He has 1M+ followers and $1M startup ideas for you

0:00starting a newsletter and keeping it going for a couple of months is one thing maintaining it permanently and actually reaching out to those audiences again and again that is a treadmill I think there will be increasing opportunities over the next 6 to n months to look at other newsletters that are in your space and in your category that have kind of fizzled out reach out to them and acquire their newsletters as a way to kind of aggregate newsletters together I could see consolidation coming in the next couple of months so I think that opportunity if you have Capital to do so so this is going to be fun Brian um I

0:37feel like you don't do enough podcast so I feel lucky that you're joining us you are a big deal on Twitter and other places you've racked up almost a million followers on places like that where you're demystifying the stock market Finance stuff you're you're becoming a multipreneur in your own right and I just wanted to jam startup ideas that's what we do here so thank you for joining me love it thanks for having me yeah big fan of the podcast um before we get to the ideas you you were telling me about a story about Jimmy Buffett and the story about the mly fool and tell me more about why

1:17you're into Jimmy Buffett to start so I'm I'm not into Jimmy buffit the musician at all like I could I could care less about his his music it's it's just not my vibe at all but one uh one of my favorite podcasts that I listen to is uh the founders podcast by David senra and he recently you know that podcast is all about digging into Founders or musicians or directors and just kind of jamming on their on their life essentially and uh he came out with an episode on Jimmy Buffett and I was like do I do I want to listen to this like uh but for whatever reason I

1:57decided to push push play on it it probably Auto Al came on if I'm being honest in my my feed and I love it when I go in to consume a piece of media and I have one expectation about especially if that expectation is going to be I just got to get through this this is going to be disappointing and on the other end I'm like that was a thousand times better than I thought it was going uh to be so uh I found it I found Jimmy Buffett's entire life fascinating but I had no idea that he was such a ridiculously successful businessman I think I think he died he died a couple

2:35of years ago um and he died a multi billionaire making him one of the top 10 grossing artists uh of of all time and I just loved hearing his story about how he did things differently and then he essentially went on tour and never stopped and spun up all these businesses uh along the way so I think there's a lot that entrepreneurs can learn by studying Jimmy Buffett even if like me you don't care for his music I'm pretty sure he was friends with Warren Buffett is that right yes correct the two of them were were uh friends and even though they had no relation to each

3:11other so what's the story he because you know what's the story with him I know he he grew up in or he he was living in Key West I think he was like poor you know playing on the streets you know how did he go from you know playing the streets of Key West to being a multi-billionaire owning a bunch of companies yeah so he actually tried to get into he wanted to be a musician he knew that about himself and he tried to get into um the music industry uh through the front door so he went to Nashville and he tried to get uh a recording uh deal and he would come in

3:43and the record labels would be like we don't know how to classify you right like you're not you're not country music you're not rock music so he tried he he got a couple of Records out I think the traditional way and they utterly failed um and he actually picked up and went to kind of green pasture Key West at the time uh which when he went there was like a shell of what it is today like rent was super cheap and he was actually uh going from bar to bar saying to them uh I'll I'll I'll play here for for tips and booze and that was his fee uh if you

4:19will and he basically was super Scrappy and lived off of uh of tips and slept where he could uh in the beginning but he went uh he he slowly started to develop uh a name uh for himself and he actually uh you know he was playing so often that his style started to become more formalized and since he was leaving living in Key West he started to make that a part of his Persona and a part of his uh of his music and um he just worked his tail off going from venue to venue around Key West and then he started to expand and then he started to

4:56go on on tour and he never had it it wasn't until he was doing this for a couple of decades before he had his first like breakout hit that actually made him um more well known as a mainstream uh singer but along the way he just developed these these interests and uh he he partnered uh to open uh restaurants and uh he owns like the uh the land shark beer brand if you're familiar that which is like one of actually a brand of beer I really really enjoy and now he's like in t built his own record label he's got his own marijuana brand he's got hotels he's got

5:33casinos he's got apparel home decor you can even buy pick a ball sets that are branded Margarita uh Ville so again just a super Scrappy guy with like really super humble beginnings but I think he became a category of one and he rejected kind of like the main way or he got kicked out or failed trying to go into an industry from the main way and kind of built it up for himself I think that is a lesson that basically every entrepreneur listening to this uh should should know and it's pretty interesting because you would never think that Jimmy Buffett and Warren Buffett would be friends although their names are the

6:10same um besides from that right and there you know I'm I'm just reading a an article about about the two um they've actually got no family relation um and I see that there's a quote in the Wall Street Journal Warren leaves uh messages for cousin Jimmy and always has um and you know Jimmy used to call Warren Uncle Warren in return they met in the 80s and they actually took a DNA test wow so they took a DNA test they are in fact not family but I'd imagine that Jimmy looked at what Warren was doing with Berkshire hathway and it seems that Jimmy was a was a quite a big

6:55investor in Berkshire hathway and just saw how he was structuring it with all the different companies and said to himself how can I leverage my brand to to do the same like if you think about Warren strategy around buying Everlasting Brands like Coca-Cola um and seiz candies like it's not too dissimilar to how Jimmy was thinking about um you know for example building his real estate Empire and Licensing his brand out that way yeah total it's a it's a Time tested strategy and and how cool would it be to have Warren Buffett as a uh some of that you could call up and uh you know shoot

7:31ideas around with Warren Buffett I think just likes being associated with famous people I know that he's actually developed a close relationship with LeBron James uh for for example so you know if if you can have a moderate level success maybe one day you could become friends with Buffett too well I think he he's a brand guy you know I think it's probably two things number one he's a brand guy and I think he he he understands the power of a brand and number two I think he's just probably loves worldclass people and anyone who's like world class he's into so the combination of those two things I think

8:03just make people like Jimmy and people like LeBron like oh yeah like you know very interesting to him um the other company that or per brand that you you you you were telling me about that I actually haven't heard the name in in a long time um and I think it's a story that younger entrepreneurs don't know much about the mly fool tell me a little bit about the story of mly fool and why it's interesting to you so the the Molly is a is a company that I have worked uh for for nine years now but they have been in so many ways um ahead of the curve uh they've

8:43essentially been a part of the Creator economy for for almost 30 years now and they have they they've done things especially with their business model um that make a ton of sense to people today but back when they started made made no sense uh at all like they were one of the first companies I'd ever come across that had a fremium business model I mean I myself was a consumer of content from the mle fool so I'm a investing nerd and they produce a ton of great free content on their website fool.com um and they create these these articles and I would be reading these articles and they would

9:20be you know high quality analysis and they clearly knew what they were talking about and I was like how am I reading this for free I don't understand how this isn't behind a pay wall somewhere I don't understand how this company makes money if like they're producing all of these articles and I'm just consuming them on the Internet for free uh lo and behold uh I I only understood later that well the business model is yeah produce a lot of free content get a lot of eyeballs monetize that with advertising and then try and convert you on the back end to be a a paying member and then

9:52once you become part of their ecosystem you know they have multiple tiers of membership that start at you know basically a hundred bucks per year all the way up to gez I don't know5 $10,000 uh per per year and you know once you're a paying member they really try and upsell you so they they have had this business model in place now for basically 30 years but they were they they were tried they they figured this out along the way and they were doing newsletters newsletters um back in 1994 before the internet was a thing before before the internet was really a distribution uh Center to them so um if

10:29you're not familiar with the mle fool but you are a part of the Creator economy I think it's a business that you should definitely study or at least understand because they have perfected the art of of um attracting eyeballs to their their properties turning those eyeballs into monetizable users upselling those users uh over time and they have built a business that does I I don't know the exact figures but I have to imagine it's nine nine plus figures in annual Revenue uh each year and growing yeah so it's really interesting so if you go to the m full website they have a if you go to our services there

11:07they list out basically a bunch of their products that they sell and uh you know the lowest price service that they sell is like is a $100 a report um which is essentially uh a research report on one stock recommendation by our analysis what is that that's a blog post it's a newsletter so you're paying $100 for a newsletter um or they have these other you know newsletters that you can sign up to they call them Services uh that pretty much are on average three four 500 bucks a month but they have ones that you know go up to a th000 $2,000 a year uh you know and it's really you

11:48know I think you would never think of a newsletter costing $2,000 a year um but it's all I think what's really smart what mle fool does that's really smart is it's it's all about the value right it's like oh if I get one good stock pick it's worth it to me to pay $2,000 a year and I think that's how a lot of people think about it yeah absolutely especially depending on the subscribers that they have many of the people that sign up for the low price ones they're probably working with you know five or six figure portfolios maybe seven figure portfolios on their own but they have

12:19plenty of members that are worth 5 10 20 50 a 100 million dollar and and for at that level of clientele for them to spend you know 10 grand a year on on a service is like you know chump James to them so they've done a really good job at segmenting their their Their audience their backend audience um and then upselling them over time the other thing that they've done that's really fascinating is they have taken their um initial business business model initial brand name and they've actually spun off from their um a number of different brands so they have a hedge fund that they run um called 16233 capital and

12:55that I believe employs a fairly traditional 2 and20 uh model model which is very obviously lucrative and that is they service a very small number of clients but they have a very high net worth client base that goes in there they have mutual funds that they've spun off they have ETFs they they've spun off they've had um sister brands that they've spun off that focus on personal finance and real estate so they have just done an excellent job of taking this core this Core Business functionality and finding multiple ways to monetize it at different price points throughout their business so again if you're in the Creator economy in any way

13:29it's definitely a business that is worth studying one of the things I like to do when I hear about businesses like this is [Music] to to really go through the funnel it's the best way to describe it so Molly fool is one of those businesses that has a funnel worth studying and it's essentially you know I listed off the 20 different services that they have those are 20 different funnels worth are you know worth uh understanding so for example you know right now I'm on one of their landing pages is it's very very um tight I would say the messaging it's our top 10 stocks to buy um the mly fool

14:06stock advisor just identified these 10 best stocks for investors to buy right now and it's you know learn how to get access by entering your email below so these are actually I I call these tweet size landing pages because it's you know 280 characters or less uh create some some curiosity um and once you get in there you get that email I'm sure um I haven't put my email yet but you get you get that email you probably hopefully get some value and then you get into that flow they could see that oh you clicked here you clicked there and you know you don't make nine figures by not um by not

14:42you know keeping keeping to send uh uh emails my partner Jordan always says if you ain't sending if you ain't sending you ain't winning that's what he says so I'm sure mle fo is sending a lot of emails um and this and and and the the the funnels are tight oh like like you I've signed up to many of their their funnels and and if you have a you know one um interpetation that I have when I when I create funnels for myself is like I don't want to be annoying I don't want to be annoying and salesy to the people that are on the overing end of my funnel

15:19I always want to be helpful and it's like well how often is too often to email is like once a week too often is two times a week too often Etc when you sign up for these full funnels you get up to four emails per day per day and that is obviously an extremely deliberate decision uh that they have made right they've been split testing this and doing all kinds of optimization of this over the course of of years so if they are sending four emails per day after you give an email to them that that isn't by accident right that that was all pre thought about and and tested

15:54so their data clearly showed that sending lots of emails to really get people to convert is the way to go yeah so you bring up a good point something I've been thinking a lot about which is you know recently a lot of uh a lot of Founders that we know are obsessed with conversion rate optimization so how do I get you know as much juice out of this lemon as possible and I get it right if you're converting at 8% and then you get that up to 12% that could be the difference that could be that could you know that could be hundreds of thousands of

16:27dollars not millions of dollars uh of profit for your business that year so like it make you know I get why people optimize for conversion rate but I think that people are making a mistake by just optimizing for conversion because it's not really long-term thinking um you know longterm and this is like a Half Bake thought so workshop with this Workshop it with me but it's this idea that like yes I could send four emails a day and I'll probably increase sales and and you know that's great but think about those people who unsubscribed and who are now going to tell their friends oh you know or or they're at a dinner

17:07table and someone brings up the mly fool and they're like oh I got so many annoying annoying emails for them I had to unsubscribe so I think that there is a balance between conversion rate optimization and um no optimization and I actually call it Community rate optimization cro um where you're optimizing you're optimizing it for you know what the community actually wants which is kind of somewhere in the middle yeah I think that that's fair the the other thing to think about is you know it depends on if you're sending emails as a personal brand or you're sending them as a a company right you don't want your personal brand

17:49necessarily associated with spamming of people but if you're on the company side my my hunch is that they know that your likelihood or your interest in signing up for these service is super high at the start and then it kind of rapidly diminishes from there so they know if you click to give them their email address to download some report uh that's when you are a a white hot lead and the the odds of you converting then and there within that 24 hours are probably the highest so they really try and and Hammer that and then it just diminishes from there but if you study the mly Fool's marketing practices

18:25people have been complaining members have been complaining about this or non-members have been complaining about that for years right for for years they say this is too over the toop um you guys produce too many reports you send too many emails blah blah blah blah and then if you look at the behavior of the people that actually sign up many of them only sign up because of the way that the marketing is done and then once they become members they grow an affinity for the brand because once you're through the pay wall the experience is completely is completely different so it could also be a sense of

19:00be worried about learning too many lessons from what people say and and follow what people actually do not what people say totally um there's one interesting point I want to bring up with with the mly fool that a lot of people don't know about so why is the mle fool the mly fool how did it get so popular initially well the mly fool had a partnership with AOL in the 90s and into the 2000s where um for those of for those people who don't remember AOL it was basically you know you dialed up you get you got to this they called it a portal which is

19:39essentially a website and there'd be different buttons that you can go and and and explore so you can go ahead in chat you can do social networking you can go check finance and then once you went to the finance section that was all powered by the mly fool so basically what happened was as AOL grew and increased their Network artifacts mly fool grew and they were standing on the shoulder of giants basically so the question for you know for for me and you Brian but also everyone listening is like you know what is that equivalent today right like you know do you go build on top of Shopify or Shopify ready

20:19too big right do you go you know what are different ecosystems that you can go build upon and then how do you go and reach out to those people so that um so that you have placement and you've partnered with these people so I think you know a lot of people create startups and they they think okay how do I get to Market I create content I'll do paid ads I'll create these marketing funnels but a lot of people miss the Strategic partnership Point um which is probably the fastest and easiest way to grow yeah I've heard um Andrew Wilkinson call this the Barnacle on a whale

20:58strategy where you just want to create you want to attach your business and your business model to some idea that is crazy crazily rapid going and for people that don't remember back in these days like AOL was the internet like that's how I first got started on the internet it wasn't like you went to the Internet it's you went to AOL and then you were on the internet and those two things were were synonyms and AOL was growing at like insane rates like 100 plus percent compounded for year over year so you are 100% correct that the mle fool uh deployed the Barnacle on a whale

21:34strategy super successfully and if we rewind the clock just over the last couple of years how many brands have been built or how many personal brands have been built off of Just The Enormous growth in Tik Tok like if you were creating on Tik Tok in in 2020 uh it was extremely easy uh to it wasn't easy but it was it was much easier to go viral from from nothing and gain you know hundreds of thousands of of followers and use that kind of that growth to sprinkle across the rest of your your your ecosystem so I think you're asking a a fantastic question I don't know what

22:07system is doing that today other than to say something related to AI I mean that is a thing that has gone parabolic over the last year it's hard to know where we are in the growth curve and how you can take advantage of that as an entrepreneur but I think I think that idea is correct when when a new platform comes along find find a way to attach yourself to that that platform find find a way to find uh create a business model around that platform and if if you do it right and get lucky you can build an entire huge business on top of that yeah

22:36and I think you know to me there's a difference between Tik Tok which is a PL you know it is a barnacle strategy like it is a platform that's growing or although now you know you might you know you might lose your whale because it might be get get banned from right there's always RIS right always risk so there's um there's that where anyone could join but it's still growing and then the other the the even better mly fool approach is you go to the whale but you say I'm GNA be the only Barnacle on you right so you essentially signed like an exclusive agreement that hey you know

23:17I'm going to be only providing Financial content and you know to your point on the AI side like yeah of course there's you know it's a whole new world with this AI movement so um it's it is tough to go to you know open Ai and be like hey let me be your de facto you know Financial provider but I actually think that um you when it comes to reaching out to whales for this sort of stuff you actually don't want to reach out to them when they're you don't want them to be whales initially right you want them to be like when I'm sure when the mly fool

23:53reached out to AOL like the AOL was like a startup they were literally a startup yes for sure it just so happened that they grew to grew to be a whal one last thing on the subject which is I know you might be listening to this and you might be like how am I going to be able to do this you know like easy for the mly fool in the 90s but the reality of the situation is if you're a series a series B CED startup you're looking for ways to add value to your user base and if someone can come and help you do that

24:26faster um you're all year right I mean yeah you can't replicate this uh exactly as you seen but you can a riff on on on the theme and in aol's case you know their their whole thing was get people online and one way to help give people a reason to go online like they were looking literally looking for reasons for people to log online like back then you had to tie up your phone line to to go online the the connection speeds were crazy slow like I'm talking like super early on so the Le fo became an enabler or a reason for people to go online so that in that case

25:03a partnership made made a whole lot of sense you do have to think what can I offer this platform to help them get they want and at the same time I get I what I want a daily reason too because like every you know you want to check your stocks daily um you know and I think that's that's another way to think about some of these Partnerships is how do you how do you create how do you how do you go to to them and say like I'm going to help increase your retention rate um your retention is going to go up because the thing that I provide is a daily use

25:36case absolutely I I don't even think that they necessarily had to create a special uh a special a special deal like I think AOL actually had a program in place because they were again looking for Content they didn't want to be content creators they wanted to partner with content creators so again it was easier for them uh it was easier for them in the first place just given the nature of what what we're trying to do but I totally think that that General strategy the general idea is find something small that could be big and find a way to partner with them or find a way to help them get they want that

26:09can be a great way to build a business so Brian this is the ideas podcast this is where we give free ideas to people some nuggets and I want to give people some nuggets to chew on what did you bring to the table to the Pod um what do you want to talk about yeah so so my category is um uh I'm I'm I'm a content creator right so that's the business that I'm studying and trying to get to know uh to really really really well and trying to get off of uh the ground my myself so that's the place that I kind of spend the most of

26:44my time thinking what are some what what services do I need or what ideas could be out there that could help other creators that are depending on where they are in the in the Creator Journey you know a lot of people myself and included I did not this wasn't like a for a thought that I had ahead of time I kind of like accidentally discovered the whole Creator economy thing and um I was actually the reason I started to put so much time into Twitter was one the pandemic so there was not much else to do uh but two I actually signed a book deal so I was writing a book and I knew

27:21at the start of writing this book well there's no point in writing a book if on the when you complete it you don't have an audience to sell it to people have to know who you are and care about it like so much of a book's success especially early on is just the marketing of the book so I put as much time into growing my social accounts specifically with the goal of having an end audience to sell to sell my book to and it was only after I built an audience that I kind of backed into the wait a second you could actually earn a living if you have an

27:50audience like Beyond just just uh selling um Beyond just selling them a book and oh by the way of all the ways to monetize and audience a book is probably the worst way that you can possibly uh possibly uh do so but I think that there's a lot of content creators out there small content creators um out there that are doing good work really love the content creation side of it but don't think about the back office end of it at all uh like that is a whole another skill set to to develop a whole another um list of work to do so one idea uh to

28:30have would be to ra raise some Capital reach out to a group of podcasters or or Twitter users or X users whatever you want to call them uh YouTubers that all are in the same category because a lot of times people start on one platform and they just focus exclusively on that platform and get them that are all you know similar size say maybe like 5,000 followers to 50,000 followers um pay them and go to them with a deal and say hey I will pay you some modest salary right uh I will I will I will allow you to turn this into a a job right an actual job with a predictable

29:11income uh in exchange you're going to essentially continue to create uh I'm G to have access to uh sell uh sponsorship opportunities on your podcast or on your your platform Etc and I'll handle all that back office uh stuff I think if you would be able to pick a a category that you think was a a growing category that was monetizable and you could Cobble together say 10 or 20 of these smaller accounts and kind of handle the back office for all of them you would have a decent size of inventory to sell to potential uh sponsors and you could provide them with a small amount of

29:50salary that they could um that they could use to kind of put more more time into it and as long as you set up the relationship so that it was mutually beneficial official if you if you place enough if you place enough chips on the table the odds are pretty good that a handful of them will take off and become fairly sizable accounts in time especially if you you pay them to do so you know this is something that um David Perell has done successfully with the cultural tutor uh that account went from like zero to what I don't even know what it's that now like over well over a

30:19million Twitter followers and and David essentially just gave um I forget the man the gentleman's name that that writes those threads and behinds the cultural T he just essentially paid him a salary and said this is what I want you to do write a thread on the cultural tutor every single day and that has worked out tremendously well uh that account has grown like wildfire now in David's case his whole business is I help people become digital writers so he invested in in a uh in a in a very high quality Case Study more than that but I think you can take that idea and apply

30:52it across different platforms uh and spread out your bets and and if you structure it correctly that could actually turn into a relatively meaningful business so basically the proposal is to producti what David Perell did for the cultural tutor but with having a bit more of a Services back office layer um because I imagine that David I mean I don't know exactly but I just imagine that he went to the cultural tutor and was like hey I'll give you x amount of dollars per month and just like continue do doing what you're doing and just go do this full-time and make it better and then almost as like a patron of the Arts

31:34it sounds like um wait you know yeah is that is that is that fair yeah and I know in in in that specific you use use case I I think the cultural tour was working at McDonald's so he essentially said I I'll give you the same salary or maybe more of a Sal that you're working at McDonald's but quit that job and spend all of your time uh do doing this but I think There's an opportunity to apply that same thinking Cobble together for lack of a better term um a podcast network but do it across different uh platforms and if you build up a decent

32:08enough size and have a decent enough uh trajectory for the um for the accounts that you you go after I think for the small accounts it gives them an opportunity to actually monetize their platforms without having to think about the back office way before they could reach any scale on their own to turn it into a a full-time uh living and in exchange they're giving up some of the of the future upside if they really hit it big but I know a lot of small creators would would happily make that uh would happily make that trade and then on the other side if you're the one

32:40aggregating uh it you have to think like a venture capitalist right you just need a handful of those if you have like you know 20 or 30 of these um on your payroll or or in your network you just need a handful of them to really make it big for the entire the entire payoff to be a big I wonder if the type of creator that make you know is the right creator for this offer is like is it the McDonald's I'm working at McDonald's Creator you know because you know if I'm going to pitch Lenny ritky five years ago four years ago when he has 15,000 10,000 followers

33:18and I and I would give him this offer you know he wouldn't take it because he sold a company at Airbnb and you know he worked in Airbnb for like nine years like he wouldn't need it so I'm wondering is the idea to find some of those like maybe younger Talent maybe you know Talent that's working a a job making 30 40 50 Grand a year is is that is that the idea yeah I I I think that uh well Lenny I think you know is a special uh use case in many ways I totally agree with you that he would be nuts to be kind of take that uh that

33:54that deal but on the flip side I know there's lot the vast majority of ators that are at the the the small scale kind of do it for because they're interested in it and they're not the odds of them having you know a massive bank account to kind of bankroll that on their own are fairly fairly low so you are absolutely correct that it would take a certain type of creator that would be interested in taking a deal that would be worth it for you to take on the risk of bringing them into your network but you know the law of Lodge numbers out there you could definitely find people

34:24that would be willing to do this if you if you turn over another enough rocks and any thoughts on category so I I recently spoke to Eric torberg on the Pod we talked about you know B2B media podcast uh that podcast actually went a little bit viral if you haven't listened to it um go and check it out on the channel but you know do you have any do you have any thoughts on you know categories that make sense um and how you how do you think about B2B versus you know your class B Toc funny meme account yeah I you're asking obviously excellent questions because it has to be

35:03in categories that you could monetize them in in some way so having a bunch of you know prank channels uh get get together isn't going to be isn't going to be great uh but you could certainly focus on um like one category that I love consuming content on is like the building category so I love watching YouTube videos that are people constructing houses or doing home repairs or doing a product views of uh of tools and services uh that could be a very a very lucrative um field to enter because there's a bunch of ways you could monetize that uh on the back end uh I'm also in the finance world so

35:41that's the one that I know uh best and obviously there's lots of ways to uh to monetize people that are interested in uh stocks or investing or or real estate through uh through brokerages uh that you could uh you you could partner with or there's tools out there that you could sell to people that have interest in that so those would be the two that come to mind but I'm sure there's lots of categories that you could apply it to yeah I mean Finance obviously massive category even for consumers like people spend money on financial products no question you know building although at the surface that

36:14looks like okay is that super Niche it's actually in the real estate category and the development category which is absolutely massive um you know if you go to a lot of small towns a lot of the biggest companies in small towns are your home renovation store uh they actually do the most amount of Revenue in these small towns so I think one way that people can think about how do I pick a category that's you know high value is watch linear TV and see who's advertising look at who's spending money on Advertising a lot because those those are some of the categories that um are big and they have money to spend and

36:54then what you have to do then is think about what is a i called a super Niche so it's like you pick a niche in that in that category but then you only focus on the top 10% of that Niche so even go a little bit nicher super Niche um I think that's a good exercise for for folks absolutely I mean it it was uh recently uh pointed out to me when when I look at some of my favorite YouTube channels that have uh that uh that I watch regularly what they essentially are is the modern-day version of hit TV shows that existed 20 or 30 years ago if you

37:28think about like um One Channel that I love is is Mark Rober my entire family loves watching his content and he he is basically the modern-day version of Mythbusters just on YouTube's uh uh format or if you look at um some animated shows I love history uh like a lot of um YouTube channels that are all about like history such as uh such as crash course and it's like well that's obviously what the History Channel literally was 20 years ago just turned into a a free YouTube channel so that's an underrated tactic I think we basically looked like what actually worked on Old traditional Legacy mediums

38:04or what who is actually advertising on Old Legacy me uh Legacy uh TV and how can you bring that uh how can you apply that to the uh the platforms that are actually growing nowadays so that's a huge Insight that I I actually think people don't talk about enough which is looking at proven ways that proven products proven creators proven media the past I mean we did it a little bit with um mly fool um but looking at that and and just being like what are the sort of takeaways I can have and how can I modernize that because and I'll give you a concrete example we're actually you know through

38:43LCA our Innovation agency we're working on a really major uh AI product and we noticed that a lot of the AI products are kind of kind of look the same and we started we started asking ourselves well why do these AI products all kind of look like chat GPT it's because they're all kind of looking at each other for inspiration um and then I had brought up the example of if you know ask ches.com which was an old search engine that had this mascot called Jeeves and it was kind of this you know kitschy Butler and you know he would give you the answers to your questions and I think through

39:23and and it became like you know it was an ultimate success even even though people don't remember it and even though it had like 05% of market share it's still sold for like you know $2 billion or something so it was a success and and um it's like what can you take from that and then Implement that into today like what can we learn from that so I think your Insight is a correct one yeah or or even the the whole idea of um looking back at you know the year 2000 um there was a huge graveyard of business ideas in ative business ideas that were just

39:59way too far ahead of their of their time right the the obvious one to talk about is um I think it was called Web van which is essentially grocery store delivery to your house that was a very Innovative idea that tried to get off the ground in 2000 but that didn't work because people didn't have mobile phones and there wasn't an Uber already established uh in place well fast forward 15 years and that exact same business model is now called inst cart which is what a 10 plus billion dollar uh company that that's out there so you didn't have to come up with new ideas you can just look at the graveyard ideas

40:35and ask was the was this a good idea but just timing was wrong that's another way to do it all right give me uh Brian while I have your brain give me give me one more idea sure so so I'm in the newsletter space like I know many of the people that we uh know are and I I know that you have said I believe that you think we're in a newsletter uh bubble where so many people have uh incentivized to take their their their audiences that are on rented land and kind of go into quote unquote owned land in the in the newsletter uh space and

41:07we've seen you know tools like convertkit and substack just make that so easy to do and starting a newsletter and keeping it going for a couple of months is one thing maintaining it permanently and actually reaching out to those audiences again and again that is that that is a treadmill that I think a whole bunch of small creators do not want to be on uh for for the long term especially when ad rates are are under pressure um and and dropping so I think there will be increasing opportunities over the next six to nine months to look at other newsletters that are in your space and in your category that have

41:48kind of fizzled out but have you know a couple thousand subscribers to them and to reach out to them and acquire their newsletters uh from from them um at at some some price as a way to kind of aggregate newsletters together I I don't know about you I am subscribed to probably 20 or 25 uh newsletters um if not more many of them in my own uh uh category and I just ask myself how how long can this can this keep going and will the people Behind These continue to run business models that are add especially those that are ad supported um I don't know I could see

42:24consolidation coming in the next couple of months so I think that'll be opportunity if you have Capital to do so yeah I think the the the newsletters that are supporting themselves via ads you know as soon as it gets more and more difficult to acquire real subscribers and which is which I think is happening real subscribers is the key word exactly exactly we can talk more about that but you know real subscribers and AD dollars you know there's just more Supply right there's more inventory of newsletters so obviously the price is going to go down so I think a lot of people who are like oh yeah I'm making

43:03five grand a month or seven Grand a month or nine grand a month now I'm making three grand or one grand they're just going to lose interest and I think the ultimate winner of this whole Gold Rush for newsletters is going to be when we look back on it will have been the the largest creators in the space who are buying tons of newsletter newsletter Subs and have become like the king of their categories King and Queens of their categories um and those people I I do believe will command high ad rates but I think it's a lot of the smaller to mediumsized people that are going to struggle and yes I

43:42agree with you there's a huge opportunity to be buying some of these up um I'm personally interested in buying some of these up um and so if you are selling holler at your boy it's just an interesting framework to look at in general it's a a good framework to be like if there's a bull market like what what are the opportunities that people aren't seeing um and if there's a bare Market what is you know what are what are the opportunities that people aren't seeing and that's just a framework for coming up with how I can actually um build something that's going to be longterm and Lasting yeah to totally I

44:19mean I'm in the I'm in the newsletter business and I uh I I would welcome a a bare Market to it you and you you one one thing you said was who are the ultimate winners well the ultimate winners in any bull market is the picks and shovels providers right so we've seen convert kit uh we've seen substack we've seen um uh many other newsletter operators themselves kind of being uh really leaning into that growth and helping to push that growth as much as possible and they are making millions in Revenue off of that just by being the Pix and shovels uh providers to that but

44:53uh being in that being in the newsletter space I for sure would welcome a a prolonged bare Market in that industry to kind of wash out some of the weaker uh players that would make it easier to reach subscribers in in inboxes with with um you know newsletters that that will persist so like you uh I'm going to be on the hunt over the next 12 months for for picking up newsletters that uh that don't want to do it anymore in my category on the cheap yeah and I think there'll be there'll be opportunities also for investors so like for example maybe you find a newsletter that has 150,000 Subs

45:27you want to buy it but you don't want to Fork over whatever it costs to buy it you know maybe there's an opportunity that um like wouldn't it be cool if you went to your community and said like hey like I want to buy this newsletter here's some of the you know open rates click through rates here's you know what I think it can generate over the next two years like I want to raise $500,000 from you and here's some perks that you're going to get and I think I I anticipate there being some interesting models like that that will emerge yeah you you could also structure

46:01the deal with the newsletter uh in some way to say look just give me the subs I'll continue to run it and I'll give you the revenue some Revenue split uh on on this for in um in perpetuity or for some amount of of time that that would be a way to taking over a list with with zero uh cash up front and then you're then you're also sharing the risk that you know the open rate goes down or a sponsorship ads kind of um clean up while still making sure that your your incentives are are aligned with each other so you're absolutely right there are ways to structure deals that

46:33wouldn't require huge amounts of capital out of your pocket to takeover lists all right Brian give me one last idea so I've become a huge user and consumer of of LinkedIn uh uh content you know for many years I kind of ignored it as a a platform it was like like so many people it was Justin Welsh that kind of turned me on to the idea of of using LinkedIn and when I think about LinkedIn has many characteristics that make it a a great platform uh for creators to focus on first and foremost the competition there is still very low when compared to other platforms like Instagram or or X or or

47:14Tik Tok they've become far more uh competitive LinkedIn by by its very nature is is less competitive it's also a growing platform that reaches over a billion uh plus users and it continues to grow but the real Overlook think about that is just the way users act on on LinkedIn versus other platforms when you're on LinkedIn you're there thinking career you're thinking business you're thinking how can I help myself you're also thinking my employer might be watching so the number of trolls on LinkedIn is like one 1,000th it is on Instagram or on um on on Twitter but learning how to master uh LinkedIn learning how to grow on it learning how

47:54to create content for it is certainly a a a unique skill set just like every platform there's always a unique skill set that you you have to um have to develop for for getting there so I think there are big ghost writing opportunities to be taken care of uh on on LinkedIn um I think you can uh one other opportunity to take care of or to think about is um finding even even small LinkedIn accounts uh connecting people on LinkedIn to other accounts on LinkedIn to do one-on-one transactions you know some of the value of those potential transactions can be tens hundreds or even hundreds of thousands

48:32or even millions of dollars uh in in value um so if you created um an agency that whose whole goal was to take a high profile account and connect them to other high-profile accounts like if if you were a um a chief marketing officer in one industry and you're like um I just want to connect with Chief Information officers in my same industry and you had whole accounts that were just developed around connecting One account to say five or 10 other highly targeted but highly valuable accounts you don't even have to get a big follower account uh to to to go on there but if you can make that connection

49:11happen in some way there could be huge value added for there one idea there Greg as as you know as a podcast host what if you help them create help that account just create a podcast and instead of reaching out to people to do sales calls you said would you be a guest on my podcast and allow them to create an hour-long conversation with each other that had zero sales connotation to it but allowed that relationship to to to start that alone as a service could lead to super high value sales and uh and and cont and um and content down the road so I think

49:46there's a big opportunity on LinkedIn that um for for ghost writers to to connect and that doesn't even involve growing the account to being having huge followings yeah and I'm starting to see more and more ghost writing firms like focused on LinkedIn pop up and I always try to think okay how do you so I I agree with like you know goes back to the whale and Barnacle like the whale is LinkedIn how do you become the barnacle and I'm kind of like the Barnacle everyone's trying to be is the ghost writing agency and I'm like what is and if you want to create a Services

50:22business what would be something that is more non obvious and I think that LinkedIn is going to be more and more uh video focused um over the next few years and the reason why is because LinkedIn is literally like three or four years behind everyone always you know they're they just that's fair yeah you know they're just always they're always coping features but it's always three or four years so in three or four years it's going to just like how Instagram is video focused and Twitter X now is video Focus focused and um Tik Tok obviously is video focused you know I think uh LinkedIn will be video focused so the

51:04question is how can you reach out to LinkedIn creators or people who post you know I call them LinkedIn creators but it's basically people who post on LinkedIn and you say I will help you create video content or repurpose your content to be video first and this is what it's going to cost I think that is an interesting opportunity yep VD video is a completely different skill set doing video the right way has much higher technical barriers 10x higher barriers than it does to just write a tweet or create some kind of quick little post on on a text based platform so I think you're right there is an

51:42opportunity to help text based creators become video based uh creators and I I totally agree with you that overtime LinkedIn is going to gradually lean into that video content uh more more and more Brian as expected this has been a pleasure um if folks folks if you like Brian you want you want him back go comment on the YouTube and uh if you're not if you're not if you're listening to this just go to the YouTube And subscribe uh it's my name Greg Eisenberg ien b r g and let folks know you know let let I think I think you you you did wonderfully and you brought a lot of good energy and

52:23Vibes to the table Jimmy Buffett like come on um we hit everything where could folks uh follow your journey uh on the internet uh I'm on all the major platforms so x uh LinkedIn uh in Instagram it's all uh YouTube whatever your platform is so it's all under my name Brian uh faldi and my my company website is a longterm mindset. I love it all right later Brian see you see you Greg