Luxury Grocery Retention, OnlyFans Earnings, and the Role of Luck in Getting Rich | Ep. 3020

So guys, as you can see, I have a bunch of Erewhon jars in front of me. Now here's the genius of Erewhon. What Erewhon is doing here is they could go with plastic jars with their soup. This is turkey chili. And then I buy candied walnuts too and things like that.

Right.

And but, but it's smart because they know in California, at least if they give you a glass jar, they can incentivize you to say, hey, if you return it to us, we'll give you $3. But returning it means I need to go back into the store. So today, Neil and I, we're going to go to Erewhon and Noah as well. We're going to go to Erewhon at lunch. I brought 10 of these jars with me. Guess what? I'm probably gonna buy a lot more stuff than just lunch and probably not gonna just return this, right?

So that's turkey chili.

Yeah.

And does it taste good?

That tastes amazing. 30 ounces of turkey chili.

Is it healthy?

Yeah. Yeah.

We tend to just get the chicken vegetable soup or chicken noodle soup.

Turkey chili, dude, it's, it's not like a bad thing. Yeah. It's like each jar, I, ChatGPT is like 600 calories or so. Right.

But no one's gonna eat a whole jar. It's too much.

I do. I do.

In one sitting?

Yeah. Yeah, hell yeah, dude. A lot of protein. But then candy walnuts are really good. Your kids will like that too.

But my point is, wait, it has candy walnuts inside?

No, no, no. That's another one. So I have another one that says candied walnuts. See, candied walnuts.

Oh, that's not a jar of soup.

No. So one, some are jars of soup. Some are different jars. Yeah.

We have those jars only from the soup. I didn't know that they sell the jars with—

But the point is, Erewhon's marketing strategy here is smart because they just— it's a retention mechanism. It gets you to come back right there. They know that their average order value is a lot higher than other people. So what's a way to get people to come back. It's just like how if you work in telecoms, it's the government mandates that you can't just churn and cancel on a dashboard online, right? You actually have to call. So sometimes you take use of— you take advantage of what the mandates are from the government, and that's how you end up making more money. Because again, they could just go with convenience and go with plastic containers, but they chose to go with the glass. And glass is actually very inconvenient. Like I had so many— I have 10 of these actually. I brought 10. So $30. Yeah, $30. I'm gonna get $30 back, so I'm very happy about that. But guess what? I'm probably gonna spend more.

How are you gonna spend more? Lunch is like maybe like $10?

No, lunch is— dude, lunch is never $10, man. Each of my Erewhon orders, okay, each one's like $80, $90 each.

No.

Yeah, but I order a bunch of things. I order it for— I order it for 2 meals and also like snacks. So I ordered popcorn, I ordered the, the overnight oats, I order like And then I order breakfast and dinner.

It's like me ordering for my family.

Yeah.

So similar costs.

But I break it out into 3. Yours is in one city.

In one city.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, I thought that was interesting cuz we're going to Erewhon today. So I was like, I need to finally bring these cuz my, um, my cleaner started packing more of, more of these and things. So they, they've, they like contain like a whole, like, I don't know, uh, what do you call it? The, the pantry. Yeah. It was covered with these.

So yeah. You have another topic in here and I'm curious on the results on this and I didn't click through to read the results. We say top OnlyFans creators average monthly revenue. What were the average monthly revenues for the top creators?

Wait, so where does it say that?

5830 line.

5830.

Okay, great, great. And I'm going to take a guess. My guess is, is it, is that article for the, like they list out each creator or is it just average?

Hold on, I'm opening it up.

So I want to take a guess on what they make.

So we're looking at, you're looking at the 0 to 0.1%. This is monthly revenue that they're capturing.

I'm gonna go with, you said 0.2%?

0 to 0.1% and then 0.1 to 1%.

I'm gonna go with 0 to 0.1% is making like 50 grand a month.

Okay. And then try for 0.1 to 1%.

10 grand a month?

Okay. So the top OnlyFans creators, what they make, 0.1%, 0 to 0.1% make $146,000 a month.

Okay. That's great.

That's— think of it as recurring. That's usually recurring.

That's a lot of cash.

And then 0.1% to 1% makes $34,000 a month. And then 1% to 5% makes a measly $200 a month. So it's the— we're talking about the fat— there's a long tail.

Yeah, but the long tail barely makes anything. It's the 1% that makes everything for— it's not the 80/20 rule. It's the 1% to 99% rule.

Yeah, it's the Pareto principle, right? So Pareto principle dictates 20% of the effort will get 80% results. In this case, It's 1% of effort gets 99% of the results, right? And this is crazy to me because the thing is, dude, $34,000 already per month is a lot of money.

That's a lot of money.

Yeah, $146,000 is like, you're good. Like that's $1.8 million a year basically.

This makes sense on the German marketer that we met, that kid who has an OnlyFans marketing agency when we're doing dinner in, was it Berlin or Frankfurt? No, we were in Frankfurt, I think, right? And he was telling us the biggest issue wasn't doing the marketing and making money. It was that because they make so much money, And we weren't getting into the numbers really, but he was saying because it makes so much money in a few months, the people he's dealing with, at least I'm not trying to generalize here, but the people he was dealing with and he had quite a bit of accounts he was working with, they tend to start getting lazy and they stop producing content. Then when they need more money, they do it again. And because it's so easy for them to make money that they don't do it consistently, they're just more so do it when they need the cash.

They start to become entitled. And remember, entitlement is what leads you to a path of what? You need an intervention at the end.

Remember that?

Remember what I told you? I spoke to that interventionist. Yeah, entitlement leads to that eventually. So guys, don't become too entitled.

But when you talk about entitlement, it reminds me of the— is it Jim Simmons who ran— what's that big hedge fund? He passed away. Was it Citadel? Renaissance? Yeah. Was it Jim Simmons?

Jim Simons.

Jim Simons or something like that. I'm getting his name wrong. But I watched a video with him a long time, and I'm paraphrasing, he was talking about why he doesn't like hiring people from like Harvard and Stanford and all those places. Yeah, he's like, they're too— in his opinion. Yeah, he felt that they were too entitled and because they were too entitled, they don't grind it out and work as hard as the people who did not.

You know what's interesting? So there's always edge cases, right? But we have someone on our team who's from Harvard and she works extremely hard. She cares a lot. So it's like you always get edge cases. But then on the other side, I remember when I was working a dead-end job when I came out of college because this is after 2008, I was doing data entry and now that job would be totally screwed. I was only doing data entry. I was getting paid $32,000 a year. Right. And there's a guy— I was 22 years old. There's a guy who was 30 years old, graduated from Harvard, and he was doing the same exact thing I was doing. Right. But to your point, though, Jensen Huang also says that people— he did a speech at Stanford and he's like, you know, the problem is you go to an amazing school like this. And the problem is people that go to great schools like this, you have very high expectations. But people with very high expectations, you have very low resilience. And when you have very low resilience and you have very high expectations, you have a lot of entitlement.

I was talking to Noah about this before you came, because I was—

Today?

Yeah, I was walking in and I saw Noah setting up and we were talking about money and making money in business. And I was telling him how, you know, there's someone that I know, Ivy League school, or technically not, Stanford's not considered an Ivy League. I'm pretty sure they're not, right? No, West Coast, too new of a school compared to Harvard. But they went to Stanford, they put in all this work, and they were complaining how they don't make as much money as someone else that we both know. Not you, but me and the other person. And they're just like, this isn't fair. I graduated from Stanford.

Entitled people.

I got it. And I was telling them like, you put in the work to get into Stanford and you feel that— and this is not all Stanford students, this is just them. And I'm like, you feel now that you put in all that work and got your degree that everything should be easy. I'm like, that's not reality. I'm like, the other person that we're comparing— you're comparing yourself to didn't put as much work into high school. They did not get into Stanford or any decent school. They actually didn't even go to college.

Mm-hmm.

And I'm like, they grinded it out. They hustled, they did whatever it took to succeed, and they're making millions and millions a year in profit. But I'm like, look at how much they work and look at where you go on vacation and look at where they go on vacation. And the response to me was, I haven't seen where they go on vacation. And I'm like, exactly. I'm like, you just got back from Hawaii. And before that you went to Oslo. And I'm like, they don't go on vacation and they're grinding it out. And I'm like, this is why they're doing better than you.

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They were pissed and they still felt it wasn't fair.

Yeah, well, life's not fair. Yes. Suck it up. Yeah.

I know people who worked way less than me, didn't put as much energy in, they're way more wealthier than I am. And they got lucky with their business. I don't hate on them. I wish I get luck like that too. And I'm like, good for you. And I hope I get luck like that as well.

You know, there's something worth talking about too. So do you believe that luck plays a minimal factor or a major factor in business?

Major factor. I think it's one of the biggest factors that people don't really think about. I was with a meeting with Guy Kawasaki years and years ago.

This is when he wrote The 100 Best List. Yeah.

And his personal brand helped him become evangelist for Canva. He made a boatload of money from his Canva shares, right?

Has he cashed out from that? I mean, I don't know if he's probably still—

he's already rich, but he'll, he'll, he'll be great from just his Canva shares as an advisor.

Yeah.

And it was early on. So when I was talking to Guy and this was in his office back in the day where he had Garage Ventures, I don't know if he still does. And he was talking to me about entrepreneurship and he's like, you know, Every time investors talk about investing in big TAMs, hard work, resilient entrepreneurs, he's like, these are all great things that you need. But he's like, if I had to pick one thing, if I could pick this one thing, he's like, I would pick luck every time. Because he's like, a lot of the companies that have done really well, it's luck. And I'll give you a great example of this recently. You saw Figma stock pop. No one knew it was going to pop that much.

Yeah.

When you look at it just from a fundamental Growth perspective, revenue, EBITDA perspective, I'm assuming you would agree they would struggle to sell for $30, $40 billion.

Majorly underpriced their IPO. So I agree.

No, no, no. But you agree right now the current valuation, if they went to the market beforehand to sell, they would struggle to sell for what they become valued at, $60 billion, $70 billion?

I don't know how much. I don't remember how much of Shopify. A lot. That's all I remember.

Uh, Figma or no, that's not it. Figma stock. Figma Inc. $79. Market cap is $38 billion. Oh yeah, it's actually gone down a lot.

No, I think I— so I searched Figma stock. I don't think that's the right one.

No, this is the right one.

Are you sure?

Figma Inc. It's gone down a lot because I was, I was saying it was overpriced.

Yeah.

And because it came out like at $110 or something like that, then it went over $120 is what it looks like. The 52-week high is $142.92 according to Yahoo Finance. That's not double from where it's at, but you're looking at like a $60 billion company. Now Figma is worth $38 billion. Wow.

$122. You're right.

Yeah.

Yeah.

No, no. If you look at the 52-week high, it's $142. It's even higher.

Wow.

Again, don't know how accurate this is. Yeah, but all I'm getting at is some of it is luck. Like people who quickly sold at that price, I don't know if existing shareholders were locked in or what the deal was. I look at that as a lot of luck. It was overpriced. Figma was not worth $120. I don't think based on their revenue, this is not financial advice, they're worth $79 that it's trading at today.

You know, you look at Canva too. I'm looking at Canva. So 2021 valuation was $40 billion and in 2022, obviously, you know, things Dropped. So it went to $26 billion. And then 2024 secondary shares sold at a valuation of $26 billion. But recent secondary sales, share sales, June 2025, $56 billion valuation. Right. And the thing is, I've spoken to Melanie before on my podcast a long time ago. And the story with her, with Canva, multibillion-dollar company, but she— it took her a very long time to find the right idea. It also took her a very long time. A lot of investors said no.

Almost all of them did.

Yeah. And but she kept going, right? So there, there's an element. I think it was a Chinese saying that luck is where opportunity meets preparation. But still, you still have to work hard. But when you work hard, that means you're better prepared for when the opportunity hits, right?

Yes.

Some people get more opportunities than others. Like, that's something you can't control, but you can control how hard you work. And some people like to think, oh, it's because I'm so good. No, like luck plays into it. And there's one thing from that Company and Giants book, all these Hewlett-Packard or you have Steve Case, you have AOL, right? They're just like No, like luck played a major factor. I'm so lucky to be like, even when they achieved all the success, the billions and billions, the hundreds of millions that they got, they're just like, luck is a major factor. And we both agree with it. I think if you're listening to this and you think that it comes down to you, I think like a big part is you, but it's oftentimes things that are out of your control too.

I was speaking at an event yesterday and someone asked me what was the key to success for NP Digital? And I straight up said luck, not because we're talking about it, but I just coincidentally said luck. And they're like, what do you mean? And I'm like, I worked hard and built up my personal brand for, call it, you know, 15+ years, more than that, 17-ish+ years before I launched NP Digital. I didn't realize a personal brand was going to help me.

You didn't know? Yeah.

I was like, it was luck that I did it early on and I just kept doing it. And then I was like, and then, and you know, some of the story, got Nick Roshan, got lucky there.

He's great.

He's great.

Critical hire. I think Mike is critical too. Mike Kamo.

Yes. My co-founder is really good. But then Nick got us JJ, which, you know, JJ's no longer with us, but JJ got us Mike G, our CEO, Mike Gullickson.

Yeah.

Which a lot of it was luck. If I never had Nick, I would've never got JJ. If I never had JJ, I would've never had Mike Gullickson. And then Mike brought a lot of amazing people and then we brought, we also recruited tons of amazing people globally outside of those 2 as well. But a lot of it was just, Timing and luck.

Yeah, I'll give you an example too, and then we can move on from this. But recently I had a former employee reach out, so he's moved on to do his own thing. He reached out, he's like, hey, how did you find like the CTO that you have? Right? I was like, it was luck. Like, I can't replicate this because it's like, yes, I invested in his last startup. Yes. Like to meet him, I met Steve from Pray.com. Okay. And to meet the CTO, it was I got invited to a dinner from a guy that I met from Miami. And then Steve couldn't make it. Steve was sick. And then so he subbed this guy in. And so the moment This guy subbed in. I was like, oh, I invested in his company. I'm like, I'm not even going to talk to these other people at this dinner. It was like a very LA dinner, right? You had some influencers there. I didn't give a crap about the other people. I just started talking to him. And then before you knew it, like we just kept testing for 6, 8 months or so. And then we realized we work really well together. And that's how that happened. I was like, you can't replicate that. That was being very lucky. But it's like I had to be at the right place at the right time in so many different situations. Yeah, same for you.

But you have to take the opportunity and seize it and actually go to those meetings and do the things that don't work out. And one of them potentially may hit. Yeah.

Yeah. You just never know. So luck is a major factor. I think Neil and I are extremely fortunate in our lives. Anyway, that's it for today, guys.

Bye.

Bye.