Equipment of the Year and the First Year He Hits Actually 5 Grand a Month So He Even Surpasses His One Year Goal And He Just Keeps Going So He First Year 60K Second Year Like 100-something K Third Year 250K Fourth Year 7 Million Fifth Year You Know It Just Keeps Growing Today This Business Does Over 30 Million a Year No way Are You Kidding Me? I Feel Like I Can Rude A World I Know I Could Be What I Want To I'm Plumbing All In It Like No Days All On A Road Let's Try And Do You Wanna
Do You Wanna Start With Up Dog? I Might Flow? Thought I Might Ket Just Sleep In There That's Way Below You Should Have Just Gave It To Me Alright Before We Start I Want To Dedicate This Podcast Shown To Two Groups Of People Because I've Had Run-Ins With These Two Groups Of People And I've Taken For Granted How Special These Two Groups Of People Are The First One
People Who Start Businesses And Are English Speaking As Our Not Native English Speakers It's Insane I Like Have Hugged Out Recently With A Few Friends That You Know Are Entrepreneurs And They Don't Speak English Natively That's So Impressive I Take It For Granted So Much Until I've Got To Communicate Some One Of A Different Language That's Amazing So I Want To Dedicate This Pod To That The Second Group Of People People Who Start Businesses And They're Not wealthy And They're Just Starting Their Businesses Trying To Make Their Dreams
True While They Have New Born Or Little Kids How Impressive Is That Like I Didn't Tate I Kind Of Took That For Granted My Parents Did That When I Was Younger I Don't Realize Now That I Have A Kid I Realize How Scary That Is So I Want To Dedicate This Pod To Those Two Groups Of People Wow Good Guy Points Okay I Like It Dedication Accepted. So I Don't Talk All Those Groups I Have A Few Interesting Things To Share With You Today Do You Have A Few Interesting Things Or What? I Have Two Things You're Gonna Like.
What Do You Got? Alright So We're Talking About AI Talking About Fancy Shit Right. Well I'm Gonna Take You On A Journey. So Sam Buckle Up Because I Got A Little Sump Before I'm Gonna Tell You About A Journey I Went Down And The Journey Starts With A Tweet I Saw That Was Very Interesting. And It Was A Tweet About You Know Bitcoin Hit An All-Time High Price AI's Taken Off. I Was Not Interested. What I Was Interested In Is A Picture Of A Guy Holding A Giant Avocado.
And I Was Like What Is This And He Says, What Is That He Goes. These Are The Best Avocados I've Ever Had. They Were Grown By My 93-year-old Japanese Neighbor. I Have Had To Use Google Translate To Talk To Her About The Variety. And She Things It Might Be One That Just Grew From This Pacific Seed. If That's True, This Could Be A New Landmark Variety. The Hass Avocado Was Discovered In Similar Fashion. And Is Now The Most Popular Avocado In The World.
This Avocado That I Found Cannot Be Propagated With Normal Methods. It Doesn't Take Well To Air Layering. I Don't Know What This Means. He Says, So I'm Gonna Have To Start With The Seed. I'm Gonna Have To Grow It Out The Tree. I'm Gonna Have To Cut It From The Mature Tree. Graphed It On To Its Own Seed. I Don't Know What Any Of This Means. But Then He's Like, And Then I'm Gonna Try To Recreate This Avocado.
It Will Probably Be A Three-year Experiment Wish Me Luck. And So I Saw This And I What A Noble Quest. I Said What Is This Avocado Teach Me About Life. No, What Is Life Led Me To To Make My Life About This Avocado. Cause I Am So Fully Invested In This Three-year Journey. About This Guy Is Gonna Try To Grow A Better Avocado. And It Led Me Down A Rabbit Hole About Him And About The Avocado.
So The Guy Is This Guy Name Kevin Is Spirer Too. Do You Know This Guy He Calls Up Stuff The Plant Daddy On Twitter? No, But I've Been. You Don't Know This Guy? No. I Think You Do When I Start To Describe People. So He's Got A Pretty Amazing Story. And I'm Gonna First Tell You His Story Then I'm Gonna Come Back To The Avocado. We're Gonna Tarantino This A Little Bit.
Alright, A Quick Break To Talk About Our Sponsor. So If You Were Gonna Start Up And You're Trying To Grow, You Need A Marketing And Sales Tool That Will Scale Up With You. Check Out The Hub Spot For Startups Program. You Can Save 30-90% On The CRM, Which Is Gonna Help You Increase Your Leads, Boost Your Revenue, And Just Keep Your Whole Team Organized As You're Trying To Grow. Hub Spot For Startups Is Trusted By Thousands Of Startups All Around The World.
And You Should Go Check Out If You Were eligible To Join The Hub Spot For Startups Program. And Take Your Grow To The Next Level. Visit Hub Spot.com Slash Startups. Alright, So This Guy Basically He Used To Work At Scribe The Book In A Box Company. They Help You Produced Books. So He's Working At Scribe. He's Like An Early Employee There. And On The Side, He Used To Have Hobbies Of Video Games At Online Poker. And He Was Just Playing Non-Stop. And So To Get Away From His Online Addiction.
He's Like, You Know What? I'm Gonna Start Gardening. Like Him And His Brother. This Is The Quote In The Article They Go. Hey, Let's Go Hit Up A Nursery. They Go To A Plant Nursery. They Are Like, Alright, We Don't Know Anything About Gardening. But We Want To Do Something. We Want To Do Something Away From A Computer Outside With Our Hands. And They Go Buy A bunch Stuff And They're Trying To Figure It Out. They're Yo Online, They're Looking Up Blogs To Learn.
And Along The Way, He Starts Blogging His Journey. Until He's At Scribe, And He Has Little Blog Starts Getting A Little Bit of Traffic. Because He's Posting His Experiments. He's Very Relatable. Because He's An Absolute New Beginner. And So People Who Are Going Are Also Absolute New Beginners. And He Starts Like This. And Eventually, He's Like, You Know What? I'm Gonna Quit My Job. At The Time, The Blog Is Making, I Know, $16,000, $17,000 a year.
So Roughly, Two Ish Grant A Month, A Little Bit More Than That, Right? So A Little Less Than Two Grand Months, Right? So He Quits His Job, And He's Like, I'm Gonna Go All In On This Thing. And At The Time, He's All About This One Type Of Gardening Called Hydroponic Garden. Is That Like Where The Plant Is Like Raised? Yeah, Is That Right? Yeah, It's Like Not In The Soil, And In Water. Something Like That. I Said Exactly, I Have No Idea.
Alright, So He Creates R-Slash Hydro, Which Is Like A Reddit Community. So He Starts Just Building A Community Around Other People Who Are Interested In The Same Type Thing. He's Doing Along The Way, He's Like, Oh Dude, I Think This Hydroponic Thing Is A Little Tunish. He Rebrands It Into Something Called Epic Gardening. Epic Gardening Today Is Huge. Dude, I'm On The Website, And I'm Looking At His Social Numbers.
Holy Crap. He's Got Like 2 Million On TikTok, 2 Million On YouTube, 1 Million People Here. His Twitter Pops Off. So He's Done Really Really Well With This Epic Gardening Content. He's Just A Dude In The Baseball Cap, Super Like Relatable. When You Watch His Videos, He's Like, He's Just Very Likeable Guys. He's Got The Gift That You Need When You're Going To Do This Type Of Content. And So He Keeps Going. And He's Basically For 10 Years, Essentially Boots Strap This Company.
So Starts With Like A $10 Domain, Pays 5 Bucks For Hosting. And He Was Like, Alright, I'm Gonna Try To Get This Thing. And His Gold Was, I'm Gonna Try To Get To 3 Grand A Month. His 3-Gonna-Month Means I Can Live Off Of This Like Blog, Grevenue. He Quit His Job. And In The First Year, He Does It. He Hits Actually 5 Grand A Month. So He Even Surpasses His One Year Gold. And He Just Keeps Going. So He's First Year, 60K. Second Year, Like 100-something K. Third Year, 250K.
Fourth Year, 7 Million. Fifth Year, You Know, It Just Keeps Growing. Today This Business Does Over 30 Million a Year. No way. Are You Kidding Me? And We Just Raised A Huge Mount of Money From Churning. The Same Guys Who Backed. We Talked About Eater, Bar Stool, Others They Have This Content To Commerce Idea. And They're Like, This Guy In The Gardening Meesh. It's Gonna Be A Little To Do Big Things. And He Had Already Kind Of Proven It.
So What He Did Was, He Was Doing Pretty Well With The Content. And He Was Just Like Learning. So He's Like, Dude, I Been On YouTube For So Long, You Know, Since You Know, Basically 10 Years Now On YouTube. He's Like, Just Keep Evolving With Whatever The New Metagame Is Of YouTube. And What It Is Up Happening Is That In 2020, Shit Takes Off During COVID. So COVID Was The Big Like, Infliction Point. That Like Really Took This From, Moderately Successful To Very Successful.
Two Things Happened. COVID First Where His Channel All The Sudden. He's Like, He Started Adding Like 15,000 Subscribers A Day. Because The Same Thing He Had When He Was Like, Dude, I'm Just So Sick Of Being Inside On My Computer. I Want To Get Outside Do Some Gardening. The Whole World Basically Felt That When COVID Hit. And So A Lot Of People Got Interested In This. And Then He's Like, Cool. All My Money Up Till That Point Was, Ads And Affiliates. Right?
So Just Like, YouTube Ad Sents, YouTube Ad Revenue, And Then Affiliate Links To Products. And Finally, He's Like, What's He Doing 30 Million That Way? 30 Million Through Ads. No No. Wait Less Than That. He Was Doing Like, You Know, Less Than A Million. Doing That. But Then He Decides, All Right, I'm A Launcher Product. And He's Like, I'm Going To Create A Gardening Product. So He Imports A Product From Australia. And Immediately It Works. And So He's Like, Oh, This Is Kind Of A Good Idea.
And He Starts To Sell That Product. And The Beautiful Thing About These Creator Businesses. Right? We've Talked About Mr. Beast. We've Talked About Logan Paul With Prime, Mr. Beast With Feastables. You Know, The Mass Creators, What They Do Is They Take A Mass Market Product. Like, You Know, Gatorade Or Chocolate. And They're Like, Cool. We'll Sell This Commodity Product Using Our Branding. And We'll Use Our Branding To Get Into Retail.
Well, For Like The Medium, Like They Have The Mid-tier Creators, Like This Guy Or You Know, Like Us, For example. You Have To Actually Create Anish Product. That's Going To Be Higher Ticket, Higher Value. And You're Going To Use Your Audience To Do It. And So What's Cool About This Is You Create Something That's Called Negative Cack. So What Is Negative Cack Means? Every Business Otherwise Has A Sales And Marketing Call. Talked Dirty To Me, Baby. I Love Negative Cack.
Keep Going. So Pack Which Is Customer Acquisition Cost Is The amount of money you have to spend in marketing or sales to get a customer. And For Most Businesses, This Is Maybe 20% 30% 40% 50% For Some Companies That's 80% of their revenues are just how much it costs to go market to acquire a customer. With A Media Business Like This, What Ends Up Happening Is You Get Negative Cack. Meaning He Gets Paid 1-2 Million Dollars A Year For His YouTube Stuff, For His Content,
Right? His Blog And His YouTube Stuff. He's Making Money On That. And That's His Customer Acquisition Channel. So It's Like Kind Of An Unfair Advantage. This Is What The Turning Guys Are Really Smart About Doing.
Shoutout to Mike Kerns over at Turning, Where They Recognize They Identify That, Hey, Some Of These Creators Have High Trust, They Have High At 40 In A Niche, And They Actually Have A Business Model, Where Instead Of Spending 30% or 40% Of Your Revenue On Acquisition Customers, You Actually Have Negative Cack. It's Actually, You Have Not Only Zero, It's Better Than Zero. You Actually Have A Profitable Media Company That Is Being Used To Acquisition Customers. And That's The Beauty Of It.
And So Then He Jumped, And He Went From Making, You Know, Let's Say A Million Bucks A Year, To Seven Million, Seven Million, To 20 Million, And Then Now He's Over 30 Million A Year, And Revenue. And The Other Cool Thing Is, He's Bolted On From Acquisitions. Hold On, What's He's Selling? He's Got Like A Seed Product, So They Like Some Trace Seed Crap, I Don't Know, I Don't Know Anything About This, It's Called Botanical Seeds.
And He Bought That Company, Actually, That's Not The One He Started, He Bought That Because They Had Retail Distributions. They Were In Like, Four, Five Thousand Stores. So He's Like, Cool, Let Me Buy This, Because I Know That My Audience Will Help Grow This, Right? This Is What I Did With Shepard, Two Right?
Let Me Buy This Company, That I, It's Already A Good Business, Knowing That My Audience Will Acquire A bunch of Customers For It, And Like That's What Happened, Wishing Up, Or We Bixie Troubled The Business, Using This Strategy, He's Doing The Same Thing, And The Gardening Meesh, And So He Bought This Seed Business, And Then He Bought This Like House Plant Business, Which Is Actually A Cool Story, So He's Like, He's Like, He's Like, During Co, But Everybody Wanted Like House Plants.
I think You Guys Talked About This With Trends, too. Like The Right. Dude, We Were, We Talked About This, Year and A Half, I Think, Before The Pandemic, About Like, Suck You Lens, Suck You Lens, Or Like, People Are Wanting To Buy, Suck You Lens, Suck You Lens On Line, There's Not A Lot Of Options. You Were Totally Right. You Were Ahead Of Trend, What He Did Was, He Was Like, Cool, Should I Start Creating This Content, And He Realized, A Very Like, In The Growth of Any Entrepreneur.
Eventually You Start To Realize That. Hey, Sometimes It's Actually Easier To Buy Than Build. And So What He Did Was Like, Well, I Could Try To Create All These Articles, Rank For Them In SEO, Or He Found This Website, That Was Called Like Your House Plant.com, but there's don't have any business around it. And so he's like, I think I could make this product a lot better, but I could like get this off a head start. So he does a who is look up. And it's some Indian VC owns this as a side project.
He buys it for $1,000. And then immediately like month one, he's making more than $1,000 off this thing. And then grows that property. And so he's done this a few times and he raised money from churn and to be able to go do more of these. And so I think this guy is amazing. I've asked him so many times to invest because I'm like, dude, this is, you are going to win and you're going to win in such a big way. It's going to shock people.
Like I think as I'm saying it now, it sounds like pretty cool, pretty obvious. And as his growth happens, but like 10 years ago, so non-obvious, even four, five years ago, even when COVID started to get more popular, it's like, okay, cool, you're a YouTuber. Okay, cool, you're a YouTuber with an e-commerce shop. I say, no, no, no. You are going to be the most trusted influencer in the gardening niche.
And the gardening niche, look at how many others, full retail brick and mortar stores that are selling fertilizer and different things like that. He can take this huge if he does this right. And now it's just a new question of how fast his kind of business development can level up with the content skills he already has. And he's got the look I'm looking at his Instagram. He's wearing flannel. He's got a nice smile. He's basically like, what's the, what's it called? Chip and Joanna.
Yeah, games, yeah, the games. He's got that type of vibe where I look at him and I'm like, you're relatable. I trust you. You're somehow a little bit aspirational, a little bit. That sounds like an insult. I didn't mean to fart to sound like that. But this is awesome. And dude, these guys that Churren have done this so many times. They did it with meat either. Who was it meat either? Who we talked about a few podcasts ago. They did it with cars and bid and Doug Demorow.
This is like, when people say they're going to do this, I often think it's like at a small scale. These guys are doing it at multi, multi, multi-billion dollar scale. It's really cool. Yeah, exactly. So I think this is, this is amazing. Now let me circle back to the avocado thing. So he says, I'm going to do this three year avocado mission and he says something about the hot avocado. And so I go look it up. I'm like, where did this hot avocado come from? Learn a couple things.
Number one, it's not pronounced hot. It's hot. So we're all saying it wrong. That's the first thing I learned. Second thing, do you know the story? Have you heard the story about the hot avocado? No, I would. No. All right. So basically, avocados were absolutely not popular back in the day. So nobody ate them. They didn't taste very good. Not even like in Mexico? No, they were not. They were just not a popular fruit. They were these. It was a green product. It was not very popular.
It didn't taste very good. And it had, oh, it wasn't even branded very well. So some people called it avocados. Some people called them alligator pairs. Some people called them like in Mexico, they called them the, like, I don't know how you pronounce the word, but it was like the Spanish word, like the native word for testicle. Like, they're just like, yeah, you want to go eat a testicle? And so nobody really liked this fruit. So enter a root off has.
Root of has basically is a male man from Milwaukee. He's now living in California. And he decides he wants to plant an avocado tree. So he goes and he buys some seeds and he tries to plant it. But like, you have to, I guess, do some grafting process or whatever to get things to like take. And it didn't work. And so he's like, ah, it didn't work, whatever. He thinks about just cutting it down, but he just doesn't get around to it or whatever. So he just lets the tree grow.
And he lets a grow for like a year or two. And then his kids, like, notice that there's fruit on it. They pluck it. They open it up and the kids really like it. This is how the story goes. Kids really like it. And he's like, oh, while you eating that, that's not good. And they're like, no, it's great. He tries it. Oh, this is actually really good. It's way creamier. It's got like kind of a nutty taste. And there was way more space between the seed and the peel. So it was like softer, creamier.
And there was just more of the actual filling. And he's like, whoa, these are actually really good. Until he starts eating it, the, you know, words are just spread. He goes and he partners with a local nursery. And he's like, hey, can you help me grow more of this tree? Because this tree is like bearing this amazing fruit. And so the nursery is like, cool, yeah, we'll do more of this tree. And we'll give you, you know, some royalty off this thing.
And then now, how's avocado's are like 80% of worldwide avocado sales. These trees are planted all around the world, Mexico and China and everywhere. Like this is the dominant fruit. And it's not even that old. So he pat it in 1935. So we're talking about avocados as we know it today are less than a hundred years old. So now here's a couple of interesting things I found from this. Number one, a lot of fruits are like this where they actually start kind of shitty. They don't taste very good.
And then through a process of artificial selection, so like not natural selection, artificial selection, you find the good tasting fruit. And then it becomes the dominant species because that's the one everybody wants to eat. I just didn't really think about that too much. Yeah, like a, like a banana, like an old banana from a hundred plus years ago, it tasted like a carrot. They weren't as sweet. And that's happened to, that's happened to me with a lot of our fruit.
It's gotten sweeter and sweeter and sweeter. So they're like the honeycress apple. There's like a cotton candy apple right now. And a lot of like health advocates are like, dude, you shouldn't even eat modern fruit. Cause it's like, it's not exactly how it used to be and the health benefits are, aren't you? Yeah, it does have the same properties in it cause it's a different thing. Right, optimize for taste.
All right, everyone, a quick break cause I want to fill you in on a little experiment that I'm doing. I've got a new project. It's called Moneywise. It's a personal finance podcast for high network people or young people who are on their way to becoming a high network. When I made a little bit of money, I didn't even know how much money I should be spending each month should be 10,000, 30,000, 50,000. And I didn't really have a lot of people to ask.
So I created a podcast called Moneywise because I wanted to figure out what are some of the things that people who have a lot of cash and who have a high net worth. What do they do with it? The first episode is with a friend of mine. He sold his company for $200 million when he was 31 years old. He gets super transparent about his monthly expenses, his portfolio, how it's impacts his happiness, everything. And so I want you guys to check it out. It's called Moneywise.
That's one word you can find it on my Twitter bio. I'm dust Sam par. Or you can just type in Moneywise on Apple, Spotify, and YouTube. All right, back to the pod. Hey, let's take a quick break to tell you about the HubSpot podcast network. If you like podcasts like this, you should check out some other cool podcasts. One is called Business Made Simple. It's hosted by Donald Miller. And it's brought to you by the HubSpot podcast network.
And what he does is he makes it easy to take the mystery out of growing your business. There's an episode that you should check out called what you should put in a job description to get the perfect hire. And then this episode, Donald Miller, looks at the whole hiring process and how important it is to emphasize both the positive attributes and the drawbacks to future candidates. And you'll learn why being self-aware as a leader will help you avoid hiring disasters. So check it out.
You'll listen to Business Made Simple wherever you get your podcasts. So a couple more interesting facts. Number one, this guy, even though he said he got like a fruit patent, which I was like, what the hell's a fruit patent? He didn't make much money off this thing. I don't think he really had the patent. I don't think he really benefited from it.
His son Charles came out and told L.A. Times that even though my dad created the greatest avocado in the world and his total royalties lifetime are $4,800. He left them $5,000. He made off of discovering this. And I say discovering, because he didn't invent this. He didn't mean to do it. He manually tried to create this. He discovered it. And even he says as he goes, it was an act of God that I discovered this fruit. And so I found that interesting.
The third thing I found interesting is the marketing behind this. So even though this thing tasted good, it didn't take off right away. And one of the reasons why is that an avocado doesn't look like most fruits. So most fruits are colorful. They look very appetizing. Like the reason they called it the alligator pair was because the skin was basically all wrinkly and tough, like the way an avocado that we all know looks. And so nobody wanted to eat it. They were like, this thing looks bad.
And so nobody would even try it. And so the fruit association of California comes together and does probably what the greatest act of any committee ever. They were like, look, a couple of things. Number one, we can't keep calling the shit testicles and alligator pairs. We got to come up with one name that we like, all right, we're going with avocado. Everybody needs to call this the same thing so that this can spread in popularity. The next thing that they did that was very, very smart.
They were like, cool. Why aren't people buying these? They're like, well, because they look like they've gone bad, right? It's like black, basically. It looks like fruit that's gone bad. So they're like, all right, new marketing campaign. We're going to put stickers on every one of these that says, ripe tonight. Basically, this is perfectly ripe. It's ready to eat tonight. And this is already true. It's just that consumers don't understand this. And so they put stickers on every avocado.
And suddenly avocado sales started to boom. Because once you try it, you like it. But people weren't trying it because they thought it had gone bad and said saying, this is ripe, ready to eat tonight. That was the second thing that they did. And the third thing was that they needed to educate people that a green avocado was actually bad avocado. And that this was a good avocado. And so they did all this marketing to make it work, which you never really think about with fruit.
Like you don't think about fruit marketing, but everything around us is the product of some ad guy trying to boost sales. And once you realize that, you can learn two things. You can learn a lot about marketing. And you can learn a lot about the products that you see are not as they appear. You become a little more skeptical, a little more jaded towards all products when you realize that even avocados were basically like, they were just someone's, some dropship or somewhere had a great idea.
Dude, we, first of all, this is awesome. This is very interesting. But we should do an entire episode on fruit and marketing. It's actually really interesting. Planet money had a podcast on the Honeycrisp Apple. It's the most pop-up before a lot of apples like that existed. It was red delicious. It's like kind of fascinating. I met a guy who had done a venture back startup. It was like raised a bunch of money. It was trying to grow. Business blows up. And we check in with him.
We're like, yo, what are you thinking for? What's next? And I think he's going to say some AI crap, some crazy, whatever, some big idea. And he's like, I'm trying to invent a new fruit. And he's like, what? And he's like, yeah. He's like, you ever had a mango? Yeah, he goes, you think you've had a mango. What's he tried my mango? I was like, I'd love to try your mango. It's entertaining. He's entertaining. And basically he was basically like the shape of the fruit really matters.
So for example, like the ease of eating. So he had these like, his mangoes were in circular spheres basically. There's like balls. And his little mango balls were ready to eat. They were super juicy. The texture was perfect. And I was like, wow, this is genuinely an amazing mango experience. Thank you for that. What's the call? Well, he kind of pivoted off there. Because he's like the logistics of it are so hard, he's like to get fresh. He's like, it tastes really great when it's fresh.
He's like, but just the logistics to get this like two customers is so hard. I would have to go about this in this way, this way, this way. So he pivoted off that idea in the end. And then you have to be very fortunate that I got to try that mango. And the crazy part is, and this is like actually kind of like an interesting moat, is that it takes 10 or 15 years to do.
Because imagine if you're building a website and you can only make a change once the year to that website and see the results and be like, ah, shit, that didn't work. Next year, let's see, because you have to, you know, you got to wait for it all to grow. It takes a long time. And so we should do a whole patentable. And it's patentable, right? Like, yeah.
You know, I guess though, there's some rules around the patents of the rules that I read were basically like, you, if you want to do a fruit patent, you can't, you, and basically it like, it has to reproduce asexually, it has to be created by breeding or grafting. It cannot be discovered. If it's already in the wild, it can't be patented. Like, there's a bunch of rules like that.
So like, you know, the first fruit plant, the first plant patent was this guy Henry who planted the climbing ever blooming rose. And like he created that rose and he patented that plant and then he gets to benefit from that. So I think when we do our fruit and plant episode, I think we got to go find like the greatest fruit brewers to have to live. Uh, yeah. I, I just looked them up on Twitter. I have had some interactions with him.
You know what's funny about Twitter is these, there's so many people like, I remember I was talking to this woman named Shelby Church and they're like YouTube celebrities. They'll have five or 10 million subscribers on YouTube and you go to Twitter and they've got 10,000 followers. And on Twitter, they're just trying to learn like the rest of us to get business insight and things like that. This guy is not that popular on Twitter, but he's got 10 million across all of his other socials.
We could just DM him and get him on here. That's kind of cool. Yeah, let's do it. Um, so I made a video of Camp MFM that I want to, I want to show. So originally, by the way, this is my debut of vlogging and you'll notice that the video is not a vlog. Why? Cause your boy sucks at vlogging. It's hard. It's really hard. I learned that the hard way. Um, he'd be like, all right, so I'll just get a shot of you walking into the house and I'm like, I just walk into the house.
He's like, no, no, you can't just walk in. I was like, what do you mean? He's like, you got to say something and then you got to walk in kind of an interesting way. I was like, that I don't walk interesting or say that I just walk in with places. There's no one here to talk to you. What am I supposed to say? Anyways, didn't work out so well, but we have a cool video. So two things. Number one, number one, if you're just listening to the audio version, you got to go to YouTube to see it.
We're not even going to put that in the audio version because it's not going to make sense. So go to go to the YouTube video if you want to actually see the video. So I might have three questions for you. What do they search? What do they search? Oh, they search my first million or you can just search the greatest podcast of all time. Either one should show up if Google is doing their job, right? And you search my first million, click on this episode and you'll see the video here.
So say I might have three questions for you. Number one, how much film are you feeling right now knowing that you skipped this year's camp MFM? In fact, we may need to not even name it camp MFM. Just name it camp Sean because you didn't know. I didn't skip it. I had a newborn child. I was committed to being with her for a certain period of time. I didn't just skip it. I couldn't go. But there was a hilarious moment when we were there. Everyone was like, dude, where's Sam?
And I was like, oh, he can't come. He just had a baby. And then everyone was like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. And then nodding. And then he goes, wasn't that two and a half months ago? And then we were all like, yeah, what the hell? And then you went, what the hell? You've been totally going for two days and it's two and a half months in. And so then we all laughed at you and then moved on. There was two and a half months ago, but I committed to three months. I committed to three months.
I had to stick with it. So that's point one. What's point two? Point two. What do you think of my not vlog video there? What could we have done better? So I wrote this down to let you know, I don't think you could have any of that music on there. I think it's going to get taken down. No, I think it's really fun. Conor Price. That's Conor Price's song. He was going to attend the camp. That's fun. The first song was Dropkick Murphy's. The first song is fine. And it's going to be absolutely fine.
Nothing is going to get taken down. This isn't like a like, oh, I just kind of asked for a mission type of thing. Like it literally won't like, like the algorithm is going to like prevent this from going alive. So I think you have to change that song. But it's great. I thought it was great. Okay. Third question for you. Have you noticed this trend? Part of this is me just showing you a vacation photo album basically. But the other part is noticing that I think you started a movement, dude.
I think I just fucked around and started a movement. So I didn't mean to do this. Did you just invent blogging? No, not the blogging. The movement is of these kind of like man camp active conferences. I don't know. I don't have a good name for it. I'm thinking this comes up like a man business camp type of thing. So I did this camp MFM thing. Then I started noticing other people who heard the podcast were like, oh, you know what would be cool? Like Sean did it for basketball.
Let's do it for something else. And so I have a few of these that are now started. So a boy Danny Miranda has like a running club type of thing. Yeah, dude. I see them out there all the time. There's like 50 of them. Looks like a blast. Pat Walls from Starter Story was like, hey, what if we did this for tennis, pickable, whatever, and they called it the MRR open. Like the mother of the great name. That's a great name. Better than our name.
Shit. This guy, this guy in Hampton message me and he goes, hey, I heard about camp Femps. So awesome. Had the same idea. This guy Victor, who's like, I'm going to do this poker. And so he did a poker get away weekend rented a house, invited a bunch of people and they just played poker all weekend. I think this is the new new wave of getting you can either just get together for drinks. But guess what? Kids don't drink anymore. Everyone sober is a salad. Dude, isn't it sane?
Did you see Whole Foods announced the most popular beer that they sell? Do you know what it is? It's Athletic Brewing Company, a non-alcoholic beer. A non-alcoholic beer is the top selling beer right now in Whole Foods. Is that insane? No one drinks. Yeah, no one drinks. So nobody drinks anymore. So what are we going to do? Get together and just, you know, sucker thumbs. This is not going to work.
So next thing, nobody wants to just sit at a conference or, you know, like a lecture hall and just sit there and listen to speakers kind of boring. You want to weave it in with these things. So I think this kind of active conference thing is cool. I think more people should make these. You can invite me. I would love to know about them and then politely, politely pass just because I don't like to leave the house that much.
But I think more people should do these and I'm hoping that I'm just hoping that I get credit for starting this movement. And I know people are going to go out and say, no, no, this has been going on forever. But that was the past. But I'm the president of the future. And I just needed to tell you that. I think it's awesome. I want to go to the next one and I'm going to make it a point to go there and make a big deal out of it because I do have FOMO after seeing that video. Good job.
And blocking's not only care if you're given birth next year when it's happening, you better be there. It, uh, dude, blocking sucks, by the way. Mr. Beast made fun of you in that video or he made fun of it. He was always with the camera. Was he giving you guys a hard time for having a camera there? Yeah, because I showed in, you know, with a camera following me, basically. And the funny part is always with the camera.
That's the first time I ever done a vlog as evidence by the fact that I at the end, I was like, that's vlog kind of sucks. Let's just make a big video out of it. Um, but it was really fun actually having the guy there. This buddy Max came and he did great job. It's really embarrassing. I see a lot of people like vlogging and walking around and they have a guy falling in my camera. It's quite embarrassing. It draws a lot of attention to you. I find it to be very, very humiliating.
The upside, you might give him a, it's the downside. You're immediately humiliated. All right, let me tell you about something. Yeah. I'm going to talk a little bit about the best business in the world. Now this business, Chimoff, who I think is coming on the pot actually, has said, it's the singular best business model and monopoly ever created. This is easy for you to guess, right? Rich crackers. No, it's gotta be Google.
Google. Yeah. So I wanted to talk to you a little bit about Google and search engine stuff because I've been interested in this for years. I've been interested in duck.go, which I call that shot. I think I missed the, I thought it was going to grow a lot faster than it actually has, but it's like slowly coming about. This is going to be the episode where we take credit for things that we had absolutely no part in and actually didn't call our shot and in fact kind of doubted it.
Yeah, it's like, hey, do you like making right hand turns on a red light? I invented that. I was doing that when I was 16. Yeah. I created it. I created it. I created that. And so the reason, let me tell you why I've been interested in it. Type four athletic fitting dress pants. Hey, the autocomplete didn't even, had no idea what I was doing there. That's not common search. Thick boy pants. Yeah. All right.
I was searching for this the other day and I had to scroll down so far to get to a website because if you look through like the first, it's like tons and tons of images. Is that what you see? So I see tons of images. So I see a whole shopping carousel. Then I see a couple of ads and then I scroll down. I see Amazon. Okay. Yeah. Go ahead. So you got to scroll down a ton to get to a website. It's actually quite annoying. And so Google's been pissing me off.
And when you just talked about how they have gone through some stuff and you still believe in the company, I'm slowly starting to lose faith in their company because the search has been really shit and it's starting to piss me off. So I've been looking for all their other alternatives. Did you Google for that? Did you just Google search for alternatives? Yeah. I mean, it's like, it's like even though I hated, I use it. You know, like it's like an abusive lover.
But I was doing some research on when they first started. So Google started in the late 90s and when they did Sergey and Larry, the founders, they created this paper called the Anatomy of a large scale hypertextual web search engine, riveting, riveting stuff. But please take our power writing course layer. Yeah. That's a little awful.
And in that paper, they talk about like what they think is possible with a search engine and they kind of started from an academic point of view, which is pretty cool though to see like their predictions. And there's this one line. It says, in general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view. The better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want.
And then he goes, he says, the goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users. So like 30 years later, they just went back and edited it and they're like, nah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. The subtext on their, like the sub headline is just psych. Yeah. Like they just like change.
And then they said, for this reason, for this reason, we expect that advertising-funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and won't be aligned with the consumer's needs. And they actually go on to say that they think a subscription service search engine is actually the answer. Of course, that is the opposite of what they've eventually have become. Google is a $1.5 trillion company, market cap company, and 95% of the revenues come from search.
And it's the greatest business model of all time. I would, I don't know how many people work at Google exactly. I think, I think over 100,000, but I would imagine that you could basically fire everyone but like 1,000 people and the company would just thrive. It would be the most profitable company in the world.
And the crappy part about Google, well, I guess it's good for them, bad for us, is that their moat is quite simple, which is the more people who use the search engine, the better it understands, like which results to give you. And so it's just going to get better or supposedly better and better and better, but harder for a new person to create an alternative. Now ultimately, I think actually open AI is going to be an alternative.
Gardener had this report where they said by 2026, they think 25%, Google search is going to be reduced by 25% because of AI. But I found a new alternative that just launched publicly a few days ago or about a month ago. They've been around quietly, but they like kind of made it, they had like a big launch coming out party the other day. And it's kind of cool. So it's called, actually don't know how to pronounce it. It's Kaji. Sorry. You're a good start. I mean, how do you say this word?
K-A-G-I. Yes. Kaji? Kaji? Kaji? Kaji? Yeah, I don't know. But it's got an interesting premise. So it was started by this guy named Vladimir. And the premise is that there are zero ads and it's five to $10 a month for a subscription. And I think that's like an interesting premise, but I don't think that that would work that well. However, this guy's story is pretty interesting. So he started bootstrapping this business in 2018, slowly started making progress.
And at this point, he's got about 30,000 people who pay for it. And if you go to Kaji.com, K-A-G-I.com slash stats, he reveals all of his stats. And so you can see the number of paid members. You can see how many searches are happening per day. And all of his stuff is pretty transparent. And I love when people do that stuff. It's so fascinating to see. And the reason he had this big launch recently is because they just raised $800,000. I think it was $800,000.
And very stupidly, it looks like they're spending that $800,000 to buy 20,000 t-shirts to send to their 30,000 members. So Vlad has some questionable judgment when it comes to finance. Yeah, real? Yeah. So they blog all about the business. So if you go to their blog.com, they blog about everything that's going on in the company. And so they're actually pretty transparent. And in the thing, he was like, yeah, and we're going to be sending out 20,000 t-shirts. And I was like, doing the math.
And I was like, oh, that's like 800 grand. So that's questionable. But he has a whole manifesto online. And it's pretty fascinating. And this is the type of entrepreneur I really like because he's got this blog, his personal website. He says, I'm dedicating the work. By the way, be honest, when you found out the founder's name was Vladimir, already you were pretty biased to like this thing, right? Yeah, man. You can add an extra million to that valuation if your name is Vladimir. Yeah, I'm in.
General rule. And I have no arguments with that. Yeah, he's he's born in Yugoslavia. And he like had all these like little like indie hacker projects for a long time. Worked at GoDaddy. So he's got, he's a very technical guy. He seems very savvy. He's a VP of product at GoDaddy. He had another company called Managed WP, which was a web application that helps users manage WordPress sites. And that got to a couple million revenue. So we have some experience.
But he has this blog where he goes, I'm dedicating this work on Cagy to my three children while I try to make the web a more humane and friendly or place for them. And I started reading that. I'm like, okay, I'm really fascinated by this guy. I'm very interested. And so on his blog, they talk all about the company and like how it's working and things like that. And he's got all these like great lines about how he's like, paying for search engines unusual.
But that's the only choice if you want to build an independent search engine that isn't ad supported. You could do donations, but I don't think it's going to work. Five billion people use a search engine. 99% of people are never going to pay. The thing is the tiny minority of people who think differently, the 1% that will pay, it's still quite a large number. That's 50 million people. And he talks about it. And 20 years of ad supported search have created resistance to the idea of paid search.
But a lot of people are already coming to the realization that the predicament that they found themselves in with ad supported search is not good for them. And my point through all this is, I think I agree with this guy. The issue is that I don't think he's going to win. I think I agree with all of his stuff about subscriptions and I'm on board that and Open AI is really good for that. I'm very fascinated with guys that are going after Google at the moment. There's been a few.
There was you.com, which I don't think is that intriguing. There is niva.com, so N-E-E-V-A, that was one. And there's a few others. And this is a type of idea that if you told me that you're going to launch this, most people as well as mine got reaction is like, there's no chance you're ever going to be Google. But when you start thinking about it, I think it's really interesting.
And I want to know what's your opinion of these people trying to build these search engines and do you actually think that any of them will work other than Open AI? I think I agree with you on pretty much all fronts, which is that Google's search over time has become more and more just used. You search for something and you get an ad. And they add the result. The top half of the page is ads. And that's what you get.
Google I think in Kaji's website, it says that Google, if you just take the revenue divided by the number of users on average, I believe that they make like 300 bucks a year off of each customer. So that's $23 a month. And that's like what you're worth to Google. So what this guy's doing is basically saying, hey, instead of Google making $23 a month off of you, you pay us $10 a month and we'll have no ads.
And I think that I agree with you, which is that the big threat to Google is obviously the AI driven engines and Google's trying to become that themselves. So whether it's Chat GPT or it's Google or it's Bing or it's some new one that we haven't heard of perplexity or whatever else, that is the big thing, which is it's a better experience. And so they're trying to win with better experience. Then you have duck.go, which is basically like we are the anti Google.
Right. We're going to and Kaji's in that same bucket where the anti anti whatever. I would say duck.goose is the surprising success. The amount of traffic they had, we did a whole thing on them, you know, in a few episodes ago, which was looking at the traffic numbers and how stunning they were. What I think is cool about Kaji is that it doesn't need to beat Google. And this is just like, I'm going to build this, I'm a cockroach.
I'm going to build this business and you can't kill me because I'm going to be supported by my customers right now. It sounds like he's probably making like what two to three million bucks a year in revenue. I think it's closer to one to 1.5. So it's making it, let's say 1.5 million in revenue and he's probably able to run the thing, break even a profitably at that rate.
And you know, he'll just keep crawling, but you know, next year he'll be at 40,000 members and that next year he'll be at 60,000 members or whatever. He'll just keep growing. And he's not even worth, it's not worth killing. If you're Google, it's too small to matter. And he doesn't have to become huge. I think what he's saying is like, my mission is for people that, you know, believe in this, the point, he says the 1% who would pay, I don't think it's 1%, I think it's like 0.1% that would pay.
Here's your option. And now the question is, how good is this? Like for example, you're into this. Did you sign up pay? Are you using this now instead of Google? It's so hard to use something instead of Google because they're the default everywhere. Yeah. And basically my frustration with Google is borderline to the point where I'm like, all right, I'm out. But the thing is, is that I'm like so, it's even more times Google and I am out of here.
The issue is like, I've logged in with everything like on Chrome. You know what I mean? I'm like, shit, I got to type it all these passwords, the socks. But I mean, I definitely, you know, chat GBT has definitely taken away at least 30% of my like Google time, which is a pretty insane number actually. And I, we're going to have to do an entire episode on Sergey Brin and Larry Page. These guys are crazy fascinating.
And I was reading a little bit about them when I was like researching how Google started. And they were like huge shitheads. And like Sergey Brin. Dude, they were shitheads. You're going to have to explain that one to me. So Sergey Brin, he's got this, he had his resume online and in the code, he put, if you expect a source code of his website, you'll find Brin's hidden objective laid out bear, which is, and this is in quotes. This is exactly what he had in the code.
I want a large office, good pay, very little work. Frequent expense account trips to exotic lands would be a huge plus. Is that real? That's insane. That's on. You can go to the website right now and find it. You would never expect somebody who's like, innermost goal is a big office, no work, expense accounts to create fucking Google. Yeah, it's funny. It's funny.
And then there's stories of Larry Page where he was just kind of like, they had this like combination of just like being really blunt and where blunt and just like not totally understanding normal human emotions. And so Larry and Sergey, they took pride in the fact that they would argue with each other and they would call each other stupid and be like, your idea is so stupid, that's dumb.
Why are you, and they would like fight and fight and fight and then one person would win and then the other person would like, can see and be like, oh, your idea is better. And they would bond over that. And then they're like, to all the other employees, they're like, that's what you all need to do. Unfortunately, when you're at like 50 or 100 or 300 people, most people aren't like that.
And there's these crazy stories of like, apparently, do you know how like a janitor when they take out the trash oftentimes and they replace the bag, they'll actually leave an empty bag at the bottom of the trash in case someone else wants to take it out and they're like, well, there's a bag already there for you. Larry saw this and he was like, that's the most efficient way I've ever seen anyone clean. That is brilliant.
And he made this whole like memo about how the janitor does that and how brilliant that is. And he's like, why can't you guys be like this? In fact, everyone in the office needs to be like this. Here's the new rules. And he laid out these like eight rules. And it was like, if you think that your idea is right, go straight to the person who's in charge and tell them exactly what you think and don't hold back.
Or it would be like, if you are working on a project and you are not providing value, leave that project right away and go and let the doers do what they need to do and just get them coffee and like, just like, serve them. Like he would do all these things that are very logical and like they disagree some more. Yeah. Like he would say these like crazy things that you hear them and like, yeah, I mean, that's more productive.
Unfortunately, like this whole thing called human emotion kind of gets in the way. And so it's probably not practical when you have 500 employees. But there's all these stories about how these guys would behave and it's very fascinating. And they were, they were shitheads when they first started. I think Google right now is going to this period where they're CEO kind of, I think it kind of sucks, to be honest. And so I think they're going to like come back.
But right now, I'm not bullish on Google. I think they're going to be around for a whole, a real long time because they're so big. But I'm eager to see something come and kind of crush them. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think the funny thing about all like crush them type of ideas is that when a company is really successful, it's like a giant castle with a huge moat. And everybody who tries to like siege the castle, it's like the cagies of the world.
They're basically trying to cross that moat and take over the castle and it's too hard the castle is too big, too strong, the moats too big, et cetera. And what ends up happening is that you, the thing that beats that castle is not somebody who comes and takes their land. It's somebody who just walks over like two miles and is like, hey, this is actually like, this is fertile land over here that everybody's ignoring. And they built a new castle over there.
And actually the thing that diminishes the castle is that that original castle is just no longer as relevant. Like the world and the attention has moved. The new plants that everybody wants, they grow on this other land over here and nobody took your thing, but you know, you became less relevant in the world. There's no one wants that thing anymore. Microsoft didn't defeat IBM or whatever by making, you know, by beating them at their own game. They were like, oh, actually the game is software.
It's operating systems. And then the things that beat the off the Microsoft monopoly and like Microsoft, the biggest tech company in the world got then beat by the groubles and the Amazon and the Facebook stuff in the world, which were like, hey, okay, cool. You can keep the operating system, we'll take the internet and Microsoft missed the internet. The internet was the place. And then even the internet was the place.
Then it was like the companies that made it unmoble were the ones that were like, oh, cool, yeah, you can have that desktop app. We're going to make Uber and we're going to we're going to create these new mobile companies, you know, Instagram WhatsApp's, and they outpaced the growth of Facebook. And so now the question now the thing is, well, AI is here and crypto is here.
And these are the new lands and then the big projects that are getting built here, they're just competing for something in a different game altogether. And I think that's really what ends up happening more so than somebody overtakes, you know, a company like Google. It's that Google becomes less relevant. You don't need search. Why do you not need search? Well, because the AI just does it. Why would I go? Why would I go search for links? That doesn't even make sense anymore. I don't need that.
I just, you know, I need the answer or even better than the answer. Oh, I just need this little AI agent that's just going to like look at what I'm doing and then like do jobs for me, right? Like I don't even have to go search for an answer. It knows the answer and then it does the task, right? That's where this is going. And so whoever does that is going to actually be the one that is the next Google without even creating a new search engine. Right.
And that's nine out of ten times it seems that's how like big innovative things come about where it's like, you know, all these people are trying to make the world's fastest car and they're trying to make a V6 turn it into a V8 and then we're going to turn it into a V10. We're going to put more cylinders in, more horsepower and then you're like, oh, this electric car just like went way faster and it has zero cylinders. You know what I mean? That's exactly how it works.
Did I tell you about the, my boss who his boss was Larry Page and what he tell me, so he didn't tell me many stories, but he told me one, which was I came in once and I was like, yeah, I was like presenting my goal. I was like, yeah, our goal is to do, you know, 9.1 this year, whatever I remember, the metric was like like 9.1 million users or something like that. And he's like, you know what Larry Page used to say when I would present a goal, like I'm going to do nine of something.
He's like, he would just say, that's a worst goal. If you could do nine, you could do 10. He's like, never set a goal at nine. And I was like, what? And he's like, I just said what I said, if you could do nine, you can do 10. Saying nine is just a wussy way to go about things. And I was like, he told you that. He's like, yeah, he would tell everybody that. And so I stole that. I made the change and then now in my company, I do the same thing.
If anybody ever comes to me, like, yeah, we're going to do four and a half. Now you're going to do five. You're going to do nine point two. No, no, you're going to do 10. Like if you're going to get nine points, or you can get to 10, trust me. It's like when five, 10 guys lie and they say they're five 11. It's like dog just say six one. Be the real thing. Act as if my friend act as if. All right. That's the pod. I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to.
I put my all in it like no days off. Rolls, let's travel never looking back.