4 startup ideas using viral loops and memes to get you paid (steal these $1M+/year ideas)

0:00any content that's going viral related to a Creator inventing a new style of making work and sharing it on Tik Tok is a product that could be sold on a monthly basis as a as a box company or in a Marketplace and this is a product you buy that allows you to create content around your purchase and in doing so you're in inadvertently marketing the thing you bought I one theme in my all my stuff is like how do you make it so that your customers share your story and bring you more business organically which is honestly a good prompt for anyone listening for any business it's like pick a business and

0:38then be like okay I'm Maddie Mo what is the viral version of this business I I'm trying to cheat to make my life as easy as possible and the viral Loop built into the business is a hell of a cheat [Music] this is going to be a special episode Maddie Mo the most famous artist you don't do that many interviews these days and I feel lucky to have snagged you for for your brain to give us some startup ideas my pleasure to be here it's a long time coming easier to pin you down for a podcast than a dinner in Miami so that is true um but for people who don't know

1:24you can you tell them the two or three craziest things that you've done yeah and done is a relative word I mean I operate a large art studio and work with a whole bunch of different people so I've facilitated or helped out with some crazy stuff one that might be of note is uh the changing of the Hollywood Sign to say hollyweed that was done by an artist in my studio uh when California legalized cannabis um a few years back and I painted a block of houses millennial Hank a developer came to me and said that they were having a hard time getting a demolition permits and so they

2:05said what could we do that would really uh make a stink so we painted this block of houses Millennial pink thousands of people came to take pictures in front of them and the city ultimately um decided that the houses need to come down which was an interesting urban development project um I taught a famous dog how to paint a portrait of itself um and that that that portrait and video did better than most artists ever do in their entire lives I DED a dragged a duffel bag full of a million dollars in cash a transparent duffel bag full of a million dollars of cashr an art fair

2:40built the fuselage of a private jet that allowed take people to take selfies inside of it got credit for all those monoliths that started popping up and most recently have decided I want to build an art town and move to the middle of New Mexico and have been um shipping away at that so what I love about you is you hijack you hijack The Narrative and you do it through ART and that's the lens of our conversation today uh you've got a few cool ideas I just want to jam with you um where should we start well the reason I hijacked the narrative as I started an

3:17advertising technology back in like 2008 9 10 when Facebook's uh API was emerging and YouTube and the iPhone were emerging and realized that there were these new centers of attention and there were certain metrics or places that you metrics you can manipulate or places you needed to be seen uh in order to capitalize on those those attention portals or places for attention and um that's where I really hone my skills that I'm now kind of playing out in art um most of my art to date has been me starting with a headline thinking to myself like what headline could I make and then reverse engineering actually

3:57actually how to do it which publication to pitch it to how to create enough digital artifacts to tell the story um I've shied away from that and I would say like in 2020 when the pandemic hit I was looking at you and Jack butcher leading these digital communities and realized that was definitely the future um so I I would say that you guys were a big inspiration for that um and started an art community and then realized there was all these ancillary businesses in addition to being a direct consumer artist or a gallery artist um that were fascinating that's supported the entire ecosystem and community and that not a

4:34lot of entrepreneurs were building and so I think that's where we're going to start is like think about the world of art as more than just Galleries and artists it's a whole bunch of infrastr between and much of it is being ignored by the powers that be the major institutions because they're set up to sell certain type product to a certain type person for a certain type of result um and that's mostly really expensive product as a store of value and sometimes a way to avoid paying taxes yeah and I'm happy you said that so because a lot of people are are listening to this and they're like art I

5:09don't like Art's cool but I'm here because I want to create a cash flowing business and what they don't realize is that you can do both yeah and you can reframe what art means art doesn't have to be a square white cube with some paintings on the walls art can be a way of living like a way of justifying the materials you use the choices you make deeply studying your Craft um I think of myself as more living an artistic lifestyle than portraying the um archetypal artist um and so that's the takeaway is like as a startup entrepreneur you can live your life artfully and that will actually

5:53lead to deeper meaning and perhaps better results all right let's dig in bro okay um so we should we talk about these ideas yeah okay I think I think we should start with this idea of a mural agency so it's not a new idea I've already built one I know the ins and outs of it very well um The Challenge I had with scaling was moving to New geographies and so the opportunity lies in indiv individuals realizing that they're in a a tier 2 City a tier three City there's no other mural agency in town and you can effectively Arbitrage uh the cost of of buying a billboard or

6:39Arbitrage the cost of generating uh social media uh attention by creating murals for Brands and I'll talk you through how this business works so if you're driving around any City you see Billboards a billboard company bought that infrastructure they put up uh Billboards they manage the placements they manage uh in how much traffic goes to those placements they manage sometimes the creative production and they sell that to advertisers advertisers need that more and more today especially for hyper local advertising or really creative out of home advertising um but the billboard Mafia owns all those placements if you're driving around a city you also will notice a whole bunch of blank walls

7:22and those blank walls and the billboard world could be referred to as like Remnant inventory their inventory that hasn't been turned into a billboard placement maybe because it can't be turned into a billboard placement for for practical reasons um but here's the pitch you go to a business owner or building owner and you say hey you got this wall how would you like to make a few hundred extra bucks a month they say wow that's cool never heard of that you sign an agreement with them to be able to manage placements on their wall um you then photograph that wall take dimensional measurements uh package it

7:59up you figure out kind of generally what the through traffic is and then you can price it for sale one for the CPM advertising that you can sell comparable to that of a billboard to an Advertiser and two for the artistic creation of the mural so the services associated with that and that can very easily scale to a multi-million dollar business and I'll tell you how hey everyone if you're anything like me you've got a ton of design work that you need websites landing pages emails social assets you name it but you don't just want beautiful landing pages or beautiful websites you want the stuff that's going to convert you want the

8:44stuff that's going to actually drive value that's where design scientist.com comes in it's an agency that for one monthly price will do all your design work all your copy work all your engineering and do stuff that actually scales your Revenue you don't need a designer you need a design scientist let's go design scientist.com I liked it so much I invested in the business one billboard placement or or one mural placement let's let's go with mural placement one mural placement can be anywhere from1 to $20,000 in a hight trffic area you get a handful of of of landlords to sign deals with you all of a sudden you control millions of dollars

9:31of inventory you go find a killer sales team you go find a few painters and all of a sudden you're just back officing a mural agency okay and you know you say like start a sales team and find painters but how do you actually go and do those things okay so um start a sales team you you have to have some hard skills to be able to do some of these things like you would need to collateralize your offering take photos of the billboard or the the the mural I keep calling it a billboard because that's effectively what it is um take photos of the building measure it

10:11figure out the total square footage make a nice little PDF that says this is that build that placement um go online and figure out what the through traffic is based on people driving by add that um extrapolate that number out on a daily basis to a monthly basis come up with a total number of impr Impressions you expect to make um for a particular Advertiser come up with a handful of formats of types of murals you could paint it could be a straight sign which is probably a lower-end production or it could be hyper realistic like photograph and that could be a higher end production and then you uh you go out to

10:49advertisers that are advertising on billboards and say hey Billboards get ignored murals are cool for X Y and Z reasons one of those reasons is the process of putting it up draws attention everyone driving by is going to see this thing going up they're going to be have some kind of emotional connection to it as it gets produced eventually they going to drive by it and be like wow the second thing that's kind of cool about these things is people will take a picture of a mural they will not take a picture and share a picture of a billboard so you're going to get organic social Impressions and you're going to

11:22get a whole bunch of earned media out of this placement and you get to work with artists and if you pick the right artist you might be able to get them to post on their social feed and tap into their influence and then all of a sudden you have these multiplying effects on a placement that you're already paying for so why wouldn't you work with us and so that's the sales pitch I'm like sold bro um then and your second question was how do you get a team of artists there's a gazillion artists out there that are not making it as full-time artists and in fact to make

11:57it as a full-time artist is kind of a curse because you become a like a packaging and shipping and customer service company and you no longer make art um so you've got these artists who would rather paint murals in their free time for an hourly paycheck than work at Starbucks and so you start reaching out to them on Instagram finding out other artists that have painted murals in your your local area and you say how' you like to be part of our mural agency um we'll go find you clients will pay you a flat fee for production you give us your portfolio of work we represent that

12:34portfolio work to our clients um if a client chooses you and has some kind of like design phase that they need to go through will make sure you get paid how does that sound go out and get a dozen different mural lists and all of a sudden you have a bunch of different capabilities to sell to these advertisers and from like a revenue and profit perspective how big does this get and how profitable is it I Against I can speak to my business it was a big like high six figure business with a dozen walls in LA and that was not 100% fill rate and that was with a team of like

13:09five different painters um that business shuddered during the pandemic when people were no longer buying out of home placements and this whole thing kind of fell on its head on its face but I think there's an opportunity to bring it back um you could probably get 10 grand per wall per month so good sales team um maybe it's a 10% sales fee for anyone that brings you a lead it's 1,200 bucks of the or 10 or 1,000 bucks of the 10 grand um painter maybe pay him, 1500 bucks so you're still at a 75% margin maybe you've got some equipment another 5% you're at 70% margin and then maybe

13:52pay the building under 10% th000 bucks a month all of a sudden you've got a 60% margin business and it's just turning out else yeah and I wonder if and you kind of mentioned it tier 2 and tier three cities like I wonder if this is even more interesting in in smaller cities because just no one's doing it right and if you get like a a new local business that comes in they're going to want something cool and splashy and they're probably going to be willing to pay you for a couple months of advertising yeah and you might not get 10 or 15 grand there because the

14:24traffic's smaller but the margins probably are bigger there right you just got to figure out how you can get cool artists to small towns but you know I think you can do that I mean cool artists are in small towns and they're waiting to break out and they're very hungry it's just about building the Frameworks around them to actually enable them to earn with their talent totally and it's cool for them because then they can point to like hey I did this mural and it puts them on the map literally another way you can kind of speed up your sales process is um is work with property developers that have

15:02tons of buildings and then you can go out with massive scale to a big Advertiser like a Pepsi or Coca-Cola and say hey do you guys want to buy 10 placements across this tier 2 City and do this really cool campaign and then you can charge some kind of crazy like handh holdy Services fee on top of the actual work and placements it's really cool because if you're doing you know a million bucks a city and you're making you know 5 600 Grand per City like could you know could you go to four cities like it's not crazy no and then you become an acquisition Target for a Lamar

15:39Billboards or um colossal media um because they need to expand their current efforts which are mostly based in tier one cities there you go all right take it go for it do it do it idea one mty Mo um I like that one you know what I like about that one I like that it's just not complicated it's so easy it's like it's so it has like four or five moving Parts but it's assuming you you get the artist you understand how to sell you're personable uh you iterate with like landlords and and uh property developers like you figure out who what your Niche is and then you pick the right

16:25City once you have it set up you got a good thing go yeah if I was in a tier one city I'd be doing that again but uh I'm in a not a tier one city anymore Fair that's why you give it away exactly um we'll go we'll go with this art rentals business and we're we're gonna do three art businesses and then one that's kind of like um close to my heart given the thing I'm doing out in tukum car New Mexico um so art rentals there's this art dealer called Stephan squiz who was referred to by the New York Times as the patron Satan for his art

17:04collecting practices and the way he views the art world I think he's a genius and he does a couple things one is he goes to artist and says hey I'll pay for all of your production and your studio and I'll pay you a living wage but all the work you create I get to own and sell and in some cases you get a REV share on and what that does does is it enables him to ma amass a massive inventory of art at a relatively low cost per unit um it also allows him to control the supply of a particular artist's uh like ove or or production um

17:46which can influence prices down the line and in some cases when if the artist blows up you've got all this inventory that's super valuable and that's happened to him for a couple times um this other thing that has happened is he's got this Mass massive inventory of Art and he was trying to think about what to do with it and so he started to rent it out to interior decorators and tier one cities um people that kind of like stage homes like 10 20 $50 million do homes in La put really good art up and often times uh the house just gets fought with the art in it if it's well

18:20placed and so he liquidates his inventory he's getting a rental fee and he's getting a Services fee to transport the work from his warehouse and install it now that works really good for high-end art in tier one cities but the thinking is if you're in a small town or let's call it a tier 2 City not a small town um and you can go Network in with the art art community I'm willing to bet there's a lot of inventory just sitting around with nothing to do artists make work they don't know how to sell it yet their demand hasn't caught up with their production they're not at their not at

18:54where they want to be just yet so you say to them let me consign this work which effectively means let me take the art place it sell it and take a percentage of the sale in order to do that work for you and for many artists that's awesome because they don't want to be sales agents and so if you go and get enough of this work signed up you photograph it you inventory it you build out a database of this work you go talk to interior decorators you go talk to commercial developers we're building big buildings you go talk to Hotel operators and they're willing to lease this work

19:28from you and you can charge something like 10% of the sale price with an option to buy it after seven years or 10 years or or whatever or a discount if you buy it after three um you charge a Services fee for an installation so the the the the leasor would likely want to keep the art for a while because they have to pay an installation fee and a deinstallation fee and you effectively create a subscription Revenue model out of this Remnant art inventory you give a r share back to the artists for enabling you to have access to the inventory and you just manage a massive database of

20:03artwork sitting in studios I think what's so smart about this idea is when artists think about their assets their pieces of art they think about working with Galleries and I think correct me if I'm wrong galleries take half of the revenue sometimes more sometimes more so a huge percentage now this is kind of flipping it on its head and it's saying forget about the galleries for a second we're actually going to go to this completely new channel that you've never thought of um it's going to be like a completely new almost agent that manages it you and the cool part is there's probably more liquidity in you know condo markets and

20:50new home developments and interior design jobs than people walking into an art gallery in your local town and being like that piece looks cool I want to buy it precisely and that's largely requires a reframing of what art is some people think of art as like the most important cultural artifacts of a generation and to be real many artists are not making the most most important cultural artifacts of generation they're making pretty things and what are pretty things decorations so if you're selling decorations and you can realize as an artist you're the maker and of decoration you probably want to sell through the appropriate channels your

21:34decorations I wonder what other assets are like this like what are other assets that are just marketed to the wrong channel it's that's a really good question I'm not smart enough to have that answer off the top of my head what do you think I was yeah I I'll give one off the top of my head so hand clothing so there's this big uh you know the last five years let's say shift towards thrifting and buying secondhand clothing and right now you either sell it on Poshmark where you're not getting that much money or you give it away to Goodwill so it's free um I think that there's an

22:20opportunity to take secondhand clothing and do deals with retail shops selling clothing I don't quite get how that works I think it's different than art in that well here let me tell you so you go to you go to the store right and the store is a boutique selling men's fashion let's say and you're like I'm G to go put this secondhand currently you don't sell any secondhand stuff I'm gonna go put this secondhand stuff that I've curated from let's say Goodwill or other places and we're going to split the revenue 50% 50% um but I'm also going to charge you a installation fee and a deinstallation

23:04fee um so why is this cool because like most of these shops don't have like a secondhand section and they don't want to it's like a whole new channel for them right so it's a similar concept um where and what I love about all these businesses is including your mural one like the startup costs aren't very much money you just have to like do the deal and find the channel yeah so I don't think it's sold in clothing stores per se but it's like a a popup Boutique in a coffee shop or at a bowling alley or something like that where you have a secondhand retail

23:51vintage store that pop ups pops up in different locations it's effectively flea market stuff I'll give you another example of one that just came to mind coffee cups should have some kind of thing on them that markets something and when I was in LA I did a lot of the murals and and brand placements for Alfred coffee um through my mural agency they were like a network of walls that we sold through and once a wall got painted then the advertiser would often want to buy the sleeves for all the coffee cups as well so it's like it's taking these services and bringing them to a retail

24:33store and adding Revenue to their current infrastructure which is the hard startup cost of getting like a brick and mortar going yeah I like this a lot super easy super easy I also think there's another Trend like on Friday I'm meeting someone for coffee at a at a clothing shop that they're doing a popup coffee shop within the clothing shop so I think you can create I think you can create an agency that is basically a Marketplace of like connecting different retailers with different service providers and different advertisers and just middleman the whole thing agreed so good go do it someone do it how many people actually go do the

25:22startups and then email you and be like I did it I did one of these and it worked there's actually been a few people that have emailed me and been like you've changed my life this has been life-changing I heard an idea that you said one year ago I took it and I just sold my company for x amount of dollars or I just hit 1 million in revenue and especially now at the pod's grown so much like it's getting crazier and crazier I love that what a service thanks for doing that Greg I mean to me it's just like selfishly I I'm one of those people and

25:57I think you are too like I'm an idea junkie and to me this is therapy like getting out ideas jamming on ideas just to me like this is my time to just it's my guilty pleasure and what I'm learning is that a lot of people are sick like me and and sick like you probably and and and need time to just flesh out ideas because we see the world and it's it's just not perfect right we see the oh what if this happened and what did that happen we're like What if people so I don't even do it fully self-servingly I do it also just for myself it's great I love this

26:40concept um should we jump into the next one yeah let's do it okay so this one I don't know that it's a gigantic business but it could be and here's why it could go viral um and so this one is this idea that every day I open Tik Tok and I love TiK ToK by the way it's so fun um every day I open Tik Tok and I see some kind of like new creative method being used by some artist that invented that method and there's a certain number of skilled people that can replicate that method but because they're skilled they're probably going to be doing their

27:23own thing but then there's this whole audience of people clicking like and comment ing on these like new viral methods that would probably buy like an art kit and I'll give you an example like there's this guy that does like spin paintings and you just dump paint on a canvas that's spinning you could easily sell that motor and a few components to enable anyone to make a spin painting or there's this other artist that has these spray caps that are unique where he like pipes out a whole bunch of different caps and as you spray it creates this really cool texture that could easily be a product that you

28:00sell to everyone that has watched this artist videos and thought of it as really cool now you could do this without permission and just go out and do it because there's no real copyright on the process for the most part or you could go partner with these artists and provide them with a new thing to sell to their growing audience of customers um so viral art kits viral Pottery kits viral spray painting kits like any content that's going viral related to a Creator inventing a new style of making work and sharing it on Tik Tok is a product that could be sold on a monthly basis as a as a box company

28:42or in a market place um now there's manufacturing challenges with this one um there's there's it there's a lot more it's probably a harder startup than the first two that we've mentioned cuz you're actually selling a product rather than a service um or a service-based product um but I wanted to kick that one out there and see what your response to that was Greg so check this out I'm gonna share my screen so I met someone who her Instagram handle is Marina minis you see my screen she creates these like miniature versions of things and it started to go really viral cuz people love Mini things and this would be a great example

29:32of like an artkit to do small mini things with like instructions on how to do it like she has 263,000 followers on Instagram she's got more on Tik Tok I think um but just crazy engagement right 84,000 likes and this is like relatively new so what I like about this idea is you can actually spend dollars add dollars to to Target people who follow certain accounts so you know that these people like Marina Minis and you can go ahead you don't need their permission right you just buy the ads against it um and yes there's the the TP what I don't like about this idea is the production side

30:17but let's just assume you can do that for a second um you start building out this Marketplace of five six seven 8 10 creators and by the way someone should go and register this domain the domain viral artkit dcom is available go it somehow it's available um so unless my producer Rafa goes and registers it you know during listening to this should be available and you grab that and then you just start having like a bunch of these creators you organize it by creators and then it becomes a thing and here's the way to take this from like a small business that's kind of annoying to an

30:57interesting big business that has recurring revenue is you just do a monthly drop where you for $50 a month you get a you know you get one of these kits and it's cool because you get to learn about a new Creator a lot of these people are creative in general like that's the reason why they follow these accounts and you're happy because you're getting that recurring Revenue can you find you know 5,000 people to pay you $50 a month or $80 a month for these things like probably yeah and I think the other macro trends that this touches on is it's expensive to live in the

31:34world and people are looking for things to do at home that take time that feel rewarding and build confidence people are also a second macr Trend as people are more and more becoming content creators and this is a product you buy that allows you to create content around your purchase and in doing so you're in inadvertently or or kind of kind of proactively marketing the thing you bought so it's a product that has a viral Loop built into it which I I quite like yeah and like you know I'm looking at Google trends for things like 3D puzzles and board games and if you look at it on

32:17a um you know let's look at it from a 2004 to present like these are these are some big Peaks you know people are they want IRL things that they can touch and do and and you're right like when going out for a drink and a cocktail cost you $18 or something like do you know you might not want to do that right because a night out might cost a100 $200 you might just want to stay in and create content with with your boys or your girls so um I do think that's it is a trend and and uh I like this this is a sneaky good

33:01idea dude I'm not going to do it someone else should do it someone's goingon to do all these all all these ideas can't wait um okay the last one which I think is kind of cool so since we last saw each other which has been years I moved to this small town I built an art residency on this Ranch um I've been kind of like getting involved in the local politics of this town um joining various organizations related to economic development in this town trying to figure out is there a way to use creative creatives and culture to revitalize economies of small towns given that there's this almost death

33:41spiral happening in big cities they're becoming unlivable they're becoming expensive people are now able to work remotely some in some cases and so is there this idea that you can take old infrastructure in small towns and create like little Utopias especially given that the major Maj of the population most these small towns are retired age and on their way to the end of their life all of this infrastructure is going to become available for sale largely because the kids of these retirees don't want to move back to these small towns because quality of life isn't there so I'm trying to figure out if I can like

34:16Kickstart a small town and my thesis started with an art residency and that was cool but what I really needed is people to be able to come to the small town spend some time enjoy nature have an affordable experience and have something to take a lot of pictures of so I bought 40 acres I turned it into a glamping site I brought in a whole bunch of big huge selfie friendly sculptures and created what I'm calling Art City and it's this concept that could be a franchise that I take to other koas or or koas and start to acquire koas through private Equity it's a a business that I could just scale

34:54myself and have 10 art cities around the country it could just like a really nice cash flow business for myself I think my guiding principle with anything I take action on is that I have to be able to do it faster than anyone else so I can iterate and make it happen quickly also it has to pencil into 25% Roi no matter what or else it's kind of like a UNG growable business um so came up with this idea glamping site 40 acres Sculpture Park off- rout 66 20,000 people drive by every single day because of our proximity to Ione 40 which is a major thoroughfare land is Affordable um it it

35:33just seems to work one thing that I had to do in order to stimulate demand for my glamp ground was sign up for hip Camp which is like Airbnb for camping and if you go look at the hip camp map there's quite a lot of cool spots but they're for the most part very much clustered around certain geographies but the thing about camper is they're often on road trips and they're crossing the country and there's areas or pockets of the country that have no hip camp sites available and why is that well in order to have an appropriate hip camp site you need to have shower facilities and toilet

36:13facilities and perhaps like a fire pit and some infrastructure for these people to camp on whether they're in a tent or a van so here's the idea go do a little bit of data analysis on hip Camp figure out where major thorough far are where people are leaving big cities heading to another location go to that town in between write a letter to a property owner and say hey I'd like to do a joint venture with you where I'm going to invest in bringing in like a composting toilet and an outdoor shower and I'm going to manage your listing on hip camp and I want a revenue share against the

36:55revenue generated and just like folks built these Airbnb Empires I suspect you could do this with hip camp and I think the macro Trend here is that for many people that are traveling airbnbs are too expensive and they want perhaps a more organic um kind of a little bit more uh in the woodsy feel experience and there's already a platform that does most of the heavy lifting and finding these customers for you so I want to comment on one quick thing I think on the air on Airbnb what I noticed it is there's a bunch of people that don't even own airbnbs they're going to people who have Apartments they

37:40call it lease Arbitrage so they're going to people have Apartments my my friend Blake roacha talks about this a lot online he he basically you know will go to this building and say listen I'm not going to buy your building but if I find you a tenant at this rate like is that cool or if I manage your Airbnb at this rate you know can I get a cut so I think this is kind of that same thing but in a different vertical that no one's thinking about literally no one and the other thing that's happening with campers and Van lifers is they're mostly content creators and so this has this

38:18other built-in viral loop I one theme in my all my stuff is like how do you make it so that your customers share your story and bring you more business or organically and so this this particular category of accommodations does does satisfy that condition that most of your customers are going to market the thing for you after they've experienced it once totally I like it the challenge is like how do you find the perfect like composting toilet outdoor shower combo that comes on like a a semi and you Fork off and drop down and it just like Works um because most people are not going to

39:00want to plug into their septic or their sewer they're going to want something self- sustaining um this might require some Capital to actually get started um those are some of the challenges I see in building out this business how much Capital realistically does it take to get going though well like a really like I bought a really nice composting toilet from my site and it was like 14 Grand for a two-seater um but this is like the the top of the line um you could probably do like an outdoor shower and a composting toilet for closer to a grand or two grand or something like that so let's say you get

39:3740 bucks a night per camper you've got a 50% fill rate that's six grand a month um I think that's six grand a month 44 no 600 bucks a month um you could could probably break even within the year and then you own the infrastructure and you keep doing that my math was way off I'm not that dumb we swear he's not that dumb yeah just okay so when the when the editor goes in I'm not that dumb exactly yeah yeah um so those are some of the ideas I had I mean I'm really into what Cody Sanchez was talking about related to like roll up of services businesses in

40:26small towns and operationalizing them I'm seeing that as a need here in this town but I'm not a subject matter expert on that and I'll probably end up doing it here and two carry um but yeah that's those are the those the big ideas for today Greg three fire ideas four fire ideas actually three in a bonus uh which we appreciate and I like all of them because anyone can do it it doesn't take a lot of capital they're all with vir ity built in uh because you know the problem I think with a lot of businesses is you just it's hard to find customer so you

41:06know if it's built in that makes your life a lot easier and uh so I appreciate you man and where uh where could folks learn about art city and you uh visit art city.com is uh where you can find uh day passes to Art City learn about the artists involved um book overnight STS and the most famous artist.com is where you can see all my work yeah and if uh if you're cruising through tukum Cary DM me on Instagram at theost famous artist and I'll show you around and otherwise uh my email is Maddie thefamous artist.com and I'm I'm open to hearing about people starting these businesses

41:46and having tremendous success with them and like what does Art City look like in 20 years like where do you want to take this thing have you heard of Marfa Texas yes okay so Marva Texas was this military town and kind of in the middle of nowhere West Texas um Donald Jud moved there with the help of this Rich lawyer guy bought up a bunch of infrastructure built his Studio brought his friends out there and Mara's real estate 10x in the last decade or so um that's an example of how art can kind of impact an economy I would like to have a tremend this measurable impact on tuken carry

42:29and pro that like investing in art is a good thing um because it drives the economy um I could see a world wherein I partner with largescale property developers and become like the creative director of their entire portfolio given the relationships I've got with these large scale sculpture artists and the understanding of installing and selling this stuff um ideally whole bunch of knowledge workers and artists and creatives moved to tukum carry and entirely new industry is born and I'm not sure what that looks like um I imagine Art City and its current instantiation will be some kind of Fran franchise business or a roll up of a

43:13whole bunch of different campsites that I turn into art cities and then like a acquisition by a publicly traded glamping gr glamp site or trailer park operator or something like that because what I'm building is the viral version of a camp site or the viral version of a trailer park yeah which is honestly a good prompt for anyone listening for any business it's like pick a business and then be like okay I'm Maddie Mo what is the viral version of this business it's just a good prompt yeah it used to be start with the headline because headlines used to be a method through which you could go viral and

43:52then the news media just got all wacky and it was no longer that interesting and then everyone became a Creator so how do you Empower people to create content because they've used your product right and so what is it it's a video is that you know reverse engineer the video the video of what I mean it's just I I feel like all social platforms are now 60% video right Instagram Tik Tok even Twitter now is like a video platform LinkedIn just added video YouTube like video is the atomic unit now of social so reverse enging reverse engineering someone being like hey I'm at you know Art City check this out yeah

44:42and some kind of interactive component that's like memeable like a meme is just a repeated Behavior how do you allow people to repeat a behavior over and over again that elicits positive reactions from the people they're sharing it with cuz that's all that's fueling this virality is like people are going look I did this cool thing please accept me and then they accept you by giving you likes and comments on the cool thing you did totally yeah exactly and I think your goal as the business owner is you know if you've got 100,000 unique visitors visiting or watching or seeing your brand how do you get the highest

45:25percentage of that 100,000 call it 20,000 30,000 to actually create a meme or create content um so that that brings in another 100,000 and then you build a flywheel yeah and I wouldn't say I figured it out yet nor do I have like as ambitious aspir as as ambitious of aspirations as you Greg I don't need to be like the guy who owns a portfolio of businesses till the end of time like literally all I want to do is wake up and like water the plants in my garden and go for a walk and like hang out with cool people and I've arrived at that place in my life and

46:04so I I'm trying to cheat to make my life as easy as possible and the viral Loop built into the business is a hell of a cheat yeah but you're looking yeah you're looking for I think all entrepreneurs are looking for shortcuts and it's just in our nature that's the best shortcut that we have is if if you if you can solve customer acquisition and solve word of mouth I think you've got a pretty good CH code and the cool thing is yes like okay you don't want to build a huge portfolio of things you know maybe I buy that maybe I don't but I will say that you've built

46:40something that could like when people ask me oh I want to build a holding company how do I do it I always say start with one thing so you you're building one thing that has this viral coefficient built in and the beauty about that one thing is it could be scaled to different regions if you wanted you know if you wanted different regions different re Revenue channels like I could see Art City becoming a kith likee brand where we do collaborations with really high-end other brands or I could see Art City becoming like an artist rep representation company where we're selling large scale sculptures for a

47:18whole bunch of artists that we don't actually have sculptures on site with um or have their sculptures on our actual property um I could imagine becoming a festival company um there's just yeah H finding a shelling point and having it be extensible I think that's what you're doing quite well Greg well I think what what you're doing and what I'm doing and what I think everyone should do if you're interested in being an entrepreneur is you're putting yourself at the middle of something that really interest you and that gives you optionality to you're like you're you're the center of gravity when it comes to you know art

47:59and this local art so you have these sculptures you're meeting artists um and then once you're once you're at the center of it even if it's local Center um doesn't need to be Global then you have this optionality around okay I can go do this thing I can go do that thing totally yeah optionality is important I get bored easily it's also more fun dude it's way more fun to to to be to have that optionality to to do different things as you evolve as like a human being yeah and one thing I've seen you preaching lately or for a while now is like the lack of Need for venture

48:39capital and building these types of businesses and I think that's totally true but as someone that's raised venture capital for I want to say like six or seven different startups that process and that going through that structure has helped me think more clearly about how to operate my own own businesses now and so it it's not that Ventures good or bad it's another path and perhaps exploring it is a good way to get punched in the face a few times and learn exactly what you don't like doing yourself so that when you start your holding company uh you've got some some strong Foundation to stand on well I think what's good

49:22about Venture and you know yes we've both done it is a you get rejected hundreds or if not thousands of times so the process of getting rejected is just good for any entrepreneur because it allows you to you're pitching all these VCS and a bunch of them are just the timing isn't right you know the the metrics need to be higher oh we have a a conflict right so you're getting you're getting all these insights and it does force you to like put all your thoughts in this deck that ultimately at the end is this potent way of explaining whatever it is you you do and that's

50:01really really awesome I feel like so that's number you know that's a and b I feel like someone should just create like the YC but at the end there's no Venture investment it's like a program designed to just help entrepreneurs and accelerate them and meet other entrepreneurs so I think the VC ecosystem does put you in the room with a lot of other VC entrepreneurs and that's that makes you high quality yeah so uh when next time I come to Miami can we go for a meal we can go for a meal also I'll be in Montreal for mural Fest in a few weeks which is a I just Googled it

50:441.15 million people go to this event that uh they decide it's a nonprofit and they basically take over like 100 mural and they do all kinds of cool murals and people go and visit it and you should check it out little R&D yeah I'm I'm uh locked in here uh making sure that my summer is very uh profitable um but maybe next year I'll check that out cool mie Mo it's been real catch you later thanks bud thank you [Music] baby