February 27, 2020 - My First Million with special guest Julia Cheek

We're good. We're here.

Um, welcome back.

Thank you.

How was, uh, the big stage? You went to New York?

Yeah. So what I did was I went to New York and I originally went to meet with some advertisers of ours and to be—

wining and dining or what?

Yeah, we, yeah, kinda. I'll tell you about it. And then I went to, uh, be on the Gary Vaynerchuk podcast and then I went to be on Is his name Pomp?

Yeah, everyone knows him as Pomp.

Pomp.

Yeah. And Anthony Popolano.

I did his podcast. It was cool. Did Gary Vaynerchuk's podcast first thing in the morning at 8 or 9 or 10 a.m. when I got there. I was a little groggy from my flight because I took some medicine when I flew. It went okay. We'll see what happens. Gary, hold on.

So you walk in. What happens?

Yeah, so walked in. So he has two offices in New York, one Hudson Yards, which I've been to before. It's buzzing. This one was his studio. It's a little quieter, but still pretty badass. In Brooklyn, Long Island City. Long Island City it is, which I don't know if that's Brooklyn or not, but, um, it was awesome, man.

Uh, and you guys know each other, you don't know each other.

So this is like first time we met, but we had, he knew who I was and obviously I definitely know who he is and he knew who our company was. He, uh, he was totally nice and he was really low key at first. He wasn't like cocaine Gary.

Yeah. He was like, you guys do a little chit-chat, small talk beforehand, or you just got into it?

Barely. So here's what happened. We sat down and there's like an audience. There's like an audience of like 10, maybe 5 or 10 people. Me, it was me and Adam on our side. And then he had an entourage and we sit down and he goes, all right, go. And he looks at me and I was like, I looked at Adam. I will. I go, Gary, I think you're interviewing me. He goes, oh, I am. I was like, right, Adam? Like, is that right? And Adam looked at— he goes, yeah, that's what we set up.

Adam, the safety blanket.

Yeah. And Gary was like, Oh, okay. So tell me about who you are. Like, and, uh, it was good. It was great. All right.

So he's a nice guy. That's good to know.

Yeah. You know, he's an easy target because he's so loud.

Yeah.

Um, I believe the, the screen went off there. Um, I believe that he is totally legitimate and a really good business person. I think his company Vayner is really, really hard to run. And he said that he was currently the CEO. COO and CEO. Um, but great business. I mean, good business. And he's totally legitimate. He's like, because he— you can like—

what makes you say that?

So like, you could put him in like the Donald Trump category of a guy who talks a lot and you're like, I don't know, this guy's the real deal, right? He's totally the real deal.

He just talks a lot. But what, what were the little tidbits that gave you that impression, right? Because I believe that. I'm not saying you're lying.

So whenever I go to the office, I ask them, I go, so how do you like working here? I always ask employees, I ask the front desk, I go, what's— you know, and you can kind of tell if they actually like it. Yeah. And when he has 800 employees, so, and the office space was— it was really expensive real estate. There was really nice furniture. Everything was set up professionally. It's a real business.

Right.

So you could tell what's legitimate and what isn't once you go in there. In this Hudson Yards office, they had VaynerMedia water, bottled water. The office was buzzing. Everyone had nice computers. It wasn't— it's not a startup, right?

Felt like a legit operation.

Totally. 100%. And kudos to him, man. He's talented.

And you did the podcast, you know, rate your performance.

I gave myself a C+.

Okay.

And then because I was— it was a— I hadn't done any reps that day. Like, I did a podcast later that day and I had a rep. You were firing. Yeah. And I was like, all right, I'm on it. Uh, it just was, it just fell a little flat, but Adam and his people said it was one of their favorite ones they've ever done.

And do you have a, uh, little prep routine you would do if, let's say before you get on stage, before you do an interview, how do you, you know, switch the light on?

Yeah. Well, I typically will, like, you know how it is, like when we're doing this thing, I was in a piss, I was in a shitty mood a minute ago and then these lights turned on and you're like, all right, I gotta like, you gotta like snap out of it. Um, and, uh, what I do is I talk to the receptionist or I'll talk to the Uber driver, um, just to like start getting—

get outta your head.

Yeah. Get my words going and get in a better, happier mood. Yeah. And that's usually what I do.

Okay.

Um, is that what you do?

Uh, no, like everything I try to like study and come up with like a framework for how to do it and like a technique. And so I picked up two things. So I picked up one from Conor McGregor. That he, I was watching this documentary of him.

Where you talk with the pencil in your mouth.

Pen in your mouth, yeah. So this, I tried it and it actually works fantastic. So basically you take a pencil or a pen, you hold it sort of horizontal sideways, you bite on it so it's in your mouth, you know, sort of going out past your cheeks. And then you just talk for 1 minute. And what happens is because the pencil's there and your mouth's in this awkward position, your tongue has to really work to like flick over and under this thing to get to the spots it usually goes to. So you end up enunciating way better. I don't know if it's placebo. I don't know if it really is like an actual warmup for your tongue, but this shit works. I've recorded myself before and after and I can tell the difference. Um, and other, I had other people listen to it. I said, tell me which one of these sounds better. And, um, I don't know whether it's placebo or not. It, that one works for me. The other thing is, um, like a quick, uh, physical change. So, um, Push-ups or something. Push-ups, a wind sprint, a jumping jack, a scream, music, whatever. I am a big believer that the fastest way to change the way you feel is through changing your body rapidly.

It totally works.

That's like a Tony Robbins-ism. Tony Robbins has this great YouTube video. If you go look at— if you just YouTube young Tony Robbins, and it's, you know, the same guy minus 25 years, and he's in a tank top and he's giving the speech, and he talks about— he goes, before I get on stage, You know, people always ask me, okay, you're a public speaker, you do a really great job. How do you do a great job of this? And he goes, because I don't make the mistakes most people do. He goes, most people are sitting in a low-energy shell. Their body posture sucks. And then they just get up on stage and they don't warm up. Like, an athlete would never do that. And he's like, I treat myself like an athlete. I get myself in a mental state, a physical state. And he goes, the second thing I do, I don't try to memorize what I'm supposed to say. 'Cause when you try to memorize what you say, you're trying to prepare. But what ends up happening is your mind is then editing. It's comparing what you're saying versus what you kind of remember you were supposed to say. And so you have this other whole thing going on in your head that takes you away from the moment. Third thing, and this is the last one, he goes, before I go up there, I convince myself that the audience has to hear this. Like their lives depend on this information. Like they need, I'm here to help. And if I can get this across, Like even with this podcast, for example, it's like, you know, somebody is out there, they're commuting, they're, you know, they have this idea that they haven't taken action on, they're kind of beating themselves up about it. Or, you know, they look around at the 5 people that they hang out with the most and they're just like, these people are not like me. And we are in their earballs and they're like, oh, there are people like me out there. And yes, I should take some action. And yes, I should have some fucking energy today. And so he's like, I just convinced myself that they have to hear this and that I'm here to serve them. And I was like, okay, yeah, just hearing that. So I do that.

Just hearing that has made me feel better.

There you go.

Um, another thing that I did while I was out there is, uh, on Sunday night I tweeted out. So, um, when I fly, I take a lot of Xanax. It's the only drug I do. I don't do any alcohol. And sometimes the night before I'll take it a little bit as well cuz I really hate flying. And so on Sunday night, Sunday night I tweeted that I rented this Airbnb, which I did, and I'm gonna host a meetup. And I got 200 replies saying, let's meet up, right? And that I couldn't do that, so I only let 20 trend subscribers come. And so the trend subscribers are also— not 100 of you listeners, or not 100% of listeners are subscribers, but all subscribers are listeners, right? And They— so I met, I think, 30 ended up coming and it was fucking awesome. It was so cool. This one kid flew up from South Carolina or something and I tweeted this on the meetup was Monday night. I tweeted this on Sunday night. Yeah. Like there was no preparation. Like we all, we did. Me and Adam landed on Monday morning. We went to the Mexican place next door and said, hey, can you bring over enough tacos for 20 people? Here's 2 or $300 and go buy us some beer and we'll pay you more money. And that's all we did. And it was awesome.

Yeah.

These people are fucking fanatical. It is crazy. Um, it's nuts. It's really odd.

Who was the most interesting person?

So many interesting people. One guy, there was this one guy, I forget his name. Maybe he's listening. He was an older, the eldest guy there, which is not old, but in his 50s or 40s. He built— was— it builds custom electric cars, cars, and through the Trends Group sold 50 cars to another custom electric car. Yeah, like he was making, uh, like they took a—

they take a Prius or they took, um, no, they took—

yeah, they took like a some type of pickup truck and made it an electric delivery van.

Oh wow.

For a cannabis company in LA. Because, um, who else did I meet? I mean, I met all types of people. One guy who sells fake boobs for a living. So he sells, um, his name—

tell me more.

Fairchild. Did this guy ever talk to you on Twitter?

No. His name's Fairchild?

Hunter Fairchild.

Yeah, yeah, I see this guy on my Twitter all the time.

Yeah, he— his boss—

he sells fake boobs for a living?

Yeah, his, his boss invented like a better—

dude, what's in his bio? Because I've looked at this guy's bio and he's not advertising this. So let's, let's see what—

putting Hunter on blast. It was me and this girl Aditi were just sitting down and Hunter came and we were just shooting the shit and we were like, Hunter, what do you do? And this woman, Aditi, she's nice. I've met her before. Um, we were just sitting there and she, he's like, well, I sell breast implants. And we were like, what? And we just started talking. I was like, so do you have like a woman who comes with you and like shows you, like shows the buyers, like you need like sales brochures. Like how do you have, like, how do you show that your boobs are the best? And he was just like walking through this whole process. It was crazy. Uh, I had never heard of such a thing.

Yeah, me neither.

But of course he came up from Virginia for this.

That's great. All right, cool. So you can do more of that or what?

Well, you and I need to do more. So what we can do is New York that we could get— I easily, we could have gotten 200 people.

Yeah.

So we can do one in New York. Um, I think Acast or whatever we use tells us where people are, right?

We gotta go to Canada. We gotta go to Utah. When we shouted out Utah that time, I know I still get more, dude, the number of these friendly ass Utah You know, citizens, whatever they're called, Utahns, reach out all the time like, hey, when you guys are here, I got you.

So maybe like—

and it feels good to be taken care of like that.

It does.

It feels great. Maybe great hospitality.

Hmm, what's— what month is it? February?

Yeah, end of February.

We, we should do a thing where we could try to hit up like 3 cities in 5 days, right? Or maybe, maybe a little longer.

So I got into this thing, I don't know if I told you about this, uh, this thing called reality. Have you heard of this?

No.

So basically, uh, you know how Jewish people have Birthright?

Yeah.

And I don't know exactly how the mechanics of Birthright work, but from what I understand, all about it. If you're Jewish, you get to go. It's paid by the sort of wealthy Jewish people around the world.

And wealthy Christian fundamental Christian Christians who believe that Israel is the land for Jews pay for it.

Oh wow, okay, didn't know that. So basically, that's a cool thing for Jewish people.

You're shaking your head. Are you Jewish, Henry?

No.

But you know all about it?

You just stunned. All my friends have gone on it. Yeah, I've never been more jealous than when my friends go on Birthright and then come back. It's like this mini study abroad.

Yeah, it's great.

And so then I was like, all right, what is this? How do I get more of this? So they have this program called Reality, Reality 2020 if you wanna look it up. And it's basically, you can be in these different groups. You can be in entertainment, you can be in technology, you can be in whatever, social impact. You apply to get in. If you get in, I've applied before, I got rejected a few years ago. This time I applied, I got in, and it's like a group, small group, I don't know, 30 people, 40 people that get accepted and get to go. It's not all expenses paid, but it's like most expenses paid. And so, um, yeah, anyways, I've been going on this trip late May now, and I'm gonna see what this is all about to Israel.

And, um, oh, I've heard of this. See if it does it. Is it a, is it a Jewish thing?

I don't think it, you don't have to be Jewish. This one's not like perfect. But it's like a, it's like a, uh, uh, but it's for like, you know, Israel's, you know, sort of startup and kind of thought leadership and young people, that sort of thing. Like future leaders.

I mean, it's like a— not in a bad way, it's a propaganda thing. It's like to get you into the Israel.

Yeah, it's like a program. Yeah, yeah. So I'm doing that, but my question to you—

going—

it's late May, so first, scared of coronavirus, may not go.

I was supposed to go in Germany in May.

So we should talk about coronavirus in a second. But secondly, why do Jews have all the good things? Why don't other people do this? This seems like a great— Birthright seems great.

Jews and Mormons. Mormons.

Yeah, Mormons.

Oh, they're like the same thing, but Mormons might be better now because they don't drink.

Do Mormons have these perks like that, like birthright or something?

Yeah, they all have all types of shit, dude. They, and they're all real good at basketball and Jews love basketball too. I mean, dude, they're all like real similar. They're a very similar group of people.

Well, the thing I, I like, uh, is the sort of pay it forward thing. I think Silicon Valley has this a lot where, um, a lot of people who move here they hesitate to reach out to people because they're like, well, why would this person want to help me? I, you know, I have nothing to offer. But like, that is the culture of Silicon Valley, is to pay it forward, is to help the like next person who doesn't know anything. And, um, I feel like Jews have this in their culture and I feel like Mormons have this in their culture. You know, I'm Indian. I don't feel like there's this same, it's not as strong for Indian people, uh, to sort of try to help out the next. Uh, and I think part of it's cuz there's such a big population, you can't afford to do it. There's like, I don't know, 6 million Jewish people on Earth or something crazy, and they run the world. So I think, you know, with a small number of people, you can offer this like much more high-touch, help each other model.

Um, I agree. Um, let, let me make one quick announcement before we get into it. And I want to, I wanted to make this on the top of this.

Maybe, maybe we might chop it up.

Maybe our editor can chop it up. But, uh, what I want to do is I've heard about these people say subscribe, unsubscribe, subscribe again. All right. And I wanna test it. So last time we asked our, our viewers for more reviews and we now have 550, maybe we got 500, 400 reviews in, in just a couple days. You guys are really active. So, and they all sent me messages. I tried to reply to everyone. Did you?

I did now.

Yeah. I went and cleaned it out.

Okay.

So here's what I want.

If you haven't got a reply, I thought you did get a reply.

So here's what I want people to do. And the reason I'm gonna, uh, I wanna do this is because I think people like seeing us succeed and they like seeing the journey.

Yes.

So you're going to help us succeed. So here's what you do. If you have an iPhone, you're going to go to like the, the, the menu where you can like turn your Wi-Fi and Bluetooth off and all that. There's a button on the bottom right where you hit record. Okay. Record that. That's going to record your screen. Then go to the podcast app, go to My First Million, click subscribe and then unsubscribe and then subscribe again. Send us a video of that happening. And if you do, also send us a question that you want and we'll answer your question. Yeah.

We'll bake a Q&A and this will tell us the truth, right? Cuz there's, we need to run the experiment. We need to know, is this how, is it, does this actually work or is this just like a myth?

And if you send us your question, ideally send it via Twitter.

Yeah.

So everyone could see and can comment in that way. It's easy. So just record yourself. Subs— what is it? Subscribing, unsubscribing, and then resubscribing. Do it a bunch of times. Record yourself. Post that on Twitter, tag one of us or both of us, and then on that same thread, ask your question.

And, and if you don't have a question, that's fine too. And then we're going to look at the charts and we're going to see what this does to the chart movement. I think it's going to actually boost the chart movement if I— if the theory is correct. You know, I believe this is why podcasters ask people to do this is because this shit actually works.

And if it does, here's what we'll do. If this does work, if people keep doing this, what we'll do is with only the people who do that, We'll like take a screenshot of our analytics and send it to them.

Yeah, yeah, we'll share the data. Yeah, no problem.

Okay, you want to get into some stuff? You want to talk about coronavirus, or you want to—

Yeah, coronavirus. Okay, so I'm terrified of coronavirus, um, and you know, generically I'm terrified, you know, I was terrified without information, and then I started looking into a little bit more.

So I don't even know about it. Can you explain what the coronavirus is?

Yeah, so basically there's a couple of these viruses, they're, uh, influenza strains. And so the flu, the flu, yeah. So basically a few years ago you probably heard SARS or swine flu. And so the very first time I think SARS happened, there was a kid got this flu, goes to the doctor's office, they're like, okay, this is the flu, and kid dies within a very short amount of time. They're like, well, that was odd, that doesn't usually happen. So they took a sample and sent it to the CDC or whoever, right? They sent it to some lab to say, what do you see here? This was a very unusual case. The health deteriorated so quick. That's not typical to the flu. And what they realized was, hey, this is a new strain called, I think it was like H1N5 at the time. And it was like, this is only ever found in animals. This is the first time it's crossed over from animal to human. And so that was bird flu when that happened. And then so there's been these different sort of very, very deadly viruses, SARS, which are, which was very, very popular. MERS, which happened in the Middle East, respiratory syndrome, is what's kind of what these, Middle East respiratory, I think syndrome is what MERS stands for, and SARS is sort of the same thing. And so the thing with these was that, you know, although there's a lot of hoopla around SARS and bird flu, like SARS killed less than 1,000 people. Less than 1,000 total fatalities. Not a big drop in the bucket as far as the death bucket goes on Earth. Coronavirus already killed like 3,000-plus people, so already much bigger than that. The reason it's scary though is actually— and for a while people were like, oh, don't worry, the fatality rate is low. Fatality rates like, I don't know, 3% for this, whereas for SARS it was like super high. I don't know, I don't think that number was like majority of people who have it die. Whereas with this, 3% means you get it but you have a good chance of living. But the big problem with that, and the article that I read was called Why You're Probably— Why We Probably Can't Contain Coronavirus, Why You Probably Are Gonna End Up Getting Coronavirus, is because This virus is extremely contagious but has these symptoms, has these trademarks that are very problematic. So it takes a while for your symptoms to show up. So you have it and you carry it for like, you know, 14 days without showing symptoms. So you'll be spreading this around and not even realizing you have it. Then once you have it, you don't just like deteriorate and like your health doesn't go to shit where they, you know, you're in the hospital, they quarantine you. It's like You know, it starts innocent and it gets worse over time. So the infectious period is so much longer that there's basically no way to quarantine this thing. There is no way for us to contain this. And so what the article was saying was like, ironically, because it is not as fatal and is not as bad for you right away, this thing is going to be unstoppable, most likely case. Second thing with that was, I guess there's 4 like, and you know, typical strains of the flu, which is why you can get your flu shot and still catch the flu, um, every year, because there's these 4 different strains and the vaccine doesn't cover sort of all, all the different variations. And, um, and so this guy's case was that most likely this is now just a 5th annual, you know, strain that we're gonna have to live with, and it's just gonna suck. Um, it's a very, very, you know, kind of a downer. Also, I'm sure, you know, sort of the bio nerds out there are gonna be like, no, there's 15 million strains.

That's right.

Um, but like, that's the summary that I took away, and if you want to just get the point, that's the point.

And so, um, what you have up here is D2C stuff. So like, my— I looked at my portfolio yesterday, I was like, fuck. So lost money yesterday off the stock market.

So crazy shit's happening all around. So generically, stock market, you know, people get paranoid. Bonds, you know, people flee to bonds, stock goes down, that sort of thing. Other funny stuff happening, you know, Zoom, the conferencing software, So the stock ticker Zoom goes up 50% today.

Wait, shit, it's up 50% today?

But wait, there's more. It's the stock ticker Z-O-O-M, Zoom. But that's not Zoom's actual handle. Zoom's actual handle is ZM. So people are buying the wrong stock because they think people are gonna be working from home and teleconferencing in. And so they're buying Zoom, which does something else altogether. It's a very small-cap stock. I don't know, Henry, check what the stock for ZOOM actually does.

God.

And it's a tiny stock, so it jumped 50% today. And like, you know, but you could actually predict this because this happened also at the IPO. Whoever bought Zoom the other thing got this huge pop at Zoom's IPO because of this.

I love—

and so we could have predicted this one.

I love when that happens.

But all kinds of fucked up things. Some other things, uh, Smart Friends are basically saying, hey, if you need—

Smart Friends?

My Smart Friends, you know, people who actually read the real information and like understand how the world works, They were like, hey, if you need prescription drugs, uh, but you should start stockpiling because most of it's coming from China and the supply chain globally is fucked. And like the world doesn't have that, uh, like friend, friend of a friend basically.

Um, but how the fuck do you stockpile prescription meds?

Uh, basically buy up, buy your refills. And, um, and so the, there's no global plan B for what happens if China gets sick. Or slowed down. We don't have another, like, supply chain. And so all kinds of things are suffering.

And I have friends that have D2C companies that buy their shit from China, and they're saying shit.

Yeah, months, months backed up. I was talking to a supplier yesterday, and he was like, even if we come back to work, there's, you know, all the other factories that we depend on, the printing factory, the packaging guys, and they're not coming. Like, the workers are just not coming back, because in most factories in China the workers don't actually live in that city permanently. So for Chinese New Year, which is when this happened— so Chinese New Year is a month-long holiday.

Yeah, well, we have a Chinese intern, he tells us all about it. He goes, he goes, it's the largest travel day in the world, right? Because every Chinese person—

everybody goes home. And when they go home, they go back to very rural areas. And already there's this problem where they don't come, you know, often they don't come back because, you know, they don't want to be living in some other city working in a factory. But with this, people are just not coming back. Um, and so there's no replacements. It's like a very dire situation. Well, and like, obviously at a human level, also incredibly dire situation.

So to turn shit into gold, where's the opportunity here? I mean, what's gonna happen? Do you think that this is gonna impact, uh, long— have long-term impact with China, China making shit and you're gonna have to go elsewhere?

I don't know. So there's a question of like, um, so two, two theories. One is for stuff like this, the people who are gonna do really well, they didn't start now. They started something 2 years ago, a blog on being a prepper or whatever, and, um, today's your day, you know, like this is your month. And so I don't think the— I don't know how much I am interested in the sort of like today opportunity. Also feels kind of fucked up.

We talked about Judy the other day, right?

The Judy sort of survival kits or bags.

I— my friend Joe Spicer bought something from, um, like survivorkit.com, and he got an email from them saying we have 100 times our normal volume, we apologize, but we're we're gonna make it happen, right? So those— the Judy thing, that which the respiratory masks—

those are not in the Judy bag, but the respiratory masks are just like out of stock. You can't get them. And that's like the thing you need is like to protect your nose.

That's long gone. No one can pounce on that. Yeah, we covered this guy who launched a company called Judy. Is it Judy?

Judy.

Yeah, Judy. It's an emergency kit.

Yep. An orange, like, emergency backpack ready to go.

My wife texted me today and said, let's go and buy a bunch of stuff.

I feel the same way. More people are doing this. Have you ever been in an emergency situation, by the way? Have you ever, like, been in a city when, like, a flood happens or anything like that? It's really bizarre how it feels.

No.

I was in Hawaii, our honeymoon.

There was a hurricane in Hawaii the week of our honeymoon when I was there.

And so we went to the grocery store. First we go to the hotel and they're like, Hey, um, we have early check-in available. And we're like, well, that's cool, thanks, because we're a honeymoon. And they're like, no, we just have like a lot of open rooms.

No one's there.

I was like, what's going on? They're like, well, have you seen the weather report? Like, there's a hurricane this week. And of course I don't check the weather, so I booked my honeymoon on a hurricane week. And, um, so we go to the grocery store and it's like the zombie attack has happened. Like, all the water bottles are gone. Like, the shelves are empty. People are just checking out like 4 carts worth It's really like, it's an odd, eerie, eerie feeling when that happens.

Yeah. This thing, my issue, here's an opportunity if someone wants to go for it, is, you know how, uh, is it, uh, there's a Politico check. Is that what it's called? Politico Fact.

You mean like the fact-checking thing?

Yeah. I don't know what it's called, but you always, so what you do is like, did Bloomberg really say this?

Right.

And it goes, that's what I want for coronavirus right now. I don't know what's true and what isn't.

So there's a blog called I believe it's called theprepared.com. It is exactly what you want. It is plain English. It's like, here's the facts, not the overreaction. And by the way, we'll tell you about the overreaction and why it's an overreaction, but here's the facts.

What's it called?

Presented in a calm, calm way. The site is beautiful. It works great on your phone. I tweeted at the guy who started, I was like, this is a, like, thank you for making this. Yeah. I was like, thank you for making this site cuz this is exactly what I need in this situation.

It auto-filled nicely. A bunch of people must be going to—

I feel like it's—

ah, he's selling kits. He's selling kits. Oh God, this guy's awesome. Cool. I'm into this.

So scary situation. Yeah, scary all around. Best of luck to everybody.

Yes, for sure. Okay. You wanna move on or—

Yeah, let's move on.

Okay. I'll, I have a few interesting things that happened. Cool companies that we can talk about. The first thing is something that has made a huge impact on me, and I think more people need to take advantage of it, which is Transparent Numbers. So basically there's a group of people out there who believe that transparency is good and they share all of their revenue. They share, they share their every metric about their business as deep as everyone's salary, their bank balance, churn, how much it costs to acquire a customer, how much customer stays on for, everything. Some are a little bit less. Well, they'll share how many customers they have, how much revenue they have, what their bank balance is. More people should follow these businesses. I, for one, am totally against that. I don't think you should ever reveal that, but I'm happy they do.

And yeah. So some examples.

So throw them out. So first of all, my friend Ankur— what's Ankur's last name? He runs Teachable.

I don't remember his last name.

If you Google— can you tell me Ankur's last name? Founder of Teachable. Okay. So he reveals on Twitter the valuation of every round. What is it?

Nagpal.

Yes. Say it.

Nagpal.

Nagpal. He reveals the valuation of every—

every time they just raised like $20 million at whatever, $200, something really good.

And he reveals how much revenue they have, how many customers they have. It's awesome.

Yes.

I love that. The other guy is Sahil. Sahil from Gumroad. Shitty business. Seems like an awesome guy. He reveals every single month all the— you could Google Gumroad founder Sahil.

It's on his Twitter. He just— he does it in a tweet length. So you don't even have to dive into the books. It's like, here's 140 characters.

Joel from Buffer, he does this. They actually just switched. So if you go to baremetrics.com, .com or Google Baremetrics. They have like 18 different companies that do this and it's pretty cool. And Joel from Buffer used to be on there. They're a $22 million a year company, so pretty valuable. And they would, would, would reveal everything. Everything.

Employee salaries, like name, salary, equity, you know, level, everything.

And you know what? They're changing. They're showing less and less because—

have you talked to 'em? Do you know why?

It becomes problematic when you add more people. Um, yeah. Duh.

It's like, you know, guy, you know, creates, you know, turns his kitchen into a man cave instead, gets a girlfriend and is like, oh, she doesn't like it. It's like, yeah, no shit, man. Like, I could have told you this, like, when you bought the plasma and put it on the fridge.

Grow up, Joel.

People don't like their salary being public.

What? So they still do salary, they still do equity.

People get upset when they see their coworker who slacks off and works from home 2 days a week and they see his salary.

Because people don't understand that different people have different situations. It's not like—

So they did it, I think, in a smart way, which is they basically were like, they used it as customer acquisition.

Yeah, it's part of their story, because they got their ass kicked by HubSpot.

And so they like—

I'm sorry, Hootsuite.

You know, this has become a bit of a playbook for small business-to-business SaaS companies, which is, look, acquisition of customers is hard. If my customer is a small business owner, what would bring a small business owner to me? What content could I put out there that would make a small business owner come? So instead of saying 7 tips to have more effective meetings, they were like, here's our P&L for this month. And sure enough, a lot of people wanted to see that. So a lot of people discovered their product through this, and so, you know, maybe this lines up totally with their values and that's why they did it, but definitely it was a great way for people to discover their business. Didn't use Buffer, but I read all their shit. And if anybody ever needed a solution like Buffer, I was like, oh, Buffer, you should use Buffer. Why? Because otherwise I wouldn't have even known about them. And so this was a pretty counterintuitive thing that they did. And, uh, they were the only ones doing it. And so you always get paid when you're the only one doing it, if it's juicy.

Yeah. And so, and one more person who's doing it and the, his business is way better than Buffer actually.

I love this guy's business.

So it's my friend Nathan Barry. I've met Nathan a while ago. And Nathan has this company called ConvertKit. They do close to $2 million in monthly recurring revenue. So $24 million. He owns 100% of it. It's probably a $100 to $200 million company. Like, it's really valuable because once customers are locked in, it's basically a Mailchimp competitor. It's an email.

That seems high to $2 million a month. You said $2 million.

That's for sure. That's how much they do.

So they're doing $2 million. No, no, that part's that. So, so $24 million a year. So $24 million, you think they're worth what?

10 times.

10 times that. Okay.

Maybe. It's grown like a weed.

Maybe.

People don't switch from their email platform.

Yeah. It'll all depend on the retention. So can you pull up, actually, can you open it, open up their, their metrics. So just, retention's high. I just Google like, like Baremetrics dashboard or something. I forgot what the URL is, but it's like something.baremetrics.com and it's like their whole company. It's like, here's how many new customers we got. Here's how many people churned this month. It's like all their graphs. And you can use it for your company.

He even showed how much profit they make.

I think it's like ConvertKit. It's like, yeah, here it is.

You got to zoom in. There you go.

So this— I don't know if this is their business or this is like the example thing, but it's like monthly recurring revenue, net revenue, fees.

Yeah, that's not it.

This is somebody else's business.

You got to do ConvertKit.

Yeah, do ConvertKit bare metrics.

Type in ConvertKit revenue. Maybe if you can't spell.

I also use ConvertKit. I actually pay for a subscription because I'm like, this product is so fucking powerful. I don't actually have many sequences set up. I have a sequence of one email right now, which is not a sequence, it's just an email. But I think it's a great product.

I love ConvertKit. I love Nathan. Nathan's a great guy. Nathan's only 26 or 27 years old.

We talked about the idea of doing a drip sequence to build a newsletter for women going through pregnancy, and like week by week. And I had a friend, or sorry, no, I had a random listener reach out on Twitter, was like, I'm doing this. Here's my kind of unique asset I have to go about this, and how should I set this up? And I sent him to ConvertKit. I was like, dude, your problem is gonna be solved in like, you know, the next 90 minutes.

Are people leaving Baremetrics? Why can't you find it?

Here you go. 1.7 million.

Oh, is that it? What's the URL?

ConvertKit.com. Yeah, so 1.7 million monthly recurring revenue. And you could just look at the—

It'll say churn.

So annual run rate doing $20 million a year, which is up 1.7%. That's got to be how much this month. Revenue churn 5.1% per month.

That's not bad.

That's not great either.

Well, it's because it's a small to medium business.

Like if you're churning 5% a month, that's, uh, like what's his— what's the net growth? So 5% a month is the churn. What's the new business every month?

1.5, 1.5%.

Yeah. So he's net negative then per month.

No, I think that that churn, that growth, that growth number takes into account churn. I see. Okay.

Gotcha. Oh, okay. That's the net.

But this is because it's the average revenue. It even says, so they make on average $60. Is it $60 a month per user?

Right.

Um, and the thing on the right, a lot of medium business is going to have a, it's going to have higher churn compared to other SaaS.

But dude, if you're, if you're a real sicko, you can just look at the live stream on the right and see every minute when somebody pays them, it'll say like right now it says $29 paid by, you know, you know, anonymous company. Dude, he's got a lot of failed payments here. Get on that, Nathan. What's going on? You can't be failing. It's 3 out of the 12 payments here have failed.

4. He has a chart that says which ones fail. So these, these companies are badass. I—

so you wouldn't do it?

No, I think—

what about a part of what you do? The email list size, the revenue?

I don't want to share anything. Publicly. Um, well, I'll say like 8 figures or something. No, I just don't think it brings a lot of good either.

You know, when a company's trying to raise or sell their business, because like 2 months before, all these articles will come out just like handing over, handing over information.

Yeah.

Um, why, why is that happening? Because they wanna raise their round or they wanna sell their company within the next 6 months.

I don't, can you go to the next, go back to the Google Doc? No, I'm not a fan of it. Uh, One time when I did my first conference when I was younger, it made like $60 grand in profit and I told everyone in the blog post and I hated the attention. So I'm never going to do that again. Okay, so let's talk about Pipe.com. You know, Pipe.com.

I saw this and I was like, dude, this is awesome. I was— I came to the— I came to our little scratchpad to write it down and you already had it written down.

Okay, so here's what— here's, here's— let me set the stage here. So when you have a subscription business, I'm talking about software subscription, but Maybe it could work for all types of stuff. Um, what happens is you do one of two things. The first is you say, all right, you sign this deal and you owe us $200 a month. And so that is a $2,400 a year subscription service. And the company that is your customer will pay you $200 a month. Um, what a lot of companies prefer to do, but this is actually a lot harder, is they say, all right, you signed one year contract. Let's get all of your payment up front. Right. Now here's the balance here is do you want— or this is what people think. They can either get more customers and allow them to pay monthly, right? Or they can get less customers but allow them to pay annually and get all of that cash flow up front. And what— what's it called? Pipe.

What they do is pipe.com.

If you have a business like ConvertKit and they have a history of 3 years and it says, look, every month our churn rate historically is 5%. Pipe can go, okay, so you have all these customers paying you each month. Let's just— I don't know how they discount it, but they probably, they probably discount it a lot. So they de-risk it and this will say, well, let's just assume that you're going to have 20% monthly churn, right? We're just going to— we'll give you all that money up front and you owe us as the money comes in with a little bit of interest.

Right. Awesome. Awesome business. So I have so many thoughts. All right. So a couple of things. First, the financial infrastructure. What's, what's really going on here? The financial infrastructure for software companies and tech businesses is being rebuilt. So we already had investors, right? Angel investors, seed investors, Series A investors, blah, blah, blah. But then you have a bank for startups. Mercury started by, you know, some successful founders from Heyzap. They started Mercury. It's supposed to be a bank designed for startups. And then you have things like Brex or Ramp, which we talked about, which is like business credit card. Designed for startups because the legacy institutions don't understand how to value these companies, how to assess risk, or how to like fund and finance these companies. Then you have things that are, you know, like marketplaces where you can buy and sell to buy and sell online businesses like Quiet Light Brokerage or wherever. You have due diligence firms that pop up that specialize in software businesses like Centurica. Then you have, you know, guys like Pipe, which basically say, great, you know, you have a cash flow problem, but you have steady— we know you have a predictable book of business. We will give you the cash up front, and we'll take a vig off the top of that. And so I think these are all really smart businesses, um, each one at a different part of the, the financial stack for software and technology companies.

FastPay, we use it. It's, it's Pipe, but for media and publishers. And Pipe has raised $70 million in funding. They're kind of stupid because we use them and we have a million— millions of dollars in credit from them, and we won't leave them because it's a wonderful service. But the reason why they're kind of stupid is because the market's a lot smaller, right, than software and the numbers are a lot smaller.

Right.

I think Pipe will be a multibillion-dollar company.

Yeah. Or the one problem with these is there's a lot of— there's a lot of competition. Yeah. I think the aggregate will be. So, for example, this is also happening on the customer side. Right. So companies like Affirm or Sezil or Afterpay. Yeah, that's on the consumer side. But same, same idea, which is like They're trying to provide different financial instrument that like the traditional financial company, like the current sort of incumbents aren't really figuring out. How do we help e-commerce companies sort of— how do we help merchants, you know, turn their products into monthly payments for their customers? But a firm came out and did it. And, you know, FastPay— or sorry, not FastPay, Afterpay. I think Afterpay is like an $8 billion company or something like that in Australia. Affirm is a multi-billion dollar company here doing the exact same thing, and they're all fighting over these merchants.

I love this shit, man. I say fuck the big banks. I fucking hate them. I hate them so much. I hate having to talk to our rep. They don't understand me, right? They don't understand what we're doing.

So Ishan, our— the producer and editor for the podcast, he had an idea. So I asked him one day, because I, you know, I have him on as sort of my right-hand man, so sometimes I just ping him with just random questions. I said, what's the biggest idea in your head right now? I was like, you know, what's the biggest startup idea you got? And, uh, you know, he's 20, 21 years old. I don't know exactly how old he is, but he's a young guy. And so he goes, well, I've been a, you know, freelancer contractor for you and many other people for, for the last few years. And, um, he's like, why doesn't a, a sort of fast pay or pipe exist for contractors? Like, I have my invoice, um, just gimme the money now. And then you wait to like, when the company pays, you take it and you take 5%. That's a big idea off the thing. And I've actually heard this idea a few times before of like, you know, my wife was a, you know, a consultant, you know, and so she always got paid like this on a 30 or 60 day cycle. And she would have, you know, $20 grand sitting in outstanding payments. If she could just get the $20 grand, you know, headache free, she would take $19,500. You know, she would take $19,000 out of that just to get the money now and not have to keep following up via email to be like, hey, Have you paid it yet? And like all that stuff. And so the problem seems real. And this is more of a question to the audience of like, what am I wrong about? What don't I get about this idea? Seems like a great idea on the surface. What's the problem with this idea? Because I've heard it bandied around a few times over the years. It's not a, it's not a like super niche idea. I think a lot of people could have this idea. So what's wrong with it? And I think that you can learn just as much from common ideas that don't work as you can from great ideas that do work. If you start to identify why does this seemingly good idea not work, why have people tried and failed over and over again, there's a lot to learn as an entrepreneur.

Yeah, I'm digging that. So pipe.com's out. I'm loving those things. All right. We want to talk about book club stuff.

Yeah. One thing. Hey, Henry, there's a guest downstairs. Would you mind letting her in? And she's going to join us for like the next segment.

Yeah.

Julia, what's up?

Hi. How are you doing?

Well, thanks for having me.

You're already in my good books because you actually were listen to the podcast.

Not all the guests do.

I do my homework. Yeah, I try to do my homework.

Yeah.

Yes, I, I have a— there's a bunch of employee fans.

Great.

Um, they found out and it was— I mean, like, they had been really gunning for me to have a chance.

Shout out to them. Do you have like that like corny name for your employees?

Like, oh, well, that is literally it.

Oh my God.

Although you changed it. Well, but then everyone's like, hey, did you just like come up with that? Because that is not that great. Um, And so I think like, you know, someone better with words was like, how about just Everlees? I was like, oh, that's better. We've shifted it to that. Do you guys have to start hustle?

Do you have like Hustlonians or some shit?

No.

Yeah, no, you're fired actually if you say something like that. Yeah, yeah, you know, with Bebo, somebody tried to like do that and I was like, thank God there's not a nice one because I don't want thought this as like a thing. Yeah, Bieber's, that would have been it. By the way, I'm followed by Justin Bieber on Twitter. No big deal.

For real?

Yeah, so crossed 10,000 followers and Justin Bieber follows me. I DM'd him.

That's actually pretty impressive.

He did not reply.

How many people does he follow?

It's got to be one of those bots that just follows people.

How many people does he follow?

I don't know. Henry, Justin Bieber, number of followers. We'll find out. Uh, the only way this can go is down for me where he follows millions of people. It's not a low number, my friend. It's not a low number. Yeah, okay. It's like 300,000. I'm one of the top 300,000 friends of Justin Bieber.

So that's better than I would have thought. I thought the number was going to be like 10 million. So for what it's worth.

Okay, so speaking of, so you have, uh, so you're Julia Everlywell is your company name, uh, but your name's Julia Cheek. Yes, it's a cool name.

Thank you.

Um, I hate my last name, and so I'm always thinking like of, you know, just totally rebranding it to something cool. But then I know people will be like, did you just change your last name to try to sound which is probably the least cool thing you could do.

Right. I kind of got the opportunity to do that because I decided I had a choice to do Julia Taylor, which was my maiden name, or if I wanted to, when I got married, take on Cheek. And it was just sort of unique, so I did it.

You did it.

Uh-huh.

Okay, great. And so for people listening who are like, okay, great, who is this person? Why are they joining the show? Give us the like 30 seconds about what's interesting about you.

Yes. So I'm Julia Cheek. I'm the founder and CEO of EverlyWell. We are based in Austin. We are about to celebrate our 5-year anniversary, which is hard to believe. But probably the most interesting thing about me starting this company is I started a company in the blood testing space, in the direct-to-consumer space, coming with no entrepreneurial background or healthcare background whatsoever, and had every kind of X in the box of why you wouldn't—

You were a consultant, right?

I was a management consultant and I went at Deloitte. Deloitte, went and got my MBA, had a really traditional— Harvard— had a really traditional corporate path.

Sam's all about the pedigrees. Yeah, I hate it, I don't care. Sam's like, Harvard? Okay, I'm in.

Yeah, there's definitely some interesting ties I think that turned me on to being an entrepreneur when I was there, but certainly like I was really on the corporate path and then had this idea when I was working at MoneyGram and left my job to do it. And I can confidently say 100% of people who know me was like, this is definitely gonna fail. There's no way it's gonna work.

So what's the company do?

Yeah, so when I was— 5 years ago, when I was working at MoneyGram, I had a bunch of all these unexplained health symptoms. This is super common, which you hear from women in their late 20s and their 30s, is they have chronic fatigue, aches and pains. They're not taken seriously at doctors. And so I went to 5 or 6 different doctors on good health insurance, and Each of them ran different blood tests. I never got my results. I paid over $2,500 out of pocket. Nothing material showed up or was communicated to me.

What do you mean you never got your results? Like you personally didn't receive them?

I personally didn't receive them.

But the doctor looked at them.

Or even if they called me, like I missed the call. Nobody ever called. They said, we'll call you if anything's abnormal. Well, like what does that mean? You tested 100 different things. Like just because something's not totally out of whack doesn't mean there's not interesting or useful information there. So I sat down and I looked at the health insurance landscape and I thought, man, people are gonna have to start paying for all this in a more meaningful way than we are today. And I'm at least confident that my cohort of women between like 25 and 45 can't get the testing that they need.

Right.

And I think I can solve that. And so it really started out honestly, not that it wasn't a big vision, but it was a little bit like if you think about the first group you're solving a problem for, that's what we launch for. So today we have 35 different tests on EverlyWell.com, on Amazon, Target, CVS, Kroger. We work with Humana, and we offer consumer-initiated testing for everything from STI testing, heart health, food sensitivity, etc.

Basically, is it every test?

It's like 90% of common test coverage from what you would get from the doctor. I've raised over $50 million from—

5-0.

5-0 from Westin East Coast VCs. That was after obviously having like 3 rounds of clawing my way through funding, and then suddenly things did get easier. And we actually grew from zero to— see, we did $40 million in sales last year. Yeah, in our 3rd year in operation.

Is that okay?

No coronavirus, but no coronavirus.

Yeah, especially for the, uh, for the healthcare entrepreneur, and we have to— I have to learn not to do that.

So coronavirus test.

Yeah, you know, if we did, I think we'd— I wouldn't be here right now. I'd be doing something else. But I'm hopeful. There's progress, as we learned today from Gilead and a couple other companies. I'm hopeful someone's close on it. But no, we don't have that, unfortunately.

Are those one-time purchases, the $40 million?

No, it's— I mean, it's a combination of new customer acquisition and repeat. We have a really healthy repeat business because a lot of our tests are things like cholesterol.

It's not recurring, is what I mean.

It's not recurring. We do have enterprise contracts that are recurring for Medicare, right? But it's a mix of what I would call one-time repeat and then actual recurring contracts, which is— there's challenges, there's good and bad. I think when you have a one-time heavy business up front, you have to build a good set of unit economics from the get-go so that you're not just optimizing on this like promise of payback, right? Right. So that's been good for us. On the other hand, we've had to be super, super super disciplined in a way that I think some consumer brands haven't been.

Right.

And so you're based out of Austin. You do this D2C at-home test that then gets sent to a lab, a partner lab. They analyze it. You get the full report. It's like, here's everything. Here's what's interesting about this. You can share it. It's like the way that it should be. Like if you didn't even, you didn't have to like invent this. If you just asked a layperson, you're like, how should this work?

Right.

That's the description. And then you just made that like happen. In real life. Uh, the other thing that's interesting is you were on Shark Tank.

I was.

So as a fan of reality TV, me and Sam both watched The Challenge, probably the trashiest reality show.

Well, tonight's the season finale of the Netflix one.

Oh, of The Circle?

No, the one where they get married after living in a room.

Love is Blind? Yeah. Wait, didn't it all come out already? Didn't they just release it today?

Today?

No, I'm at episode 3 of that one. Um, Good show.

It's pretty awesome.

Pretty good show. Uh, have you seen it?

I haven't seen it yet.

Do you know the premise?

I do know the premise. They put people in rooms and they don't see each other.

It's actually about a couple.

Terrible description.

Oh, then they have to get married. I missed that part.

Or you get cut off the show. Like, literally, you don't even get like eliminated Survivor style. They just edit you out. Like, you're just not shown ever again if you didn't propose. And so what ends up happening is it's 10 days behind a wall. You talk to this person and you're speed dating basically behind a wall. You're kind of like deciding who you like.

Yeah.

And then someone proposes through the wall. So they're like, can you come close to the wall, please? I'm on a knee now and I want to, you know, ask you to marry me. And then, but the thing is that I thought that's where the show would end, but then they like put them in the real world together and they're like, all right, you're going to get married in 30 days and see what happens.

And it's pretty interesting stuff.

Okay.

So good job, Netflix.

Shout out. What were you asking her about? Shark Tank.

Oh, actually Shark Tank.

Yes.

Because tell me about how it came about. You applied many times, one time. How'd you get on?

Yeah, so Shark Tank was an— honestly, I am a huge fan of the show. I also am a huge fan of my own experience, and that's not, I think, what everyone has to say, but I always tell people I think it can be a really game-changing thing for entrepreneurs if you do it the right way. It is a lot of freaking work, a ton of work. So I—

once you're on or before you're on?

Before you're on.

Okay.

Um, so I would say like, so I— we aired in November of 2017.

Good in the beginning.

I know, but it was like a 9-month process of I would say the year of 2017, 80% of my year was Shark Tank-related things. So we applied, and by we, me. It's like a 50-page written application that you do.

Online or?

No, it is printed and written out. I tried to use a PDF editor. I mean, it was like, yeah, it was like a decade ago, technology.

So you write this whole thing out.

I write this whole thing out. I will be honest, I was a finalist at TechCrunch Battlefield in 2016. The producer scout from Battlefields Company. So they reached out. Um, so it's kind of like if you're thinking about American Idol maybe, which I would never be, but you either can get contacted and sort of put in the front and to audition, or you kind of blind audition or wait line. So it's not that I had necessarily a better chance, but I did get shortcut into the application process. So filled that out. The application probably takes 40 hours. And then you have to sign all their contracts and basically sign your identity and image away to ABC for in perpetuity. But, um, and then from there you do a voice interview with producers, you do a video interview as well with the application, then another video interview of your pitch. And then from there the producers work with you for about 4 months on like what is your story, what is your What is your script? And it's ultimately your— what I think people don't realize on Shark Tank, it's a human interest story. You are there to make good reality TV, but it is your decision. The producers will help you and advise you, but this is your gig, and it's up to you to decide how you want to display yourself and who you want to be on TV. But they can then decide whether or not to air you.

Do you still remember your opening? Because you probably drilled it like a couple times.

I did, I did. And I will tell you, I thought I was like really good and comfortable at public speaking. And then I did this and I was like, okay, I was really bad. And now, now I feel comfortable. Yeah, I did. So I signed or I shook on the largest deal ever for a female entrepreneur in terms of valuation. So yeah, with Lori Greiner, she is on board. She's been tremendous because of QVC. And for me, it was really at the time we had no brick-and-mortar retail presence. And I knew that that was a priority for us, to create a product that was like actually accessible and ubiquitous. And that's actually, in hindsight, been a really good move for us. But I felt that she would be invaluable in helping us to get into some of those stores. Yeah, she really helped with packaging and branding and making something that's accessible. When you're trying to like sell a testing kit where either people think it's a DNA kit, right, or they have no idea what it is, um, being able to differentiate that when you have like 10 seconds to grab Um, so the deal we shook on was— oh gosh, shook, because there's the shake, there's the shake, and then there's the actual deal.

It's the actual deal.

I can't disclose that. However, it was different. Yes, it was better or worse? Better for the company and probably better for Lori.

And better because, honestly, why does the deal change? So normally there's like, they do diligence and they might change it probably for their favor. You're saying it went better for you guys?

It went better.

How does it improve?

So there was I would say, and it's very case by case. So what happens after the show is— Can I pause you one second?

I want to make sure you project because your audio, what you're saying is great. I want to make sure we're getting it all. So my audio paranoia.

We're here.

Just make sure you're— talk louder than you're comfortable talking.

So, after you shake on the deal on the show, a fair number of those deals, I think it's something like over half, never come to fruition at all. And then another quarter or so actually change, and then another quarter get done at the terms that, um, that you shook on. Yeah, I think each Shark, each Shark has a different approach. So like, I— they're totally— you then go into their management company, right? So you're going into Mark Cuban companies or Lori Greiner's companies. And so it's not a, um— I don't know what each Shark's process is. I can say Lori's was super fair. They go through very detailed diligence on everything. But, but you know what, the show actually does diligence on you They have a venture analyst on board, so they run diligence on you before you ever pitch. What was your valuation that you guys agreed on? I pitched, my valuation was $20 million post-money.

And how much did she invest?

So that was a, it was a line of credit deal at an 8% interest rate for 5% of the company.

And was it like, you know, hey, deal offer on the spot, or do you have this like long pause where you're like, can I think and write this down?

Well, in my case, every Shark was out, and I actually knew I wanted either Lori or Mark— sorry, Lori or Mark Cuban. And so I was really excited about it, and so I really did want to work with her, and it was a good deal. So I actually sat on the show because you're supposed to negotiate. I said, because it makes good TV.

Yes.

Um, and so I said, I know I'm supposed to negotiate, but I want to take this deal. So I didn't. You do have— it is really what you see. Like, you can exit, you can talk about it with your partner, you can call a lifeline or a friend. They may edit that out or whatever else, but you can take a minute to think about it.

What's something people don't see or don't realize that is different from having actually gone through it versus watching it? What's one difference?

I think people know it's edited. I don't think people realize how long the actual time filming can be. From when you walk in and walk out to like what they edit down to 5 minutes. So it varies, but mine was probably an hour and they edited it to 7 minutes. Some people have gone on up to 2 to 3 hours, some are 15 minutes, right? And so I think, you know, it's edited to a degree, but I don't think you realize how much discussion actually happens when you're pitching. She is investing her own money, always.

Um, so then does she have a fund or is it literally just hers?

It is in a fun structure, but it's her capital. It's her money. You know, I don't know. I will say she is a prolific, um, salesperson in the sense that like the top 3 or 4 companies from Shark Tank, and I mean companies that have done like a quarter of a billion in sales, um, Squatty Potty. Yeah, those— she has a relationship with each of those companies and is invested in each of those companies. Um, so I suspect expect quite a bit, not to mention her own patent portfolio and the success she's had with products. She has a great team.

But do those pay cash flow? I mean, who cares if you— I mean, it's important, but if you own equity in—

Yeah, and there's not an exit. Yeah, so I don't know.

Where is her cash coming from?

I don't know. I don't know. Yeah, I don't know.

Well, because I also agree with that.

Checks.

Well, and I also don't know, Saudi money. Each deal is different, right? So like, she does it just like in any VC deal is different, right? She's negotiating a deal with me that's different. I don't know what, what terms are, you know, with the rest of her companies. I do know she has put all of these companies on the map, from Scrub Daddy to Squatty Potty, these companies that have incredible consumer products. Now she delivers. Yeah, so I'm telling you, I think ever— it seems to be actually— I don't have one, but it does seem— I, I mean, it does seem very popular, apparently. So, okay.

So, um, so Everlywell question for you, uh, when you actually get the test, how do you actually—

wait, hold on, let me ask one more question about Shark Tank and then we'll end on Shark Tank. How much traffic did your site get?

Oh yeah, so we got— I don't know, it was, it was November.

We aired even better than now because there's more—

watch TV more than, right? And it aired the night before Cyber Monday. It was Thanksgiving weekend. It was— couldn't have been a better day. All my poor team, they were wonderful. They canceled all their Thanksgivings It was a lot of work, but we got about 30 times our normal traffic, but we had an interesting experience. We didn't have this tremendous huge spike the night of in terms of purchases, but we ended up doing about $1 million in sales, which at the time was a tremendously large number for us, in the 4-day period after the show. There's been a little bit of this interesting thing for us that I haven't heard many other companies have, which is we doubled over— like, we doubled in that week on a run rate standpoint, and then we continued doubling the next month, and we never had that decline. But we didn't have this spike in like the 3-hour period that we aired. Yeah, we had a lot of traffic, I think like a million sessions. Yeah, uniques. Yeah. So, and we did— I mean, we had to— I mean, at the time we were not set up for that scale. Now we don't even have to think about it. We know we've always been on Stripe, not WooCommerce, not Shopify. We've built on it now and totally customized it. It's not— I know, but it's one of the big ones that actually I think we should have gone to Shopify, but we didn't. So I shouldn't— now I shouldn't name them because it's going to sound bad. But shout out to Shopify. Yes, exactly.

I like to think he's listening.

Yeah.

We're trying to get him on.

I was gonna say, that valuation, right? Yeah, so he also streams on Twitch.

Great guy.

Oh, um, so yeah, so we saw really good traffic increase, but it was an— it was a very different pattern. And Lori warned us about that. She said some companies it's like they sell out immediately, and some companies it's just a slow kind of a slow burn. So, um, that was what it was with us, but we did not crash, um, which was essential. Do you—

I have a bunch of questions. Do you have some?

I have some. Not about Shark Tank though.

I mean, me neither.

Close the chat on Shark Tank.

I'm— I, I know nothing.

Stay tuned. There, there may be a, uh, there may be an upcoming, an upcoming thing there.

So come back as one of the glory children.

Potentially, potentially. We are actually, in 2 years, we're the number— I think we're number 10 on the all-time best-selling list out of 9 seasons. The socks and then Squatty Potty. Bombas.

Oh, they're on there?

Yeah, number 1. $250 million in sales.

Shit.

Yes, I'm wearing Bombas.

Yeah, I went on Twitter, I said, what's the best sock money can buy?

When we sold the company, people love it.

I'm gonna buy unlimited of the best sock. Yeah, that's the thing I'd always told myself.

That's cool.

When I become a millionaire, unlimited best socks. And Bombas was like what everybody said.

Do you love them?

Um, yeah, I love them, but I need more. That's it. Like, I ran out. Yeah, yeah, I, I bought the whatever the like 60 pair or whatever, but like I think I need like 500 pairs of socks.

Like laundry, you know, that's like one of the best hacks you could do is what I did was I bought— I only have one pair of underwear but I own like 30 of them. Yeah, one pair of socks and I own 50 of them. Yeah, so I never match socks. Yeah, it's the greatest hack ever. Yes, I've been doing since I was 18.

Should we applaud?

Um, okay, so I got a question for you.

Yes.

Let's say I buy the product. What do I actually do at home when I take the test? Like physically, what is— what do I have to do?

So this, uh, people are often surprised how many people we get to take their blood at home, but that's often what it requires. So like most of our testing is pricking your finger to draw a small sample of blood. Um, some are saliva, some are urine, but obviously there's a reason why they normally take your blood at a lab. It's because you can analyze the most number of markers and the broadest assortment of markers using blood. So it's dried blood spot testing. It's like a very frankly old-school model.

Your method?

Yes. Quest, LabCorp, all of the labs have dried blood spot testing. This is nothing novel. Just means you're pricking a finger and you're dropping blood onto a treated paper or a treated device that is then— the blood is then drying.

But you guys aren't doing the—

We're not. We're not.

You're a middle person.

We are a middle person, which if you were a VC responding to me back in 2016, I was a marketing company.

That's what I was gonna say about you taking a fence sitter.

No, I don't take a fence sitter.

But it's the relationship. So that's the most important part.

Right. And I think, you know, it's interesting when people are like, oh, well, you're just a middleman or you're just marketing. But I really view us more as, okay, the labs are our manufacturing partners, right? You don't buy things directly from manufacturers. Typically, right? You buy them from a brand. So we have 7 different partner labs we work with. Probably the, the one that runs the majority of our business is PerkinElmer, which is a publicly traded life sciences company. They're huge, they're global, and they've been really a good partner to scale, and they have a lot of credibility. They're the worldwide leader in dried blood spot testing. So it's been a good—

what everyone grows up wanting to be, the worldwide leader.

Hey, I know, but you know what, like, for us in space and we're in the medical space, it's really important to have that, that stamp, especially with, with all the failures that have happened.

I want you to hear Sam's thoughts on food allergy testing.

Sam, yeah, take it away. I'm excited.

Let's go.

I think that a lot of them are bullshit. Yeah, am I right or wrong or what do you think?

I think it depends.

And you need— we talked about this earlier.

No, it's, it's important and it's, um, but they do every test though. So we do every test. It's okay if I don't buy one It's interesting. First of all, to correct you, there's a major difference between a food allergy and celiac disease and then a food intolerance or a food sensitivity.

I thought food is intolerance.

Okay. Just for listeners, I think it is important because even doctors just say allergy and sensitivity is the same thing.

It's definitely not.

I've compared the intolerance test to chiropractery.

Interesting.

Yeah.

Okay.

I was like, "I think that it sounds good, but it doesn't work." You know, it's interesting.

We have become associated— this food sensitivity testing in general has become associated with EverlyWell, which I suppose is like I'm proud of from a brand standpoint, but on the other hand, it's been going on for over 30 years and there's thousands of doctors that do both IgG, IgA testing. Around the US, and most people that you talk to, if you've talked to them about food intolerance, they're like, "Oh yeah, I had that done at my allergist," or, "I had it done at a nutritionist or at my general practitioner." It has to be used in a specific context to be valuable, and so I do think that is why it's really important that you educate people on how it should be used. It should be used with an elimination diet. It is not a be-all end-all. It's a guidance. It is something— it is our test where we have more people quantitatively say it's changed their lives than any other test. But— and there's good research around it for that use. What there's not good research around is saying like it diagnoses you with an allergy. It can just be used as kind of a black and white guidance of what you should and shouldn't eat. That's absolutely not true. So I think there's a lot of misinformation. I think there's a lot of different types of testing and the nomenclature gets mixed up for things that shouldn't be used for. And I think it's great that EverlyWell has been known as the brand for that, but honestly, we're offering a test that has been around for decades and needs to be used in the right way. And if we can take the lead in educating people on what that should be, then we'll do that.

What category of tests do you think is the biggest opportunity?

Sexual— well, we call it sexual health, STIs. And there's several reasons for that. One, right now our tests are too highly priced because the lab itself itself is expensive for us to run the test. So we— I mean, right now, our single marker STDs are a really good price, between $39 and $49. It's also HSA and FSA covered. So for some people, that's a great solution. But many people, for obvious reasons, want a comprehensive test. And that test is, I think, $200 and— $199.

What's the leading company in this space for STIs?

STIs. STIs is the clinical, right? Yeah, sexually transmitted infections is the correct nomenclature. Um, we call it sexual health testing because we think that this is something people should just be proactive about. Um, and I think it's in the space for digital, uh, for at-home. Yeah. Um, it's— I would say it's probably us, just from branding standpoint. There's a couple companies that specialize— you guys?

Wow.

Um, which, to be clear, should tell you how under-resourced and served this opportunity is because there's— Yes, yes, this is a multi-billion dollar opportunity. I'm gonna— again, if we're gonna riff, lots of other people can come into this space. Um, there's a specific company that only does STI testing, but they haven't been well funded, they've struggled. Um, and we really believe that this is not only how you can best close public health gaps, you also can get people on board to then use testing it from home over their lifetime for any other health issue as well. People don't want to go into a clinic. You don't want to go, period. Right. And our solution, you actually can not only get your results, but then you can diagnose and treat through an independent physician if you have a positive, if it's a relevant STI that can be treated. So it's a full-service solution. And what you're looking at right now is we have a really good business. But if you look at the price sensitivity sensitivity, there's a certain age group that's going to be willing to pay $250 to go get a test versus going to a clinic and potentially getting it for free.

Are you acquiring customers profitably on first touch, or do you hope to— do you lose money on them on their first touch and then hopefully—

Profitably on first touch. But that is, for me, we're in Austin, I'm a first-time founder, we're building a sustainable business. We didn't go out and raise money on this premise of just negative contribution margin and than hoping to sell people later down the road.

Is search the main channel?

No, wait, search.

Well, it depends. Search for different categories, but search has a ceiling. It does have a ceiling, even with STI testing. If you're selling a CD test online, you need that shit right now.

Right.

So for that category, certainly search is great for us, but Facebook/Instagram was for a long time our largest acquisition channel, and both by force and by proactively moving away. We have really diversified, which has been a good move for our business.

So, some on TV now?

Some TV. We've had mixed success with— we, again, because we are on this profitable unit economics from the beginning play, we, when we can't fully measure attribution and ROI on first purchase, sometimes it's hard for us to want to invest. So, we've had mixed success with TV, but we do believe it's important for brand building and category education.

Is all that $50 million going into marketing spend?

No, no, engineering, product, clinical. A lot of it goes into clinical and medical affairs.

Um, but you're not doing the clinical, so what's the— is it the kit, making sure the kit is as robust?

So we have, well, we have a regulatory and compliance team that ensures that either the lab partners we're working with or new lab partners that we're making sure that they're meeting the highest quality standards. We're starting our own research studies to prove outcome data, which will take time, but we think is really important. We do have obviously a healthy paid marketing budget, but we're trying to hire more in-house around content, SEO, organic, and those pieces as we start to actually build out like a healthy marketing engine and not just be dependent on this like paid social thing that we were the last few years.

Did you bootstrap this?

No. And that I think is a really—

You would have if you could have.

I would have if I could have. It's a really important Important question though. Go ahead.

You said like you're a marketing company. I'm like, oh, okay, so just white label this thing.

Right.

You see it, put this cute millennial pink on it, and then just start buying traffic. What— where's the— I mean, that's it. That's how simple it sounds.

What was— what were some of the challenges beyond the like, you know, yeah, well, for me, send traffic to a landing page and order this like white label product, right?

So we don't white label, we actually fully end-to-end construct and brand our kits, um, and really what the lab does is run the sample. That's the goal of the lab. Um, but there's also a really complex product from an engineering standpoint. Um, so not only creating obviously what is somewhat basic, an e-commerce site, but then a results platform that is able to speak with a third-party physician network, translate lab results that were often really messy, and then be able to say that in a meaningful way to consumers. And 5 years ago, that was not as easy from a, like, a UX standpoint as it is today.

So a doctor interprets all the results?

An independent physician.

Why couldn't they do something where they just say, like, the normal ranges, and if you are in range or out of range? So, like, I use Wellness FX, and they do blood tests, and they just say, like, you—

they also use a doctor.

No shit.

Yeah, it's for regulatory reasons. It's to make sure that you basically have a doctor in the process of saying, okay, I made sure that this test is appropriate for you. I've made sure that if there are critical values— so for example, if you took our STI test and you had an abnormal, you would have a physician call you and talk you through next steps and offer you a telemedicine consult, right? And so there, there are checks and balances in place. You don't always have to interact with the doctor if it's just a normal result, but there's certain like levels of escalation. So, so, but it is, it is similar to HonestFX except it's home kits, and Wellness FX really kind of stayed on the quantified self brand and never was able to scale.

That business totally fizzled.

Yeah, it's still out there.

It's alright though. I use it, but it's not like that successful.

But it's interesting. I mean, there have been a lot of companies, many, especially after Shark Tank, I would put it in the 2 dozen range, that launch an Instagram, create a pretty logo, have a kit, And then about 6 months to 12 months later, you never hear from them again. And it does speak to the power of brand marketing and experience. I mean, our NPS is a 60. We have a world-class customer base. I think in this case, first mover advantage really helped us in the category. It doesn't cause us to keep winning, but it mattered a lot here. So—

I'm not an NPS— I'm not super savvy with NPS, but is 60 good? I thought 60 would be sort of like—

It all depends on what you compare it to. You have to compare it to others that are similar to you. So if you're a bank and you have a 60 NPS, you're the best bank on Earth. If you're a 60 but you're like a movie, then it's like, eh.

Yeah, exactly. World-class would be like 80 or above, right? So certainly it's below that, but I think how we view it is we look at other healthcare services and most are around a zero to a negative.

Don't measure.

Right, right. And so we feel good about it for Product rating is 4.5 out of 5 stars on average. And so, we do look at that and say, okay, this has to be qualified. It's a very favorable VC metric, one that I think has sometimes limited actionability or limited kind of data-driven decision-making around what do you do with it. But we like it in terms of saying, okay, just benchmark where are we. Right.

So, when you were starting this, and something my sister was managing, my wife was managing, —right? And you have this idea. You're sitting at Deloitte, and you have this personal experience where, you know, you do this test, and you're like, this is crappy. That's what I'll call, like, every entrepreneur has the stated story, which is like, you know, I was trying to get a test, and I just, you know, was so frustrated, and therefore I decided to create a solution. And behind the stated story is, like, you know, more of the real story. Our audience is very entrepreneurial. and they feel this on a daily basis. They have these ideas, they also have doubts, they want to vet the idea. So tell me, like, that from the moment you had the idea, that first couple weeks, you know, what was, what was going through your mind? What were you doing? And what got you over the point where you're like, okay, I'm actually going to do this?

Yeah, I think this is important because I— it is the real story, right? So I'm like, oh, I just had this idea and I, you know, we moved, we moved to Austin in a U-Haul. All those things are true, um, but there's a —my husband and I and our dog. There's a few things that I think are important. It's not like I woke up one day and was like, oh, I'm gonna go do this crazy thing. So I did go to Harvard, and I was in this weird time. It was during the recession in 2009 when everybody in my class and the class above me were becoming entrepreneurs. And so you had Rent the Runway, you had Birchbox, you had Gilt a few years before, Stitch Fix, Oscar, I had two unicorn founders in my section alone, and at the time, GrabTaxi out of Korea, and then, um, that was huge. Who was— oh, Coupang, both in my section, right? So at the time, it didn't feel that unique, but I was being exposed to this day in and day out. And so I had this kind of roadmap for how to go about it once I started thinking about becoming an entrepreneur. And so I— the reality is I probably spent two years on the weekends in my spare time, not making any money, but going through different industries, different business models, advising different companies on their business plans and seeing like what would really stick. You have all those receipts saved? I do, but it's really like, I look back, it's kind of boring. It's like travel. I don't know. I will, I will send it, but it's, it's like I, I would be very literal in how I would go about evaluating all these ideas and Honestly, EverlyWell was probably the craziest and the worst of the ideas for me to go and actually do, given my background. What were the other ones? No, I mean, it was like travel, luxury resale, something like what The RealReal is doing. I mean, house decorating curation online, like all kinds of different spaces where there's probably opportunity in any of those if you do it the right way. Hey, it's a great house. Yeah. Two for two. Well, it's on— to be clear, it's I don't know if I took an idea from them or if I actually came up with it, but, you know, the match with EverlyWell was not necessarily one where you'd be like, oh, shit. It was not obvious. Right. It was not obvious, but it was the one where, like, I realized really early on, this is a decade-long thing. So if it actually works, you're in it for a long time. So you had to be passionate.

So how long after you did this exercise did you sort of start it?

No, it was a couple years. I mean, until I had this health experience in 2015, and then I kind of matched the two together. So this was early 2015. I ended up incorporating the company June 18th, 2015, and then I left my job in August.

Did you think of yourself as an entrepreneur? You said you're on the corporate path, but it sounds like you had dabbled in the idea of being an entrepreneur.

I had dabbled. I didn't. Both my parents are lawyers. I didn't realize, one, that being an entrepreneur was actually a career a career choice and a path that you could, like, become good at. That didn't necessarily mean financial success, but you could be a serial entrepreneur and actually make that a career. And I also, frankly, didn't have a lot of confidence. So it was interesting at Harvard because I kind of looked around and thought, I think I'm just as smart as all these people who are, like, really founding successful companies. So maybe I can do it too. And I honestly did it just to see if I could do it. I never— I truly couldn't even imagine having made $1 million in sales. And so I'm not sure I necessarily thought about what it would look like today. I just thought it was a really big opportunity and something that I wanted to see if I could go do, and that was how I made the decision, is I thought I'm passionate, I think it's a major thing. I was in the fintech space and I thought that was already really oversaturated by 2015. There's tons of apps, et cetera. And so I knew that this was an area that I didn't care about. Turns out I was a little wrong about that. But, and, and, you know, I do think Wellness FX is an example where I think they were just ahead of their time. They were too early on the curve, right?

And then started, or like scientists or something like that, or they're, they're in the industry, right? I think that's a weakness. You have to kind of be a marketer first, or you don't have to be, but if it's a consumer brand, you have to have that part of you. You got to be aggressive, right? Um, as you were, you were an outsider, right? Yes, completely. What What opportunities have you uncovered where you tell people, man, just so you know, like there's this huge problem in this industry I think could be solved?

What other adjacent things have you observed? Yes.

Because I'm a total outsider, but when I hear about these type of businesses, I'm like, if you can like solve a handful of problems, it's so easy to crush it.

Price transparency, which may seem obvious, and I think there's a lot of companies that talk about in healthcare, healthcare doing price transparency, but they don't actually do it. And even the digital startups trying to do it, they can't actually tell you what something will cost in healthcare. So we just go outside of insurance so that we can actually tell people what something will cost. But if you were able to do this in a really big way and say, hey, we can accurately tell you your cost commitment for this service, I think you would crush it. And I think the insurance system— I don't— within insurance, but I think there is a much much larger growing acceptance of consumers who are happy to pay for something in healthcare as long as they know what they're gonna get and what it costs. And so, I don't know that it has to be within insurance. You also have this HSA and FSA space that's exploding in terms of people on FSA and HSA plans, and then what they're using those dollars for. I think there's an interesting play there. Of a company? Brought a half-baked. Yeah. Oh, that's okay. That's what we do, man. If you could be a— so if you had physicians and you said, okay, I'm going to have you pay $50 anytime you see the physician, we're going to own a pharmacy and any of your drugs are going to be transparently priced and you can't use a coupon, everything is the same price and it's all generic. Um, and then if you you say, okay, and then I want to be able to get, you know, testing done, and then they can tell you the pricing on that. But here's the problem with it: you have to actually own the supply chain and the services chain. You have to be vertically integrated to do this, because otherwise— I know, but my point is you almost build a system external to the system, and you can do this at affordable pricing. The reason healthcare is so expensive is because you're adding cost into the system through the insurers. And those contracts, then when you get the bills, you're getting the bill for whatever they didn't want to cover. But that was intent— like, the provider billed the insurance company what they had hoped the insurance company would pay, not at all what it costs.

Um, in healthcare, whatever. For example, uh, when we started our company, we realized, yeah, like, paying freelancers.

Yes. Wow, I didn't notice how hard that was.

Yeah. So like along the way where you've like— you're entrepreneurial.

Oh, I have a list.

Yeah, but some of them get solved. So for example, like 3 years ago, 2 years ago on Black Friday, we hit a bunch of compliance limits with our banking system on spend in Facebook. So I was like, gosh, I wish there was a product where you could actually get like a cash advance for social media advertising. Now we're big enough to where we don't have to use a product like Abraxa or like ClearBank would do it, right? But at that time, if those solutions had been around, we absolutely would have been able to take advantage of them. And then of course they came out and I was like, oh, that would have been a really good idea. So yeah, but we really hit a bunch of challenges with that and it really can bring down businesses. And then I think, you know, other places are how do you make, like, as you think about doing a startup, I mean, the amount of time we spend on contracts and HR and legal and templatizing, I mean, there's so much cost in the system that I would love to take out of it. In healthcare and in highly regulated industries, it's really hard to do things quick, dirty, and cheap, and it's unwise.