6 Retro Business Ideas That Could Be As Big As LEGO ($11.8B)

All right, this is a fun episode. Sam started doing Legos and that sent us down this rabbit hole where he discovered Two businesses that I had never heard of. I guarantee you never heard of it. They're awesome businesses in the Lego niche of all things. And then we brainstormed other things that people could do around these passionate niche audiences that most people overlook. Love it. This is an MFM classic, MFM special. If you like this podcast, you're gonna love this one. Uh and I also had like an epiphany about 45 minutes in. that kinda changed the way I think about this podcast. So that's that's what I got out of this episode. Sam, what did you get? So while researching this stuff. There is a

ton of twists and turns to the story, the background story of how these companies started. I want you guys to listen to them. It doesn't happen. It's the second story involving Lego. You'll know exactly what I'm talking about when we get there. It's about two thirds of the way into the episode. I got emotional researching this and I actually want you guys to like listen to the topics and the companies that we brought up. I want you to go to their websites and see what I'm talking about. You'll know exactly what I'm talking about when you get to the the part of the episode and let us know in the YouTube comments if this actually got to you, like it got to me. I dug it. It was tons of like weird Parts of the stories that I did not expect to happen. Anyway.

Check it out. Let us know in the YouTube comments if you actually dug this because I think you will and which parts of the stories you like best. I feel like I can rule the world, I know I could be what I want to I put my law in it like a day song on the road. Sean here with Sam. Your boys who are stuck at three hundred and ninety nine thousand YouTube subscribers. They said we'd never get to four hundred. In fact, they're still saying we'd never get to four hundred.

So did you see this tweet that went viral that goes T all my haters said I wouldn't make it. I didn't make it. They were right. Honestly, good call by the haters. Like a legendary tweet. I love that stuff. Um yeah, we're at three ninety nine. The I I read every YouTube comment, do you?

Read and reply, bro. Not to everyone, but I I reply like It's like a I'm in line at a coffee shop. I'll just go through and go through a whole episode and try to reply as many as I can. Yeah, so uh if you're listening and you're not on YouTube. Do do your boys a favor and just click subscribe. It means a lot to us. It costs you nothing. And uh we've got a good episode today. We have we last time we talked

We both had the same topic written down. We did it again. It happened again this time. Uh, before we get into the episode, I gotta tell you something. How big is your house? Square footage? Uh

Fifty six hundred? I'm in a house right now, um, visiting family. So I rented an Airbnb for two weeks. My home, my normal home uh in Austin, is uh just a little over two thousand square feet. It's not big. It's nice, but it's not big. I'm currently renting a seventy five hundred square foot house.

I am losing so much stuff. This is such a big house. I think that even 55 would be too big for me. Do you like having a big house like that? Yeah, it's great. Well, to love. I'll tell you. One, the utility bill here. If I had to guess, it's like two thousand a month.

W what's your utility bill? Well, you're in California, so you don't really use Too much. I don't even check it. Uh I don't I don't look. Uh but it's everything's on auto pay and I don't even want to look. I it's probably like twelve hundred, fifteen hundred dollars, I guess. Wow, okay, so that's expensive, but whatever.

Uh but the other thing, things break all the time. Like there's seven bathrooms here and like one of the the guy has like a jacuzzi thing in one of his bathrooms. It's not working. I don't know how many people and using all seven bathrooms. That's you don't you don't use half the shit the shit. That's the trick. That's how it breaks. That's how it breaks. You just don't use it. It's so anyway. I I wanted to buy a big home eventually and I'm happy I'm testing this out. It's such a big house. I understand the downsides to it. I'm just like Fixing things. It's a pain in the butt.

Well, here's my here's my my rule. Number of humans. Plus two. That's how many beds. That's how many bedrooms I want in my house. Number of humans plus two bedrooms.

And one of those bedrooms turns into man cave. Like where I have the studio here right now. This is one of the bedrooms we just converted. And the other one's a guest room. Uh now my kids are small right now, so they're like all sleeping in the same bed and stuff like that. Doesn't really Help but as they get older, that rule is gonna come into effect. Yeah, and I think maybe my needs will change, but I just wanted to test out a big house.

I'm shocked by how much I dislike it so far. I like it. Most people don't do this at all, and you do it a lot, which is Where do I want to live? How do I wanna live? Do I wanna live in a city? Do I wanna live in the suburbs? Do I live in a big house, small house, near water? You know, what matters to me. Uh,'cause I think a lot of people have these predefined Ideas that are completely based on nothing. No evidence.

And uh I really take a lot of inspiration from the way you test out lifestyles. You prototype Like How you wanna live. And uh

More people should do that, for sure. I d I do it all the time. And the reason I do it is because if you think about it, so renting a really fancy Airbnb for a week, it could be expensive. Let's just say it's a thousand dollars a night or more. So let's just say let's round up and say it's ten grand for a week. That's expensive. But you know what's more expensive? Buying a home that you only see for twenty four hours and or you th through a one hour tour and being like Cool. This is my place now for the next 10 or 20 years. That's way more expensive. Andrew, honestly, you start to lose a little trust in yourself. It's like, oh, I thought this would make me happy. It turns out I don't even like this, right? Uh I'm not listening to that guy anymore. And by the way, you don't have to be rich to do this lifestyle testing. Like I was doing this When I had a you know, no no money because

Well I didn't have It's all relative to where you're at, right? So it's where do I want to live? I would move to like I would do a road trip or we would drive to another place. live on a friend's couch, but we would live there for two weeks and just kinda see, okay. What's it like in this place? Like where I tried in Chicago, then I tried in Colorado, and then you know, I just test it out different places in order to see where do I want to be. And um

I think that's a very smart way to to go about things. You want to talk about Legos, my man? Let's talk about Legos. Can I introduce this category with which is the following. You text me and you go, dude. I'm playing a ton of Legos. What? It's like yeah, every night I'm playing Legos. Do you do this? And I was like, No, I don't do this. But I know. a bunch of other people that do and it caught my attention because

I'm not sure if you know this, but this is kinda becoming this like uh Trendy thing. So there's a bunch of like NBA players that kind of came out of the closet saying, Yeah, this is what I do at night. Yeah, like another reputation for NBA players. We're all out at the strip club after games and whatever. And there's like this guy Miles Turner, he's like, I'm building like replica Star Wars, like you know, Death Stars with with my Legos at night four or five hours a night.

And I got kinda interested. So I looked at By the way, in college, I I lived with the basketball team in college. They were the biggest nerds of all the athletes. Like they they didn't go out. Six seven wedgeies. Well, like like a Friday night was playing video games. Like it it was like they were the least party animal of all the athletes. That's probably fair. So Do you know what this category is called? Is it called the is it the acronym?

That's sort of an A? No, no, no. They call'em they call people like you Cadults. The toy industry, they call you guys cadults and cadults

Or Eldertainment is the name of this group of people that are adults buying kids toys. And that sounds like a pretty fringe thing, but it actually makes up 25% of all toy sales. So billions and billions of dollars. One one out of every four people that go buy, you know, let's say a set of Legos. Is it gonna be an a you know, a a older teenager or adult?

But you know what they call it for Legos for specifically for Legos? It's called uh I don't it's one of those words that I've C but I don't know if you're supposed to how you're supposed to say it, but A F O L adult fan of Legos. That's they're you're self identified as an A F L O. Actual. Fucking old Lego Maker. Yeah. So So this uh this category Uh like It's makes up all the growth in the toy industry. So toy industry, if you look at how fast it's growing, sixty percent of all the growth is just coming from this one segment. So it's like this like

Kind of the segment that's growing really fast. At first I didn't understand it, but then They did some surveys, right? Because all the toy companies were like, What's going on here? We don't this is not what we planned for. So Several years ago they commissioned a bunch of studies and they w they went and asked

Why are you doing this? And I'm I'm curious if you're gonna say the same thing,'cause ninety percent of the adults Also the same three reasons that they do it. What are your reasons, Sam? Bonding with my family. Well, in my family, it's my wife. Um no s no screens, and we could just sit at the table and do it together while we're just talking and maybe there will be T V on in the background background, but it's basically bonding without screens sitting at the table. And it reminds me of my childhood. That's exactly right. The uh the three word nostalgia, which you just said. Um anti loneliness, so bonding with with whoever you're you're doing it with.

And detoxing from from phone, as well as kind of like an anti anxiety angle to it, like is a real relaxing a relaxing activity. Because I'm following directions. I'm I'm just following the directions. I'm not making any decisions. I'm doing what I'm told. That's interesting. Oh, okay. I thought it was kind of the hands part of it, but you're saying As an adult I'm constantly having to make decisions and think. And it's so nice to not make decisions and just be told, put this blue thing over here.

Yeah, it's like a it's like uh uh a PG rated dominatrix. You know? Like instead of spitting in my mouth, it's telling me to like connect the these two pieces. Yeah, some people you're into that stuff. All right, to each his own. This is fascinating to me. So I want you to tell me I have some more ideas around What like more exam I have a bunch of examples around this trend and some ideas of what I think people could do. But before we do that, I just want to know what are you what are you actually doing? So You're buying Lego kits. Like

Which ones? And what do you what do you do? So Lego's this huge company. So I think they do about ten billion dollars a year in sales. Uh it was started in like the twenties by just an engineer. And Now they have got they've got movies, characters, it's like a it's like a Marvel almost. It's a like a a whole franchise.

I particularly like the line called Technics. And Technics is cool because It's basically you'll build cars or tractors or uh a bridge and there's gears within the machine. And so I'm learning how like You know, like in the snow. When um

old cars when you spin your tires, only one tire would spin sometime. That's because of a rear uh differential. That's like a mechanical piece. And so I'm like building that and I'm understanding how transmission works. I'm building I built a land rover that has six a six speed transmission. And I see how how gears work. And so it's really fascinating to me to see these moving parts. So I build techniques. I've probably spent fifteen hundred dollars on them so far. Each one is between one fifty and three fifty. And I buy only the Technics one. That that's my thing.

And you're You finish them in one sitting or you these are like multiple No No uh one a week. So uh but it'll take I'll sit for two hours and if my wife's not with me, I'll listen to a podcast or something and I'll just sit there for two hours assembling it from like Nine to eleven. Just you and the voice of Scott Galloway. Yeah, I'm just like I'm listening to like some war story. So it's like just like me and me and Benito Mussoliti as I build this land rover. Like just like six inch tractor. Yeah. I love by the way how you're like, yeah, I built a six you know a six No, no, no. You didn't. You really didn't. I feel like you got a lot of confidence from this that like I could.

Came down to it, but now could you, man. So All right, so you were doing this. Is this a fad or you think this is like a lifelong hobby for you? What are you what are you thinking? Lifelong. I could see it being lifelong. Oh wow. Yeah, I could see it. And what do you do with them when you're done? You finish the the six speed tractor or whatever. What are you going to do with this? So one of the companies that I'm gonna bring up.

But basically you can tell this company that I'll I'll break down and explain what sets you have, and you destroy them and you rebuild them using different plans. And so you can make alternative items out of them. And so that's what I intend to do. Uh, okay. All right. They're not gonna sit on a shelf. I'm not gonna be like the 40 old virgin and have like dolls and packages still unused. No. I it it really is a enjoy the journey type of thing. So once I'm done with it, I'm like I don't care about it. Okay, good. Um

So I wanna bring up a couple other examples. Cause I I saw this and I was like, Oh, that's weird. That's interesting about Legos. And I was like, No, there's something to this like Cad. behavior, right? Where adults

buying and doing kid things that is You know. Antiphone. Anti loneliness. And uh and nostalgic.

And um I'm gonna give you some examples of of trends that are like this. So The first is calm. Um we're both friends with the the founders of Com, Alex and Michael. And I don't know if you remember this, but back in the day

Calm was really struggling. Today Calm is like Kind of. very popular. It's a multi billion dollar company. But Back when we were living in San Francisco and hanging out with Alex Uh, Calm was like small. It was a slow grower. It was not sexy. Nobody wanted to invest. But it was kind of a joke, like a meditation app. Are you kidding me? And Alex is very jokey and the other things he built, like million dollar homepage, were all jokes. So it's kinda like, Oh, cool.

And the other guy built Like a stuffed animal business before that. Yeah, so there they were definitely like non-serious, serious entrepreneurs. Um they but I remember one time talking to Michael. So Michael came to visit from London and he's like I was like, so what do you do with comp? Cause you're not even here full time. Alex is sitting in his apartment grinding away at this thing that's not really going too fast, growing too fast.

What are you doing? And he's like, Oh, I'm work I work on new products. And I'm like, dude, this is not like uh You know, he looks at Richard Branson, I was like, This is not Virgin Atlantic. What new product? He's like, No, no, I got a great one. He goes I wanna do Um Bedtime stories for adults.

And I was like what? He's like No, no, no. I I was like, that's okay, whatever, marketing stunt, I guess. He's like, No, no, I think this is gonna be a thing. He goes. Keep People are gonna like you say a lot of adults they listen to things before they sleep to help

them relax and help them actually like fall asleep. But they're not done very well. Do you? Uh yeah, I do sometimes. I have like I I have like a version of white noise that I sometimes listen to, or I'll just listen to podcasts and fall asleep, which is not the same thing. But uh there's like a relaxing people who want a relax a relaxation thing. In fact I think one of the top podcasts in the world is just

Like eighteen hours of sleep. Sounds. I listen to Family Guy when I go to bed and I just hear the Peter. Yeah. Exactly. And so

He's like, I'm gonna do the thing. They ended up being sleep stories and sleep stories were one of the things that really let calm take off. It like exploded after sleep stories. In fact I would say that Calm is It's less about meditation. It is more about the state of being common. And really the number one product is the sleep stories. And he they got Matthew McConaughey to narrate. This like bedtime story. And he was hosting

I don't know if you remember this in San Francisco. He would before to prototype this, he was hosting parties. In San Francisco, where you would go to this woman's house. And he would lay down on her carpet. And you would have like a pillow. And they would like set the mood and then she would just talk and put you to sleep and then everybody would go to sleep.

And um It was the most San Francisco thing ever. And these were that was like a party. It was like it was like a networking event. It was like a it was amazing. And you think calm is gonna ha have toy, or you're saying the the toy is No, I'm saying this is part of the same thing. Like adults using adults using kid product basically. So bedtime stories for adults. That's another version of Yeah. You know, adults using Lego's. My family member I have family members, I won't even say who they are. They might be embarrassed who go to sleep to calm bedtime stories.

What's embarrassing about that? It's awesome. I don't know. I don't know. You know you never know. I'm not gonna out someone. So there's also like Moon Pals and Squishmellows. Have you seen these? Yeah. I know Moon. They're like basically giant stuffed animals, but they're

geared more towards adults than they are for kids. And you see like Yeah, twenty four year old girls on the Bronx who like have like a You know, like a moon pal that the carrier man, like safety blanket. Funko Pop. Is that was that what it's called? What's the Funko?

Funko's a publicly traded company, you know that. No. They they're they're like a uh four hundred million dollar uh market cap company during the during Covid when everybody was stuck at home and people started just spending money collecting or buying crypto or doing whatever. Funko was like over a billion dollars'cause they were selling so many of these Figurine doll thing. Figurine like dolls, that's all it is?

Yeah, just like a little a little toy um toy figure, action figure. No action, I guess, just just toy figurine that um has an oversized head. And we talk that's funny. Uh we had talked about mini brands as well, like the company mini brands that makes miniature I don't even like Coke Cans. Uh those are insane too. Another one. Have you ever been to Build Abear?

Dude, they they kill it. Yeah. I've taken a nephew there. So build a bear is like this thing in the mall where you can build a teddy bear. It's usually like, you know, it's four kids. You know that forty percent of their revenue now comes from adults? That's insane. That's insane. And they call it Build Abear After Dark. They basically like open up at late hours and let adults come in and basically like, you know.

it do it as a date night activity and stuff like that. It's crazy. Um There's uh uh uh American Dow. Uh you know, I don't know if you you had a sister, so you would know American Dow. But I bet Ari knows American Dial or had an American dial. American dial still crush it. Uh, do you know what American dollars?

No, is that not Barbie? That's something else? It's different. It's a doll that's maybe three foot tall. It back then they would cost a hundred and fifty dollars, so it's a big deal. And there it was sort of like G. I Joe, but for girls. And there was like an American doll. Student. And so it looked like a little girl who was going to Harvard or American doll astronaut or something like that. Like so if you look up American doll.

You'll see like it's like They it was like themed, but they were supposed to be more high end than a Barbie and more collectible, I think. American doll only fans creator. Oh, they have like new new genres. That's great. So they um Uh there's there's just like the like even Barbie, by the way. Do you know the bar you know how the Barbie movie came about?'Cause like the Barbie movie is not geared towards kids.

Right? Like if you've seen it. It's it's not a It's not a kid's movie, really. It's an adult. It's like towards adults and that this is the reason why. They actually Bar Barbie the company actually created an internal Movie production company.

To create this movie Gear towards adults. to help sell more dolls into this Uh like uh

segment. And so there's those marketing stunt for that. Which is kinda crazy when you think about it. I didn't realize that about the Barbie movie. Um, but like there's also tabletop gaming. So you know those guys from Chernan they've made it like big bets on tabletop gaming, which is basically board games that adults play. They have like exploding kittens and they have some other ones, but

That's another genre. Even McDonald's came out with an adult happy meal. I don't know if you saw this last year. Just a hilarious like they made a bigger box. With Full size fries and an adult toy. And they did this last year, and it was like this viral marketing stunt that went crazy because everyone's like, Oh, dude, I want to go get one. And uh like went viral on TikTok and stuff like that.

Brands are really capitalizing on this. So I have a few ideas I want to pitch it pitch you. I want you to tell me You can just give me a uh Genius. or idiot on these. This is sort of like a mini drunk ideas episode for you. All right.

First one. You know how have you seen the stats how millennials are just like not getting married and not having babies. Like it's like a lower rate than ever before. Yeah. Tamagotchis.

For babies. So basically you give you give that twenty eight year old Who's single and whatever You give them a Tamagotchi, that's a baby that they gotta keep they gotta raise and they gotta take care of. Like Tamagotchis, I think were pets. Screw it. We're just doing an actual human baby. You got to take care of this thing. And it literally

Is the same level of uh like Same same like hourly needs. As a baby. And let's see what you got. So Tomaga for babies. That's my first one. So the problem with these ideas is if you would have told me

About the things that are successful now. that they like this is this is gonna work. I would have said those are all horrible ideas. So this is like a really challenging category. That's why I prepped you by telling you all the ones that worked before I told you my bad ideas, just to kind of like frame you like prime you for like, hey, I don't know, man, anything's possible. So Do I think Tamag Yes, I think I think there there'd be legs for Tamagotchi. Wha what happened to the company?

Uh, dude, I have no idea. What's Tamagotchi It's a it's a Japanese business. Yeah. It's a it's based in Japan. Yeah, I I'd I'd believe that Atamigachi for babies can't be. It's a standalone device. That's gonna replicate having a baby. All right, that's number one. Number two. Did you ever use Connects?

Yeah, love connects. You ever build a big Ferris wheel? No,'cause connects were hard and I had a cousin. I have a cousin who's the same age as me. Looks like me, last name Puri. And

This guy's way smarter than me. And I th I'm pretty sure the reason he's way smarter than me is that his dad bought him connects when he was a little kid. And he was just making connects all day, every day after school. I was playing Dreamcast and he was building connects. Guess what he does now? I have a podcast. He builds like self driving cars. This guy's a genius. So like I'm pretty sure Kinex is the uh you know the the number one contributing factor to this guy being a genius. Dude, listen to this. Connects was sold in two thousand eighteen for only twenty eight Twenty one million dollars.

I know, I know, crazy. What out of what how is Lego like a fifty billion dollar company and connects Sold for twenty one million dollars. Like what happened here? And when you were describing the Lego Technics, it's very similar. So connects. The difference was that it was more kinda like a stem Kid thing where it's like sciencey and mathy where it's like You cr you know, you have these like m l little like rotating wheels and mot it's almost like a motor that you're creating.

It's like a high functioning version of Legos. That's how I describe you, by the way. You're a high functioning version of a Lego. I take that as a compliment. So I think Kinex should just like somebody should just reboot Kinex. targeted at as uh for adults that want to do Lego's basically. Uh, the guys like you. Literally connects for Sam Par. That's my next idea. Go ahead. Yeah, I'm in. That's a that's a no brainer. I'm in.

So Connect was acquired in two thousand nineteen. And they're basically not that existent anymore because of because of a bunch of tariffs, uh something like where they couldn't import'em. But uh Yeah, I'm in. I think it's Yeah, I think they sold a bunch through like Toys R Us and then Toys R Us went bankrupt and I think they lost a bunch of revenue there. So I think just

Hey. Well, bad luck. an unfortunate bounce of the ball there, and I I feel like Connect still is a good opportunity. All right, here's my next one. All right, what else? Easier Rubik's Cube.

Can you do a Rubik's Scube? No, I can't. I cannot. Can you kinda wish you could? Yeah. Yeah. I mean what we used to do is just take the stickers off. Mm. You take the stickers off it and then you put them all back in the right place and you can brag that you did it.

Oh okay, gotcha. You can also buy it new and it's done. So um What's the easiest party trick you can do? Like I can juggle. Can you do anything like that? Yeah, um if I smoke a cigarette I could blow smoke out my ear.

Really? I swear to God. Yeah. I've had all these your ear? I've had all these surgeries in my ear and so like some pipes got rerouted and I used to be able to blow smoke out my ear. How do we not start every podcast with that? Come on. We would be at four hundred thousand subscribers. Solving a Rubik's cube cube is a close second, though. All right. Easier Rubik's game. So

I think Rubik's Cube, fun little idea. It's kinda like a fidget spinner anyways, the way that the Rubik's Cube feels. However, too hard. Way too hard. And we get it. If you could do a Rubik's Cube, that's fantastic. That's chess. Where's checkers? I need a checkers of Rubik's Cubs and so Um here's what I'm thinking.

letters on the outside, and it's kinda like Wirtle. Wordle is a very fun game, simple game. You play every day. You could build a daily habit. I think somebody needs to take the concept of Wirtle. But put it in the form factor. of a Rubik's Cube where every day you get a notification on your phone or there's a website that posts the starting letter combination and then you gotta rotate it to make the work.

And it should take like Five minutes. Do you play the New York Times mini crossword? No, do you? Every day. This thing's amazing. It's such a fun. It's sixty it's literally like a sixty second

break. It's a game. It's a crossword. Crosswords are kind of fun, but a real crosswalk is pretty hard and time consuming. And that when New York Times made this mini It that thing drives like millions of dollars like It's like I don't know, ten percent of New York Times' revenue comes from this little game app and it's mostly the New York Times mini crossword. This thing is a a an absolute hit product.

All right. L I have two more. Candle pouring kits. So another thing that is highly tactile, highly satisfying, leaves you with a result, a candle. Um

Candle pouring is something I see a lot on TikTok. I don't know exactly how it goes or how it works. But I'm pretty sure this could be another like adult cra arts and crafts relaxation thing that that is accessible to many and results in you actually having something that's not just clutter and junk in your house. 'Cause you could just light the candle.

Use it, melt it down, and then you're done. So I think a candle pouring kit. uh company could do pretty well. Dude, I'm in on that one,'cause you'd wanna buy one. You you'd wanna continually buy them if you got into it, right? Um

Yeah, and candles make a ton of money. Like go look at the candle MLMs. Uh if you want to know what products work, go look at what MLMs work and uh work backwards from there. So there are several multi level marketing schemes that are Based around candles, which tells me there's a a giant market for candles. Tell me one more and then I want to blow your mind with the Lego story. Okay.

Um I'm now seeing what I wrote here and I have no idea what this means, so I'm gonna just take this as a uh as a blank canvas for myself. Relaxation puddle. I don't know what I meant when I wrote this. This is late last night. Um I think what I oh I think what this is is like

My kids, uh one of the things you do with kids is you give them something called like sensory play. So you buy this like And you put in like Orbees or you put in these like gel circle things. You put your hand in it, it's kinda cool sensation. It's like It's like very cold.

You there are like these like balls that you can kind of like, you know Um you could touch and feel, but they're not like Uh It's like slime, you know, slime's really popular for kids. There's like all these things that are very tactile. Play-doh. And so you

I think what I was thinking here is it's very relaxing if you put your hands on this thing. What if you could put your whole body in this thing? I think is what I was thinking. It's more like those uh those uh sensory deprivation tanks that people like to do in San Francisco. Uh and maybe other places as well, I'm not sure. But something you could just go lay in and it's like a super nap.

is really where my head was going. I'm trying to yes and you. But it's really hard. when the premise is a relaxation puddle. Dude, the word puddle is so underrated, actually.

Sounds great. Uh has all kinds of jokes and commentation, very memeable word. And I think that's what you want with any of these. You want the idea to be so stupid. That you get memed? Into popularity.

You understand what I'm saying here? Yeah. Here's what we could do. You're gonna Do it. It's gonna sound ridiculous. And ninety five percent of America wants to make fun of you. But then that the those articles go out, those memes go out.

And then five percent of people are like Oh no, I'll try it. Right. Like you remember when that thing happened that like guys were laying on their back and they were like suntanning their butthole? Yeah, that's the new thing. I don't even think that was a thing. But I think there was someone behind that that was like you know what we'll get written up everywhere automatically overnight if I say that this is a thing. I've got this friend, Chris, who would send me So many photos of you just see his legs like as if he's that way closed with his legs in the air. He's like say his last name. He deserves it for doing that. Just being healthy. Uh but like crocs are like this, right? They're intentionally ugly. They're intentionally so ugly, you have to talk about them.

And the design like stands out in a not so good way, but the result of it is that uh you know gets talked about. Yeah, like you just gotta figure out what the fuck a relaxation puddle is first. You're just starting with the words. Let me tell you Two

crazy stories. The second one is in particular crazy, and I think you're actually gonna dig it'cause it it it's gonna revolve around your world. So I'm a Lego fan. I I like doing Legos now. It's my new thing. There's this website called Rebrickable. So Re Brickable is this amazing website. It was clearly started by an engineer. I think his name is Actually don't know what the guy's name is who started it. Uh Nathan. I think his name's Nathan. So Nathan

was uh Yeah. Just an engineer at some company normal job in Australia. He started this website that he it's actually quite complicated. And what you do There's

Tens of thousands of Lego kits, you know, and it's been around for a hundred years. So there's probably hundreds of thousands of different types of Lego kicks kits. You tell it what type of Lego sets you have. And then other designers So people who are Lego fans have created directions on how to build their own creations. It's called an MOC, My Own Creation. And it's a whole community of people who build MOCs. And he has roughly Thirty thousand people. who have uploaded a variety of MOCs that you can buy from ten dollars probably all the way up to a hundred dollars.

And what's interesting about this guy There's so many. Yeah. crazy business implications here. But what's interesting about this guy is A, he's an engine and the the the people who listen to this podcast with a bunch of engineers out there, there's a huge overlap of Venn diagram of Lego enthusiasts. And this guy adds a third circle to that Venn diagram of business people. And so basically it had he reveals all of his stats online. And you could go to his blog and you could see it.

He started this company, I think, in two thousand and ten, and it was just a project. I looked at his LinkedIn. He worked as a full time per uh had a full time job. Since two thousand. Until two thousand twenty. And he reveals every year how much page views that the website has had, how many registered users it's had, how many people are selling products on there. So it's basically a marketplace. And so in two thousand twenty three, he had eleven million users create an account.

on his website, which is which is huge. And so if you account for let's say three percent of people buy something, that's three hundred and thirty thousand people. Or sales who bought an MOC. So someone's directions on building something. Say the average sales about 15 bucks. That's about five million dollars in revenue that he's uh collected. And of course he gives a lot to most of it to the designer. But there's people who have whole like stores on the website. And it's really fascinating. And his page views last year, 2023, were around a hundred and sixty million page views.

And if you look at his website, he blogs every year and he says what his stats are, how many pay trees he's had he has, and it's a very interesting blog to read because A, he's being transparent about the business. And B You can see how to build like a rabid community. So on his blog, on and it's clearly a self built blog. He's not even using WordPress. He built everything from scratch. You'll see the comments saying, I love this community. I'm so into uh Rebricable. Like Nathan, you're the man. Like people are are are rabbit about this uh niche. It's incredibly fascinating.

And this type of guy, I'm just gonna stereotype him. He's not a business savvy person, or at least he doesn't want to be. Like he's not out there trying to milk this dry and make as much money as possible. But this type of business that he has. once you get users to a passionate following like this to your website You can sell them anything. And so what Andrew Wilkinson calls us is an airport business. So once you're there.

Well, while you're here, we could sell you this, we could sell you that. It's people are here to learn and they're ready to buy. And the reason why this is fascinating is because with Legos you know, they cost hundreds of dollars sometimes and you want to buy a new one every month, every couple of months. And so the market is actually quite big to build a big business. This is like a a type of company that if you wanted to be a PE guy, which I don't think you should because this is like a work of art to me, but if you wanted to be a PE guy and buy a business that you could milk for tons of profit and you don't actually have to do that much innovation.

This is one of those websites. Dude, what a great find. This is such a cool, cool business. Yeah, ten million users. And by the way, look at this. I looked I went to top designers. We gotta put this on the screen so that our three hundred and ninety nine thousand

YouTube subscribers can see this. The Chinese restaurant? This thing is insane. This is insane. Who who made this up? This is so crazy. This I this is insane. And the technology to build this stuff is amazing because A, you could just buy uh an MOC from someone and they'll tell you what parts or kits that you need and they they'll sell them. Yeah. You could there's this like crazy algorithm that they have where you upload

hundreds of different kits that you have. And then you click like submit. And then you see like a wheel turning and it takes like sixty seconds as if it's like doing heavy like calculations, and then it'll give you a huge List of hundreds or thousands of different MOCs that others have uploaded that you can create with the parts that you have, and it'll say you have a hundred percent of the parts need for this, or you have

fifty percent of the parts. Here's the other fifty that you have. You can buy them here. It's really fascinating. And it's quite complicated, I would imagine, to build that. You found like Dork Mecca. This is great. It's it's the best. Adults doing Lego

Who need Custom Custom made Lego like designs. This is insane. Uh yeah, this is cool. By the way This Chinese restaurant? Three thousand like two thousand pieces.

Ten bucks for the for the MOC. What a steal. It's amazing. And they they there's people uh like there's people in the forums saying that they're close to making a full time living selling their MOCs. And so when you have a rabid base like this, it's crazy fascinating to see what types of businesses you can build. Now, this particular model is very unique to Lego, but you could look at what the sneakerheads have done with shoes, you know, like that was like considered silly a few years ago. There was a small group of people and they created marketplaces for it. And but this is a perfect example of how this is executed well of these niche followings and going all in on them and building them for the community. And what's interesting is check this out.

So in year one He had uh a million people come to the website. So in year one, so um so it's eighty thousand people a month. That's pretty good. But it's it's not crazy. That's pretty good. His pay juice were eleven million and he started that I think in two thousand and fifteen. I said most recently in two thousand twenty three he had So we 11 exits. We had 11 million users and 160 million page views. And you could see how slowly these types of businesses build, and it would be very hard to break this company down. This is they have a true mo.

Yeah, hundred percent. Should we help them with like a marketing slogan, maybe? Dude, this guy This guy's This guy's killing it, man. Th whatever he's doing, I want to be part of it. But let me tell you about an even cra let me tell you an even crazier story. This actually should be a movie.

So there's a website called BrickLink. So go to BrickLink for me. BrickLink was started in two in the year two thousand. So one of the you know early, early, early first website businesses, first internet companies.

So BrickLink, it originally started as Brick Bay. Brick Bay. The guy who started his name is Dan Jezick. So you per you spell that last name. J E Z E K. Do me a favor and type in Dan Jesnik.

Uh On your on your uh Chrome and go to his personal website. You see his personal website? It looks like a Geo City Uh website.

Is he dead? Why is it? He's dead. Okay. So let me tell you the story. So Dan started he Dan was uh Well he uh they didn't explicitly say this, but it sort of sounded like he was a hacker type of guy. And so he was kind of like uh a little bit

Gray hat, where he was the type of guy who probably like would break into like different websites and things like that. That's that's the vibe that I got from him. But he was fascinated fascinated with Legos. And so he built this website called Brick Bay. It was called Brick Bay at the time because he lived in Hawaii on a bay. Eventually he got sued by ebay. They're like you can't use bay, so we changed it to Brick Link. And he was kind of like reading about him, I kinda got vibes of Ross Albrich, the guy who started Silk Road. It was one guy

He was anonymous and he would blog about all the changes he was making to the website, but it was under the name admin. He never used his real name. And it was just him, and he had a handful of volunteer admins who helped him run the site. He ran it like a community. And what Bri BrickLink does is you can buy and sell different types of Legos. And so the thing about Legos is If you build the thing, you don't have any more joy for it sometimes, so you can pack it up in the boxes and you could sell it uh and just get a little bit of your money back and then keep going or buy rare or interesting pieces. And so

He ran this for ten years and it became a good business. However, he died tragically. No one online actually says how he died. We don't know. A lot of people suspected a drug overdose, but we don't know. But he was working on this website.

full time, twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. It was like a full time gig. When he died, his mother Imagine like a cute old lady who like bakes cookies. That's what his mom looks like. And when he died.

His mom loved, you know, she loved her son and she was so passionate about the community that that he made that she was like, Well, I can't let this community go away. And so her and her husband, Uh Dan's stepdad. Took over the website. But because it was just one guy running it, they didn't even have the passwords. They didn't even know how it was run. And so they eventually called the web hosting site.

Or the web hosting service, and they're like, Hey, here's what happened. Can you help us? They gave them the passwords, and they just spent three years figuring this out and try to make the community thrive again. And it did. And the community stepped up and they were like, We gotta do this for damn. This community is too good. We can't let Brick uh BrickLink go away because we love buying and selling Legos here. And so they run this business for three years and it becomes a good business. Now Dan dies. They're running it. Three years later, a billionaire named Jay Kim bought it.

Have you ever heard of Jake him? No. So Jay Kim, if you click his Wikipedia, obviously J Jay Kim's not his real name. It's uh Jim.

Kim Jong Jun. I don't even know if I'm pronouncing that correctly. He's a Korean guy. But he was famous in Korea because if you Google Jake him, you'll have to type in like Jake him. Gaming

Korean billionaire. Jay Kim was basically kinda like the Marcus Pink Mark Pincus of Korea. So we in the nineties, he was early in the internet and he created games and he became the biggest gaming company in Korea. Then he was a billionaire. So he starts this family holding company where he buys a bunch of interesting companies. And BrickLink was one of the companies that he loved.

Another one, now this is where it kinda comes into your your world. By the way, he says at the time of his death he was the third wealthiest person in all of Korea. Yeah, he's a big deal. He's a big deal. But Jay Kim, he was like a steward for this website. So they basically they didn't change much.

But one of the reasons why he bought it. And one of the things that makes this interesting, and I'll read this excerpt from uh from uh basically uh Dan, the original BrickLink owner's mom, wrote this beautiful tribute. So if you go to danjezic.com, wrote this amazing tribute where they show pictures of Dan and h him growing up and working on BrickLink. So she wrote this amazing thing and I'll read part of it. And she said, Not long before he died, he developed an international monetary exchange engine called BrickLink. That allowed

sellers almost anywhere in the world to sell in their own currency in their customers could buy in their own currency as well. And every two hours this system that he that Dan built It would update and so you can buy cross country and uh or across the world and your currency would automatically be updated and so everyone was getting a fair shape. He built that in two thousand and ten, which is pretty fascinating. And Jay Kim also owns a Bitstand. Have you heard of Bitstand?

Crypto uh exchange, right? One of the largest crypches in the world. And so the reason why this guy, Dan, and this whole story is fascinating. Is there's actually some weird crypto implications here where you see this overlap of like Wow, what this guy Dan was doing is actually

Like in the same world. of this this whole cryp thing and he was pretty early to it. And these Lego fans, and if you go to uh BrickLink and see the comments They're all similar. It's all a similar type of people. And this business, BrickLink, it's fascinating. And oddly

Jake Him. also died under mysterious circumstances in his fifties in Hawaii, where Dan died. And so there's a bunch of like weird things going on with the story. But BrickLink is a very fascinating company. And most recently, Jay Kim, after he died, Lego, the company, bought the website.

And they openly said, We bought this website because we want to carry on this tradition. We don't want anyone messing with it. We don't intend to do too much with it. We just wanna keep it going'cause this is for the people. Wow. That's pretty cool. Very fascinating. On on this guy's website. On this guy's website it says uh

Here's a quote from him about what he wants to do after he uh uh there's a subject there's a post on the forum that's an I was called afterlife question mark. Who, J Kim or the or Dan? Uh Dan, Dan. He goes, After I die here and go to heaven, this is how I imagine it to be. A place where there's infinite amount of bricks and an infinite amount of time to build them with. Um to build with them. Uh there would be all kinds of bricks for all themes so that I could get

So that when I got bored of building a castle I could move on to a town or a pirate ship. Chip. There would be lots and lots of other Lego maniacs. To share ideas and build with. Isn't that uh it's fascinating, right? So great. And if you read this guy, Dan, if if both Dan and Nathan from the other website, they use these just like uh Wha what was the name Dread?

Pirates. Wha what's the Silk Road guy? Yeah. Whatever. They they it's a marketplace, but it's a weird movement and it's a weird diary and it's like a cult and there's a very particular leader and he is leading the charge. It's a really good thing. And nobody knew his name is he was just called Admin on B. Admin. He was just Admin. No one they they kinda knew it was Dan, but he never like revealed his name. And it was just, oh, Admin's doing this. And it's just this weird like It all stems from like, you know, remember like the phone freaks, like people who would like hack into um

uh payphones and then there was uh the internet and they were doing things like that. Now there's crypto. Like it's this weird chain where it's actually all quite similar. It's this weird underground community. And so as a business person, I see these I see these things and I'm like. What other products Costs a lot of money.

Have a passionate, nerdy following. And where you can build a large audience and then eventually sell them everything. And Lego fits that perfectly. I think there's a few others you you've named a few, but it's It's it was actually challenging for me to find other things that were at like this, but like sneakerheads are kind of one of them. But there's It's just really fascinating how how big I think these businesses can be, even though they appear quite niche.

Oh, dude. Uh forgot. Thrill of the show. So first of all The thrill of the show is one of the Chef's kiss, best inventions we've had. Uh and unlike the gentleman's agreement, which we kind of stole from somebody else, the thrill of the show is actually an original.

But I have a different thing I want to try today. Are you down for it? Yes, the thriller shell, by the way, came up. literally thirty seconds before we hit record a few weeks ago and we said, How do we promote interesting stuff? And you were like, Well, we gotta tell them valuable content and then hopefully they'll buy whatever we're selling. Just call it the thrill of the shill. So congratulations.

Let's hear. Yeah. So that so that was good. But now I want to try something different. Have you ever read this thing that is um Like this he the th the famous Hemingway story, I'm sure you have'cause you're a copyrighter guy. Which is the six word story. Do you know this? Uh about the guy outside holding the the poster board. Uh I don't know if it's that exactly. But basically there was a challenge which was

Tell uh it was a six word story contest. So it was how do you tell a story? In six w only s only you only have six words. And the the the lore is that they told us to Ernest Hemingway. And he came up with the six word story and he won. Um which was

For sale. Baby shoes. Never worn. Uh six words. Tells a h tells a deep story. It hits you in the emotions.

There's another story like that where there's a homeless guy sitting outside and he says, uh like I'm blind, please help. And a c a famous copywriter Right. He goes, Let me help you and he goes, uh it's spring outside. Or it's springtime. And then I'm blind, please help.

And so I have a six word. Challenge. Six word thrill of the show. I'm gonna hit you with, all right? So I'm gonna do my Hemingway.

I'm gonna do this whole ad in six words. Here we go. Business for sale. Owner never hired. And it's about this business it's a story about a business.

That failed and it's up for sale now. And then why? Because the owner never hired. He tried to do it all himself. And he just never made the key hires. They needed to scale the business because he didn't go to support Shepherd.com and find amazing talent overseas to hire at a low cost, five times less than the United States. Boom. How was my story? That was beautiful. That was beautiful. Dude, the Hemingway one was quite good too. I'm still thinking about that one. What is it? Uh business percent. I shouldn't have put Hemingway before my one that I made up one minute ago. Maybe I shouldn't have done the all time best. Against mine. What was it what was the line? Uh

Business for sale, owner never hires. Just like the shoes for sale. Business for sale. Owner never hired. I thought it was good.

Support Shepherd.com. That's the that's the shill. The thrill was A beautiful line. There we go. Back to the episode. You know the other one that's most like this is fanfiction.

So Wattpad reminds me a lot of this where Uh what pad and there's also another one that's like uh Some wiki it's like a wiki It's like a Wikipedia, but fandom. Fan uh yeah I think Phantom like

bought them or something like that, but there's another one that's just straight the Wikipedia part of it. Um But fan fiction. So and people get super, super, super passionate about Harry Potter and about, you know, different um books and then they kind of spin out their own their own world, right? Like uh

I remember muggled net. Which was started by that guy, Emerson Sparts. And uh you know. Or Spats. I don't know I don't know how you say his last name. Um

They built such a huge, huge website. just around fans of Harry Potter. It was very much like, you know, BrickLink or whatever. And on that, I remember I used to go on there and read people because we'd be waiting for the last book to come out. And people would write their own versions of that last book. And uh they would you know, you would just read like a full length book that somebody just wrote in their spare time for fun.

And that led to some big things like, you know, fifty shades of gray. Came out of the year. a fan fiction post uh just like that. Like it was written originally as a fan fiction post around Twilight. And so fanfiction and if you people who were surprised that Wattpad was giving like hundreds of millions of visitors every month.

Like one of the most popular websites in the world. I think they sold for six hundred million dollars to a Korean company recently. Two years ago, maybe. Yeah, and they weren't making any money, but they weren't making much money, but but the the passion and the the usage was there. It was off the charts. And then you know, you don't have to do uh much marketing because The people who are passionate about it are just gonna search the internet for every nook and cranny.

To find you know, other people like who are as fanatical about it as them. So there's a few attributes here that I I I'm just thinking about off the top of my head. So attribute number one is they seem like jokes at first. So like it's kinda silly, like almost embarrassing. Like what do you do for a living? Oh, I run a Lego blog. Like it seems silly when you talk about it. Uh at first.

But If there's enough people, it's it could be pretty great. The second thing is I actually think I think these types of companies You shouldn't build quickly. These are slow bird businesses where

You don't want to get too big too fast. Otherwise the nerds, the passionate ones will be like, Oh, this is lame. This is too big, too mainstream. But Number three is if you do it right. They have huge motes and they're very, very hard to kill. People get very loyal to them. But

Just like actually New York Times Cooking actually had this a few years ago. So New York Times Cooking is a similar community like this, passionate fans. They had a revolt. Because uh in their Facebook group, someone made a change, an admin made a change, and they revolted. I don't know if you remember this about two or three years ago. Uh

They had sixty thousand people in the New York Times cooking. They changed something where like you had to get your posts approved at oppos as opposed to posting on your own. a change like that, people revolt it. And so these communities, you're basically a steward of the people. You're not a you're not you're not all the time a dictator. You have to be very You have your your fans are temperamental. Um, and so there's pros and cons of these types of companies, but I do think they're very, very valuable because of how hard they can be to ruin.

The um Do you think Be self serving, but just uh real real discussion. Do you think we can kind of do this? I I I kinda think that we have the makings of doing something like this. But we also

might F it up by trying to grow it too fast. So for example One of the best tests. I I remember talking to Ben once, and uh one of the best tests for will somebody like MFM? Is This experience. Do you ever go to a restaurant? And then you can't help it, but your brain is like trying to calculate the like how much is this restaurant making? Like you basically start counting the tables.

And then you count, you know, you just count the tables, you figure, oh, this many meals per hour, what's our bill? Our bill's this much. Okay, average ticket is this, and you end up with like, what's the eBay of this restaurant? And That if you're like that. you're probably gonna like this podcast. It's a very high, like Yeah, overlap.

But being like that is weird. Right. That's not a normal way that people are. Most people just go to the restaurant, they look at the menu, they order the food. And if you're sitting down with four other people, no one else at that table is gonna nerd out with you, like Look how packed this place is, like Wow, how much do you think one of these servers is per hour? And look how much the meal like you know what I mean, no one n you're gonna dork out with that, but no one's gonna be like, Dude, shut the fuck up and just eat your chicken parm.

Exactly. And so in the same way that most of the Lego people, if they went to school, could not find somebody as or if they go to in this adult one, you go to work, you're not gonna find people who are trying to build the this uh two thousand piece Chinese restaurant that they bought the blueprint for for ten dollars, like You're not gonna find your people there. And so you find your people elsewhere. You find it on Brick Um

I think for us Uh it's the same thing. Though that person who's at that dinner, the six people they're at the dinner with, your your family, your friends, they might not Wanna jerk out about it. But you find us and the community of people that like this, and you're like These are all people.

who want to know the eating of the restaurant. And so it becomes this like glue and you find your people. And I think I've been tempted in the past to try to grow this faster. And the things you do to grow it faster are sort of like dilutive. You actually sell out a little. You sell out a little, right? Like it's the cringy YouTube thumbnail face. It's the Um, you know, it's the talking about a topic that might not be

the thing you would actually n wanna dork out about. Like I like that this episode is basically Ninety percent. us storking out about these like niche Lego websites. Versus things that might be more mainstream. You know, talk about the Super Bowl next week or whatever.

But It will attract the right people. Uh I thought the Super Bowl was in November. I didn't even know that. That's news to me. So

Uh okay, that's one thing. The second is like a business principle I saw. So somebody said this that I thought was really good. They go. If you want to build like a a truly, a truly strong business. Build like a reverse funnel.

I was Oh that's interesting. So like I always think of every business as a funnel, but I always think about it from top to bottom. What do you mean, audience first? Yeah, top of the funnel is people who don't know you, they they they come to your website for the first time, they hear your podcast for the first time, they hear about your put product for the first time. And that's like, you know, they become aware of you. And then they might get interested, then they might actually sign up as a user, then they might sign up for the paid account. And the paid account is always at the bottom. And I always just thought of a funnel as top to bottom. And what this person was saying was they're going to Yeah, you actually want the reverse you want to build as a reverse funnel, meaning you wanna find like

The ten people. who are most interested and passionate about what you're doing. To where you know. You these are your extreme hardcore users who absolutely love that you're doing this. And they will use it every day and give you feedback and they'll annoy you with their feedback. They'll tell all their friends, their friends won't even listen. It doesn't matter. And they're your power power users. And then you sort of go one rung up and you go to like the next hundred people who care a lot for sure, but less than those 10 who are like really nuts. And then you go to the thousand people, ten thousand people, a hundred thousand, and you you stack the funnel.

From the bottoms up. is a way to think about building an enduring product because you're really gonna find the people who need it the most, who love it the most, they're gonna give you the best feedback to give you to get the product to be uh you know better. And you're gonna find, you know, The people who love it versus everybody else who's kinda like, Oh, that's cool. Um, and and I thought, Oh, that's actually a good principle too, when it comes to how to build something. I don't know. When you built Hampton, did you did you do that?

Yeah, for sure. Uh yes. How did you think about who the First, let's say ten to twenty people should be. How did you decide that? So at first I was like, let me figure out who wants this most. But then I uh

I and I had ideas as to who that would be. And then what I found was I was like wow, there's a lot of entrepreneurs in Tennessee Iowa. Idaho. Delaware.

Some of these forgotten areas that aren't on the coast. And I'm shocked at how lonely they are and how much they need this. Let's go get more of those people. And so that's what we did is I didn't I thought it was gonna be like cool New York or San Francisco people. And turns out it was Cool. Kentucky guys too, but like I just didn't even they weren't even part of my like They weren't even part of my vernacular. I wouldn't even have thought about them. And so that's what we did. I think um With this podcast.

I think it's good that you and I have other businesses that A pay us money and B can grow faster because there's been very There's been It's been very tempting to try to do things that are inauthentic. But we know they will get more views.

And actually we've done a good job of sticking to like Being authentic. But this is the this is a very that was a really good point of yours that this podcast as well as a handful of other ones, they're like these nerdy things that a small group of people are really passionate about. Like for example Did you see the meetups that people were doing for MFM? I was just about to bring that up. That's that's an example of a test. Dude, do you know they're still meeting?

Like they're they're still needing. So we thought I guess uh the first mind blowing thing was Oh, if me and Sam say we're gonna go to some place to do a live show, wow, we could feel like you know, a thousand to two thousand people in a in a uh whatever a theater to to come watch us. And it's a ton of work. What's that? It's a ton of work. And we're both just like

All right, let's not really do this. And and yeah, we cool. We had the moment where it was Felt good, but like I don't know if that's what we want to do on an ongoing basis. And then somebody came to us, I I forgetting her name off the top of my head. Rachel River from River.

And she's like, hey, our product does this. She's like, yeah, our product is For creators who have a community, let your community meet up without you. And I was like Key word without you. Love it. Um, and I was like, I actually that kinda makes sense because again It you know, while it feels good.

to maybe be like you know the center of attention. doesn't really feel good. And also that's not actually what makes something really valuable. But what we'd rather do is Use our content as a magnet as a honeypot. To bring in the cool guy from Kentucky and the cool girl from Illinois, who they all do the restaurant thing where they start calculating restaurant revenues when they walk into a restaurant. And get them together'cause they're gonna hit it off, but it'd be hard for them to find each other.

And so if all we serve as is basically the finding function. for those people to meet. And what's cool is that they did the first meetup, but then now they've just been meeting on a monthly basis. That tells me that we did something right. I don't know. We didn't intend to do that to be very clear. Like that was not None of this was intentional. But that that means something went right.

I FaceTime a few of them. Like they was like, Hey, we're doing this thing. I was like, All right, cool, I'll FaceTime and just say hi. And there was people and by the way, we we have like there's no like monetary thing. I think it's completely free. If you Google M FM And then river. Meet up. You'll see like the landing page. I talked to people, they were like, Yeah, I drove six hours to come to this one because I'm looking for a husband or a wife. Like I wanna meet someone who has these similar values that

for some reason MFM is a proxy for. Uh, and so I thought that was like super fascinating. And they told me they go, Oh, we're still actually doing monthly meetings because we just want to hang out with other Dorks like us. I thought that was awesome. By the way, our our c what I my tagline for people that will like this is just business nerds with a sense of humor. That's the whole thing.

If you're a business nerd, meaning like you do business, but you also, in addition to the business you run, you actually kinda nerd out about more business stuff. You can't can't really get enough. It doesn't feel like work to you to think about business or to read about businesses or learn more business stuff. And then with a sense of humor.'Cause there's probably people that are You know. more experienced than us that share more tactical stuff that are Um

you know, whatever. They're smarter, better, they're more to the point. But I think the one thing we do is we try to ha we have a lot of fun while we do this and that that rubs off. And so that's the The capture of like who is the audience for us. So we just dorked out on like niche, niche passionate things. I think that um

This Lego shit is crazy fascinating. Um You'll have to go to the Dan Jezick site, danjic.com just to look at this. And maybe you guys will dork out over uh over this thing I did. And by the way, if you made it this far into the pod, you're definitely one of these nerds. Just go ahead. This is my one sellout. Go ahead and click subscribe on the YouTube page'cause you made it this far. And you can actually make fun of us in the comments or Let us know what you think about this niche stuff.

I have one more quick one that's like kind of in the theme of Kids stuff, games, toys. Have you seen this thing called Pal World? I know you're not a gamer, but do do you know about this? No, what is Pal World? Howworld is currently like the most popular P C game in the world.

It came out of nowhere. Tell me what Steam. I still don't under I don't understand exactly what Steam is. Steam is like an app store, but for computers. The company that makes Counter Strike? They In order to let people come download the new version of CounterStrike and buy it, they created Steam. It's like a store to sell Counterstruc yeah, sell Counter Strike, but it also sold all the other games, right? So now anybody can list their thing there. But I can't do it on Apple. Well no, because you're playing on a

you know, uh a razor PC or something like that. Got it. So what do you need the Apple app store for, right? That's not gonna work. Um so It's the Apple App store, but for computer games. Um And huge, by the way, like a multi billion dollar product. So

The number one game on Steam right now is Pal World. Pal World And like Seven days has done two hundred million in revenue. When games hit They hit like none other. And by the way, this thing was made like on a$10,000 budget. So it was like a very, very low cost game. What's interesting about this, right? So the game is basically

Um the game to me, the reason I wanted to bring this up, not because I I don't know, I'm not even playing the game. I uh it's not like you play games like we don't have a lot to talk about here. But I do think It's an example of the midwit meme strikes again. And this is basically that the best ideas

The absolute best ideas are simple. And they're not just simple, they're simple to the point of sounding dumb. Okay. So simple to the point of sounding dumb. What does that mean? So Uh to me this is uh Let's see. Simple to the point of sounding dumb is Snapchat, the next big social app. It wasn't started as this like

grand intellectual theory on the future of Of communication. It was like What if you could send someone a picture that would like disappear in ten seconds? Nudes. College nudes. Right? And people are like, What would you do with that? I don't know, stupid shit. Why stupid shit?'Cause it's gonna disappear in ten seconds. So I have no no filter, right? And then after the fact it becomes this thing that people intellectualize and they're like

Well, see the thing is that um you know. Impermanence is actually the greatest form of permanence. Like, what are you talking about? And uh and people start to get intellectual about it. But that's not where the best ideas come from. The best ideas come from Really, really simple things that can be described in just a couple of words.

Pal World, if you go look at this game, it's like Oh, what's the game? The game is Pokemon with guns. It's like yes. And then literally the CEO he he says this, he goes

I'm not a visionary. I I don't know how to do that. Um I just try to make whatever people want. And I knew that uh Pokemon yeah, or he didn't say Pokemon'cause he doesn't want to get sued, but he's like Yeah, I had this idea of like

You know, you could run around and capture these little monsters. But then we added guns because, you know, Americans love to shoot things. That's insane. That was like the the core idea. And he was like they're like so why do you yeah, what was the decision to do this art style? He's like Oh, I didn't even want to do that, actually. I wanted to do the like the cool three D thing. But I didn't even know that to do that you have to have like an animation rig and all the stuff. He's like so I made one. And I was like, God, that was hard. I there's no way we could do this with like ten thousand characters like impossible.

Um He's like so we had this artist that we had rejected And then we like hired her later and they're like oh they're like why you know what did you tell her to do? It's like I don't know, like whatever our programmer could make, like that was her mandate. Like, what was your budget? He's like, I don't know, we had like ten thousand dollars, but

Um We didn't really set a budget. He's like, You know, I guess if we needed more, I would have probably just gone and borrowed some more. They're like, Tell us about the developers on your team. He's like, one of my developers is a guy I met like at a convenience store, this kid, he's like a teenager. Well like he told me he could coach. I told him to come by and w you know, yeah, he works on the game, but he's pretty critical for the game. So the founder has written this like really amazing blog post where he like explains everything that you're talking about and he's like He's kinda he's like a shithead in the best possible way.

And he's like he basically says he goes This game shouldn't even exist. uh it's the antithesis of proper game development. And he says, um He goes, We had no budget. Uh no thing company would ever start developing a game without a budget.

But Pocket Pair which is the developer is not a sane company. And he just talked about so I start asking myself, what's the budget? When the balance of our bank account reached zero, we could always just borrow money or release money just before the company went bankrupt. We had about two years of runaway and I decided just to keep working without stressing about budget because all I was worried about was getting the game done as fast as possible. And it's like

Quite. N like a corporate CE CEO. This is like pretty awesome. He's in Japan. Is this a Japanese guy? Uh, yeah, it's a Japanese game. He basically made some money in crypto and then took the crypto money and was like, All right.

I'm gonna start a game studio with this, even though he Kinda wasn't like, you know, equipped to do that. Um Like right now on Steam, it's the number one game that right now, as we're recording this, there's over one million people concurrently playing the game. That's insane.

Um, like the highest was two million at a time. We're playing the game just concurrently. It's the number one, more than Dota, more than Counter Strike, more than BUBG. More than all of them. He was like uh This one lady applied, but I didn't think her designs were that good, so I rejected her. But then she kept three months later, she sent me a DM DM and I was so amazed that she was bold enough after I rejected her to keep messaging me.

So we hired her. Uh like like it just has like story after story of like that doesn't make sense, so let's do it. Uh but that the meme the mim meme where it's like, you know, the the i the Jedi kind of think the same thing, right? Like Just m like Just make the game as fast as possible, right? Or like, you know, if you run out of money, just try to get some more.

Um What should you make it? What if Pokemon had guns? That'd be cool. Right. It's like versus people who are like, you know, trying to over overly intellectualize and overanalyze everything. And um, I just see this trend over and over and over again. I I I truly believe

I did I tell you about the midwit thing I'm trying to do? No what? I I truly believe it This midwit meme explains so much of my own life. And like I wanna see it every day as a reminder.

Two don't overthink it. Just keep it simple and just what's the obvious answer? What's the obvious answer is like It's always there. But it gets

fogged up by my own Stupidity trying to overly uh over architect things. Or like wanna be an intellectual. And so George Mack, our friend, uh do you know do you know George? He's awesome. Yeah. He's a great dude. Very interesting thinker.

And so he had this idea for a Like to do a super glossy like Coffee table book high end. But of just like A hundred midwit memes.

And I heard this idea and I was like, that's genius. I can't wait. And so I messaged him And then like months later I was like Dude, what happened to the book? And he's like Oh well I didn't want to do it because you know Um

You know, I was gonna have to do three hundred sixty five uh his original thing was three hundred sixty five days like one a day. Three hundred sixty five midway meetings. He's like But then if I get to 365 and I thought, well, the you know, the cost of this might be a little high. I'm not sure if I'm gonna be able to make my money back, but then you know he's like and really a best selling book is something that has these attributes, and I went and studied all the best selling books, and I I learned all these commonalities between atomic habits and this and this and this. And I just sent him the midway beam back after his like thousand word like what's that message and I was like Make the book, it'll be fun.

Right. It's obvious. Just make the just do it. It'll be fun. Who cares? Like you don't have to Do all these stuff. You might lose a little bit of money. It's okay. Right? Like But people who are bought something cool will come with this. It's it's no big deal.

And so I'm trying to convince him to do this, uh to to do this book with me. I'm like, let's just make this book. It'll take us like two weeks and it'll be fun. And like, Anybody who actually buys this thing. is gonna be the exact type of person I want in my life. Just do it. Do it on your own. Uh I'm looking for an excuse to do a project with George because I really like him and also this was his idea. So I don't wanna steal his idea. I wanna convince him to do this with me. If he w if he really refuses, I'm gonna say, All right, can I just do this myself? And myself.

It's Monday. I think this episode goes live on Wednesday. I forget when, but whenever it goes live. Give him he has seven days. If this doesn't get actually. George for Mac. Just tweet at him at just say

Do it. And he he he's gonna have to figure out why everybody's tweeting, do it at him. And I'm sure he will eventually put two and two together and know this is what I'm this is why he needs to do it. I uh I enjoyed this episode. What do you think? Yeah, this is fun.

I enjoyed dorking out over this stuff. I had a great time. Do we wrap here? Is that the pod? That's the part. I feel like I learned something today. Yeah, and I had a great time. That's the minw that's the midwit meme of preparing for these things. I'm like uh what gets views? What what uh what will what will make more money. Uh what will be more fun. Um all right, that's the pod.

I feel like I can rule the world of no way be what I want to I'm putting my all in it like my day's off On the roadless travel never looking back

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