6 Retro Business Ideas That Could Be As Big As LEGO ($11.8B)

All right, this is a fun episode. Sam Parr started doing Legos and that sent us down this rabbit hole where he discovered two businesses that I'd never heard of. I guarantee you never heard of it. They're awesome businesses in the Lego niche of all things. And then we brainstormed other things that people could do around these passionate niche audiences that most people overlook.

Love it.

This is an MFM classic, MFM special. If you like this podcast, you're gonna love this one. Uh, and I also had like an epiphany about 45 minutes in that kind of changed the way I think about this podcast. So that's, that's what I got out of this episode. Sam, what did you get?

So while researching this stuff, there is a ton of twists and turns to the story, the background story of how these companies started. I want you guys to listen to them. It doesn't happen— it's the second story involving LEGO. You'll know exactly what I'm talking about when we get there. It's about two-thirds of the way into the episode. I got emotional researching this, and I actually want you guys to like listen to the topics and the companies that we brought up. I want you to go to their websites and see what I'm talking about. You'll know exactly what I'm talking about when you get to the, the part of the episode. And let us know in the YouTube comments if this actually got to you like it got to me. I dug it. It was tons of like weird parts of the stories that I did not expect to happen. Anyway, check it out and let us know in the YouTube comments if you actually dug this, because I think you will, and which parts of the stories you like best.

What is up? Sean here with Sam, your boys who are stuck at 399,000 YouTube subscribers. They said we'd never get to 400. In fact, they're still saying we'd never get to 400. Sam, did you see this tweet that went viral that goes, all my haters said I wouldn't make it. I didn't make it. They were right. Honestly, good call by the haters. It's like a legendary tweet.

I love that stuff. Um, yeah, we're at 399. The, I, I read every YouTube comment. Do you?

Read and reply, bro. Not to everyone, but I, I reply like, it's like a, I'm in line at a coffee shop. I'll just go through and go through a whole episode and try to reply as many as I can.

Yeah. So, uh, if you're listening and you're not on YouTube, do, do your boys a favor and just click subscribe. It means a lot to us. It costs you nothing. And, uh, we've got a good episode today. We have, we last time we talked, we both had the same topic written down and we did it again. It happened again this time. Uh, before we get into the episode, I gotta tell you something. How big is your house? Square footage?

Uh, 5,600.

I'm in a house right now. I'm visiting family, so I rented an Airbnb for 2 weeks. My home, my normal home, uh, in Austin is, uh, just a little over 2,000 square feet. It's not big. It's nice, but it's not big. I'm currently renting a 7,500 square foot house. I am losing so much stuff. This is such a big house. I think that even 55 would be too big for me. Do you like having a big house like that?

Yeah, it's great. What's not to love?

I'll tell you one, the utility bill here, if I had to guess, it's like $2,000 a month. What's your utility bill? Well, you're in California, so you don't really use too much electricity.

I didn't even check it. I don't look, but everything's on autopay and I don't even want to look. I, it's probably like $1,200, $1,500, I guess. Wow.

Okay. So that's expensive, but whatever. Uh, but the other thing, things break all the time. Like there's 7 bathrooms here and like one of the, the guy has like a jacuzzi thing in one of his bathrooms. It's not working. I don't know how many people go in and using all 7 bathrooms.

That's, you don't use half the shit. The shit. That's the trick.

That's how it breaks. That's how it breaks is you just don't use it. And so anyway, I, I wanted to buy a big home eventually and I'm happy I'm testing this out. It's such a big house. I understand the downsides to it of just like fixing things. It's a pain in the butt.

Well, here's my, here's my, my rule. Number of humans plus 2. That's how many beds, that's how many bedrooms I want in my house. Number of humans plus 2 bedrooms. And one of those bedrooms turns into man cave, like where I have the studio here right now. This is one of the bedrooms we just converted and the other one's a guest room. Uh, now my kids are small right now, so they're like all sleeping in the same bed and stuff like that. It doesn't really. Help, but as they get older, that rule is going to come into effect.

Yeah. And I think maybe my needs will change, but I just wanted to test out a big house. I'm shocked by how much I dislike it so far.

I like how much you test out things. Most people don't do this at all, and you do it a lot, which is where do I want to live? How do I want to live? Do I want to live in a city? Do I want to live in the suburbs? Do I want to live in a big house, small house, near water? You know, what matters to me? Because I think a lot of people have these predefined ideas that are completely based on nothing, no evidence. And I really take a lot of inspiration from the way you test out lifestyles. You prototype like how you want to live. And more people should do that for sure.

I do it all the time. And the reason I do it is because if you think about it, so renting a really fancy Airbnb for a week, it could be expensive. Let's just say it's $1,000 a night or more. So let's just say, let's round up and say it's $10,000 for a week. That's expensive. But you know what's more expensive? Buying a home that you only see for 24 hours and, or through a 1-hour tour and being like, cool, this is my place now for the next 10 or 20 years. That's way more expensive.

Andrew, honestly, you start to lose a little trust in yourself. It's like, oh, I thought this would make me happy. It turns out I didn't even like this, right? I'm not listening to that guy anymore. And by the way, you don't have to be rich to do this lifestyle testing. Like I was doing this when I had, you know, no money because Well, I didn't have, it was all relative to where you're at, right? So it's where do I want to live? I would move to, like, I would do a road trip or we would drive to another place, live on a friend's couch, but we would live there for 2 weeks and just kind of see, okay, what's it like in this place? Like where I tried in Chicago, then I tried in Colorado and that, you know, I just tested out different places in order to see where do I want to be. And I think that's a very smart way to go about things.

You want to talk about Legos, my man? Let's talk about Legos.

Can I introduce this category with, which is the following. You text me and you go, dude, I'm playing a ton of Legos. What? It's like, yeah, every night I'm playing Legos. Do you do this? And I was like, no, I don't do this. But I know a bunch of other people that do. And it caught my attention because I'm not sure if you know this, but this is kind of becoming this like, uh, trendy thing. So there's a bunch of like NBA players that kind of came out of the closet saying, yeah, this is what I do at night.

Out of the closet.

Yeah. Like, you know, the reputation for NBA players, we're all out at the strip club after games and whatever. And there's like this guy, Miles Turner. He's like, I'm building like replica Star Wars, like, you know, Death Stars with my Legos at night, 4 or 5 hours a night. And I got kind of interested. So I looked at it.

By the way, in college, I lived with the basketball team in college. They were the biggest nerds of all the athletes. Like they didn't go out.

I was giving them wedgies, 6'7 wedgies.

Well, like, like a Friday night was playing video games. Like it was like they were the least party animal of all the athletes. All right, everyone, a quick break to tell you about HubSpot. And this one's easy because I'm gonna show you an example of how I'm doing this at my company. When I say I, I mean not my team. I mean I'm the one who actually made it. So I've got this company called Hampton. You could check it out. Joinhampton.com. It's a community for founders. And one of the ways that we've grown is we've created these surveys where we'll ask our members certain questions that a lot of people, a lot of times people are afraid to ask. So things like what their net worth is, how their assets are allocated, all these like interesting questions. And then we'll put it in a survey. And I went and made a landing page, so you can check it out at joinhampton.com/wealth. You can actually see the landing page that I made. And the hard part with this is with Hampton, we are appealing to a sort of a, a higher-end customer, sort of like, like a Louis Vuitton or a Ferrari. So I needed the landing page to look a very particular way. HubSpot has templates. That's what we use. We just change the colors a little bit to match our brand. Very easy. They have this drag and drop version. Version of their landing page builder. And it's super simple. I'm not technical and I'm the one who actually made it. And once it's made, I then shared it on social media and we had thousands of people see it and thousands of people who gave us their information. And I can then see over the next handful of weeks, this is how much revenue came in from this wealth survey that I did. This is where the revenue came from. So it came from Twitter, it came from LinkedIn, whatever it came from, I can actually go and look at it and I can say, oh, well that worked, that didn't work. Do more of that, do less of that. And if you're interested in making landing pages like this, I highly suggest it. Look, I'm actually doing it, but you could check it out. Go to the link in the description of YouTube and get started. All right, now back to MFM.

So do you know what this category is called?

Is it called the— is it the acronym that starts with an A?

No, no, no. They call them— they call people like you kidults. The toy industry, they call you guys kidults. And kidults, or elder-tainment, is the name of this group of people that are adults buying kids' toys. And that sounds like a pretty fringe thing, but it actually makes up 25% of all toy sales. So billions and billions of dollars. One out of every four people that go buy, you know, let's say a set of Legos is going to be an older teenager or adult.

And you know what they call it for Legos, specifically for Legos? It's called, uh, I don't, it's one of those words that I see, but I don't know if you're supposed to, how you're supposed to say it, but AFOL, Adult Fan of Legos. That's what they're, you're self-identified as an AFLO, actual fucking old Lego maker.

So, so this, uh, this category, uh, like it's mixed up all the growth in the toy industry. So toy industry, if you look at how fast it's growing, 60% of all the growth is just coming from this one segment. So it's like this, like kind of this segment that's growing really fast. At first I didn't understand it, but then they did some surveys, right? Because all the toy companies were like, what's going on here? We don't, this is not what we planned for. So several years ago they commissioned a bunch of studies and they went and asked, why are you doing this? And I'm curious if you're going to say the same thing because 90% of the adults all said the same 3 reasons that they do it. What are your reasons, Sam?

Bonding with my family. Well, in my family, it's my wife. Um, no, no screens and we could just sit at the table and do it together while we're just talking and maybe there'll be TV on in the background. Background, but it's basically bonding without screens, sitting at the table. And it reminds me of my childhood.

That's exactly right. The, uh, the three-word nostalgia, which you just said, um, anti-loneliness. So bonding with, with whoever you're, you're doing it with and detoxing from, from phone, as well as kind of like an anti-anxiety angle to it. Like, is it real relaxing, a relaxing activity?

Because I'm following directions. I'm, I'm just following the directions. I'm not making any decisions. I'm doing what I'm told.

That's interesting. Oh, okay. I thought it was kind of the hands part of it, but you're saying as an adult, I'm constantly having to make decisions and think, and it's so nice to not make decisions and just be told, put this blue thing over here.

Yeah. It's like a, it's like a, a PG-rated dominatrix, you know, like instead of spitting in my mouth, it's telling me to like connect these two pieces. Yeah.

Some people, you're into that stuff. All right.

To each his own.

And so this is fascinating to me. So I want you to tell me, I have some more ideas around, like more exact, I have a bunch of examples around this trend and some ideas of what I think people could do. But before we do that, I just want to know, what are you actually doing? So you're buying Lego kits, like which ones? And what do you do?

So Lego is this huge company. So I think they do about $10 billion a year in sales. It was started in like the '20s by just an engineer. And now they have got, they've got movies, characters. It's like a, it's like a Marvel almost. It's like a whole franchise. I particularly like the line called Technics and Technics is cool because it's basically you'll build cars or tractors or a bridge and there's gears within the machine. And so I'm learning how, like, you know, like in the snow when old cars, when you spin your tires, only one tire would spin sometime. That's because of a rear differential. That's like a mechanical piece. And so I'm like building that and I'm understanding how a transmission works. I'm building, I built a Land Rover that has 6, a 6-speed transmission and I see how gears work. And so it's really fascinating to me to see these moving parts. So I build Technics. I've probably spent $1,500 on them so far. Each one is between $150 and $350 and I buy only the Technics one. That's my thing.

And you're, you finish them in one sitting or these are like multi-week projects?

No, no, one a week. So, but it'll take, I'll sit for 2 hours And if my wife's not with me, I'll listen to a podcast or something and I'll just sit there for 2 hours assembling it from like 9 to 11.

Just you and the voice of Scott Galloway.

Yeah. I'm just like, I'm listening to like some war story. So it's like just like me and Benito Mussolini as I build this Land Rover.

Like this like 6-inch tractor.

Yeah.

I love, by the way, how you're like, yeah, I built a 6-inch tractor. You know, a 6-speed transmission. It's like, no, no, no, you didn't. You really didn't. I feel like you got a lot of confidence from this that like, I could— came down to it, I now could. And, uh, I don't think you could, man. So, all right, so you're doing this. Is this a fad, or you think this is like a lifelong hobby for you? What do you— what are you thinking?

Lifelong. I could see it being lifelong. Oh wow. Yeah, I could see.

What do you do with them when you're done? You finish the, the 6-speed tractor or whatever? What are you going to do with this?

So one of the companies that I'm going to bring up, but basically you can tell this company that I'll break down and explain what sets you have and you destroy them and you rebuild them using different plans. And so you can make alternative items out of them. And so that's what I intend to do.

Ah, okay. All right.

Well, they're not going to sit on a shelf. I'm not going to be like The 40-Year-Old Virgin and have like dolls and packages still unused. No. I, it, it really is an enjoy the journey type of thing. So once I'm done with it, I'm like, I don't care about it.

Okay, good. Um, so I wanted to bring up a couple other examples because I, I saw this and I was like, huh, that's weird, that's interesting about Legos. Then I was like, no, there's something to this, like, kidult behavior, right? Where adults buying and doing kid things that is, you know, anti-phone, anti-loneliness, and nostalgic. And I'm going to give you some examples of trends that are like this. So the first is Calm. We're both friends with the founders of Calm, Alex and Michael. And I don't know if you remember this, but back in the day, Calm was really struggling. Today, Calm is like kind of very popular. It's a multibillion-dollar company. But back when we were living in San Francisco and hanging out with Alex, Calm was like small. It was a slow grower. It was not sexy. Nobody wanted to invest in it.

Well, it was kind of a joke. Like a meditation app. Are you kidding me?

And Alex is very jokey. And the other things he built, like Million Dollar Homepage, were all jokes. So it is kinda like, oh cool.

And the other guy built like a stuffed animal business before that.

Yeah. So they, they were definitely like non-serious, serious entrepreneurs. Um, they, but I remember one time talking to Michael. So Michael came to visit from London and he's like, I was like, so what do you do with Comp? 'Cause you're not even here full-time. Alex is sitting in his apartment grinding away at this thing that's not really going too fast, growing too fast. What are you doing? And he's like, oh, I'm work— I work on new products. And I'm like, dude, this is not like, uh, you know, he looks at Richard Branson. I was like, this is not Virgin Atlantic. What new products? He's like, no, no, I got a great one. He goes, uh, I wanna do, um, bedtime stories for adults. And I was like, what? He's like, no, no, no. I, I was like, that's okay, whatever marketing stunt, I guess. He's like, no, no, no, I think this is gonna be a thing. He goes, people are going to, like, he's like, a lot of adults, they listen to things before they sleep to help them relax and help them actually like fall asleep, but they're not done very well.

Do you?

Uh, yeah, I do sometimes. I have like, I have like a version of white noise that I sometimes listen to, or I'll just listen to podcasts and fall asleep, which is not the same thing. But, uh, there's like a relaxing, people who want a relaxation thing. In fact, I think one of the top podcasts in the world is just like 18 hours of sleep sounds and it's like, I'll put on—

I listen to Family Guy when I go to bed and I just hear like Peter, like I just hear that while I'm going to sleep.

Yeah. You're just chuckling to sleep. Exactly. And so he's like, I'm going to do this thing. They ended up being sleep stories and sleep stories were one of the things that really let Calm take off. It like exploded after sleep stories. In fact, I would say that Calm is It's less about meditation. It is more about the state of being calm. And really the number one product is the sleep stories. And he, they got Matthew McConaughey to narrate this like bedtime story. And he was hosting, I don't know if you remember this in San Francisco, he would before to prototype this, he was hosting parties in San Francisco where you would go to this woman's house and you would lay down on her carpet and you would have like a pillow and they would like set the mood and then she would just talk and put you to sleep and then everybody would go to sleep. And, um, it was the most San Francisco thing ever. And these were, that was like a party. It was like, it was like a networking event. It was like a, it was amazing.

And so, but you think Calm is gonna have toy, or you're saying the, the toy is the—

no, I'm saying this is part of the same thing. Like adults using, adults using kid product basically. So bedtime stories for adults. That's another version of, yeah, you know, adults using Legos.

My family member, I have family members, I won't even say who they are. They might be embarrassed to go to sleep to Calm bedtime stories.

What's embarrassing about that? It's awesome.

I don't know. I don't know. You never know. I'm not going to out someone.

So there's also like Moon Pals and Squishmallows. Have you seen these?

Yeah, I know Moon Pals.

They're like basically giant stuffed animals, but they're geared more towards adults than they are for kids. And you see like, you know, 24-year-old girls in the Bronx who like have like a, you know, like a Moon Pal that they carry around as a little like safety blanket.

Funko Pop. Is that, was that what it's called? What's the Funko?

Funko's a publicly traded company. You know that? No, they, they're, they're like a $400 million market cap company. During the, during COVID when everybody was stuck at home and people started just spending money collecting or buying crypto or doing whatever, Funko was like over a billion dollars because they were selling so many of these figurine doll things.

Figurine like dolls. That's all it is.

Yeah, it's just like a little, a little toy. Got it. Toy figure, action figure, no action, I guess just, just toy figurine that has an oversized head.

And we, that's funny. We had talked about Mini Brands as well, like the company Mini Brands that makes miniature, I don't even, like Coke cans. Those are insane too.

Another one. Have you ever been to Build-A-Bear?

Dude, they kill it. Yeah, I've taken a nephew there.

So Build-A-Bear is like this thing in the mall where you go and build a teddy bear. It's usually like, you know, it's for kids. You know that 40% of their revenue now comes from adults? That's insane. That's insane. That's absolutely insane. And they call it Build-A-Bear After Dark. They basically like open up at late hours and let adults come in and basically like, you know, do it as a date night activity and stuff like that. It's crazy. There's more.

Same with American Doll. You know, I don't know if you, you had a sister, so you would know American Doll. But I bet Ari knows American Doll or had an American Doll. American Dolls still crush it. You know what American Doll is? No.

Is that not Barbie? That's something else?

It's different. It's a doll that's maybe 3-foot tall. It, back then they would cost $150. So it was a big deal. And there it was sort of like GI Joe, but for girls. And there was like an American Doll student. And so it looked like a little girl who was going to Harvard or American Doll astronaut or something like that. It was like themed, but they were supposed to be more high-end than a Barbie and more collectible.

American Doll OnlyFans creator. Oh, they have like new, new genres. That's great. So they, um, so, uh, there's, there's just like, like even Barbie, by the way, do you know that Barbie, you know how the Barbie movie came about? Cause like the Barbie movie is not, not geared towards kids, right? Like if you've seen it, it's not a, it's not a kid's movie really. It's an adult. It's like geared towards adults. And that this is the reason why they actually, Barbie, the company actually created an internal movie production company to create this movie geared towards adults to help sell more dolls into this kidult, uh, like, uh, segment. And so there's a marketing stunt for that, which is kind of crazy when you think about it. I didn't realize that about the Barbie movie. Um, but like there's also tabletop gaming. So, you know, those guys from Churnin, they've made it like big bets on tabletop gaming, which is basically board games that adults play. They have like Exploding Kittens and they have some other ones, but That's another genre. Even McDonald's came out with an adult Happy Meal. I don't know if you saw this last year. Just a hilarious, like they made a bigger box with full-size fries and an adult toy. And they did this last year and it was like this viral marketing stunt that went crazy because everyone's like, oh dude, I want to go get one. And it like went viral on TikTok and stuff like that. Brands are really capitalizing on this. So I have a few ideas I want to pitch you. I want you to tell me. You could just give me a, uh, genius or idiot on these. This is sort of like a mini Drunk Ideas episode for you.

All right.

All right. First one. You know how you've seen the stats, how millennials are just like not getting married and not having babies? Like it's like a lower rate than ever before.

Yeah.

Tamagotchis for babies. So basically you give, you give that 28-year-old who's single and whatever, You give them a Tamagotchi that's a baby that they gotta keep, they gotta raise, and they gotta take care of. Like Tamagotchis, I think, were pets. Screw it. We're just doing an actual human baby. You gotta take care of this thing. And it literally is the same level of, uh, like same, same like hourly needs as a baby. And let's see what you got. So Tamagotchi for babies. That's my first one.

So the problem with these ideas is if you would've told me about the things that are successful now, that they like, this is, this is gonna work. I would've said those are all horrible ideas. Correct. So this is like a really challenging category.

That's why I prepped you by telling you all the ones that worked before I told you my bad ideas, just to kind of like frame you, like prime you for like, hey, I don't know, man, anything's possible.

So do I think Tamagotchi? Yes. I think, I think there, there'd be legs for Tamagotchi. What, what happened to the company?

Dude, I have no idea. What's Tamagotchi?

It's a, it's a Japanese business. Yeah, it's a, it's based in Japan. Yeah, I, I'd, I'd believe that a Tamagotchi for babies could work.

It's a standalone device that's gonna replicate having a baby. All right, that's number one. Number two, did you ever use K'Nex?

Yeah, I love K'Nex. You ever build a big Ferris wheel?

No, 'cause K'Nex were hard. And I had a cousin, I have a cousin who's the same age as me, looks like me, last name Puri, and this guy's way smarter than me. And I, I'm pretty sure the reason he's way smarter than me is that His dad bought him K'Nex when he was a little kid and he was just making K'Nex all day, every day after school. I was playing Dreamcast and he was building K'Nex. Guess what he does now? I have a podcast. He builds like self-driving cars. This guy's a genius. So like, I'm pretty sure K'Nex is the, uh, you know, the number one contributing factor to this guy being a genius.

Dude, listen to this. K'Nex was sold in 2018 for only $28, $21 million.

I know, I know. Crazy. What out of what happened? How is Lego like a $50 billion company? And K'NEX sold for $21 million. Like what happened here? And when you were describing the Lego Technics, it's very similar. So K'NEX, the difference was that it was more kind of like a STEM kid thing where it's like sciencey and mathy where it's like, you know, you have these like little like rotating wheels and it's almost like a motor that you're creating. It's like a high functioning version of Legos.

That's how I describe you, by the way. You're, you're, you're, you're a high functioning version of a Lego. That's basically you.

I take that as a compliment. And so I think Kinex should just like, somebody should just reboot Kinex targeted at, as for adults that want to do Legos basically. Uh, the guys like you, literally Kinex for Sam Parr. That's my next idea. Go ahead.

Yeah, I'm in. That's a, that's a no-brainer. I'm in. So Kinex was acquired in 2019 and they're basically not that existent anymore because of, because of a bunch of tariffs, uh, something like where they couldn't import them. But, uh, Yeah, I'm in. I think that's awesome.

And I think they sold a bunch through like Toys R Us and then Toys R Us went bankrupt and I think they lost a bunch of revenue there. So I think just, hey, a little bad luck, you know, unfortunate bounce of the ball there. And I feel like K'Nex still is a good opportunity. All right. Here's my next one.

All right. What else?

Easier Rubik's Cube. Can you do a Rubik's Cube?

No, I can't. I cannot. Can you?

You kind of wish you could?

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, what we used to do is just take the stickers off. You take the stickers off it and then you put 'em all back in the right place and you can brag that you did it.

Oh, okay. Gotcha. You can also buy it new and it's done. So what's the easiest party trick you could do? Like I can juggle. Can you do anything like that? Yeah.

If I smoke a cigarette, I could blow smoke out my ear. Really? I swear to God. Yeah. I've had all these—

Out your ear?

I've had all these surgeries in my ear and so like some pipes got rerouted and I used to be able to blow smoke out my ear.

Dude, how do we not start every podcast with that? Come on. Sandbagging us. We would be at 400,000 subscribers.

But dude, solving a Rubik's Cube is a close second though.

All right. Easier Rubik's Cube. So I think Rubik's Cube, fun little idea. It's kind of like a fidget spinner anyways, the way that the Rubik's Cube feels. However, too hard, way too hard. And we get it. If you could do a Rubik's Cube, that's fantastic. That's chess. Where's checkers? I need a checkers of Rubik's Cubes. And so, um, here's what I'm thinking. Letters on the outside, and it's kind of like Wordle. Wordle is a very fun game, simple game you play every day. You could build a daily habit. I think somebody needs to take the concept of Wordle but put it in the form factor of a Rubik's Cube where every day you get a notification on your phone or there's a website that posts the starting letter combination and then you gotta rotate it to make the word. And it should take like 5 minutes. It's like, you know, do you play the New York Times mini crossword? No. Do you? Every day. This thing's amazing. It's such a fun, it's 60, it's literally like a 60-second break. It's a game. It's a crossword. Crosswords are kind of fun, but a real crossword is pretty hard and time-consuming. And when New York Times made this mini, it, that thing drives like millions of dollars. Like it's like, I don't know, 10% of New York Times's revenue. Comes from this little game app, and it's mostly the New York Times mini crossword. This thing is an absolute hit product. All right, I have two more. Candle pouring kits. So another thing that is highly tactile, highly satisfying, leaves you with a result, a candle. Um, candle pouring is something I see a lot on TikTok. I don't know exactly how it goes or how it works, but I'm pretty sure this could be another like adult craft, arts and crafts relaxation thing that, that is accessible to many and results in you actually having something that's not just clutter and junk in your house. 'Cause you could just light the candle, use it, melt it down, and then you're done. So I think a candle pouring kit company could do pretty well.

Dude, I'm in on that one because you'd want to buy one. You'd want to continually buy them if you got into it, right? Yeah.

And candles make a ton of money. Like, go look at the candle MLMs. If you want to know what products work, go look at what MLMs work and work backwards from there. So there are several multilevel marketing schemes that are based around candles, which tells me there's a, a giant market for candles.

Tell me one more and then I wanna blow your mind with a Lego story.

Okay. I'm now seeing what I wrote here and I have no idea what this means. So I'm gonna just take this as a blank canvas for myself. Relaxation puddle. I don't know what I meant when I wrote this. This was late last night. I think what I, oh, I think what this is, is like my kids, one of the things you do with kids is you give them something called like sensory play. So you buy this like box and you put in like Orbeez or you put in these like gel circle things. You put your hand in, it's kind of this cool sensation. It's like, it's like very cold. You, they're like these like balls that you can kind of like, you know, you could touch and feel, but they're not like, it's like slime, you know, slime's really popular for kids. There's like all these things that are very tactile, Play-Doh. And so you, I think what I was thinking here is it's very relaxing if you put your hands in this thing. What if you could put your whole body in this thing? I think is what I was thinking. It's more like those, uh, those, uh, sensory deprivation tanks that people like to do in San Francisco, uh, and maybe other places as well. I'm not sure, but something you could just go lay in and it's like a super nap is really where my head was going.

I'm trying to yes and you, but it's really hard when the premise is a relaxation puddle.

So, dude, the word puddle is so underrated actually. Sounds great. Uh, has all kinds of jokes and commentaries, very memeable word. And I think that's what you want with any of these. You want the idea to be so stupid that you get memed into popularity. You understand what I'm saying here?

Yeah.

You're gonna, here's what you're gonna do. You're gonna do it. It's gonna sound ridiculous and 95% of America wants to make fun of you. But then that, those articles go out, those memes go out, and then 5% of people are like, I don't know, I'd try it. Right? Like, you remember when that thing happened that like guys were laying on their back and they were like suntanning their butthole and they're like, yeah, that's the new thing. I don't even think that was a thing, but I think there was someone behind that that was like, you know what? We'll get written up everywhere automatically overnight if I say that this is a thing.

I've got this friend Chris who would send me so many photos of you just see his legs, like as if he's not wearing clothes with his legs in the air.

He's like, just like, say his last name. He deserves it for doing that.

Just being healthy. Uh, let me tell you, like Crocs are like this, right?

They're intentionally ugly. They're intentionally so ugly. You have to talk about them and the design like stands out in a not so good way, but the result of it is that, uh, you know, gets talked about.

Yeah. Like you just got to figure out what the fuck a relaxation puddle is first. You're just starting with the word. Let me tell you two crazy stories. The second one is in particularly crazy, and I think you're actually gonna dig it 'cause it, it, it's gonna revolve around your world. So I'm a Lego fan. I, I like doing Legos now. It's my new thing. There's this website called Rebrickable. So Rebrickable is this amazing website. It was clearly started by an engineer. I think his name is, I actually don't know what the guy's name is who started it. Nathan, I think his name's Nathan. So Nathan was, just an engineer at some company, normal job in Australia. He started this website that he, it's actually quite complicated. And what you do, there, there's tens of thousands of Lego kits, you know, and it's been around for 100 years. So there's probably hundreds of thousands of different types of Lego kits. You tell it what type of Lego sets you have, and then other designers, so people who are Lego fans, have created directions on how to build their own creations. It's called an MOC, my own creation, and it's a whole community of people who build MOCs. And he has roughly 30,000 people who have uploaded a variety of MOCs that you can buy from $10, probably all the way up to $100. And what's interesting about this guy, there's so many crazy business implications here, but what's interesting about this guy is A, he's an engineer and the, the, the people who listen to this podcast, there's a bunch of engineers out there. There's a huge overlap, a Venn diagram of Lego. Enthusiasts, and this guy adds a third circle to that Venn diagram of business people. And so basically it had, he reveals all of his stats online and you could go to his blog and you could see it. He started this company, I think in 2010, and it was just a project. I looked at his LinkedIn. He worked as a full-time per, uh, had a full-time job since 2000, uh, until 2020. And he reveals every year how much page views that the website has had, how many registered users it's had, how many people are selling products on there. So it's basically a marketplace. And so in 2023, he had 11 million users create an account on his website, which is— wow, which is huge. And so if you account for, let's say, 3% of people buy something, that's 330,000 people or sales who bought an MOC. So someone's directions on building something, say the average sale is about $15. That's about $5 million in revenue that he's collected. And of course, he gives a lot to most of it to the designer. But there's people who have whole like stores on the website and it's really fascinating. And his page views last year, 2023, were around 160 million page views. And if you look at his website, he blogs every year and he says what his stats are, how many page views he's had, he has. And it's a very interesting blog to read because A, he's being transparent about the business and B, you could see how to build like a rabid community. So on his blog, and it's clearly a self-built blog, he's not even using WordPress. He built everything from scratch. You'll see the comments saying, I love this community. I'm so into, uh, Rebrickable. Like, Nathan, you're the man. Like, people are, are, are rabid about this, uh, niche. It's incredibly fascinating. And this type of guy, I'm just gonna stereotype him. He's not a business savvy person, or at least he doesn't want to be. Like, he's not out there trying to milk this dry and make as much money as possible. But this type of business that he has, once you get users to a passionate following like this to your website, You can sell them anything. And so what Andrew Wilkinson calls this is an airport business. So once you're there, well, while you're here, we could sell you this, we could sell you that. It's people are here to learn and they're ready to buy. And the reason why this is fascinating is because with Legos, you know, they cost hundreds of dollars sometimes and you want to buy a new one every month, every couple months. And so the market is actually quite big to build a big business. This is like a type of company that if you want it to be a PE guy, which I don't think you should, because this is like a work of art to me. but if you wanted to be a PE guy and buy a business that you could milk for tons of profit and you don't actually have to do that much innovation, this is one of those websites.

Dude, what a great find. This is such a cool, cool business. Yeah. 10 million users. And by the way, look at this. I looked, I went to top designers. We got to put this on the screen so that our 399,000 YouTube subscribers can see this. The Chinese restaurant.

This thing is insane.

This is insane. Who, who made this up? This is so crazy. This. I— this is insane.

And the technology to build this stuff is amazing because, A, you could just buy an MOC from someone and they'll tell you what parts or kits that you need and they'll sell them. Or you could— there's this like crazy algorithm that they have where you upload hundreds of different kits that you have and then you click like submit and then you see like a wheel turning and it takes like 60 seconds as if it's like doing heavy like calculations and then it'll give you a huge lists of hundreds or thousands of different MOCs that others have uploaded that you can create with the parts that you have. And it'll say you have 100% of the parts needed for this, or you have 50% of the parts. Here's the other 50% that you have. You can buy them here. It's really fascinating. And it's quite complicated, I would imagine, to build that.

You found like dork mecha. This is great.

It's the best.

Not only adults doing Legos, adults doing Legos. Who need custom, custom-made LEGO, like, designs. This is insane. Uh, yeah, this is cool. By the way, this Chinese restaurant, 3,000, like, 2,000 pieces, $10 for the, for the MOC. What a steal.

It's amazing. And they, they, there's people, uh, like, there's people in the forums saying that they're close to making a full-time living selling their MOCs. And so when you have a rabid base like this, it's crazy fascinating to see what types of businesses you could build. Now, this particular model is very unique to LEGO, but you could look at what the sneakerheads have done with shoes. You know, like that was like considered silly a few years ago. There was a small group of people, right? And they created marketplaces for it. And, but this is a perfect example of how this is executed well of these niche followings and going all in on them and building them for the community. And what's interesting is, check this out. So in year 1, he had a million people come to the website. So in year 1, so, um, so that's 80,000 people a month. That's pretty good, but it's, it's not crazy. That's pretty good. His page views were 11 million and he started that, I think in 2015. I said most recently in 2023, he had, so he 11xed it. So we had 11 million users and 160 million page views and you could see how slowly these types of businesses build and it would be very hard to break this company down. This is, they have a true moat.

Yeah, 100%. Should we help them with like a marketing slogan maybe?

Dude, this guy, this guy's, this guy's killing it, man. Whatever he's doing, I want to be part of it. But let me tell you about an even cra— let me tell you an even crazier story. This actually should be a movie. So there's a website called Bricklink. Bricklink was started in 2000, in the year 2000. So one of the, you know, early, early, early first website businesses, first internet companies. So BrickLink, it originally started as Brick Bay. Brick Bay. The guy who started, his name is Dan Jezek. So you, you spell that last name J-E-Z-E-K. Do me a favor and type in Dan Jezek, uh, on your, on your, uh, Chrome and go to his personal website. You see his personal website? It looks like a GeoCity, uh, website.

Is he dead? Why is like—

he's dead. He's dead.

Okay.

So let me tell you this story. So Dan started, he, Dan was a, they didn't explicitly say this, but it sort of sounded like he was a hacker type of guy. And so he was kind of like a little bit gray hat where he was the type of guy who probably like would break into like different websites and things like that. That's, that's the vibe that I got from him, but he was fascinated, fascinated with Legos. And so he built this website called Brick Bay. It was called Brick Bay at the time because he lived in Hawaii on a bay. Eventually he got sued by eBay. They're like, you can't use bay. So we changed it to BrickLink. And he was kind of like reading about him. I kind of got vibes of Ross Ulbricht, the guy who started Silk Road. It was one guy, he was anonymous and he would blog about all the changes he was making to the website, but it was under the name admin. He never used his real name and it was just him. And he had a handful of volunteer admins who helped him run the site and he ran it like a community. And what BrickLink does is you can buy and sell different types of Legos. And so the thing about Legos is if you build the thing, you don't have any more joy for it sometimes. So you can pack it up in the boxes and you could sell it and just get a little bit of your money back and then keep going or buy rare or interesting pieces. And so he ran this for 10 years and it became a good business. However, he died tragically. No one online actually says how he died. We don't know. A lot of people suspected a drug overdose, but we don't know. But he was working on this website. Full-time, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. It was like a full-time gig. When he died, his mother, imagine like a cute old lady who like bakes cookies. That's what his mom looks like. And when he died, his mom loved, you know, she loved her son and she was so passionate about the community that he made that she was like, well, I can't let this community go away. And so her and her husband, uh, Dan's stepdad took over the website, but because it was just one guy running it, they didn't even have the passwords. They didn't even know how it was run. And so they eventually called the web hosting site. Or the web hosting service, and they're like, hey, here's what happened. Can you help us? They gave them the passwords and they just spent 3 years figuring this out and try to make the community thrive again. And it did. And the community stepped up and they were like, we got to do this for Dan. This community is too good. We can't let BrickLink go away because we love buying and selling Legos here. And so they run this business for 3 years and it becomes a good business. Now Dan dies. They're running it 3 years later. A billionaire named Jay Kim bought it. Have you ever heard of Jay Kim?

No.

So Jay Kim, if you click his Wikipedia, obviously Jay Kim's not his real name. It's, uh, Kim Jung Joon. Jay Kim was basically kind of like the Marcus Pinkus, Mark Pinkus of Korea. So in the '90s, he was early in the internet and he created games and he became the biggest gaming company in Korea. Then he was a billionaire. So he starts this family holding company where he buys a bunch of interesting companies and BrickLink was one of the companies that he loved. Another one. Now this is where it kind of comes into your, your world, by the way.

He says at the time of his death, he was the third wealthiest person in all of Korea.

Yeah, he's a big deal. He's a big deal. But Jae Kim, he was like a steward for this website. So they basically, they didn't change much, but one of the reasons why he bought it, and one of the things that makes this interesting, and I'll read this excerpt from, uh, from, uh, basically, uh, Dan, the original BrickLink owner's mom, wrote this beautiful tribute. So if you go to danjesik.com, wrote this amazing tribute where they show pictures of Dan and him growing up and working on Bricklink. So she wrote this amazing thing, and I'll read part of it. And she said, not long before he died, he developed an international monetary exchange engine called Bricklink that allowed sellers almost anywhere in the world to sell in their own currency, and their customers could buy in their own currency as well. And every 2 hours, this system that he— that Dan built it would update. And so you can buy cross-country and, uh, or across the world and your currency would automatically be updated. And so everyone was getting a fair shake. He built that in 2010, which is pretty fascinating. And Jay Kim also owns Bitstamp. Have you heard of Bitstamp?

Yeah. Crypto, crypto, uh, exchange, right?

One of the largest crypto exchanges in the world. And so the reason why this guy Dan and this whole story is fascinating is there's actually some weird crypto implications here where you see this overlap of like, Wow, what this guy Dan was doing is actually like in the same world of this, this whole crypto thing. And he was pretty early to it. And these Lego fans, and if you go to BrickLink and see the comments, they're all similar. It's all a similar type of people. And this business BrickLink, it's fascinating. And oddly, Jay Kim also died under mysterious circumstances in his 50s in Hawaii where Dan died. And so there's a bunch of like weird things going on with this story. But BrickLink is a very fascinating company. And most recently, Jay Kim, after he died, LEGO, the company, bought the website. And they openly said, we bought this website because we want to carry on this tradition. We don't want anyone messing with it. We don't intend to do too much with it. We just want to keep it going because this is for the people. Wow.

That's pretty cool.

Very fascinating.

On, on this guy's website, on this guy's website, it says, uh, here's a quote from him about what he wants to do after he, uh, uh, there's a subject, there's a post on the forum that said, it was called Afterlife?

Who, J. Kim or Dan?

Dan. Dan. He goes, after I die and go to heaven, this is how I imagine it to be. A place where there's infinite amount of bricks and an infinite amount of time to build them with, to build with them. There would be all kinds of bricks for all themes so that I could get, so that when I got bored of building a castle, I could move on to a town or a pirate ship. There would be lots and lots of other LEGO maniacs to share ideas and build with. Isn't that awesome?

It's fascinating, right?

It's so great.

And if you read this guy, Dan, if both Dan and Nathan from the other website, they use these just like, uh, what was his name? Dread Pirates? What's the Silk Road guy?

Yeah.

Whatever. They, they, it's a marketplace, but it's a weird movement and it's a weird diary and it's like a cult and there's a very particular leader and he's leading the charge. It's a really—

And nobody knew his name. He was just called Admin on BroomHorse.

Admin. He was just Admin. No one, they kind of knew it was Dan, but he never like revealed his name. And it was just, oh, admin's doing this. And it's just this weird, like, it all stems from like, you know, remember like the phone freaks, like people who would like hack into payphones. And then there was the internet and they were doing things like that. Now there's crypto. Like, it's this weird chain where it's actually all quite similar. It's this weird underground community. And so as a business person, I see these, I see these things and I'm like, what other products cost a lot of money? Have a passionate nerdy following and where you can build a large audience and then eventually sell them everything. And LEGO fits that perfectly. I think there's a few others, you've named a few, but it's, it was actually challenging for me to find other things that were at like this, but like sneakerheads are kind of one of them, but there's, it's just really fascinating how big I think these businesses can be, even though they appear quite niche.

Oh dude, I forgot Thrill of the Shill. So first of all, The Thrill of the Shill is one of the chef's kiss best inventions we've had. And unlike the Gentleman's Agreement, which we kind of stole from somebody else, the Thrill of the Shill is actually an original. But I have a different thing I want to try today. Are you down for it?

Yes. The Thrill of the Shill, by the way, came up literally 30 seconds before we hit record a few weeks ago and we said, how do we promote interesting stuff? And you were like, well, we got to tell them valuable content and then hopefully they'll buy whatever we're selling. Just call it the Thrill of the Shill. So congratulations. Let's hear it.

Yeah, so that, so that was good. But now I wanna try something different. Have you ever read this thing that is, um, like this, the famous Hemingway story? I'm sure you have 'cause you're a copywriter guy, which is the 6-word story. Do you know this?

Uh, about the guy outside holding the, the poster board, like the paper?

Uh, I don't know if it's that exactly, but basically there was a challenge, which was tell, uh, it was a 6-word story contest. So it was, how do you tell a story in 6 words? Only, only you only have 6 words. And the, the, the lore is that they told this to Ernest Hemingway. And he came up with a 6-word story and he won, which was for sale, baby shoes, never worn. 6 words tells a deep story, hits you in the emotions.

There's another story like that where there's a homeless guy sitting outside and he says, I'm blind, please help. And a famous copywriter writes, he goes, let me help you. And he goes, it's spring outside, or it's springtime. And then I'm blind, please help.

And so I have a 6-word challenge, 6-word Thrill of the Shill that I'm, I'm gonna hit you with. All right, so I'm gonna do my Hemingway. I'm gonna do this whole ad in 6 words.

Here we go.

Business for sale. Owner never hired. And it's about this business. It's a story about a business that failed and it's up for sale now. And then why? Because the owner never hired. He tried to do it all himself. And he just never made the key hires that he needed to scale the business because he didn't go to supportshepherd.com and find amazing talent overseas to hire at a low cost, 5 times less than the United States. Boom. How was my story?

That was beautiful. That was beautiful, dude. The Hemingway one was quite good too. That, I'm still thinking about that one. What is it? Uh, what business per se?

Maybe I shouldn't have put Hemingway before my one that I made up 1 minute ago. Maybe I should have done the all-time best against mine.

What was it? What was the line? Uh, business for sale, owner never hired.

Business for sale. Just like the shoes for sale. Business for sale, owner never hired.

I thought it was good. SupportShepard.com. That's the, that's the shill. The thrill was a beautiful line. There we go.

Back to the episode. You know, the other one that's most like this is fan fiction. So Wattpad reminds me a lot of this where, uh, Wattpad, and there's also another one that's like, uh, some wiki. It's like a wiki. It's like a Wikipedia, but fandom fan. Uh, yeah, I think fandom like bought them or something like that, but there's another one that's just straight the Wikipedia part of it. Um, but fan fiction. So people get super, super, super passionate about Harry Potter and about, you know, different, um, books, and then they kind of spin out their own, their own world, right? Like, uh, I remember MuggleNet, which was started by that guy Emerson Spartz. And, uh, you know, or Spatz, I don't know. I don't know how you say his last name. Um, they built such a huge, huge website just around fans of Harry Potter. It was very much like, you know, BrickLink or whatever. And on that, I remember I used to go on there and read people because we'd be waiting for the last book to come out and people would write their own versions of that last book. And, uh, they would, you know, you would just read like a full-length book that somebody just wrote in their spare time for fun. And that led to some big things like, you know, Fifty Shades of Grey. Came out of a fan fiction post, uh, just like that. Like it was written originally as a fan fiction post around Twilight. And so fan fiction and a few people who were surprised that Wattpad was getting like hundreds of millions of visitors every month, like one of the most popular websites in the world.

I think they sold for $600 million to a Korean company recently, 2 years ago, maybe. Yeah.

And they weren't making any money, but they weren't making much money, but, but the, the passion and the, the usage was there and it was off the charts. And then, you know, you don't have to do much marketing because the people who are passionate about it are just gonna search the internet for every nook and cranny to find, you know, other people like who are as fanatical about it as them.

So there's a few attributes here that I, I, I'm just thinking about off the top of my head. So attribute number 1 is they seem like jokes at first. So like it's kind of silly, like almost embarrassing. Like what do you do for a living? Oh, I run a Lego blog. Like it seems silly when you talk about it. At first, but if there's enough people, it's— it could be pretty great. The second thing is, I actually think— I think these types of companies you shouldn't build quickly. These are slow-burn businesses where you don't want to get too big too fast, otherwise the nerds, the passionate ones, will be like, oh, this is lame, this is too big, too mainstream, getting commercial. But number 3 is, if you do it right, they have huge moats. And they're very, very hard to kill. People get very loyal to them. But just like actually New York Times Cooking actually had this a few years ago. So New York Times Cooking is a similar community like this, passionate fans. They had a revolt because, uh, in their Facebook group someone made a change, an admin made a change and they revolted. I don't know if you remember this about 2 or 3 years ago. Uh, they had 60,000 people in the New York Times Cooking. They changed something where like you had to get your post approved as opposed to posting on your own. A change like that, people revolted. And so these communities, you're basically a steward of the people. You're not all the time a dictator. You have to be very— your fans are temperamental. And so there's pros and cons to these types of companies, but I do think they're very, very valuable because of how hard they can be to ruin.

Do you think, not to be self-serving, but just real discussion. Do you think we can kind of do this? I kind of think that we have the makings of doing something like this, but we also might fuck it up by trying to grow it too fast. So for example, one of the best tests, I remember talking to Ben once, and one of the best tests for will somebody like MFM is this experience. Do you ever go to a restaurant and then you can't help it, but your brain is like trying to calculate the, like, how much is this restaurant making? Like, you basically start counting the tables. And then you count, you know, you, you just count the tables, you figure, oh, this many meals per hour. What's our bill? Our bill's this much. Okay. Average ticket is this. And you end up with like, what's the EBITDA of this restaurant? And that, if you're like that, you're probably gonna like this podcast. It's a very high, like, you know, overlap. But being like that is weird, right? That's not a normal way that people are. Most people just go to the restaurant, they look at the menu, they order the food.

And if you're sitting down with 4 other people, no one else at that table's gonna nerd out with you. Like, Look how packed this place is. Like, wow, how much you think one of these servers is per hour? And look how much the meal is. Like, you know what I mean? No one, you're going to dork out with that, but no one's going to be like, dude, shut the fuck up and just eat your chicken parm.

Exactly. And so in the same way that most of the LEGO people, if they went to school, could not find somebody as, or they go to, in this adult one, you go to work, you're not going to find people who are trying to build the, this 2,000-piece Chinese restaurant that they bought the blueprint for, for $10. Like, you're not going to find your people there. And so you find your people elsewhere. You find it on BrickLink, you find it on Rebrickable or whatever. I think for us, it's the same thing. That person who's at that dinner, the 6 people they're at the dinner with, your, you know, your family, your friends, they might not want to dork out about it, but you find us and the community of people that like this and you're like, these are all people who want to know the ebitda of the restaurant. And so it becomes this like glue and you find your people. And I think I've been tempted in the past to try to grow this faster. And the things you do to grow it faster are sort of like dilutive.

You actually sell out a little.

You sell out a little, right? Like it's the cringy YouTube thumbnail face. It's the, um, you know, it's the talking about a topic that might not be the thing you would actually want to dork out about. Like, I like that this episode is basically 90% us dorking out about these like niche Lego websites versus things that might be more mainstream, you know, talking about the Super Bowl next week or whatever, but it will attract the right people.

I thought the Super Bowl was in November. I didn't even know that. Yeah, that's news to me.

So, okay, that's one thing. The second is like a business principle I saw. So somebody said this that I thought was really good. They go, if you want to build like a truly strong business, build like a reverse funnel. I was like, oh, that's interesting. So like, I always think of every business as a funnel, but I always think about it from top to bottom.

What do you mean? Audience first?

Yeah. Top of the funnel is people who don't know you. They, they, they come to your website for the first time. They hear your podcast for the first time. They hear about your product for the first time. And that's like, you know, they become aware of you and then they might get interested. Then they might actually sign up as a user. Then they might sign up for the paid account. And the paid account is always at the bottom. And I always just thought of a funnel as top to bottom. And what this person was saying was they go, Yeah, you actually want the reverse. You want to build as a reverse funnel, meaning you want to find like the 10 people who are most interested and passionate about what you're doing to where, you know, these are your extreme hardcore users who absolutely love that you're doing this and they will use it every day and give you feedback and they'll annoy you with their feedback. They'll tell all their friends, their friends won't even listen. It doesn't matter. And they're your power, power users. And then you sort of go one rung up and you go to like the next 100 people who care a lot for sure, but less than those 10 who are like really nuts. And then you go to the 1,000 people, 10,000 people, 100,000, and you stack the funnel from the bottoms up is a way to think about building an enduring product because you're really going to find the people who need it the most, who love it the most. They're going to give you the best feedback to give you to get the product to be, you know, better. And you're going to find, you know, the people who love it versus everybody else who's kind of like, oh, that's cool. And I thought, oh, that's actually a good principle too when it comes to how to build something. I don't know, when you built Hampton, did you, did you do that?

Yeah, for sure. Yes.

How did you think about who the first, let's say, 10 to 20 people should be? How did you decide that?

So at first I was like, let me figure out who wants this most. But then I, uh, I had ideas as to who that would be. And then what I found was I was like, wow, there's a lot of entrepreneurs in Tennessee, Iowa, Idaho, Delaware, some of these forgotten areas that aren't on the coast. And I'm shocked at how lonely they are and how much they need this. Let's go get more of those people. And so that's what we did is I didn't, I thought it was going to be like cool New York or San Francisco people. And it turns out it was cool Kentucky guys too, but like, I just didn't even, they weren't even part of my, like, they weren't even part of my vernacular. I wouldn't even have thought about them. And so that's what we did. I think, um, with this podcast, I think it's good that you and I have other businesses that A, pay us money and B, can grow faster. Because there's been very, there's been, it's been very tempting to try to do things that are inauthentic, but we know they will get more views. And actually we've done a good job of sticking to like being authentic. But this is the, this is a very, that was a really good point of yours that this podcast, as well as a handful of other ones, they're like these nerdy things that a small group of people are really passionate about. Like, for example, did you see the meetups that people were doing for MFM?

I was just about to bring that up.

That's, that's an example.

The test.

Dude, do you know they're still meeting? Like, they're still meeting.

That's exactly right. So we thought, I guess, uh, the first mind-blowing thing was, oh, if me and Sam say we're gonna go to someplace, do a live show, wow, we could fill like, you know, 1,000 to 2,000 people in a, in a, uh, whatever, a theater to, to come watch us.

And it's a ton of work.

What's that? It's a ton of work. We're both just like, all right, let's not really do this.

Yeah, I don't want to find a Toronto.

And, and, you know, we cool. We had the moment where it was felt good, but like, I don't know if that's what we want to do on an ongoing basis. And then somebody came to us, I'm forgetting her name off the top of my head. Rachel?

Rachel River.

From River. And she's like, hey, our product does this. She's like, yeah, our product is for creators who have a community. Let your community meet up without you. And I was like, keyword, without you. Love it. Um, and I was like, I actually, that kind of makes sense. Cause again, it, you know, while it feels good to maybe be like, you know, the center of attention. Doesn't really feel good. And also that's not actually what makes something really valuable, right? What we'd rather do is use our content as a magnet, as a honeypot to bring in the cool guy from Kentucky and the cool girl from Illinois who they all do the restaurant thing where they start calculating restaurant revenues when they walk into a restaurant and get them together. 'Cause they're gonna hit it off, but it'd be hard for them to find each other. And so if all we serve as is basically the finding function, for those people to meet. And what's cool is that they did the first meetup, but then now they've just been meeting on a monthly basis. That tells me that we did something right.

I don't know.

We didn't intend to do that, to be very clear. Like, that was not— none of this was intentional, but that, that means something went right.

I FaceTimed a few of them. Like, they was like, hey, we're doing this thing. I was like, all right, cool. I'll FaceTime and just say hi. And there was people— and by the way, we have like, there's no like monetary thing. I think it's completely free. If you Google MFM and then River, meetup, you'll see like the landing page. I talked to people, they were like, yeah, I drove 6 hours to come to this one because I'm looking for a husband or a wife. Like, I want to meet someone who has these similar values that for some reason MFM is a proxy for. Uh, and so I thought that was like super fascinating. And they told me, they go, oh, we're still actually doing monthly meetings because we just want to hang out with other dorks like us. And I thought that was awesome.

By the way, our, our, what I, my tagline for people that will like this is just business nerds with a sense of humor. That's the whole thing. If you're a business nerd, like meaning like you do business, but you also, in addition to the business you run, you actually kind of nerd out about more business stuff. You can't, can't really get enough. It doesn't feel like work to you to think about business or to read about businesses or to learn more business stuff. And then with a sense of humor, 'cause there's probably people that are, you know, more experienced than us that share more tactical stuff that are, um, you know, whatever, they're smarter, better, they're more to the point. But I think the one thing we do is we try to, we have a lot of fun while we do this and that, that rubs off. And so that's the, the capture of like, who is the audience for us?

So we just dorked out on like niche, niche passionate things. I think that this Lego shit is crazy fascinating. You'll have to go to the Dan Jesik site, danjesik.com, just to look at this. And maybe you guys will dork out over this like I did. And by the way, if you made it this far into the pod, you're definitely one of these nerds. Just go ahead. This is my one sellout. Go ahead and click subscribe on the YouTube page because you made it this far and you could actually make fun of us in the comments or Let us know what you think about this niche stuff.

I have one more quick one that's like kind of in the theme of kids stuff, games, toys. Have you seen the thing called Palworld? I know you're not a gamer, but do you know about this?

No. What is Palworld?

Palworld is currently like the most popular PC game in the world. And it came out of nowhere.

Tell me what Steam— I still don't under— I don't understand exactly what Steam is. Steam is like an app store, but for computers.

The company that makes Counter-Strike? They, in order to let people come download the new version of Counter-Strike and buy it, they created Steam. It's like a store to sell Counter-Strike, you know, sell Counter-Strike, but it also sold all the other games, right?

So now anybody can list their thing there, but I can't do it on Apple.

Well, no, because you're playing on a, you know, a Razer PC or something like that.

Got it.

So what do you need the Apple App Store for, right? That's not going to work. Um, so it's the Apple App Store, but for computer games. Um, and huge, by the way, like a multi-billion dollar product. So the number one game on Steam right now is Palworld. Palworld in like 7 days has done $200 million in revenue. When games hit, they hit like none other. And by the way, this thing was made like on a $10,000 budget. So it was like a very, very low cost game. What's interesting about this, right? So the game is basically, uh, the game to me, the reason I wanted to bring this up, not because I'm not even playing the game. It's not like you play games. We don't have a lot to talk about here. but I do think it's an example of the midwit meme strikes again. And this is basically that the best ideas, the absolute best ideas are simple and they're not just simple. They're simple to the point of sounding dumb. Okay. So simple to the point of sounding dumb. What does that mean? So, uh, to me, this is, uh, let's see, simple to the point of sounding dumb is Snapchat, the next big social app. It wasn't started as this like grand intellectual theory on the future of communication. It was like, what if you could send someone a picture that would like disappear in 10 seconds?

Yeah. Nudes. College nudes.

Right? And people are like, what would you do with that? I don't know. Stupid shit. Why stupid shit? Because it's going to disappear in 10 seconds. So I have no filter. Right? And then after the fact, it becomes this thing that people intellectualize and they're like, well, see, the thing is that impermanence is actually the greatest form of permanence. Like, what are you talking about? And people start to get intellectual about it, but that's not where the best ideas come from. The best ideas come from really, really simple things that can be described in just a couple words. Palworld, if you go look at this game, it's like, oh, what's the game? The game is Pokémon with guns.

It's like, what?

It's like, yes. And then literally the CEO, he says this, he goes, I'm not a visionary. I don't know how to do that. I just try to make whatever people want. And I knew that, uh, Pokémon, you know, he didn't say Pokémon because he didn't want to get sued, but he's like, yeah, I had this idea of like, you know, you could run around and capture these little monsters, but then we added guns because, you know, Americans love to shoot things.

That's insane.

That was like the core idea. And he was like, they're like, so why do you know, what was the decision to do this art style? He's like, oh, I didn't even want to do that. Actually, I wanted to do like the cool 3D thing, but I didn't even know that to do that you have to have like an animation rig and all this stuff. He's like, so I made one and I was like, God, that was hard. I, there's no way we could do this with like 10,000 characters, like impossible. Um, he's like, so we had this artist that we had rejected and then we like hired her later and they're like, oh, oh, they're like, what, you know, what did you tell her to do? He's like, I don't know, like whatever our programmer could make, like that was her mandate. They're like, what was her budget? He's like, I don't know, we had like $10,000, but, um, we didn't really set a budget. He's like, you know, I guess if we needed more, I would've probably just gone and borrowed some more. They're like, tell us about the developers on your team. He's like, one of my developers is a guy I met like at a convenience store, this kid, he's like a teenager, but like he told me he could code. So I told him to come by and you know, yeah, he works on the game. He's pretty critical for the game.

So the founder has written this like really amazing blog post where he like explains everything that you're talking about. And he's like, he's kind of, he's like a shithead in the best possible way. And he's like, he basically says, he goes, this game shouldn't even exist. It's the antithesis of proper game development. And he says, he goes, we had no budget. No sane company would ever start developing a game without a budget, but Pocket Pair, which is the developer, is not a sane company. And he just talks about, so I start asking myself, what's the budget? When the balance of our bank account reached zero, we could always just borrow money or release money just before the company went bankrupt. We had about 2 years of runway and I decided just to keep working without stressing about budget because all I was worried about was getting the game done as fast as possible. And he's like quite not like a corporate CEO. This is like pretty awesome. He's in Japan. Is this a Japanese guy?

Yeah, it's a Japanese game. He basically made some money in crypto and then took the crypto money and was like, all right, I'm gonna start a game studio with this. Even though he kind of wasn't like, you know, equipped to do that. Um, like right now on Steam, it's the number one game that right now, as we're recording this, there are over 1 million people concurrently playing the game.

That's insane.

In a second. Like the highest was 2 million at a time were playing the game just concurrently. It's number one, more than Dota, more than Counter-Strike, more than PUBG, more than all of them.

He was like, this one lady applied, but I didn't think her designs were that good, so I rejected her. But then she kept, 3 months later she sent me a DM and I was so amazed that she was bold enough after I rejected her to keep messaging me. So we hired her. Like, like he just has like story after story of like, That doesn't make sense. So let's do it.

Uh, but that meme, the meme where it's like, you know, the Jedi kind of think the same thing, right? Like just make, like, just make the game as fast as possible. Right. Or like, you know, if you run out of money, just try to get some more. Um, you know, what should you make it? What if Pokémon had guns? That'd be cool. All right. It's like versus people who are like, you know, trying to over overly intellectualize and overanalyze everything. And, um, I just see this trend over and over and over again. I, I truly believe— I didn't tell you about the Midwit thing I'm trying to do.

No, what?

I truly believe this Midwit meme explains so much of my own life and like, I want to see it every day as a reminder to don't overthink it. Just keep it simple and just what's the obvious answer? What's the obvious answer is like, it's always there, but it gets fogged up by my own stupidity trying to overly over-architect things.

Or like want to be an intellectual.

And so George Mack, our friend, uh, do you know George? He's awesome. Yeah, he's a great dude. Very interesting thinker. And so he had this idea for a, like, to do a super glossy, like, coffee table book, high-end, but of just like 100 Midwit memes. And I heard this idea and I was like, that's genius. I can't wait. And so I messaged him and then like months later I was like, dude, what happened to the book? And he's like, oh, well, I didn't want to do it because, you know, you know, I was going to have to do 365. His original thing was 365, like one a day, 365 Midwit Memes. He's like, I don't know if I get to 365. And I thought, well, the, you know, the cost of this might be a little high. I'm not sure if I'm going to be able to make my money back. But then, you know, he's like, really a bestselling book is something that has these attributes. And I went and studied all the bestselling books and I learned all these commonalities between Atomic Habits and this and this and this. And I just sent him the Midwit Meme back after his like 1,000-word like WhatsApp message. And I was like, Make the book. It'll be fun. Right? Like, it's obvious. Like, just make the, just do it. It'll be fun. Who cares? Like, you don't have to do all these things. You might lose a little bit of money. It's okay. Right? Like, but people who will buy something cool will come with this. It's no big deal. And so I am trying to convince him to do this, uh, to do this book with me. I'm like, let's just make this book. It'll take us like 2 weeks and it'll be fun. And like, anybody who actually buys this thing is going to be the exact type of person I want in my life.

Just do it, do it on your own.

I'm looking for an excuse to do a project with George because I really like him. And also this was his idea, so I don't want to steal his idea. I want to convince him to do this with me. If he really refuses, I'm going to say, all right, can I just do this myself? And I'll do it myself.

It's Monday. I think this episode goes live on Wednesday. I forget when, but whenever it goes live, give him, he has 7 days. If this doesn't get him to do it, he has 7 days.

Tweet at George Mack, his Twitter handle.

George underscore Mac.

Just tweet at him at, just say, do it. And he's going to have to figure out why everybody's tweeting, do it, Adam. And I'm sure he will eventually put two and two together and know this is what I'm, this is why he needs to do it.

I, uh, I enjoyed this episode. What do you think?

Yeah, this is fun.

I enjoyed dorking out over this stuff. I had a great time. Do we wrap here? Is that the pod?

That's the pod. I feel like I learned something today.

Yeah. And I had a great time. That's the midwit meme of preparing for these things. I'm like, uh, what gets views? What, what, uh, what will, what will make more money and what will be more fun? Um, all right.

That's the pod.