, I finally figured out the my the like my my true shadow. Like what? And it's like you know, it kinda gets into like this whole like You know like the gypsy girl type of vibe. It's like there's a whole like group of people that love therapy.

That love like horoscopes. There's like these like weird Venn diagrams that you can find where it's like people who are really into sort of the mystic self. And so this book capitalized on that. I think today If you were to write. I don't know why I said you. I should have said me. If I were to write.

A modern day version of Yeah. Tony Robbins's book, At least I'm hard within, or Mark Manson's book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck. I think if I wrote a modern version of those and I just pumped Let's say

Nine months and a quarter million dollars of effort? into Seeding it on TikTok. I think I could have a By far a best seller. I think I could sell Yeah, millions of copies of a book. This isn't a book, right? Is this like one of those things where it's like a journal.

It's like two word or two pages, three pages of of of writing and then a week's worth of like notes. No, no. This is not like a planner. It's not like a daily planner. It's I mean I haven't read the whole thing, but like It's basically it's a lot of Text content, but then there are like fill in the blanks or like what's that for you in a box and you write it in your box. But it's not like It's not like just a

It's not just days and you you you need to journal in it yourself. Have you seen Design Your Life? Is that what it's called? Yeah. Designing your life. It's like a book by like you know, it hits all the check marks where it's like a Harvard psychologist who spent thirty years studying happiness and lifestyle design. Stanford, I think. Yeah, like writes a book on this and then it's a it's a cool book. I read it. And then now they have like a journal that goes along with it. And You could just look at this and be like what works and what doesn't work. Uh, but yeah. And by the way, the I don't know if the this angle would work with you because did you s have you Googled the author

Of that shadow. Yeah, yeah. She's very different. She's very different than me. Very aspirational. That's not nobody knew nobody could see that when they're when they're buying the when they're just l watching a TikTok.'Cause it it wasn't like It didn't look like a commercial for the book. It was just somebody saying how this line in this book book really spoke to them.

Or how this book Change the way they view things. Like there's a whole um hook on TikTok that's very famous where they say Some it starts with somebody saying

Um do you have any book recommendations? And then they zoom the camera in really close like to their nose and their eyes, they go I have books that will change the way you even like look at the world. I would I have books that won't be so good you will never be able to look at a man again and they're like romance books or whatever. Like I have books that will melt the frontal lobe of your brain and they go like really intense with it. And that's a that's like a common like memed hook that they use. So the first It's like the first video. By the way, I like how you were like, I don't know if you could do this, this girl's hot. Was the thing you basically just tried to tell me.

Well She's a twenty five year old. Like I'm looking at this New York Times article, by the way, she's twenty-five, which is just amazing. She's like a twenty-five year old, like really pretty woman. And that's like d TikTok's demographic. Like you know, you're like you're a grey bush. You're a grey bush at TikTok world. The videos are not her. Uh the videos are whatever. Uh the videos are from the creator. The creator just looks how the creator looks. They they don't look like her. And

This is amazing, by the way. You know, I think I went to one point you were like, I feel like I'm riding a horse Like a few years after Henry Ford invented the car. Uh, like it's just like it's you you can't compete. When I see these videos and these plans, I think to myself, I can never compete in this world of e come. This is just insane. Like the way that they stuck like the way that you were describing zooming in on someone's eyes. If I were in that meeting and try to figure out how to do it or in my bedroom, like at night trying to figure out like how do I write this script. I would have been like this is

Like This is like cringe. Like I can't do this. Do you know what I mean? Yeah. Like I I can't you know what I mean? It's really hard. I totally get what you mean. And I'm I by the way, I'm not saying that these are easy to do. I don't I don't mean to say that. I just mean that somebody's gonna do these. And I think the way to think about this is what are your attributes? So for you and me at this point.

If we want to m do something that's gonna be, you know, successful We have other attributes. Like, well, I could just use capital. I have a lot of capital. I could just invest in things that are already working. That's a easy way to make money. Um I have a good network. I have a unique network where I know a lot of people who are doing interesting things and they will uniquely let me into something. Okay, that's cool.

Maybe I have this audience from the podcast. So I have attributes. If your attributes are I got a shit ton of time. I have nothing to lose. And I've

Pretty shameless with my phone, right? Twenty four and I grew up like mastering this stuff. Yeah, I just been fing around on TikTok or I understand the metagame here. Better than whoever is the brand marketing manager or the head of paid acquisition. for Madison Reed or whatever these things are. Then you're the one, right? Moys It's like

I get that I can go to Facebook ads and tinker on this all day in a way that Procter and Gamble's Head of act head of marketing is not gonna do. They're gonna be buying Super Bowl ads. They're not gonna be sitting here in Facebook ads manager every day and doing that. But you don't you get what I mean, right? Like you have different advantages than the incumbents do. And I think if your advantage is that you're you grew up on these networks or you you're willing to hustle with with in a way that they're not You're willing to sit there and slide into DMs and send out free product and do all this stuff, you can win. And you can win in in in in these categories that already exist. When I was with Moyes during the I mean, when I say with him, like uh he was just W you know, we weren't like acquaint we were just acquaintances, but I would just see him on his computer and he'd be like, Everyone, check this out and like she he would track the numbers every single day in this spreadsheet and be like, We just changed this number from a one percent to a one point two five percent

And then it was like now that one point two five, that's the standard for that day. Now we're gonna add in this one new change where we're gonna add a yellow or a red arrow pointing at this one thing. Boom, we just got that one point two five to one point four. Tomorrow we're gonna do that. Like it was like a methodical like it was basically like I But joke. I just call it dude, we're all just spreadsheet monkeys because like all we're trying to do is he was just doing was just staring at the spreadsheet turning one point four to like one point six. You know what I mean? Right. Well I think By the way, he's not j he wasn't just like that kind of At the beginning and now he's Like oh he's made it so he's different. No he's

He's still the same way, dude. I had a question for him about our econ business. I was like, hey, here's our we're keeping track of this. We're trying to use this. I don't know if I should trust this or if I should trust Google Analytics or if I should try Triple Wheel or if I should trust Shopify Analytics. They're all giving me slightly different numbers. Like, how do you How did you do it? And I just figure I I just figured he'd be like You know, I just Yeah, I just kept it simple. I just did this and he goes It did say I just kept it simple and I was like oh okay, cool. So which one did you just

You just picked one? And he goes, No, I just kept it simple. Every day I went in and I wrote down the numbers for all the platforms. Every single day. Here's my sheet. And he was still doing it now. It's like ten years later, the guy's just a hundred million dollars animal. Yeah, a hundred million dollars later, and he wakes up in the morning and he sits down and he triangulates and he tracks. He goes, Yeah, they never drift between you know more than four percent, but I just do it anyway. So I'm just like It's kinda like um almost like a daily practice, almost like a like a sp almost like a religious act he would do every day, a spiritual act he would do. Sort of an offering to the economic gods. If you're a chef at a bakery and you've worked there for twenty years, you know that if you leave the dough out for an hour versus forty five minutes before you put it in the oven, you're gonna have a very minor difference because you've done that thousands of times. And that's basically like the same thing.

Yeah. Like you notice these very small differences. Uh I I admire his um Tenacity. uh towards things. I don't think he does anything in a not tenacious way. Uh all right, let me continue. I got two more ideas for you. Okay, so I did beauty stuff.

I did a book or self help and by the way. That's how Mark Manson made subtle art of not giving a F like tens of millions of copies sold. He was blogging before that and built a blog audience and he used the blog audience to launch the book and that was audience too. Seems like so old school. Uh like when I'm hearing this

Because a blog takes ten years. And hundreds of thousands of words and potentially hundreds or thousands of posts. Dude, I've told this story before, but I'm gonna tell it again because there's A lot of new listeners.

There was a time when I was building an uh about you know five to ten years ago where I was building an app that we thought would be a big hit in high school. Oh, dude, teens, teens love this app. So I said, Well, what are we doing? We're all just twenty to thirty year old guys sitting in this office. Let's go show this to some teens. So we went first, we stood outside of a a Chipotle and we said, free burrito if you test our app. They looked at us like we were creeps, but they took our free burritos, testing the app.

All right, we we need to get more people saying yes. Right now, only one out of ten is willing to take a risk. I said how do we just Go to where they're A captive audience. They're trapped. So we went to a school, we said, Hey

I'd love to come in and teach a a a class on business and it and at the end I'm gonna tell them about our new app. Is that okay? They said, Yeah, sure. We came in, we basically got to be a substitute teacher. And I remember Going up in front of the class, I think this was like a ninth or tenth grade class. And I was like, uh we're telling'bout their app and they're like, All right, like

Well try it. Like just give us the app. I was like, cool. So um you just gotta get the test flight and we put a uh link on the uh I said, can we just pull up the link and then you guys just go to this go to this URL. Uh just Go to this link and then you'll get the app. And then was it was it like Sean.com slash H J Y L four nine eight, whatever. Just write it down. It's just a just do this link.

And the guy in the back just Looks up and his phone was all like Cracked and whatever. Links are gay. And I can tell you there was no recovering from that. And he said that the whole class just stopped typing. They're like, Yeah, he's right. Links are gay. Links are gay. That's what's like today blog. It's like if I said, Hey, I'm starting a blog because I really want to use this as kind of like building my audience to promote my book, I'm gonna do they'd be like Blogs are gay is what like that ninth grader would have shouted at me just like absolutely humiliating me. Dude, but what's old is new again. It'll come back eventually. Hopefully, hopefully. Uh all right. So

Two last ideas. Candy candles. Click this link and uh if you're on YouTube, you'll see this on on our video screen. It's important to look at these because these are You're selling a visual product. So go down and and see where I put candles just Watch that video right there. Oh my God. It's all right. A mason jar.

Holy crap. Wait, those are not are those real Oreos? So it's a mason jar with a lady dipping what looks like Oreos and animal crackers as as if she's making like a Oreo smoothie with whipped cream in a mason jar. Exactly. But the but instead of the smoothie, it's wax. Oh that's wax? I thought that was real. No, this is a candle. So these these th that's wax. I don't know if the Oreos are real or not. I can't tell.

But I'm saying I can't of course it's not real. Look at the numbers on this video. Alright, it has six hundred thousand likes. Holy shit. How many views does this have? I don't know. This so this woman has And she's just like a

Lady. She's like a baker. She just made that video. So I saw that video and I was like, Oh man. Um This could be a product. Why do I believe this?

So one just like I said, I wanted to take things that worked and the Facebook ads Hey Day and be like, could I translate this into With the new distribution engine. Another version of that is take anything that sells well in an MLM. Because TikTok kinda works the same way. TikTok is basically you

You give your product to a bunch of people, they go and then shill it to their network and their community. That's how an MLM kinda works without the The pyramid part of the the scheme. But it is working so good. Like I'm clicking there was stuff it's like It's like Frappuccinos and shit like coffee. That looks like it makes me I wanna eat it. I wanna drink it.

But it's a candle. I wanna dr eat it, drink it, smell it. Uh I want all of it, right? And that's what I'm doing. It's a basically a sensory overload. And that's If I see that I think this will perform. This will perform if we if we armed creators with this. If we had enough volume, this content will always perform. It has this oddly satisfying sort of delicious thing and people

Who like candles? love candles. There's actually I said that wrong. There's nobody in between. You either don't use candles or you love candles. There's nobody who just kinda likes candles. Uh, that's a candle purchaser. And so that's why if you go look up successful MLMs and I did this one night and I I should have done an M FM episode on it, but like You can go break down successful M L Ms and you could try to figure out what product categories are they in because those are categories that you could go into and be successful with

If you just took out the MLM. Same product has the same desire, but using new. Yeah, there's a bunch of them. And so like candles is a huge one. So I think I think candy candles could be a category that somebody goes into And I'll give you one last one. Um

Twenty three and me. So twenty three and me. was this like really interesting company. It got really big. But the company is blown up. It is ex like self imploded. It still does three hundred million dollars a year of revenue.

But they've basically the board all resigned. They quit. The company's losing money, the stock is in the tank, it's like worth nothing now. Dude, they had a major hack too. I remember they lost six million people's DNA. And like it's been on there forever. And I get an email saying Your shit's g like hacked. Like someone else has like email. Yeah. Yeah. It was horrible. Like it was like the w that's probably has to be the second worst act behind besides your bank account. Yeah, it's terrible. But I think and there's others in this space. Ancestry has a ancestry DNA product.

I think you could sell that through this network. So I think a new way of acquiring customers, I think that type of product, which is a Kind of a mix of a digital and a physical product, a subscription product. Have you seen the food ones? Well, is it as an allergy or what is it? Yeah. So you can so the science behind this stuff is iffy. It's not sh you know, a lot of people debate if it's legit, but That never that never sensitivity is what you mean. Yeah, where it's like yeah, where it's like which foods are you sensitive to based off of your DNA and based off your saliva, which like that it it might be bullshit I actually think it is. But A ton of people do.

Myself included. Yeah, so I think there's a huge opportunity. This is five ideas I thought of this morning, but I do think that uh the the upside of it is I think That Unlike the cliche, you know, people the cliche is that you can't get rich quick, you know, blah, blah, blah.

There are actually ways that you could get rich quick. A boy selling native for in two and a half years for a hundred million dollars. That's pretty quick. It's the best way to get rich is quick, as Moy says. And so I think that it is not And I and by the way, I've seen this firsthand in a couple of the companies that we've started or or incubated that have been in this space. I guess what I'm saying is

The growth here is quicker than I've seen pretty much anywhere else. Um, I don't think it's easy to do. I think it's I think you're competing in like you said sort of Sharky waters. It's not that a lot of people are competing, but all the people who are competing here are very smart.

And very ha very scrappy. But there's a lot of categories out there. And if you can find a category Where the traditional incumbents aren't doing this, I think there's a lot of money to be made. Dude, listen to the story really quick. So do you remember there's this company called Elite Daily? Do you remember Elite Daily? It's like a blog, right?

Yeah, so Elite Daily was a blog launched maybe in two thousand and twelve. And within one year, they scaled Elite Daily. It was basically a blog that said like Um A lot of stuff they said was like controversial. So it was like you know, why men should do this or women should do that. You know, and like c which a controversial take. And then sometimes it was like just

a variety of lists. But the the guy who started it, his father was Jacob the Jeweler. You remember Jacob the Jeweler, the rapper? Uh the guy like Yeah, that was his Supply the Rapper, right? Yeah, supply the Rapper. That was his kid. And so he started this blog when he was twenty two, and this was when millennials were the Gen Z. So millennials were the young guys. And Within one year it got to be the most popular blog on the internet when shit was getting something like a hundred million monthly unique. About eighteen months in or something like that, I went to their office in New York City. And their office was a bunch of like New York kids, like twenty two year olds who are being paid like 15 or 18 dollars an hour or something like that. And they had just rows and rows of cheap IKEA tables, and everyone just sitting there on their computer. just like banging out headlines to articles and then they would like write just a couple words, they would see which ones like they would post it on Elite Daily because they had so much traffic. They would see which ones get a little bit of traffic and then they would go and write out the articles. And then eventually the company sold for sixty million dollars. Which in the media world, it was like the biggest thing on earth. And so Elite Daily, if you Google like Elite Daily acquired, it was like the it was just like a massive. How fast was that? How many how many years?

Ah, this was like ten years ago, so I don't remember, but I think it was something like two years. Like it was like really fast. Like they were doing like tens of millions in revenue uh literally within twelve months. Like it was Almost overnight. And I remember going to their office and I thought that this was like a legit publication. It was just like these like they built like some software that like Guess what was gonna go viral.

And it they're just banging them out in this room. And it was crazy because it was crazy. It was an example of people who find one little hack and they go all in on it. They dedicate their lives to it and they end up building a business that is huge. Like this is kind of what this TikTok thing, which is like Oh, you're telling me if I just like get this one mom to share this thing, oh, I'm gonna build a whole infrastructure all around this where a lot of outsiders look at and this are like that's like crazy. Like, what are you doing? That's like ridiculous. Like you can't do that. And they're like But why can't I? Like the math says that this one work, therefore I'm gonna go get three hundred of'em. And uh this elite daily thing, it was insane to see this firsthand. And I got to talk to those guys. It was all wild. Uh this is like the new version of that. And so I got to see these guys sort of like I w I wasn't uh particularly friends with the founders. I was friends with some of these um employees, so I got to see from that angle. They got rich overnight, basically. And it was like the exact same thing of just like finding a little tiny thing.

And going all in on it. Yeah, I think uh it's not It's not for everybody and it's not easy and all that. Uh my disclaimers would be why why um why am I not doing this? Well, besides the fact that I don't really want to be Even if I could, even if I wanted to, I here's why I wouldn't do this.

It's a really frenetic And stressful space to be in. That's changing like every day. And so I don't like to I don't know what the right analogy would be, but it's sort of like sprinting on quicksand.

And um I just I wouldn't really want to do it. Right, but But if I had no other choice or if I was wired that way where that's fun for me, I Okay, great.

Uh I'm not really wired that way. It's also age. Age age makes you different. Yeah. The second thing is that Most businesses like the terminal value Yeah, the exit value is in

How durable, how sustainable, how sticky is this? And by definition This is not super sticky, super durable, super sustainable. Um you get The upside, which is a fast spike that's sort of more than you could otherwise get organically,

But the downside is 18 months from now, I don't know if any of this will work. You might fall off a cliff. Uh, and so I think that's the the upside and the downside of this. And then also for a lot of these, it's physical product, it's e-commerce. Which is just its own beast in and of itself. You have supply chains, you have fulfillment, you have Inventory risk. And you have um

Shitty margins generally. And so like I think digital products and software. Even if it doesn't grow as fast can still be a better bet to make and getting able to go there. So And getting big fast is not necessarily bad as long as you have the right mindset. So for example, a lot of people don't talk about this, but Jeff Bezos Um, Amazon, they got huge very fast. They were also Google's biggest advertiser. When Google first released advertising.

Uh, and they got big on the back of Google. And it worked because they were like, We're gonna use this to make ourselves huge. And also we know that the customer's always first. So we have to provide the best customer service with the best product. So if you combine all those things, you can create something amazing. Yeah, yeah, exactly. I I do think also, um One last uh I guess like important caveat on this. Is If you do this, there's sort of a um better and worse ways to do w worse way to do it. And I would say

The most important variable in something like this is just the repeat purchase. So how much How much of a true brand and um long term customer can you build? There's a lot of people that I see doing this for products that you would only ever buy once. It's like man, you're gonna go through all the mental gymnastics to get somebody to buy one time and then The product is not a consumable. It's not something you're meant to buy again. And you're gonna have to release a new product in order another pro a second product or a third product of a whole different type in order to get there.

That's playing the hard game on extra hard mode. Don't I wouldn't recommend doing it. I think that reason is if I remember correctly, I'm just remembering this from like years ago. I think that's why Moy said he didn't do mattresses. I think he was like looking at mattresses and this was right when Casper became a thing. But he was like, Yeah, like a mattress has four hundred dollars and literally everyone in America needs it, which is great. But you only buy one every eight years. Right. So like of the products I mentioned, the Botox thing, the it's That's a constant once you get on that treadmill of, you know. sort of like face improvement. Tell me about it. Yeah, I know. I know you're feeling the burden right now.

Come a little closer to the camera. Let's take a look at that puppy. Um hair color. You gotta keep doing it. Candles. You burn them. They melt. You gotta get another one, right? So like these are things that are consumables that uh Th

have repeat purchase in them. Do we want to end there and save your last one for another one? Yeah, I had a bunch of other ideas, not in the TikTok game, but uh I think we got excited and used the whole episode for TikTok. So if you like this. We probably have two more episodes worth of just Pure ideas.

Go on YouTube. Or tweet at us and just comment on uh if you're gonna comment on YouTube, just be like, Yo, more ideas and tell us your favorite idea of these. Alright, thank you. That's it. That's the pod. I feel like I can rule the world, I know I could be what I want to I'm putting my all in it like my days off On the road less travel never looking back

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