He Built A $27M/yr Business From A PLANT Blog?!

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Episode 561: Shaan Puri (https://twitter.com/ShaanVP) and Sam Parr (https://twitter.com/theSamParr) tell the story of a niche plant blog becoming a $27M/yr gardening empire.

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Show Notes:
(0:00) Intro
(2:00) $27M ARR gardening influencer
(14:30) Fruit Marketing: How Hass avocados became #1
(23:30) New Movement: Man Camps
(31:00) Search Engines – Best Business In The World
(44:00) Sergey Brin and Larry Page Stories You’ve Never Heard

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Links:
• Plant Daddy on YouTube – https://www.youtube.com/@epicgardening
• Epic Gardening – https://www.epicgardening.com/
• Kagi – https://kagi.com/
• Camp MFM Sizzle – https://tinyurl.com/5bam77eb

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Check Out Shaan’s Stuff:
Need to hire? You should use the same service Shaan uses to hire developers, designers, & Virtual Assistants → it’s called Shepherd (tell ‘em Shaan sent you): https://bit.ly/SupportShepherd

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Check Out Sam’s Stuff:
• Hampton – https://www.joinhampton.com/
• Ideation Bootcamp – https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/
• Copy That – https://copythat.com
• Hampton Wealth Survey – https://joinhampton.com/wealth

He quit his job and in the first year he does it he hits actually five grand a month so he even surpasses his his one-year goal and he just keeps going so first year 60k second year like aund 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 Sam do you want to um do you want to start with up dog I might well thought I might catch a sleep in there uh that’s you should have just gave it to me that’s way below you you should have just gave it to me um all

Right before we start I want to dedicate this podcast Sean oh to two groups of people because I’ve I had runin with the these two groups of people and I’ve taken for granted how special these two group groups of people are the first one people who start businesses and are

English speaking as are uh not native English speakers it’s insane I like have hug I hug out recently with a few friends that uh 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 someone 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 come true while they have newborns or little kids how impressive is that like I didn’t

Take I I kind of took that for granted my parents did that when I was younger I don’t realize now now that I have a kid I realize how scary that is so I want to dedicate this podcast to those two groups of people wow good guy points

Okay I like it um dedication acceptance shout out to shout out to all those groups um I have a few interesting things to share with you today do you have a few interesting things or or what I have two things you’re going to like

What do you got I’m GNA take you on a journey so Sam Buckle up because I got a little something for you I’m GNA tell you about a journey I went down and the journey starts with a tweet I saw that was very interesting you know Bitcoin

Hit an all-time high price AI taken off my I wasn’t I’m 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 here what he said he goes these are the best avocados

I’ve ever had they were grown by my 93-year-old Japanese neighbor I have had used Google Translate to talk to her about the variety and she thinks it might be uh one that just grew from this this specific seed if that’s true this could be a new Landmark variety the H

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 uh it doesn’t take well to air layering I don’t know what this means he says so I’m going to have to start with

The seed I’m going have to grow it out the tree I’m going have to cut it from the mature tree graft it onto its own seed I don’t even know what any of this means but then he’s like and then I’m going to try to recreate this avocado it

Will probably be a three-year experiment wish me luck and so I saw this and I’ve what a noble Quest I said you’re like what do this avocado teach me about life no what has life led me to to make my life about this avocado because I am so fully invested in this three-year

Journey about this guy who’s going to 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 named Kevin Espiritu do you know this guy he’s calls himself the plant Daddy

On Twitter No but I’m in you don’t know this guy I think you do when I just started describing 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 all right so

This guy basically he used to work at scribe the like book in a box company that they help you produce books so he’s working at scribe he’s like an early employee there and on the side he um used to have hobbies of like video games and online poker and he was just playing

Non-Stop and so to get away from kind of his online addiction he’s like you know what I’m going to start gardening like him and his brother they’re this is the quote in the article they go hey let’s go hit up a nursery they go to a plant nursery and

They are like all right we don’t know anything about gardening but like we want to do something we want to do something away from a computer outside with our hands and they go buy a bunch of stuff and they’re trying to figure it out they go online they’re looking up

Blogs to learn and along the way he starts blogging his journey and so he’s at scribe and he his little blog starts getting you know a little bit of traffic because he’s posting his experiments he’s very relatable because he’s an absolute Nob beginner and so people who are Googling are also absolute new

Beginners and they start to like this and eventually he’s like you know what I’m gonna quit my job at the time the blog is making I don’t know 167,000 a year so roughly two two-ish grand a month a little bit more than that right so or a little less than two grand a

Month sorry so he’s uh he quits his job and he’s like I’m going to 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 the plant is like raised is that yeah

It’s like not in the soil and like in water something like that I said exactly I have no idea all right so he’s he creates R hydro which is like a Reddit community so he starts just building a community around other people who are interested in the same type of thing

He’s doing along the way he’s like oh dude I think this hydroponic thing is a little too Niche he rebrands it into something called epic gardening epic gardening today is huge is dude I’m on the website and I’m looking at his social numbers holy crap he’s got like 2

Million on Tik Tok 2 million on YouTube a 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 likable guy he’s got

The gift um that you need when you’re going to do this type of content and so he keeps going and he basically for 10 years essentially bootstraps this company so it starts with like a $10 domain pays five bucks for hosting and he was like all right I’m going to try

To get this thing his goal was I’m going to try to get to three grand a month because three grand a month means I can live off of this like blog Revenue he quit his job and in the first year he does it he hits actually five grand a

Month so he even surpasses his his one-year goal and he just keeps going so first year 60k second year like aund 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 he just raised a huge amount of money from churnin the same guys who backed we talked about eer bar stool others they have this content to Commerce idea and they’re like this guy in the gardening Niche is gonna be able to do big things and 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’ve been on YouTube for so long you know since you know basically 10 years now on YouTube he’s just keep evolving with whatever the new metag

Game is of YouTube and what ends up happening is that in 2020 [ __ ] takes off during Co So Co was the big like inflection point that like really took this from moderately successful to very successful two things happened Co first where his Channel all of a sudden he said he started adding

Like 15,000 subscribers a day because the same thing he had when he was like oh 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 AdSense YouTube ad revenue and then you know affiliate links to products and finally he’s like was he doing 30 million that way 30

Million ads no no way less than that he was doing like you know less than a million doing that but then he decides all right I’m gonna launch a 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 this is kind of a good idea and he starts to uh sell that product and you know 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 febles you know the

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 the the mid- tier

Creators like this guy or you know like us for example you have to actually create a niche product that’s going to be higher ticket higher value um 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

CAC so what does negative CAC means every business otherwise has a sales and marketing talk dirty to me baby I love negative CAC keep going CAC 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 it’s 80% of their revenues are just how much it costs to go market to to to acquire a customer with a media business like this what ends up happening is you get Negative CA meaning he gets paid one to2 million

Doar 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 chin guys are really smart about doing shout out to

Mike CNS over at Turnin where they recognized they identified that hey some of these creators have high trust they have high Authority in a niche and they actually have a business model where instead of spending 30 or 40% of your revenue on acquiring customers you actually negative CAC 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 acquire these customers and that’s the beauty of it and so then he jumped and he was went from making you know let’s say a million bucks a year to 7 million 7 million to

20 million and then now he’s over 30 million a year in in revenue and the other cool thing is he’s bolted on some Acquisitions all right everyone a quick break to tell you about HubSpot and this one’s really easy for me to talk about because I’m going to show you a real

Life example so I’ve got this company called Hampton join hampton.com it’s a a community for Founders doing between 2 million all the way up to like $250 million a year in revenue and one of the ways that we’ve grown is we’ve created these cool surveys and so we have a lot

Of Founders who have high net worths and we’ll ask them all types of questions that people typically are embarrassed to ask but provide a lot of value so things like how much the founders pay themselves each month how much money they’re spending each month what their payroll looks like if they’re optimistic

About the next year and their business all these questions that people are afraid to ask but well we ask them anyway and they tell us in this Anonymous survey and so what we do is we created a landing page using HubSpot landing page tool and it basically has a

Landing page that says here’s all the questions we asked give us your email if you want to access it and then I shared this page on Twitter and we were able to get thousands of people who gave us their email and told us they want this

Survey and I could see did they come from social media I can see did they come from Twitter from LinkedIn basically everywhere else that they could possibly come from I’m able to track all of that and then I’m able to see over the next handful of weeks how

Many of those people actually signed up and became a member of Hampton in other words I can see how much revenue came from this survey how much Revenue came from each traffic Source things like that but the best part is I can see how much revenue came from it and a lot of

Times it takes a ton of work to make that happen HubSpot made that super super easy if you’re interested in doing this you can check it out hubspot.com the Link’s in the description and I also put the link to the survey that I did so you can actually see the landing page

And how it worked and everything like that I’m just going to do that call to action then and it’s free check it out in the description all right now back to MFM hold on what’s he selling he’s got like a seed product um so they like some tray

Seed crap I don’t know I don’t I don’t know anything about this it’s called Botanical seeds um 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 or 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 Shephard too right it’s like let me buy this company that I is already a good business knowing that my audience will acquire a bunch of customers for it and

Like that’s what happened with shepher we basically tripled the business using this strategy he’s doing the same thing in the gardening Niche and so he bought this seed business and then he bought this like house plant business um which is actually a cool story so he’s like he

Gets into he’s like during Co everybody wanted like house plants I think you guys talked about this with Trends too like the dud we were we talked about this a year and a half I think before the pandemic about uh like suul succulents or like people are wanting to

Buy succulents online and there’s not a lot of options you were totally right you were ahead of trend what he did was he was like cool um should I start creating this content and he realized a very like you know in the in the uh 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 you know yourhouse plant.com and he’s like this actually

Has like good content and it’s good SEO they just 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 he does a who is lookup 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 ,000 do off this thing and then grows that property and so he’s done this a few times and he raised money from Chan

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 gonna win and you’re gonna win in such a big way it’s G 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 so non-obvious even four or five years go even when Co started to get more popular it’s like okay cool you’re a YouTuber okay cool you’re a YouTuber with the Ecom shop

It’s like no no no you are going to be the most trusted influencer in the gardening Niche and the gardening Niche you know look at how much there’s full retail brick and mortar stores that are selling fertilizer and different things like that like he can take this huge if

He does this right and now it’s just GNA be a question of how fast his kind of Business Development Can 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 like he’s got it’s he’s

Basically like a uh what’s the what’s it called chip and Joanna uh yeah Gaines yeah the G yeah 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 sounded like an insult I

Didn’t mean I didn’t mean for it to sound like that uh but this is awesome uh and dude these guys at churnin have done this so many times they did it with meater who we or was it meater who we talked about a few podcasts ago they did

It with cars and& bid and Doug demorrow 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 uh 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 hos avocado and so I go look it up I’m like where did this hos avocado come from learned a couple things number one

It’s not pronounced H it’s h so we’re all saying you’re wrong that’s the first thing I learned second thing do you know the story have you heard the story about the the has avocado no I why would no all right so basically avocados W 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 there were these it was a green product it was not very uh popular it didn’t taste very good and it

Had 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 the 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 just like yeah you want to go go eat a testicle and so nobody really liked this this fruit so enter Rudolph H Rudolph H basically is a mailman 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 thing to like take and it didn’t work and so he’s like ah didn’t work whatever he thinks 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 it grow for like a year or two and then his kids like notice that there’s fruit on it they PL they pluck it they open it up and the kids really like it this is how the story

Goes kids really like it he’s like oh why you eating that that’s that’s not good and they’re like no it’s great he tries it he’s like 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 it was just more of the actual like filling and he’s likew these are actually really good and so he starts eating it you know word starts to spread he goes and he partners with the local nursery and he’s like hey can you help

Me grow more of this tree um because this tree is like bearing this amazing fruit and so the nursery is like cool yeah we’ll we’ll do more of this tree and we’ll give you you know some royalty off this thing and then now as avocados 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 patented it in 1935 so we’re talking Le avocados as we know it today are less than 100 years old so now here’s a couple of

Interesting things I found from this so 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 uh banana from 100 plus years ago tasted like a carrot they weren’t as sweet and that’s happened that’s happened with a

Lot of our fruit it’s gotten sweeter and sweeter and sweeter so they’re like the honey Cris Apple uh 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 because it’s like it’s not exactly how

It used to be and and the health benefits are are aren does have the same properties in it because it’s a different thing uh optimized for taste so um couple 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 is a fruit patent um he didn’t make much money off the 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 the LA Times that even though he go my dad created the greatest

Avocado in the world and his total royalties lifetime are $4,800 less than $5,000 he made off off of uh of of discovering this and I I say discovering because he didn’t invent this he didn’t mean to do it um he didn’t like M you know like manually try to create this he

Discovered it and even he says this he goes it was an act of God that I discovered this that this fruit and so um 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 like the skin was basically like all wrinkly and like tough like

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 like fruit Association of California comes together and does probably what the greatest like greatest act of any

Committee ever they were like look couple things number one we can’t keep calling this [ __ ] testicles and alligator pairs like 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 that they did that was very very smart they were like cool uh why aren’t people buying these they’re like well because they look like they’ve gone bad right they’re dark it’s like black basically it looks like fruit that’s

Gone bad so they’re like all right new new marketing campaign we’re g to put stickers on every one of these that says ripe tonight basically that this is the 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 on every avocado and suddenly avocado St sale started to Boom because once you try it you like it but people weren’t trying it because they they thought it had gone bad instead saying this is ripe ready to eat tonight that was the second

Thing that they did um and then the third thing was that they were like they needed to educate people that a green avocado was actually a 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 like once you realize that you can learn two things you can learn a lot about marketing and you can learn a lot about um you know what 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 Iz that even avocados were basically like you know they were just someone’s some drop shipper somewhere had a great idea dude we first of all this is awesome this is

Very interesting we should do an entire episode on fruit and marketing it’s actually really interesting uh Planet Money have had a podcast on the honey crisp apple you know it’s the most popular right you know before a lot of apples like that existed it was red delicious uh 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 was trying to grow business blows up and we check in with him we’re like yo like what are you thinking for what’s next and I think he’s gonna say some AI crap some like

Crazy you know whatever some some big idea and he’s like I’m I’m trying to invent a new fruit and I was like what and he’s like yeah he’s like you ever had a a mango yeah he goes you think you’ve had a mango wait till you try my

Mango like I’d love to try your mango send it to me he sent it to me and basically he was he was like he was basically like the shape of the fruit really matters so for example like the ease of eating so he had these like uh his mangoes were in like circular

Spheres basically like little 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 this what’s it called Well he kind of pivoted off the idea 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 to 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 but and then you have I feel very fortunate that I got to try that mango and the crazy part is and this is like actually kind of like an interesting MO is that it takes 10 or 15

Years to do because imagine if you’re building a website and you could only make a change once a year to that website and see the results and be like ah [ __ ] 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 um and so we should do a whole thing right like you know I guess there’s some rules around the patent so the rules that I read were basically like you if you want to do a fruit plat

Patent you can’t um you basically 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 PL the

First plant patent was this guy Henry who planted the 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 preneurs to ever live uh yeah we I I just looked him 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 just trying to learn like the rest of us to get business in 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 them and get them on here that’s kind of cool yeah let’s do it I would love that so I’m gonna uh show you something here 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 of vlogging and you’ll notice that the video is not a vlog why because your boy sucks at vlogging it’s hard learned that 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 um walking into the house and I’m like I just walk into the house he’s like no no no you can’t just walk in I was like what do you mean he 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 I just walk in places there’s no one here to talk to what am I supposed to say anyways didn’t work out so well but we have a cool video we are playing for the Rolex oh

God this is Camp MFM the once a year Retreat I host with Mr Beast where we get 20 entrepreneurs in 3 days is living in one house together where we play basketball play poker what the was that and just have a whole lot of fun and

This year I asked my buddy max if he would come with us and record the whole thing always has to have a Camera man there’s a lot of good not as much good [ __ ] to the championship team has to do a cold Pune in the pond yeah there go down and Screen hey the the the buzzer went Off really deep breaths [Applause] Ready set go [Applause] W straight to the top never going down don’t superill had a great time and can’t wait for next year all right so two things number one number one if you’re just listening to the audio version you got to go to YouTu 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 Sam I have three questions for 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’s doing their job right and you search my first million click on this episode and you’ll see the video um here so Sam I have three questions for you number one how much fomo 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 because you didn’t skip it I could 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 by way 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 uh he just had a baby and then everyone’s like oh yeah yeah yeah and nodding and then one guy goes wasn’t

That two and a half months ago and then we were all like yeah what the hell and I even thought about it you can totally go for two days it’s two and a half months in and so then we all laughed at you and then moved on it 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 was I

Wrote this down to let you know I don’t think you can have any of that music on there you know I think it’s gonna get taken down no I think it’s be fine Conor price that’s Conor Price’s song he was gonna attend the camp it’s fun the first song was Dropkick Murphy’s

The first song is fine and it’s gonna be absolutely fine nothing’s gonna get taken down this isn’t like a like oh I just got to ask for Mission type of thing like it literally won’t like like the algorithm’s gonna like prevent this from going live so I think you have to

Change that song but it’s great I thought it was great okay narc um okay third third question third question for you have you noticed this trend uh right part of this is me just showing you a vacation photo album basically but the other part is noticing that um I think I started a

Movement dude I think I just [ __ ] around and started a movement so I didn’t mean to do this did you just invent vlogging no not the vlogging this 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 it’s something 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

I have a few of these that are now started so um our 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 um Pat walls from starter story uh

Was like Hey what if we did this for tennis pickleball whatever and they called it the Mr open like the month Rec Revenue open great name that’s better than our name [ __ ] this guy uh this guy in Hampton messaged me and he goes hey heard about

CFM so awesome had the same idea this guy Victor he was like I’m going to do this for poker and so he did a poker getaway weekend uh rented a house invited a bunch of people and they just played poker all weekend I think this is

The new new wave of uh of getting you can either just get together for drinks but guess what the cool kids don’t drink anymore everyone’s sober as a salad dude isn’t itane did you did you see uh 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 yeah 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 uh you know

Suck our thumbs this is not going to work so next thing nobody U 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 uh 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 um you can invite me I would love to know about them and then politely politely pass cuz I don’t like to leave the house that much but I think more people should do

These and I’m hoping that um 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 been going on forever but that was the past but I’m the present future and I just

Needed to tell you that I think it’s awesome I uh 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 uh after seeing that video good job and vlogging not

Only I don’t care if you’re giving birth next year when it’s happening you better be there it uh dude vlogging sucks by the way D Mr Beast made fun of you in that video or he made fun of he was always with the camera was he giving you

Guys a hard time for having a camera there yeah cuz I showed in you know with a camera following me basically and uh the funny part is always with the camera that’s the first time I’ve ever done a vlog as evidenced by the fact that I at

The end I was like this Vlog kind of sucks let’s just make a hype video out of it um but it was really fun actually having a guy there this our buddy Max came and uh he did a great job it’s really embarrassing I see a lot of

People like vlogging and walking around and they have a guy uh following them on camera it’s it’s quite embarrassing it draws a lot of attention to you I find it to be very very humiliating the upside you might get famous the downside you’re immediately humiliated um all right let me tell you

About something yeah I’m gonna talk a little bit about the best business in the world now this business chamath 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 get

Right Ritz crackers no it’s got to be Google Google Facebook yeah Google and 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 Duck Go which I called that shot I think I

Missed the I thought it was going to grow a lot faster than it than it uh actually has but it’s like slowly coming about this by the way 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 early yeah it’s like hey do you like making right-hand turns on a red light I invented that I was doing that I was doing that when I was 16 yeah my permit I created it I

Created that uh and so the reason let me tell you why I’ve been interested in it type four athletic fitting dress pants hey the auto complete didn’t even had no idea what I was doing there that is not a common search thick boy parants 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 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 uh 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 you

Just talked about how they uh like have gone through some stuff and you still believe in the company I’m slowly to I’m slowly starting to lose fa faith in their company because the search has been really [ __ ] and it’s starting to piss me off and 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 hate it 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 large scale hypertextual web search engine riveting riveting stuff but please take our my power writing course Larry P that title is awful and in that paper they talk about

Like what they think is possible with a search engine and and and they kind of started from an academic point of view which is pretty cool though to see like their their predictions and there’s this one line it says in general it could be argued from the cons 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 like the the sub text on their like the sub headline is just psych like they just like uh and then and they said for this reason uh as for 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 needs and they actually go on to say that they think a subscription service uh search engine is actually the answer of course that is the opposite of what they’ve eventually uh have become you know Google is a$ 1.5 trillion

Dollar 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 thousand but I would I would imagine that you could basically

Fire everyone but like a thousand 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 remot 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 a an alternative now ultimately I think actually open AI is going to be an

Alternative uh Gardner had this report where they said by 2026 they think 25% uh Google search is going to be reduced by 25% because of uh AI but I found a new alternative that just launched uh publicly a few days ago or about a month ago they’ve been around quietly but they

Like kind of made they had like a big like launch uh coming out party the other day and it’s kind of cool so it’s called I actually don’t know how to pronounce it it’s Kaji yeah sorry Good Start I mean how do you say this word k

A gii yeah Kaji Kaji K kg 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 is that there are zero ads and it’s five to $10 a month for a subscription and I think that 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 cad.com

K ai.com stats he reveals all of his stats and so you could see the number of paid members you can see how many searches are happening per day you all of this stuff is pretty transparent and I love when people do that stuff it’s so fascinating to see and the reason he had

This like big like launch recently is because because they just raised 8800 I think it was $800,000 and very stupidly they looks like they’re spending that $800,000 to buy 20,000 t-shirts to send to their 30,000 members so so Vlad uh Vlad has some questionable judgment when it comes to finances that real

Yeah so they blog like all about the business so if you go to their uh blog do blog. ci.com they blog about like 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 uh 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 that’s like 800 Grand like so so that’s questionable but they like he has like this whole Manifesto online and it’s pretty fascinating and this this is the type of entrepreneur

Who I really like because he’s got this blog uh 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 I’m in you can add

An extra million to that valuation if your name is Vladimir I’m in general rule and I have no arguments with that yeah he’s 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 was a VP of product at GoDaddy uh he had another company called manage WP which was a web application that helps users manage uh WordPress sites and that got to a couple million Revenue so he has some experience but he has this blog

Where he goes I’m dedicating this work on Kaji to my three CH children while I try to make the web a more Humane and friendlier 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 he 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 pay for search engine is 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 5 billion people use a search engine 99% of people are never going to pay the thing is the tiny minority of people who think differ the 1% that will pay it’s still quite a large number that’s 50 million people

And he talks about 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 I don’t think he’s going win I think I agree with all of his stuff about subscriptions and I’m on board with that and open AI is really

Good for that uh but I’m very fascinated with guys that are going after Google at the moment there’s been a few there was u.com which I don’t think is that intriguing uh there was nea.com so neeva 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 gut reaction is like there not a 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 uh of these people trying to build these search engines and do you actually think that any of them will work other than open AI well I think I agree with you on pretty much all fronts which is that uh Google’s search over

Time has become more and more just you 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 that’s what you get Google I think uh in kaji’s website it says that Google if

You just take their revenue divided by the number of users on average I believe that they make like 300 bucks a year off of each customer I think it’s like 277 so that’s 23 bucks 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 bucks a month off you you pay us 10 bucks 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 uh engin and Google’s trying to become that themselves so you know

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 Duck Go which is

Basically like we are the anti- gooogle right we’re gonna and kaji’s in that same bucket we’re the anti anti whatever I would say duck duck ghost is the surprising success the amount of traffic they have we we did a whole thing on them you know in a few episodes ago

Which was looking at their traffic numbers and how stunning they were what I think is cool about Kaji is that it doesn’t need to beat Google 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 uh I think it’s closer to one to 1.5 of subscription making let’s say 1.5 million in revenue and he’s probably

Able to run the thing Break Even or profitably at that rate and um you know he’ll just keep crawling you know next year he’ll be at 40,000 members and then 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 it’s too small to matter um 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 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 um 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 six or seven more times Google and I am out of here the the issue is like I’ve logged

In with everything like on Chrome you know what I mean I’m like [ __ ] I gotta type in all these passwords this sucks but I mean I definitely you know chat GPT has definitely taken away at least 30% of my like Google time which is a pretty insane number actually and I uh

We’re going to have to do an entire episode on Sergey BR and Larry pige 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 [ __ ] and like Sergey Bren dude they were [ __ ] you’re gonna have to

Explain that one to me so Sergey Bren he’s got this uh he had his resume online and in the code he put uh if you expect the source code of his website you’ll find brin’s hidden objective laid out bare 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 could go to the website right now and find it uh you would never expect

Somebody whose like innermost goal is a big office no work expense accounts to create [ __ ] Google yeah it’s it’s funny and then there’s stories of Larry pagee um where he he was just kind of like they had this like combination of just like being really blunt and where uh 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 concede and be like oh your idea is better and they would buy 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 uh apparently uh 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 uh if you think that your idea is

Right go straight to the person who’s in charg 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 and like he would do all these things that very logical and like you dis agree some more yeah like he would say these like crazy things that you hear them 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 [ __ ] when they first started I

Think Google right now is going through those uh period where their CEO kind of I think it kind of sucks to be honest uh 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 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 kaj’s of the world they’re basically trying to cross that moat and take over the castle and it’s too hard the Castle’s too big too strong the Mo’s too big Etc 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 it’s like hey this is actually like this is fertile land over here that everybody’s ignoring and they build 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 no one wants that thing anymore like 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 the Microsoft Monopoly and like Microsoft the biggest

Tech company in the world got then beat by the Googles and the Amazon and the Facebooks of 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

When the internet was the place then was like the companies that made it on mobile were the ones that were like oh cool yeah you can have that desktop app we’re going to make you know Uber and we’re going to we’re going to create these new mobile companies you know

Instagram whatsapps and they outpaced the growth of Facebook and so now the qu now the thing is well AI is here and crypto is here and these are the the new lands and then the big projects that are getting built here they’re just comp they’re just competing for something in

A different game altogether and I think that’s really 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 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 gonna

Actually be the one that is the next Google without even creating a new search engine right and that’s nine out of 10 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 a V6 turn it into a V8 and then we’re going to turn 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 uh you know what I mean that that’s how it works did I tell you about the um my boss who his boss was Larry pagee and what he tell so he didn’t tell me many stories but he told me one which was I came in once and I was like yeah

Um I was like presenting my goal I was like yeah our goal is to do you know 9.1 this year uh I don’t remember what 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 uh present a goals like I’m gonna do nine of something he’s like he would just say that’s a wuss goal if you could do nine you can do 10 he’s like never set a goal at nine it’s like and then I was like what and he’s like I just said

What I said if you can 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 and I I made the change and then now in my

Companies I do the same thing if anybody ever comes to me like yeah we’re gonna do four and a half now you’re gonna do five yeah we’re gonna do 9.2 no no no you’re gonna do 10 like if you can if you’re gonna get 9.2 you can get to 10

Trust me it’s like when uh 510 guys lie and they say they’re 5’11 it’s like dog just say 61 be the real thing yeah act as if my friend act as if um all right that’s the Pod