How This Gardener Made Millions In His Backyard

he quit his job and in the first year he does it. He hits actually 5 grand a month. So he even surpasses his, his one-year goal and he just keeps going. So first year, $60K, second year, like $100K something, third year, $250K, fourth year, $7 million, fifth year, you know, it just keeps growing. Today, this business does over $30 million a year.

No way.

Are you kidding me? Sam, do you want to, um, do you want to start with Up Dog? I might as well. Thought I might catch you sleeping there.

Uh, that's like—

you should have just gave it to me.

That's way below you.

You should have just gave it to me.

Um, all right, before we start, I want to dedicate this podcast, Sean. Oh, to to two groups of people because I've had run-ins with these two groups of people and I've taken for granted how special these two groups of people are. The first one, people who start businesses and are English speaking as a, or, uh, not native English speakers. It's insane. I like have hung, I hung out recently with a few friends that, uh, you know, are entrepreneurs and they don't speak English natively. That's so impressive. I take it for granted so much until I've got to communicate someone of a different language. That's amazing. So I want to dedicate this pod to that. The second group of people, people who start businesses and they're not wealthy and they're just starting their businesses, trying to make their dreams come true while they have newborns or little kids. How impressive is that? Like, I didn't take, I kind of took that for granted. My parents did that when I was younger. I don't realize now, now that I have a kid, I realize how scary that is. So I want to dedicate this podcast to those two groups of people. Wow.

Good guy points. Okay. I like it. Um, dedication accepted. Shout out to all those groups.

Um, I have a few interesting things to share with you today. Do you have a few interesting things or, or what?

I have two things you're going to like.

What do you got?

I'm going to take you on a journey. So Sam, buckle up because I got a little something for you. I'm going to tell you about a journey I went down and the journey starts with a tweet I saw that was very interesting. You know, Bitcoin hit an all-time high price. AI's taken off. My, I wasn't in, I'm not interested. What I was interested in is a picture of a guy holding a giant avocado. And I was like, what is this? And he says, here's what he said. He goes, these are the best avocados I've ever had. They were grown by my 93-year-old Japanese neighbor. I have had to use Google Translate to talk to her about the variety, and she thinks it might be one that just grew from this specific seed. If that's true, this could be a new landmark variety. The Hass avocado was discovered in similar fashion and is now the most popular avocado in the world. This avocado that I found cannot be propagated with normal methods. It doesn't take well to air layering. I don't know what this means. He says, so I'm going to have to start with the seed. I'm going to have to grow it out the tree. I'm going to have to cut it from the mature tree, graft it onto its own seed. I don't even know what any of this means, but then he's like, and then I'm going to try to recreate this avocado. It will probably be a 3-year experiment. Wish me luck. And so I saw this and I, what a noble quest.

I said, what does this avocado teach me about life?

No. What has life led me to, to make my life about this avocado? Because I am so fully invested in this 3-year journey about this guy who's going to try to grow a better avocado. And it led me down a rabbit hole about him and about the avocado. So the guy is this guy named Kevin Espiritu. Do you know this guy? He calls himself the Plant Daddy on Twitter.

No, but I'm in.

You don't know this guy?

No.

Yeah, I think you do. When I just started describing people. So he's got a pretty amazing story and I'm going to first tell you his story, then I'm going to come back to the avocado. We're going to Tarantino this a little bit. All right. So this guy, basically he used to work at Scribe, the like book in a box company there. They help you produce books. So he's working at Scribe. He's like an early employee there. And on the side, he used to have hobbies of like video games and online poker, and he was just playing nonstop. And so to get away from kind of his online addiction, he's like, you know what? I'm gonna start gardening. Like him and his brother, they're like, this is the quote in the article. They go, Hey, let's go hit up a nursery. They go to a plant nursery and they are like, all right, we don't know anything about gardening, but like, uh, we want to do something. We want to do something away from a computer outside with our hands. And they go buy a bunch of stuff and they're trying to figure it out. They go online, they're looking at blogs to learn. And along the way, he starts blogging his journey. And so he's at Scribe and he, his little blog starts getting, you know, a little bit of traffic because he's posting his experiments. He's very relatable because he's an absolute noob beginner. And so people who are Googling are also absolute noob beginners and they start to like this. And eventually he's like, you know what, I'm going to quit my job. At the time, the blog is making, I don't know, $16,000, $17,000 a year. So roughly 2-ish grand a month, a little bit more than that, right? So a little less than 2 grand a month.

Sorry.

So he quits his job and he's like, I'm going to go all in on this thing. And at the time, he's all about this one type of gardening called hydroponic gardening.

Is that like where the plant is like raised? Is that right?

Yeah, it's like not in the soil and it's like in water, something like that. I said exactly, I have no idea. All right. So he's, he creates r/hydro, which is like a Reddit community. So he starts just building a community around other people who are interested in the same type of thing he's doing. Along the way, he's like, oh dude, I think this hydroponic thing is a little too niche. He rebrands it into something called Epic Gardening. Epic Gardening today. He's huge. He's got like—

Dude, I'm on the website and I'm looking at his social numbers. Holy crap.

He's got like 2 million on TikTok, 2 million on YouTube, a million people here. His Twitter pops off. So he's done really, really well with this Epic Gardening content. He's just a dude in a baseball cap, super like relatable. When you watch his videos, he's like, he's this very likable guy. He's got the gift that you need when you're going to do this type of content. And so he keeps going and he basically for 10 years, Essentially bootstraps this company. So it starts with like a $10 domain, pays $5 for hosting. And he was like, all right, I'm going to try to get this thing. His goal was I'm going to try to get to $3,000 a month because $3,000 a month means I can live off of this like blog revenue. He quit his job and in the first year he does it. He hits actually $5,000 a month. So he even surpasses his, his one-year goal and he just keeps going. So he first year $60,000, second year, like $100,000 something. Third year, $250,000. Fourth year, $7 million. Fifth year, you know, it just keeps growing. Today, this business does over $30 million a year.

No way. Are you kidding me?

And he just raised a huge amount of money from Chernin, the same guys who backed, we talked about Eater, Barstool, others. They have this content to commerce idea and they're like, this guy in the gardening niche is going to be able to do big things. And he had already kind of proven it. So what he did was he was doing pretty well with the content. He was just like learning. So he's like, dude, I've been on YouTube. For so long, you know, since, you know, basically 10 years now on YouTube, he's like, just keep evolving with whatever the new metagame is of YouTube. And what ends up happening is that in 2020, shit takes off during COVID So COVID was the big, like, inflection point that, like, really took this from moderately successful to very successful. Two things happened. COVID first, where his channel, all of a sudden, he said he started adding, like, 15,000 subscribers a day because the same thing he had when he was, like, Oh dude, I'm just so sick of being inside on my computer. I want to get outside, do some gardening. The whole world basically felt that when COVID hit. And so a lot of people got interested in this. And then he's like, cool. All my money up till that point was ads and affiliates, right? So just like YouTube AdSense, YouTube ad revenue, and then, you know, affiliate links to products. And finally, he's like, was he doing $30 million that way?

$30 million through ads? No, no, no.

Way less than that. He was doing like, you know, less than a million doing that. But then he decides, all right, I'm gonna launch a product. And he's like, I'm gonna create a gardening product. And so he imports a product from Australia and immediately it works. And so he's like, oh, this, this is kind of a good idea. And he starts to sell that product. And, you know, the beautiful thing about these creator businesses, right? We've talked about MrBeast. We've talked about Logan Paul with Prime, MrBeast with Feastables. You know, the mass creators, what they do is they take a mass market product like Gatorade or chocolate. And they're like, cool, we'll sell this commodity product using our branding and we'll use our branding to get into retail. Well, for like the medium, like the mid-tier creators, like this guy, or, you know, like us, for example, you have to actually create a niche product that's going to be higher ticket, higher value. Um, and you're going to use your audience to do it. And so what's cool about this is you create something that's called negative CAC. So what does negative CAC mean? Every business otherwise has a sales and marketing cost.

Talk dirty to me, baby. I love negative CAC.

So CAC, which is customer acquisition cost, is the amount of money you have to spend in marketing or sales to get a customer. And for most businesses, this is maybe 20%, 30%, 40%, 50%. For some companies, it's 80% of their revenues are just how much it costs to go market to acquire a customer. With a media business like this, what ends up happening is you get negative CAC, meaning he gets paid $1 to $2 million a year for his YouTube stuff, for his content, right? His blog and his YouTube stuff. He's making money on that and that's his customer acquisition channel. So it's like kind of an unfair advantage. This is what the Churnin guys are really smart about doing. Shout out to Mike Kearns over at Churnin, where they recognize, they identify that, hey, some of these creators have high trust. They have high authority in a niche and they actually have a business model where instead of spending 30 or 40% of your revenue on acquiring customers, you actually have negative CAC. It's actually, you have not only zero, it's better than zero. You actually have a profitable media company. That is being used to acquire these customers. And that's the beauty of it. And so he, then he jumped and he was, went from making, you know, let's say a million bucks a year to $7 million, $7 million to $20 million. And then now he's over $30 million a year in, in revenue. And the other cool thing is he's bolted on some acquisitions.

All right everyone, a quick break to tell you about HubSpot. And this one's really easy for me to talk about because I'm gonna show you a real life example. So I've got this company called Hampton, joinhampton.com. It's a community for founders doing between $2 million all the way up to like $250 million a year in revenue. And one of the ways that we've grown is we've created these cool surveys. And so So we have a lot of founders who have high net worths and we'll ask them all types of questions that people typically are embarrassed to ask, but provide a lot of value. So things like how much the founders pay themselves each month, how much money they're spending each month, what their payroll looks like, if they're optimistic about the next year in their business. All these questions that people are afraid to ask, but well, we ask 'em anyway and they tell us in this anonymous survey. And so what we do is we've created a landing page using HubSpot's landing page tool, and it basically has a landing page that says, here's all the questions we asked. Give us your email if you want to access it. And then I shared this page on Twitter and we were able to get thousands of people who gave us their email and told us they want this survey. And I could see, did they come from social media? I can see, did they come from Twitter, from LinkedIn, basically everywhere else that they could possibly come from? I'm able to track all of that. And then I'm able to see over the next handful of weeks how many of those people actually signed up and became a member of Hampton. In other words, I can see how much revenue came from this survey, how much revenue came from each traffic source, Things like that. But the best part is I can see how much revenue came from it. And a lot of times it takes a ton of work to make that happen. HubSpot made that super, super easy. If you're interested in doing this, you could check it out, hubspot.com. The link's in the description. And I'll also put the link to the survey that I did so you can actually see the landing page and how it worked and everything like that. I'm just gonna do that call to action then. And it's free. Check it out in the description. All right, now back to MFM. Hold on, what's he selling?

He's got like a seed product. So they like some tray seed crap. I don't know. I don't, I don't know anything about this, but it's called Botanical Seeds. And he bought that company actually. That's not the one he started. He bought that because they had retail distributions. They were in like 4,000 or 5,000 stores. So he's like, cool, let me buy this because I know that my audience will help grow this, right? This is what I did with Shepherd too, right? It's like, let me buy this company that I, is already a good business, knowing that my audience will acquire a bunch of customers for it. And like, that's what happened with Shepherd. We basically tripled the business. Using this strategy. He's doing the same thing in the gardening niche. And so he bought the seed business and then he bought this like houseplant business, which is actually a cool story. So he's like, he gets into, he's like during COVID everybody wanted like houseplants. I think you guys talked about this with trends too.

Like, dude, we were, we talked about this a year and a half, I think before the pandemic about, like succulents, succulents, or like people are wanting to buy succulents online and there's not a lot of options.

You were totally right. You were ahead of trend. What he did was he was like, Cool. Should I start creating this content? And he realized a very, like, you know, in the, in the, the growth of any entrepreneur, eventually you start to realize that, hey, sometimes it's actually easier to buy than build. And so what he did was like, well, I could try to create all these articles, rank for them in SEO, or he found this website that was called like, you know, yourhouseplant.com. And he's like, this actually has like good content and it's good SEO. They just don't have any business around it. And so he's like, I think I could make this product a lot better, but I could like get this off a head start. So he does a whois lookup and it's some Indian VC owns this as a side project. He buys it for $1,000 and then immediately like month one, he's making more than $1,000 off this thing and then grows that property. And so he's done this a few times and he raised money from Churnin to be able to go do more of these. And so I think this guy is amazing. I've asked him so many times to invest because I'm like, dude, this is, you are going to win and you're going to win in such a big way. It's going to shock people. Like, I think as I'm saying it now, it sounds like pretty cool, pretty obvious. And as his growth happens, but like 10 years ago, so, so non-obvious, even 4 or 5 years ago, even when COVID started to get more popular, it's like, okay, cool. You're a YouTuber. Okay, cool. You're a YouTuber with an e-com shop. I say, no, no, no, you are going to be the most trusted influencer in the gardening niche and the gardening niche. You know, look at how many, there's full retail brick and mortar stores that are selling fertilizer and different things like that. Like. He can take this huge if he does this right. And now it's just gonna be a question of how fast his kind of business development can level up with the content skills he already has.

And he's got the look. I'm looking at his Instagram. He's wearing flannel. He's got a nice smile. Like he's got, it's, he's basically like a, what's the, what's it called? Chip and Joanna.

Yeah. Gains. Yeah. The gains.

Yeah. He's got that type of vibe where I look at him and I'm like, you're relatable. I trust you. You're somehow a little bit aspirational, a little bit. That sounded like an insult. I didn't mean it. I didn't mean for it to sound like that. Uh, but this is awesome. Uh, and dude, these guys at Churnin have done this so many times. They did it with MeatEater, who we, or was it MeatEater who we talked about a few podcasts ago? They did it with Cars and Bids and Doug DeMuro. This is like, when people say they're going to do this, I often think it's like at a small scale. These guys are doing it at multi, multi, multi-billion dollar scale. Uh, it's really cool.

Yeah, exactly. So I think this is, this is amazing. Now let me circle back to the avocado thing. So he says, I'm going to do this 3-year avocado mission. And he says something avocado. And so I go look it up. I'm like, where did this Hass avocado come from? Learned a couple things. Number one, it's not pronounced Hass. It's Hass. So we're all saying it wrong. That's the first thing I learned. Second thing, do you know this story? Have you heard the story about the Hass avocado?

No, I, why would, no. All right.

So basically avocados were, avocados were absolutely not popular back in the day. So nobody ate them. They didn't taste very good.

Not even like in Mexico.

No, they were not. They were just not a popular fruit. They were these green, it was a green product. It was not very popular. It didn't taste very good. And it had, it wasn't even branded very well. So some people called it avocados. Some people called them alligator pears. Some people called them like in Mexico, they called them the, like, I don't know how you pronounce the word, but it was like the Spanish word, like the native word for testicle. Like they're just like, yeah, you want to go eat a testicle? And so nobody really liked this fruit. So Enter Rudolph Haas. Rudolph Haas basically is a mailman from Milwaukee. He's now living in California and he decides he wants to plant an avocado tree. So he goes and he buys some seeds and he tries to plant it, but like you have to, I guess, do some grafting process or whatever to get the thing to like take. And it didn't work. And so he's like, ah, it didn't work, whatever. He thinks about just cutting it down, but he just doesn't get around to it or whatever. So he just lets the tree grow and he lets it grow for like a year or two. And then his kids like Notice that there's fruit on it. They pluck, they pluck it, they open it up and the kids really like it. This is how the story goes. Kids really like it. He's like, oh, why are you eating that? That's, that's not good. And they're like, no, it's great. He tries it. He's like, oh, this is actually really good. It's way creamier. It's got like kind of a nutty taste and there was way more space between the seed and the peel. So it was like softer, creamier, and there was just more of the actual like filling. And he's like, whoa, these are actually really good. And so he starts eating it. The, you know, word starts to spread. He goes and he partners with a local nursery and he's like, hey, can you help me grow more of this tree? Um, because this tree is like bearing this amazing fruit. And so the nursery is like, cool, yeah, we'll, we'll do more of this tree and we'll give you, you know, some royalty off this thing. And then now Hass avocados are like 80% of worldwide avocado sales. These trees are planted all around the world, Mexico and China and everywhere. Like this is the dominant fruit.

And it's not even that old. So he patented it in 1935. So we're talking avocados as we know it today are less than 100 years old.

So now here's a couple of interesting things I found from this. So number one, a lot of fruits are like this where they actually start kind of shitty. They don't taste very good. And then through a process of artificial selection, so like not natural selection, artificial selection, you find the good tasting fruit and then it becomes the dominant species because that's the one everybody wants to eat. I just didn't really think about that too much.

Yeah. Like a, like a banana, like an old banana from 100 plus years ago tasted like a carrot. They weren't as sweet. And that's happened. That's happened with a lot of our fruit. It's gotten sweeter and sweeter and sweeter. So they're like the Honeycrisp apple. There's like a cotton candy apple right now. And a lot of like health advocates are like, dude, you shouldn't even eat modern fruit because it's like, it's not exactly how it used to be.

And the health benefits are, aren't the same properties in it because it's a different thing optimized for taste. So a couple, a couple more interesting facts. Number one, this guy, even though he said he got like a fruit patent, which I was like, what the hell is a fruit patent? He didn't make much money off this thing. I don't think he really had the patent. I don't think he really benefited from it. His son, Charles came out and told the LA Times that even though he, he goes, my dad created the greatest avocado in the world and his total royalties lifetime are $4,800, less than $5,000 he made off, off of, uh, of, of discovering this. And I, I say discovering, 'cause he didn't invent this. He didn't mean to do it. Um, he didn't like, you know, like manually try to create this. He discovered it. And even he says this, he goes, it was an act of God that I discovered this, that this fruit. And so, um, I found that interesting. The third thing I found interesting is the marketing behind this. So even though this thing tasted good, it didn't take off right away. And one of the reasons why is that an avocado doesn't look like most fruits. So most fruits are colorful. They look very appetizing. Like the reason they called it the alligator pear was because like the skin was basically like all wrinkly and like tough, like the way an avocado that we all know looks. And so nobody wanted to eat it. They were like, this thing looks bad. And so nobody would even try it. And so the like Fruit Association of California comes together and does probably what the greatest, like greatest act of any committee ever. They were like, look, a couple of things. Number one, we can't keep calling this shit testicles and alligator pears. Like we got to come up with one name that we like. All right. We're going with avocado. Everybody needs to call this the same thing so that this can spread in popularity. The next thing that they, that they did that was very, very smart. They were like, Cool. Why aren't people buying these? They're like, well, because they look like they've gone bad, right? They're dark. It's like black, basically. It looks like fruit that's gone bad. So they're like, all right, new marketing campaign. We're going to put stickers on every one of these that says ripe tonight. Basically that this is the, this is perfectly ripe. It's ready to eat tonight. And this is already true. It's just that consumers don't understand this. And so they put stickers on, on every avocado and suddenly avocado sales started to boom. Because once you try it, you like it, but people weren't trying it because they thought it had gone bad instead of saying, this is ripe, ready to eat tonight. That was the second thing that they did. And then the third thing was that they were like, they needed to educate people that a green avocado was actually a bad avocado and that this was a good avocado. And so they did all this marketing to make it work, which you never really think about with fruit. Like you don't think about fruit marketing, but everything around us is the product of some ad guy trying to boost sales. And like, once you realize that, you can learn two things. You can learn a lot about marketing. And you can learn a lot about, um, you know, what the products that you see are not as they appear. You become a little more skeptical, a little more jaded towards all products when you realize that even avocados were basically like, you know, they were just someone's, some dropshipper somewhere had a great idea.

Dude, we, first of all, this is awesome. This is very interesting. We should do an entire episode on fruit and marketing. It's actually really interesting. Uh, Planet Money have had a podcast on the Honeycrisp apple. You know, it's the most popular, right? You know, before a lot of apples like that existed, it was Red Delicious. It's like kind of fascinating.

I met a guy who had done a venture-backed startup. It was like raised a bunch of money, was trying to grow, business blows up. And we check in with him. We're like, yo, like, what are you thinking for what's next? And I think he's going to say some AI crap. I'm like crazy, you know, whatever, some, some big idea. And he's like, I'm trying to invent a new fruit. And I was like, what? And he's like, yeah. He's like, you ever had a mango? I'll go, yeah. He goes, you think you've had a mango? Wait till you try my mango. I was like, I'd love to try your mango. Send it to me. He sent it to me. And basically he was, he was cut like, he was basically like the shape of the fruit really matters. So for example, like the ease of eating. So he had these like, uh, his mangoes were in like circular spheres, basically it's like little balls. And his little mango balls were ready to eat. They were super juicy. The texture was perfect. And I was like, wow, this is genuinely an amazing mango experience. Thank you for this.

What's it called?

Well, he kind of pivoted off the idea because he's like, the logistics of it are so hard. He's like to get fresh. He's like, it tastes really great when it's fresh. He's like, but just the logistics to get this like to customers is so hard. I would have to go about this in this way, this way, this way. So he pivoted off that idea in the end, but, and then you have to be, I feel very fortunate that I got to try that mango.

And the crazy part is, and this is like actually kind of like an interesting moat, is that it takes 10 or 15 years to do. Because imagine if you're building a website and you could only make a change once a year to that website and see the results and be like, ah, shit, that didn't work. Next year, let's see. Because you have to, you know, you got to wait for it all to grow. It takes a long time. And so we should do a whole thing.

And it's patentable, right? Like, you know, I guess though, there's some rules around the patent. So the rules that I read were basically like, you, if you want to do a fruit patent, you can't, you basically like, it has to reproduce asexually. It has to be created by breeding or grafting. It cannot be discovered. If it's already in the wild, it can't be patented. Like there's a bunch of rules like that. So like, you know, the first fruit plant for the first plant patent was this guy, Henry, who planted the climbing ever blooming rose and like he created that rose and he patented that plant and then he gets to benefit from that. So I think when we do our fruit and plant episode, I think we got to go find like the greatest fruitpreneurs to ever live.

Uh, yeah, we, I, I just looked them up on Twitter. I have had some interactions with him. You know, what's funny about Twitter is these, there's so many people, like I remember I was talking to this woman named Shelby Church and they're like YouTube celebrities. They'll have 5 or 10 million subscribers on YouTube and you go to Twitter and they've got 10,000 followers. And on Twitter, they're just trying to learn like the rest of us to get business insight and things like that. This guy is not that popular on Twitter, but he's got 10 million across all of his other socials. We could just DM him and get him on here. That's kind of cool.

Yeah, let's do it.

I would love that.

So I'm going to show you something here. So I made a video of Camp MFM that I want to, I want to show. So originally, by the way, this is my debut of vlogging. And you'll notice that the video is not a vlog. Why? 'Cause your boy sucks at vlogging.

It's hard.

I learned that.

It's really hard.

I learned that the hard way. Um, he'd be like, all right, so I'll just get a shot of you, um, walking into the house. And I'm like, I just walk into the house. He's like, no, no, no, you can't just walk in. I was like, what do you mean? He's like, you gotta say something and then you gotta walk in kind of an interesting way. I was like, but I don't walk interesting or say— I just walk into places. There's no one here to talk to. What am I supposed to say? Anyways, didn't work out so well, but we have a cool video.

We are playing for the Rolex.

This is Camp MFM, the once a year retreat I host with Mr. Beast, where we get 20 entrepreneurs for 3 days living in one house together, where we play basketball, play poker—

what the fuck was that?—

and just have a whole lot of fun. And this year I asked my buddy Max if he would come with us and record the whole thing.

Always has to have a camera. Man, there's a lot of good, not as much good. It's basically the championship. Yeah, losing team has to do a cold plunge in the pond.

Yeah, they go down and scream.

Hey, the buzzer went off.

Really deep breaths. Ready, set, go! Wow, wow, straight to the top. Never going down. Don't wait for the drop. Never stand still.

Everyone here was super chill. Had a great time and can't wait for next year.

All right. So two things. Number one, number one, if you're just listening to the audio version, you got to go to YouTube to see it. We're not even going to put that in the audio version because it's not going to make sense. So go to, go to the YouTube video if you want to actually see the video. Sam, I have three questions for you.

What do they search? What do they search?

Oh, they search My First Million. Or you can just search the greatest podcast of all time. Either one should show up if Google's doing their job right. And you search My First Million, click on this episode and you'll see the video here. So Sam, I have 3 questions for you. Number 1, how much FOMO are you feeling right now knowing that you skipped this year's Camp MFM? In fact, we may need to not even name it Camp MFM, just name it Camp Sean because you didn't show up.

I had a newborn child. I was committed to being with her. I, for a certain period of time, I didn't just skip it. I couldn't go.

But there was a hilarious moment when we were there. Uh, everyone was like, dude, where's Sam? And I was like, oh, he can't come. He, uh, he just had a baby. And then everyone's like, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. And then nodding. And then one guy goes, wasn't that 2 and a half months ago? And then we were all like, yeah, what the hell? And I hadn't even thought about it. You can totally go for 2 days and it's 2 and a half months in. And so then we all laughed at you and then moved on.

It was 2 and a half months ago, but I committed to 3 months. I committed to 3 months. I had to stick with it. So that's That's point one. What's point two?

Point two. What do you think of my not vlog video there? What could we have done better?

So I was, I wrote this down to let you know. I don't think you could have any of that music on there. You know, I think it's going to get taken down.

No, I think you'll be fine. Connor Price. That's Connor Price's song. He was going to attend the camp. It's fine.

The first song was Dropkick Murphys.

The first song is fine and it's going to be absolutely fine. Nothing's going to get taken down.

This isn't like a, like. Oh, I just got to ask permission type of thing. Like it literally won't, like, like the algorithm is going to like prevent this from going live. So I think you have to change that song, but it's great. I thought it was great.

Okay.

Narc.

Um, okay. Third, third question. Third question for you. Have you noticed this trend? Uh, right. Part of this is me just showing you a vacation photo album basically. But the other part is noticing that, um, I think we started a movement, dude. I think I just fucked around and started a movement. So I didn't mean to do this.

Did you just invent blogging?

No, not the blogging. This, the movement is of these kind of like man camp active conferences. I don't know. I don't have a good name for it. I'm thinking this comes up like a man business camp type of thing. So I did this Camp MFM thing. Then I started noticing other people who heard the podcast were like, oh, you know what would be cool? Like Sean did it for basketball. Let's do it for something else. And so I have a few of these that have now started. So our boy Danny Miranda has like a running club type of thing.

Yeah, dude. I see them out there all the time. There's like 50 of them.

Looks like a blast. Pat Walls from Starter Story was like, hey, what if we did this for tennis, pickleball, whatever? And they called it the MRR Open, like the Month of Revenue Open. Great name.

That's a great name.

Better than our name. Shit. This guy, this guy in Hampton messaged me and he goes, hey, heard about Camp FM's so awesome, had the same idea. This guy Victor, he was like, I'm going to do this for poker. And so he did a poker getaway weekend, rented a house, invited a bunch of people, and they just played poker all weekend. I think this is the new wave of getting— you can either just get together for drinks, but guess what? The cool kids don't drink anymore. Everyone's sober as a salad.

Dude, isn't it insane? Did you see Whole Foods announced the most popular beer that they sell? Do you know what it is? It's Athletic Brewing Company, a non-alcoholic beer. A non-alcoholic beer is the top selling beer right now in Whole Foods. Is that insane? No one drinks.

Yeah, no one drinks. So nobody drinks anymore. So what are we going to do? Get together and just, you know, suck our thumbs? This is not going to work. So next thing, nobody wants to just sit at a conference or, you know, like a lecture hall and just sit there and listen to speakers. Kind of boring. You want to weave it in with these things. So I think this kind of active conference thing is cool. I think more people should make these. You can invite me. I would love to know about them. And then I politely passed just because I don't like to leave the house that much, but I think more people should do these. And I'm hoping that, I'm just hoping that I get credit for starting this movement. And I know people are going to go out and say, no, no, this has been going on forever. But that was the past, but I'm the present future. And I just needed to tell you that.

I think it's awesome. I want to go to the next one and I'm going to make it a point to go there and make a big deal out of it because I do have FOMO after seeing that video. Good job. And vlogging's not only—

I don't care if you're giving birth next year when it's happening, you better be there.

It, uh, dude, vlogging sucks, by the way. Dude, MrBeast made fun of you in that video, or he made fun of it. He was always with the camera. Was he giving you guys a hard time for having a camera there?

Yeah, because I showed in, you know, with a camera following me basically. And, uh, the funny part is always with the camera. That's the first time I've ever done a vlog, as evidenced by the fact that at the end I was like, that's vlog kind of sucks. Let's just make a hype video out of it. Um, But it was really fun actually having a guy there. This, our buddy Max came and, uh, he did a great job.

It's really embarrassing. I see a lot of people like vlogging and walking around and they have a guy, uh, following them on camera. It's, it's quite embarrassing. It draws a lot of attention to you. I find it to be very, very humiliating.

The upside, you might get famous. The downside, you're immediately humiliated.

Um, all right. Let me tell you about something.

Yeah.

I'm going to talk a little bit about the best business in the world. Now, this business, Chamath, who I think is coming on the pod actually, has said it's the singular best business model and monopoly ever created. This is easy for you to guess, right?

Ritz Crackers. No, it's got to be Google. Google. Yeah.

Google. And so I wanted to talk to you a little bit about Google and search engine stuff because I've been interested in this for years. I've been interested in DuckDuckGo, which I called that shot. I think I missed the time. I thought it was going to grow a lot faster than it actually has, but it's like slowly coming about.

This is, by the way, this is going to be the episode where we take credit for things that we had absolutely no part in and actually didn't call a shot. And in fact, kind of doubted it earlier on. Yeah.

It's like, hey, do you like making right-hand turns on a red light? I invented that.

I was doing that when I was 16. Yeah.

I created it. I created that. And so the reason, let me tell you why I've been interested in it. Type for athletic fitting dress pants.

Hey, the autocomplete didn't even, had no idea what I was doing there.

That is not a common search. Thick boy pants. All right. I was searching for this the other day and I had to scroll down so far to get to a website because if you look through like the first, it's like It's tons and tons of images. Is that what you see?

So I see tons of images. So I see a whole shopping carousel. Then I see a couple of ads and then I scroll down, I see Amazon. Okay. Yeah, go ahead.

So you got to scroll down a ton to get to a website. It's actually quite annoying. And so Google's been pissing me off. And you just talked about how they, uh, like have gone through some stuff and you still believe in the company. I'm slowly to lose. I'm slowly starting to lose faith. Faith in their company because their search has been really shit and it's starting to piss me off. And so I've been looking for all their other alternatives.

Did you Google for them? Did you just Google search for alternatives?

Yeah. I mean, it's like, it's like, even though I hate it, I use it, you know, like it's like an abusive lover, but I was doing some research on when they first started. So Google started in the late '90s and when they did Sergey and Larry, the founders, they created this paper called The Anatomy of Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine. Riveting, riveting stuff.

But please take our, my power writing course, Larry.

Please.

That title is awful.

And in that paper, they talk about like what they think is possible with a search engine and, and, and they kind of started from an academic point of view, which is pretty cool though, to see like their, their predictions. And there's this one line, it says, in general, it could be argued from the consumer point of view. The better the search engine is, the fewer advertisements will be needed for the consumer to find what they want. And then he goes, he says, the goals of the advertising business model do not always correspond to providing quality search to users.

So like 30 years later, they just went back and edited it and they're like, nah.

Yeah. Yeah. Like the, the subtext on their, like the subheadline is just psych. Like they just like, Uh, and then, and they said for this reason, uh, as well as for, for this reason, we expect that advertising-funded search engines will be inherently biased towards the advertisers and won't be aligned with the consumer's needs. And they actually go on to say that they think a subscription service, uh, search engine is actually the answer. Of course, that is the opposite of what they've eventually, uh, have become. You know, Google is a $1.5 trillion-dollar company, market cap company, and 95% of the revenues come from search. And it's the greatest business model of all time. I would, I don't know how many people work at Google exactly. I think, I think over 100,000, but I would, I would imagine that you could basically fire everyone but like 1,000 people and the company would just thrive. It would be the most profitable company in the world. And the crappy part about Google, well, I guess it's good for them, bad for us. Is that their moat is quite simple, which is the more people who use the search engine, the better it understands, like, which results to give you. And so it's just going to get better, or supposedly better and better and better, but harder for a new person to create an alternative. Now, ultimately, I think actually OpenAI is going to be an alternative. Uh, Gartner had this report where they said by 2026, they think 25%, uh, Google search is going to be reduced by 25% because of, uh, AI, but I found a new alternative that just launched publicly a few days ago or about a month ago. They've been around quietly, but they like kind of made, they had like a big like launch coming out party the other day and it's kind of cool. So it's called, I actually don't know how to pronounce it. It's Kaji. Yeah.

Sorry.

I mean, how do you say this word? K-A-G-I.

Yeah. Kaji.

Kaji.

Keet.

Keiji. Yeah, I don't know, but it's got an interesting premise. So it was started by this guy named Vladimir, and the premise is, is that there are zero ads and it's $5 to $10 a month for a subscription. And I think that that's like an interesting premise, but I don't think that that would work that well. However, this guy's story is pretty interesting. So he started bootstrapping this business in 2018, slowly started making progress, and at this point he's got about 30,000 people who pay for it. And if you go to kagi.com, kagi.com/stats, he reveals all of his stats. And so you could see the number of paid members. You can see how many searches are happening per day. You, all of this stuff is pretty transparent and I love when people do that stuff. It's so fascinating to see. And the reason he had this like big, like launch recently is because they just raised $800,000. I think it was $800,000. And very stupidly, they, it looks like they're spending that $800,000 to buy 20,000 t-shirts to send to their 30,000 members. So, so Vlad, uh, Vlad has some questionable judgment when it comes to, uh, finances. Yeah. Yeah. So they blog like all about the business. So if you go to their, uh, blog.blog.kadji.com, they blog about like everything that's going on in the company. And so they're actually pretty transparent. And in the thing he was like, yeah, and we're, uh, uh, we're going to be sending out 20,000 t-shirts. And I was like doing the math and I was like, oh, that's, that's like $800 grand. Like, so, so that's questionable. But they had, he has like this whole manifesto online and it's pretty fascinating. And this, this is the type of entrepreneur who I really like because he's got this blog, uh, his personal website. Website, he says, I'm dedicating the work.

By the way, be honest. When you found out the founder's name was Vladimir, already you were pretty biased to like this thing, right?

Yeah, I'm in.

You can add an extra million to that valuation if your name is Vladimir.

Yeah, I'm in.

The general rule, and I have no arguments with that.

Yeah, he's, he's, he's born in Yugoslavia and he like had all these like little like indie hacker projects for a long time, worked at GoDaddy. So he's got, he's a very technical guy. He seems very savvy. He was a VP of product at GoDaddy. He had another company called ManageWP, which was a web application that helps users manage WordPress sites. And that got to a couple million in revenue. So he has some experience, but he has this blog where he goes, I'm dedicating this work on Kadji to my 3 children while I try to make the web a more humane and friendlier place for them. And I started reading that. I'm like, okay, I'm really fascinated by this guy. I'm very interested. And so on his blog, they talk all about the company and like how it's working and things like that. And he's got all these like great lines about how he's like, paying for a search engine is unusual, but that's the only choice if you want to build an independent search engine that isn't ad supported. You could do donations, but I don't think it's going to work. 5 billion people use a search engine. 99% of people are never going to pay. The thing is, the tiny minority of people who think differently, the 1% that will pay, it's still quite a large number. That's 50 million people. And he talks about 20 years of ad supported search have created resistance to the idea of paid search. But a lot of people are already coming to the realization that the predicament that they found themselves in with ad-supported search is not good for them. And my point through all this is I think I agree with this guy. The issue is that I don't think, I don't think he's going to win. I think I agree with all of his stuff about subscriptions and I'm on board with that. And OpenAI is really good for that. But I'm very fascinated with guys that are going after Google at the moment. There's been a few. There was You.com. Which I don't think is that intriguing. Uh, there was Neva.com, so N-E-E-V-A. That was one. And there's a few others. And this is a type of idea that if you told me that you're going to launch this, most people, as well as my gut reaction, is like, there's not a chance you're ever going to beat Google. But when you start thinking about it, I think it's really interesting. And I want to know, what's your opinion, uh, of these people trying to build these search engines? And do you actually think that any of them will work other than OpenAI?

Well, I think I agree with you on pretty much all fronts, which is that, uh, Google search over time has become more and more just you, you search for something and you get an ad and they add the result. The top half of the page is ads. And that's what, that's what you get. Google, I think, uh, in Kaji's website, it says that Google, if you just take their revenue, divide it by the number of users on average, I believe that they make like $300 a year off of each customer, I think it's like $277. And so that's $23 a month. And that's like what you're worth to Google. So what this guy's doing is basically saying, hey, instead of Google making $23 a month off you, you pay us $10 a month and we'll have no ads. And I think that I agree with you, which is that the big threat to Google is obviously the AI-driven, uh, engines and Google's trying to become that themselves. So, you know, whether it's ChatGPT or it's Google or it's Bing or it's some new one that we haven't heard of, Perplexity or whatever else, that is the big thing, which is it's a better experience. And so they're trying to win with better experience. Then you have DuckDuckGo, which is basically like, we are the anti-Google, right? We're gonna, and Kaji's in that same bucket. We're the anti, anti-whatever. I would say DuckDuckGo is the surprising success, the amount of traffic they have. We did a whole thing on them, you know, a few episodes ago, which was looking at the traffic numbers and how stunning they were. What I think is cool about Kaji is that it doesn't need to beat Google. This is just like, I'm going to build this, I'm a cockroach. I'm going to build this business and you can't kill me because I'm going to be supported by my customers. Right now it sounds like he's probably making like, what, $2 to $3 million a year in revenue?

I think it's closer to $1 to $1.5 million.

Okay. So he's making, well, let's say $1.5 million in revenue and he's probably able to run the thing, break even or profitably at that rate. And, uh, you know, he'll just keep crawling, you know, next year he'll be at 40,000 members and then next year he'll be at 60,000 members or whatever. He'll just keep growing. And he's not even worth, it's not worth killing if you're Google. It's too small to matter. And he doesn't have to become huge. I think what he's saying is like, my mission is for people that, you know, believe in this, the point, he says the 1% who would pay, I don't think it's 1%. I think it's like 0.1% that would pay. Here's your option. And now the question is, how good is this? Like, for example, you're into this. Did you sign up? Hey, are you using this now instead of Google? It's so hard to use something instead of Google because they're the default everywhere.

Yeah. And basically my frustration with Google is borderline to the point where I'm like, all right, I'm out. But the thing is, is that I'm like, so 6 or 7 more times, Google, and I am out of here. The issue is like, I've logged in with everything like on Chrome.

You know what I mean?

I'm like, shit, I got to type in all these passwords. This sucks.

But I mean, I definitely, you know, ChatGPT has definitely taken away at least 30% of my like Google time, which is a pretty insane number, actually.

And I, uh, we're gonna have to do an entire episode on Sergey Brin and Larry Page. These guys are crazy fascinating. And I was reading a little bit about them when I was like researching how Google started and they were like huge shitheads. And like Sergey Brin, dude, they were shitheads.

You're gonna have to explain that one to me.

So Sergey Brin, he's got this, uh, he had his resume online and in the code He put, uh, if you inspect the source code of his website, you'll find Brin's hidden objective laid out bare, which is, and this is in quotes, this is exactly what he had in the code. I want a large office, good pay, very little work. Frequent expense account trips to exotic lands would be a huge plus.

Is that real? That's insane.

That's on, you can go to the website right now and find it.

Uh, you would never expect somebody who's like innermost goal is a big office, no work. Expense accounts to create fucking Google.

Yeah. It's funny. It's funny. And then there's stories of Larry Page where he was just kind of like, they had this like combination of just like being really blunt and where blunt and just like not totally understanding normal human emotions. And so Larry and Sergey, they took pride in the fact that they would argue with each other. And they would call each other stupid and be like, your idea is so stupid. That's dumb. Why are you? And they would like fight and fight and fight. And then one person would win. And then the other person would like concede and be like, oh, your idea is better. And they would bond over that. And then they're like, to all the other employees, they're like, that's what you all need to do. Unfortunately, when you're at like 50 or 100 or 300 people, most people aren't like that. And there's these crazy stories of like, uh, apparently, uh, do you know how like a janitor, when they take out the trash oftentimes and they replace the bag, they'll actually leave an empty bag at the bottom of the trash in case someone else wants to take it out. And they're like, well, there's a bag already there for you. Larry saw this and he was like, that's the most efficient way I've ever seen anyone clean. That is brilliant. And he made this whole like memo about how the janitor does that and how brilliant that is. And he's like, why can't you guys be like this? In fact, everyone in the office needs to be like this. Here's the new rules. And he laid out these like 8 rules. And it was like, uh, if you think that your idea is right, go straight to the person who's in charge and tell them exactly what you think and don't hold back. Or it would be like, if you are working on a project and you are not providing value, leave that project right away and go and let the doers do what they need to do and just get them coffee and like, just like serve them. And like, he would do all these things that are very logical and like—

If you disagree, some more.

Yeah. Like he would say these like crazy things that you hear them and like, yeah, I mean, that's more productive. Unfortunately, like this whole thing called human emotion kind of gets in the way. And so it's probably not practical when you have 500 employees. But there's all these stories about how these guys would behave and it's very fascinating. And they were, they were shitheads when they first started. I think Google right now is going through this period where their CEO kind of, I think it kind of sucks to be honest. And so I think they're going to like come back, but right now I'm not bullish on Google. I think they're going to be around for a whole, a real long time because they're so big, but I'm eager to see something come and kind of crush them.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I think the funny thing about all like Crush them type of ideas is that when a company is really successful, it's like a giant castle with a huge moat and everybody who tries to like siege the castle, it's like the Khajis of the world. They're basically trying to cross that moat and take over the castle and it's too hard. The castle's too big, too strong, the moat's too big, et cetera. And what ends up happening is that you, the thing that beats that castle is not somebody who comes and takes their land. It's somebody who just walks over like 2 miles and is like, hey, this is actually like, this is fertile land over here that everybody's ignoring. And they build a new castle over there. And actually the thing that diminishes the castle is that that original castle is just no longer as relevant. Like the world and the attention has moved. The new plants that everybody wants, they grow on this other land over here. And nobody took your thing, but, uh, you know, you became less relevant in the world.

No one wants that thing anymore.

Microsoft didn't defeat IBM or whatever by making, you know, By beating them at their own game, they were like, oh, actually the game is software. It's operating systems. And then the things that beat the, the Microsoft monopoly and like Microsoft, the biggest tech company in the world got then beat by the Googles and the Amazons and the Facebooks of the world, which were like, hey, okay, cool. You can keep the operating system. We'll take the internet. And Microsoft missed the internet. The internet was the place. And then even when the internet was the place, then it was like the companies that made it on mobile were the ones that were like, oh, cool. Yeah, you can have that desktop app. We're going to make, you know, Uber and we're going to, we're going to create these new mobile companies, you know, Instagram, WhatsApps, and they outpaced the growth of Facebook. And so now the question, now the thing is, well, AI is here and crypto is here. And these are the new lands. And then the big projects that are getting built here, they're just competing for something in a different game altogether. And I think that's really, that's really what ends up happening more so than somebody overtakes, you know, a company like Google. It's that Google becomes less relevant. You don't need search. Why do you not need search? Well, because the AI just does it. Why would I go, why would I go search for links? That doesn't even make sense anymore. I don't need that. I just, you know, I need the answer or even better than the answer. Oh, I just need this little AI agent. That's just going to like, look at what I'm doing and then like do, do jobs for me, right? Like I don't even have to go search for an answer. It knows the answer and then it does the task, right? That's where this is going. And so whoever does that is going to actually be the one that Is the next Google without even creating a new search engine.

Right. And that's 9 out of 10 times. It seems that's how like big innovative things come about where it's like, you know, all these people are trying to make the world's fastest car and they're trying to make a V6, turn it into a V8, and then we're going to turn into a V10. We're going to put more cylinders in, more horsepower. And then you're like, oh, this electric car just like went way faster and it has zero cylinders. Uh, you know what I mean? That's exactly how it works.

Did I tell you about the, um, my boss who his boss was Larry Page and what he told me? So he didn't tell me many stories, but he told me one, which was I came in once and I was like, yeah. Um, I was like presenting my goal. I was like, yeah, our goal is to do, you know, 9.1 this year. Uh, what I remember what the metric was like 9.1 million users or something like that. And he's like, you know what Larry Page used to say when I would, uh, present the goals, like I'm going to do 9 of something. He's like, he would just say, that's a wuss goal. If you could do 9, you could do 10. He's like, never set a goal at 9. It's like, and then I was like, what? And he's like, I just said what I said. If you could do 9, you can do 10. Saying 9 is just a wussy way to go about things. And I was like, he told you that? He's like, yeah, he would tell everybody that. And so I stole that and I made the change. And then now in my companies, I do the same thing. If anybody ever comes to me like, yeah, we're going to do 4.5, No, you're going to do 5. We're going to do 9.2. No, no, no, you're going to do 10. Like, if you're going to get 9.2, you can get to 10. Trust me.

It's like when 5'10" guys lie and they say they're 5'11". It's like, dog, just say 6'1". Be the real thing. Yeah. Act as if, my friend. Act as if. All right. That's the pod.