Million Dollar Businesses with 0 Employees

This is awesome. Ben texted me or like Slacked me while we were doing this and he goes, Steph's been spitting fire for the last 50 minutes. So this is badass. About to see my first million. Got to the safe and it's filling up. Got to the bank, it's not big enough.

About to see my first million.

Million. Million. What's going on? What's up?

I'm good. How are you?

I'm good. All right. You're back. Sean is on a family vacation and you are the sub. And I think it's a good sub. So you sent me this document that we're gonna go through a ton of stuff. There's so much stuff on here. How, uh, is this like a list that you've been keeping for months or is this just, you made this just for this?

This is part of a list I've been keeping for months. I, uh, I keep this list in my Evernote that just every time I see a new idea, whether it's from like a newsletter or something you guys talk about on My First Million that I wanna respond to. I just have a running list. So this is probably like a quarter of that bigger list.

What? This is 15 pages. How many words? Just what we have here is like 10,000 words.

We should share this. I mean, at least parts of it, because we're not going to get through all of this.

This is amazing. If I was you, I wouldn't share this. I would charge people for it. This is good.

I mean, there's definitely things that I'm excluding from here. You know, you don't share the ones that you actually want to build.

You, uh, so you told me one time that you want to become a billionaire.

I think I want to. We'll see if that actually happens.

Well, I said who cares if it happens or not, but you said that's what you wanted. Do you, um, what are you gonna do to become that?

I mean, I feel like if I ever become a billionaire, we're gonna talk hopefully about Tyler Perry later. It has to come from building something on my own. I need to have equity in something. Like, you don't become a billionaire from working for a company and buying ETFs.

Well, there's a few examples, but the likelihood of becoming a billionaire is slim to none. The likelihood become— of becoming a billionaire by being an early employee somewhere is much slimmer of that subset, but it's possible.

It's definitely possible. Um, should we talk about these companies of one, which I feel like are kind of anti— not anti-billionaire, but a different approach to building?

Yes, and I actually don't think they're anti-billionaire. I think you can become a billionaire this way, but Just so people know, so this is Steph Smith. Steph, you work at The Hustle. You basically helped me start Trends and you ran it for a while and you still kind of run it, but you also do like a bunch of other different projects and you have this Gumroad book called Doing Content Right. Is that right?

Yep.

And it made like 150 Gs in the first year or something like that, right?

Yep, exactly.

And you are the type, so we, We aren't like really partners anymore, but I felt like when we, when you ran Trends, I viewed it a little bit like a partnership. So I've worked with you pretty closely for a while now. Now that, now we're just friends, but, uh, is that all, is that all accurate? What am I missing?

I think so. Yeah. I, uh, I build stuff on the side for fun. Taught myself to code a couple years ago, and now I also have a podcast. So if people like what they hear here, um, it's called The Shit You Don't Learn in School. That's my little plug.

And you are very, you and I are similar in that there's like, it's kind of like Sean, like there's like this, there's like overlap of things that are very, very similar between us, but there's things that are very different in that what you're different about is that you sweat the details, uh, like crazy. And you're pretty technical in the sense of like, I really think it's just, you're just smarter than me. Like you can just figure things out. Like you can just, you can just figure certain things out. So your research is actually typically more like in-depth and technical than my research. And I like that.

Thanks. I mean, I don't know if I actually sweat the details. If anyone knows me closely, like if you were to ask Cal, he'd be like, no, she's like a mess. So I appreciate that I come off that way.

So let's talk about companies of one. So we're, you're, you have a list of like 10 or 7 companies that are run by one person that are shockingly big. Let's go through some of 'em and, uh, talk about 'em.

Yeah, so I think you called out two before, so I'm going to just call out those two quickly. You called out Built With before, which is the site that basically can tell what a site is built with. Is it built with WordPress or Squarespace or what plugins is the site using? And that one at the time when you found it was I think doing around 14 million. And then you've also covered Nomad List and Remote OK by Peter Lovells. And those two I think together are doing around a million a year. And those two I think are both completely solo founders. I know Peter certainly is, um, but there are a couple others. So have you heard of Uggmonk?

Well, hold on. So BuiltWith— so people know, BuiltWith is like maybe one of the most impressive ones here, but not the— but one of— BuiltWith is like, it's like a— I think they have a plugin as well, but it's a website. You go to builtwith.com, you enter in thehustle.co. Let's say you want to— you, you see something on our website that you like and you want to copy, and you're like, how'd they build that? What plugins did they use? What— whatever. You use BuiltWith And they make money because they like, what do they do? I think they like sell people's data or something.

I'm not sure actually. Let me look this up because I know they get a crazy amount of traffic. Look, they've got plans on their site. So they've got a basic plan. I don't know what you get with it, but it's $295.

Oh, I know what you get. You get basically, I believe you sign up and it tells you people's, so it crawls all these websites and it tells you what type of features they have on their website and what type of plugins. And I think you pay money and it'll say, we have the emails or contact information of all types of people who use blank plugin and you sell a plugin that is complimentary to that, therefore pay money and you can now target them and advertise against them or, or things like that.

Yeah, they charge. So their basic plan is $3,000 a year. Their pro is $5,000. Their team is $10,000. There's a cool little trick they have on their pricing page. If you go to it and you hover over, they have like technologies, keywords, and they have these little GIFs that they're actually like showing what you would get with the product. I've never actually seen that before, so that's a cute little hack.

And it's built by basically one guy in Australia. Um, all right, so what are some of the other companies?

Okay, so I was gonna call it Uggmonk. So this one's not as big. I actually don't know exactly, um, how much they're making, but it's a really simple e-commerce store. They started just selling really nice t-shirts, which sounds like, okay, like there's enough t-shirt stores out there. Um, but this guy, Jeff Sheldon, he focused on just really high quality shirts. And then now he's moved into almost like productivity stuff. If you, are you in the doc?

I'm looking at Uggmonk. So when I go to Uggmonk, I see like a pen holder and I see, um, like a, a to-do list —like, it's like cute, well-designed, like, pen holders, which doesn't sound neat, but honestly, it looks pretty sick.

Yeah, it looks surprisingly sick. If you go to— let me— if you click in the doc where it says, "Look at this," if you click that, that is his setup. And he's like one of those builders who I think has built a little Twitter following as well. And he just has this beautiful desk setup, which is like the perfect ad. Oh, I've seen this.

It looks awesome.

I never thought I'd want to go and buy like a $100 to-do list, but I, I think I'm gonna buy one.

Yeah, I, it's just like cute, easy to use, like mid-century modern stuff. Yeah, I'm on board. How much revenue does he do?

I'm not sure, but I'm pretty sure he does several million a year. He gets over 200,000 page views a month. Um, and I, he's been going at this for several years, so I know he makes enough to have left his full-time job several years ago and he's grown a lot since then.

So I'd probably say a couple mil. Wow, that's crazy. All right, that's a good find. It's just one guy? He's the only employee?

I think so. I mean, he probably has some staff now that he's been growing, but I'm pretty sure he doesn't have a big team. All right, what's next? All right, Kard is actually one guy. He might have contractors, but Kard, C-A-R-R-D. I've built sites with Kard. People probably recognize Kard, or they've almost certainly been on a site built by Kard. And it's built by this guy AJ, and it's doing $1 million a year AR. I think he actually just raised money. Now, so I think he's kind of going for— Did he really just raise money?

I would love to invest in this.

Yeah, he raised money earlier this year. He was like big in the Indie Hacker community, and then I think he posted on Indie Hackers this year like, look, I'm, I'm going to raise money. I'm going to, you know, really go for it. But he— it's kind of crazy. 2.5 million sites have been built on Card. And yeah, I think he hit like a million ARR.

So it's a free platform for building simply— for building simple, fully responsive one-page websites that can do anything. Um, yes, I actually think so. There, there was this company called, um, you remember About.me? No, what is that? About.me. So go to about.me. That's the URL. Um, you don't remember that? You're— I'm just a little bit older than you, which, which is like, then that few years probably makes a difference because About.me, when I was just getting started, was considered like the preeminent builder in this space and they made it, it was a one page website where you can explain stuff about you. And it was started by this guy named Tony Conrad, I believe his name is. And he's this cool looking dude who, uh, is also an investor now. And he sold it after only 2 years to AOL for like $40 million, and it was bootstrapped. You see About.me? You see how it's like basically the same thing?

Yeah, it reminds me of— you've heard of Unsplash, right? I love Unsplash. So— or sorry, I'm not thinking of Unsplash, I'm talking about Unfold. Unfold is this app that basically For Instagrammers, it adds different, like it allows you to kind of piece together pictures for your Instagram story. But they also started these like one-pagers where basically, because all these Instagrammers, they're like, oh, I need my link in bio. Link in bio is also a site like that. But Unfold was sold to Squarespace, I think like last year or something. I don't know for how much though.

Man, I think that these one-page website builders are actually really cool. So there's this other business I almost invested in. I think it's called the mediakits.com or.co. I believe it's just called Media Kit. And all they did was built a really slick website builder where you could create your media kit and send it to people. So, and, uh, whether you're The Hustle or you're just an Instagram person, you just had this like, uh, thehustle.co/media-kit or like, you know, um, stephsmith.com/media-kit. And it was that your media kit was on there. And that sounds like not that important. But it's kind of like DocSend. So DocSend, if you don't know what DocSend is, DocSend is basically all it is is PowerPoint in the cloud, but email gated. So you have to enter your email and then you get all types of information. So you use it when you are creating a pitch deck and you want to send it to investors so you know who has it and, uh, and who views it and how long they've used it. And it's basically that. Um, so anyway, Card. Is pretty badass. That actually might be one of the highest potential businesses you have here, I think.

Yeah, and I mean, he actually runs Card as a subscription business, so that's $1 million ARR, and I think it's probably way past that today. I think you're going to like the next one though. Go to this nextepisode.net. I think it's actually next-episode.net. It's such an old site. I think the guy's been running it for 15 years. And if you just open it up, you'll get a sense of how the UI hasn't caught up to where we are today. But it's amazing because this guy's been running it for 15 years, guess how much traffic this thing gets?

I'm looking at it on SimilarWeb. This is crazy. So what is this called? So next-episode.net.

What is this? Yeah. It's a site where basically, like, there's no way I would think that a site like this would still exist, but people use it. Um, that basically helps you track your TV shows and it's a little bit of a community. So I, I think I've never used it, but you know, people watch The Bachelor, they hang out on this site and they find other people who watch The Bachelor and they talk about it. Um, but it's kind of crazy how much traffic this site gets.

This is awesome. And so here's why I know this is a big business. So if you go to SimilarWeb and you look at the traffic, the estimated monthly traffic is 3.6 million uniques a month. That's decent. That's not like the best, but it's like really good, particularly for one person. But if you go to traffic source, it says that 80% is coming from direct traffic, which basically means that there's a lot of people that are just typing in this URL and going there on a consistent basis. And if you do that, you probably can have a huge business. And it looks like they have got, um, a premium, which is only $2 a month. But, uh, how big is this?

So I don't know exactly how big it is, but he's been running it for 15 years and I know he's definitely, I, I found him on Hacker News, one of those posts that was like, hey, like who's a solopreneur who's doing this thing on their own? And he's like, I've worked on this entirely on my own for the last 15 years. So what? This is crazy.

Good find. I can't, Wait, so who— what's this person's name?

Do you know? Let me send you—

Here he is. I found him. Nico— Nicolet. Yeah. Wow, this is a good find. How much revenue do you think he does on this?

I don't know about today, but I'm assuming like if he's getting that many million page views and he's been working on it for 15 years, I'd say like maybe a million a year.

What do you think? Yeah, I would agree with that. And it's probably mostly all profit.

Yeah, well, I mean, he's literally the only one who works on it. Um, in one of the, the posts on Hacker News, he's like, yeah, I started it for myself because I couldn't find such a tool back in the day. And, um, basically he's like avoided hiring other people, um, because he doesn't want to like scale through hiring.

Um, all right, what else we got?

There's a ton on here. There's some, there's one called Hostify by a guy named Riley who basically, um, has scaled that to like a million a month in a year or two. There's some good stories from back in the day where apparently SurveyMonkey was doing $19 million in revenue with 12 employees. So not a one-person thing, but Plenty of Fish is another example where they were doing apparently $10 million and the guy was by himself. He might have even been part-time. So that's kind of a crazy story from back in the day too.

How did, how do you know this about SurveyMonkey?

So it was posted, it was actually, you posted about BuiltWith a while ago, I think. And then I went through all of the comments of you basically, you were like, can anyone tell me something more efficient than that? And this guy named Trip posted, yeah, SurveyMonkey was doing $19 million with 12 employees. And you asked him if this was documented and basically someone else commented and was like, yeah, Trip's too modest to say this, but he actually invested in SurveyMonkey. 2009, so he probably knows the numbers.

Wow. This is amazing. I've heard this. I've heard rumors about SurveyMonkey doing this. This is crazy. This is so cool. So did I tell you about how I told you about Craigslist, right? So The Hustle, our very first office, it was this apartment. It basically, it looked like a townhome, like a, like a typical San Francisco townhome, but it was zoned as business and on the bottom was this, uh, was a piano teacher. In the middle, it was like a 3-story townhome, but they like divvied it up into apartments. So the bottom one was a piano teacher, the middle one was this company called nugs.net. And nugs.net sells— it's like a marketplace where you can trade, uh, like Phish and Grateful Dead like CDs that you recorded at their concerts. And above that was Craigslist. And Craigslist moved out and we moved in, and this was in 2016. I think. And which means Craigslist at the time, the landlord told me, he goes, they were making around $300 million in revenue and they worked out of this little office. And this office was so small. It was basically a 3 or 2 bedroom apartment. And he was like, there's basically like 14 people here. And that was the whole company. And they were so cheap. Craig was so cheap. That the rent, the rent I was paying was like $500 and I split it with my friend Sieva. But so the rent for the whole place was probably only $2,000. So they're paying $2,000 or $3,000 in rent for this place when they were that big. And they were so cheap that in the lease, apparently it said like toilet paper is provided by landlord. And every once in a while, uh, I think his name was Ishmael. He would forget to, uh, or Emmanuel, I mean, I forget. It was like this old Jewish guy. He would forget to put the toilet paper and replenish it, and they wouldn't pay the rent. They go, until we get the toilet paper, you're not getting the rent. And, uh, they— additionally, Craig worked out his— I, I used, uh, Craig's room because it had a kitchen table in one of the bedrooms that he used as his desk. It was like this ugly kitchen table that was like his desk, but it was really heavy and they couldn't move it and they just left it there. And that was my desk for a long time, was this like weird kitchen table. And that was out of the Craigslist office. And that's how scrappy they were. Dude, I love that.

So I mentioned Peter Lovells before. He's a friend of mine from Bali. He once tweeted about this, so I don't feel bad sharing it, but he used to walk around with this, like, you know those bags that you get at a grocery store, the like plastic bags that are like a dollar? Yeah. So you'd think that some guy making like a million bucks a year, all profit, is gonna like upgrade his lifestyle, he would carry his laptop around in one of those bags and like, that's it. And you'd see him walking around in flip-flops and a t-shirt and you'd be like, dude, like respect. 'Cause like you make a lot of money and everyone knows that 'cause you have that open page. But he's like walking around with like a grocery store bag as his laptop holder.

That's stupid. That's very stupid. It would ruin your laptop. Um, all right. What are some other smaller ones?

All right. So I wanna call it a couple. These are actually, uh, Also some people I know from Bali. So it's kind of cool when you live in a place like Canggu because you're just running into people just like this. So one of them is this thing called Banner Bear. So if you click on the link where it says Banner Bear, that's their open page. So a lot of these people also create these cool open pages like the ones from Nomad List. But I wanted to show you this one because if you scroll down, if you're on the page, do you see the moto— the motor— I can't even say it, the Moto Meter.

Yeah, what is this? So I'm looking at basically a pic— pictures of motorcycles. Yeah. Um, of like nice Triumph motorcycles.

So basically like he's got his revenue and you can see his MRR and it's pretty impressive. He's at around an ARR of $300,000. I think he only started this, you can see in sometime in 2020. Um, but he kind of rethought the open page and he was like, you know what? I just, I don't wanna just show my revenue. I wanna show people like what I wanna spend this on. So he loves. Motorcycles and he has like these different goals. So like if he hits a certain MRR, he like unlocks a new motorcycle. And so I thought that was just like a kind of cool, cool little thing. And you can see just like Peter, he shows all of his data. Like you have the number of trials per month, his churn, obviously the Moto Meter, his GitHub commit activity. So I think that's pretty cool. 'Cause like, I think years ago there was some people showing their like open revenue, but now people are kind of like, rethinking what they can share.

What the hell is Banner Bear? This is so cool looking. What does it do?

So basically, I think it's basically like an API for generating images. So do you know how like, we could have used this at Trends, honestly. Do you remember we would run events and we'd have to like go on Fiverr and like, you know, it would kind of, it wasn't very expensive, but it takes some time and you're like, oh man, like we should just have like an image template for all of our events and it has like a certain background, a certain theme. And so he's made it possible to basically generate images based on certain inputs. So you don't have to go and hire a designer to do that. You can auto-generate images. And so some people use this for social media, right? So you have a certain theme that aligns with your brand and you're just adjusting all of your blog posts to use Banner Bear instead of going and hiring a designer to create an image for each one.

This guy's site is beautiful. He reminds me of, how do you say that Peter Lovells guy? Is that Peter? Yep. He reminds me of that. This guy looks like an artist.

Yeah, I mean, I think what's cool about all of these folks is like they do the whole stack. Like I guess you have to as a company of one, but they do like the marketing, they do the design, they do the development. And what's cool is that like, because they're not necessarily experts, quote unquote, in these spaces, like they're just kind of hacking it together, I find they're actually a lot more creative, right? So they're like, they're not like constrained by the marketing degree that they had. you know, before. And so Peter is like another example where he's, he pretty consistently does pretty cool things on marketing or on Twitter, for example, recently he like, instead of paying $10,000 for ads, he's like, I'm just giving $10,000 away to like someone who retweets this. And it got like 11,000 retweets, which obviously is like much more than he would've spent on ads.

This and this website Banner Bear, it was launched in, uh, 10 of 2019. So let's round up to be 2020. So let's say it started in January of 2020. That means it's what, 2 years old? Yep. It's growing pretty well. Does it say his growth rate? I mean, this could be pretty, this could be a really good business. Yeah. And, and, and it's just him.

I think he like might've hired like a part-time customer service person, but yeah, it's going really well.

Wow. This is amazing. How big do you think this could get?

I think pretty big because it's actually like, you know, it's one of those niche problems that you're like, What, like a, you're going to create a product that auto-generates images? Like, who needs that? But then you actually think like, wow, every company that has a blog has to generate all these images en masse. Every company that runs something on social media. Like, I think the reason it's working is it's actually, even though it seems like a niche problem, it's a problem that most companies have. Wow. All right.

You want to pick a couple more?

We can just call out one more, which is, have you heard of Headlime?

No, what's that? How do you find all this stuff, by the way?

Well, like I said, I combed through some of the threads that you posted before, but Headlime, Banner Bear, Nomad List, like these are all people who were nomadic. And I think it's like the indie hacker community and the nomad community overlap because they're both kind of like rebellious in a way. They're like, I don't need to live in one place or like I don't need to raise venture capital. And so I think there's an overlap there. And so, yeah. Most of these guys are people that I used to like co-work with in Bali. Wow.

Okay, so what's Headlime?

So Headlime is a super, super simple app, but Danny, the guy who built it, built it in like a couple months and within a year he sold it for 7 figures. So all it was is it was using AI to generate kind of like landing page headlines or copy. And so if you look at the landing page, it It kind of looks like a much more complex product, but it's actually pretty simple. And if you've heard of copy.ai, I think there's like similar elements to it.

Oh, hey, look, on the website of Headlime, they use my name. They're writing in English.

Wait, really? I was gonna say, I just noticed that. You must have seen this before. Maybe you used to use it.

I've never seen this. This guy's using my name. I've never, that's so funny. Is he trying to tell me to use this?

I don't know because I also don't know, like I said, he sold this. So I don't know if he put that there, if the new founders put it there.

Um, you're— wait, you're seeing my face and name on this website? Yeah, yeah, totally. God, that's so funny. Why is my face on here? Whatever, that's cool.

Uh, yeah, well, this is just like a super simple one where it's like— I love— it's like perfect example of like just being scrappy, building something. He exited 7 figures within, I think, 8 months, which is pretty crazy. Um, and yeah, I just— I think one theme is just like these people find like a niche problem that isn't or at least seems niche, they solve it. It has to be an existing problem that people want solved. I think the thing that a lot of people do wrong when they're trying to like do their like own little startup is they look for things that like don't really exist. But these are like perfect examples where it's like, oh, of course people need sites to like house their work. Of course people need like nice t-shirts and productivity stuff. Of course people need like landing page copy. So I think that's the like one learning for me.

How did this guy build this?

He built it in the open on Twitter. So he just coded it and he would like keep giving updates. And then I think he launched it on Product Hunt, like pretty classic launch strategy, but I think it kind of blew up after Product Hunt and then he sold it.

But it's just built on top of that GPT-3 thing? Yep. Wow. All right. That's amazing. Wow. I cannot believe that. Good find. Um, you want to try something else?

Yeah, let's talk about just a couple of these. So another thing that I did, which kind of overlaps with what we talked about, is just like sites that have a surprising amount of traffic. So sites that you're like, wait, really? Like, there's no way. And then you look it up and you're like, wow, I guess like, you know, 20 million people a month actually look this up. So one of them I want to show you is called Glitchin Deals. Have you heard of glitching? No, what's that mean? Okay, so you know how Like, of course, e-commerce is popping off. A lot of companies have e-commerce sites. Not all of them have fully functioning e-commerce sites. So sometimes they glitch, right? So sometimes an airline will, you know, show a flight for like $20 that's really meant to be $200. Sometimes, you know, there'll be something that's $1 and it's like really supposed to be $100. It's just like a decimal place error. And this happens all the time, right? And apparently, according to the law, like if you, advertise it for a certain amount, like you have to sell it for that amount. So there are all these sites that basically look for glitches. And I found this out because I was at my partner's like family home for Christmas last year. And I remember his aunt being like, "Hey, do you want like a podcast mic?" And I was like, "I don't, like, sure. I don't know. Like why do you have?" She's like, "I've got 30. Like I just have to give them away." And I'm like, "What do you mean you have 30?" And I guess she found a glitch in one of these groups. And yeah, like she just got 30 podcast mics that like she, she got for free.

So free, it was free.

In that case, it was free. Most of the time it's just like a crazy wild deal that the company didn't mean to do.

So like I need to buy, I'm trying to up my game and get that garage fridge. You know, I'm talking about that garage fridge. It's like it's like it's store all my meat. And so I, uh, on here they've got a $25 garage fridge. I need that freezer. Yeah, and, uh, that's how you know you make it when you get a garage fridge. And, um, they have one for $50, and it looks kind of complicated to use though.

Yeah, so I have to say I've never actually glitched myself. I think it's one of those like rabbit holes that like the same way people go and like try to like enter sweepstakes. I think it's like a similar phenomenon, but there's a ton of people doing it. So this Glitch and Deal site gets 4 million, uh, page views a month. But it's only been around for a year.

It started in December 2020.

How do they find the deals? I think they must scrape them, or they have at least— I think it's actually a separate glitch site, but they have a Facebook group. And this Facebook group has 342,000 members. What? Guess how many people post a day in this Facebook group? How many? 250+ posts a day. That's crazy. Today when I checked, it had 262 posts, and it was like 11 AM.

I'm not that surprised because when we do giveaways for The Hustle, we'll do like a t-shirt giveaway. And like these websites, it's like a circular— like they all like copy each other. And it's basically like Midwestern-y stay-at-home moms mostly. And they love giveaways. And like one time we've like— we're giving away stickers and I saw one of them post this on like a forum. Uh, like, hey, there's this newsletter called The Hustle. You just got to share your referral link and they'll send you stickers. I just got mine. And there was hundreds of people commenting on it, like talking about different strategies that allows them to get more referrals through The Hustle. So they'll get their t-shirt or their stickers or whatever. People look like this demographic. It's mostly women I've noticed. And it's mostly like, uh, stay-at-home mom types. They love this shit. They love these deals. They love free stuff. They love—

it's like a challenge for them. I remember asking his aunt, like, "Why did you do this? You don't need 30 podcast mics." And she's like, "I just wanted to win," almost. And I think it's so interesting that so many people are doing this, 'cause like you're saying, it's like a crazy amount of people who probably don't need this stuff, but are like, "I'm so stoked that I got a gas grill on clearance." Yeah, we were giving away—

We were giving away, like, stickers that said The Hustle. And it's like these ladies, like they don't care about business or tech. Like they just didn't, they didn't care about our brand, but they just wanted it just because it was available to get and they felt good. Yeah, it was crazy to me. What else we got?

Okay, so let's go to Nugget Comfort. So if you want to click on that, it is, it was actually something shared in the trends group a while ago. I don't even know how to explain what these are. They're basically like cool children's pillows. But they're children's pillows that you can basically make into different shapes and forts. And it was just crazy to think— So Nugget was, I think, started relatively recently. I'd say in the last year or so. I think they had some mailing list for a prior product before that. But they made over $4 million in sales, uh, in a month with zero ad spend. So—

Nugget Comfort is doing over $4 million a month? Yes. What?! If you go to— So here's how I know that they're at least pretty big. You go to their website, so it looks like they're based in North Carolina. You go to their website and you look at, you click careers and you see who they're hiring for. They're hiring a senior accountant. So you know that they're, they're counting, counting the money, counting that bread. They have an, uh, then they need a bunch of different warehouse operators. They need a production associate, which means that that production associate is gonna report to someone. Uh, so you know that there's like a huge, like a pretty meaningfully sized, meaningful sized team here. This company's only a year old. Who started it?

I'm not sure who started it. Let me pull up this Facebook post.

So basically it's called Nugget Comfort. It's like, it looks like pillow cushions that it's like pillows, but you can like build with them. It's almost like a combination of Legos meets pillows. Yeah, exactly.

And I don't actually know exactly who the founder is. This was shared in the Facebook group. Looks like it might be someone called Hannah Fussell. A former elementary school teacher. Um, yeah, so actually Nugget was launched, so it had a previous product that I think was not geared towards young kids. Um, and I guess they had some Kickstarter at the beginning, and then ultimately I think COVID hit, um, and they had to reposition, and somehow they came up with this like children's product, which I think is just so interesting because I feel like there are certain, um, certain industries like pets or children that people have just an endless budget to spend on. And so these pillows, I think they're like $200 or something. It's only $300.

It's not a lot of money. Yeah. They call it a pillow couch. This is amazing. This company, this is one of the wilder things. This is brilliant. I totally understand it. What a cute, cool thing. Uh, this is amazing. All right.

Let's move on to public domain review. We'll do one more. Um, This one just relates to something you guys have talked about before about how certain IP, you know, is not in the public domain and then it moves into the public domain after a period of time. And so this is a site that basically tracks all of that stuff. I think I originally found this because apparently Winnie the Pooh is going into the public domain in January. And so I think I found some article about that and it was on the Public Domain Review. So I think it's publicdomainreview.com.

What's gonna happen? What's gonna happen when that happens? What type of opportunities are going to be there and what businesses do you think are going to pop up?

So I think, so just for like background for people listening, there's tons of obviously different books or like the Bible, for example, that's in the public domain. People can like buy and sell. You guys talked about like cool millennial Bibles. Winnie the Pooh is a book that, you know, was written ages ago and then in 2022 would go into the public domain. So I believe, I think there's like several different different things that, or different, not patents, what's it called when something is not in the public domain? A copyright? Yeah, several different copyrights. And so you need to look into exactly what this covers versus what else exists. But you could, for example, potentially go and take a Winnie the Pooh book, make it modern, and resell that to new customers. I think potentially—

So, for example, on this website publicdomainreview.org, they've got a store where you can buy prints like they put on the wall, and it's like really sick art. So you're saying, like, now they can use Winnie the Pooh in that art, or they can resell old Winnie the Pooh art or something like that.

Yeah, and what I'd be interested to find out is specifically about merch. I don't know exactly if it's just the book, like the book IP, or if it actually has to do with just the IP overall. But the crazy thing about a lot of these big franchises— Pokémon, Hello Kitty, Winnie the Pooh— they've all done over $80 billion of sales in merch alone. So a lot of people think like, okay, if you're talking about Pokémon, they made a lot of money off the show. It's like, no, they actually didn't make that much off the show. They made a ton of money off the merch. And the same thing is true for like Mickey Mouse or Star Wars. That's where all the money is made. And so what I'd be interested to know, and I don't know the answer to this, is whether these things moving into the public domain, does that mean like I can then go sell like a Winnie the Pooh shirt? I'm not sure.

Do, uh, first of all, how long does a copyright last? Is it 76 years, I think?

You are gonna know this better than I do.

I believe it's 76 years, but it's pretty messed up actually when you think about it. So like, let's just say that like a family invented, uh, a person invented Winnie the Pooh. They, they die, they leave it to their family. So you're telling me after, I think it's 76 years, uh, or it's, it's death of the creator plus 76 years.

Yeah, it's, it's from what I see now, it's death of the creator plus at least 50 years, but it can be extended to 70. is it 70?

I remember, 'cause it's like the— it was like— I remember the law. There was a law created that did that. It's kinda messed up, actually, when you think about it, that that is going to expire. Why would that expire? Like, why? I guess it depends.

I mean, you see the same thing with drugs, right, where you don't want someone to be able to capitalize on something forever. And I think it probably has to do with, like, the public benefits from something being in a free market over time.

Yeah, but that's bullshit, because if I bought a piece of property and a piece of land Wouldn't that be weird if on the third generation you could take back that land?

I guess so. I wonder, like, yeah, I wonder how they determine what things have these expiring copyrights versus what things, like, that doesn't exist.

I think that's interesting. I would like to learn more about that. But sorry, go ahead about publicdomainreview.org.

Well, it's just another one of those sites where you're like, wow, that's one, an interesting site where you can kind of browse and see what is moving into the public domain.

It's a beautiful site. It's very fun to read.

Yeah. It also gets, I mean, not a crazy amount of traffic, but 500,000 page views a month. And so I wonder actually, I didn't notice they are selling art or different collections. I was wondering how they were monetizing, but it must be through that.

This is awesome. I love this website. You want to do one more?

Um, sure. Do you see one that you want to do in here? I mean, one of the ones that we can talk about, which is just like a super fun little thing, it's like an internet find, is this foodtimeline.org. There's not much of a business opportunity here, but I just think it's like a fun thing to browse. Basically, someone has gone down the internet rabbit hole and found like the first citations of when a food existed. So it starts with like water and ice, and then, you know, you get like wheat and things like, basically there's like a bunch, there's like hundreds of different data points here. And then of course it moves to like 2013, which you see like test tube burgers. Um, but I just think this is like an awesome thing where like, again, I don't know what the business opportunity is here, but like if you have extra time, you can create really nifty things like this online. And this site, this page alone, there's only like one page here, gets over like 150,000 page views a month, I think. So I don't know, I just thought it was like a cool internet find.

This is awesome. Broccolini was only invented in 1993.

It's kind of crazy to look and see like, wait a minute, like I guess it makes sense because it's fermented, but kimchi was invented in the 7th century. But then you scroll down and you're like, yeah, what? We didn't have, I don't know, like you said, broccolini until 1993 or what's another crazy thing on here?

High fructose corn syrup, 1967. I would have thought that was far sooner. Buffalo wings, only 1964. How intriguing. This is a really, really cool website. I think that the reason why I think this is cool— so this woman, it's Lynn Oliver. She launched it in 1999. The reason why this is cool is because I respect— so listen, Lynn Oliver, she— or Oliver— she was born 1958. She died in 2015. She was a library and food historian and the sole author of the Food Timeline website. So there's this— she has a Wikipedia page. I just love that there's someone who's this weird and quirky enough to dedicate time to do this because I love people like that and people who are crazy enough to put all their energy into something like this.

Exactly. I just think like this is the coolest thing ever. And whoever actually created this, like, thank you for doing that. I've actually one related business opportunity.

Oh, listen to this. According to the Wikipedia, the site's domain supposedly expires in 2025. But as of September 2020, the WHOIS database shows that it's to lapse on April 2022 because she died. So she died and now it's set to go out on April 2022. So there you go.

Speaking of copyrights, there you go. One, I guess, food-related opportunity. Have you ever looked up like healthiest fast food or like healthiest cheese or like—

Totally. Do you remember that book? You're not American, so I don't know if they have this in Canada, but it was called Eat This, Not That. Yes. You remember the series? It's such a good book series. And I would like use it to figure out like what's a good, like if I wanna eat a burger, what's the healthiest burger at a fast food place?

So you're not the only one. And I discovered this 'cause I think one day I was looking up something ridiculous like healthiest cheese. And so a ton of people are searching this every single month. So I think some of these numbers are old, but something like healthiest cereal, which we all know like cereal's not good for you. 50,000 searches per month, healthiest bread, 30,000 searches a month, healthiest cheese 20,000. And then there's also a ton of search volume for things like, yeah, like healthiest meal at Taco Bell or something like that, which I just love because it's like, it just shows again this problem where it's like people want to eat healthy, but they're realistically in some cases like unable to. But it also reminds me of something that Peter levels it with his like Nomad List site, which is basically, I call it your listicle is my opportunity. So whenever I go—

You made up that phrase?

Yes, I've been thinking about it for ages, but I like, basically whenever I search something and all of the results on that page are listicles, right? So you look up like healthiest cheese and you get to a site and it's just like 5, it's like a long article with like 5 types of cheese and you're like, oh my God, like this should be easier, right? And there's so many sites that have basically found things with a lot of search volume and made it easier. Like that's what Nomad List does. He's like, you know what, there's all these like variables and you can play with them yourself. I'm gonna collect this data. So that instead of getting a bunch of listicles when you look up like hot place in June to go traveling, he's like giving you that information so you can access it yourself, right? He's basically like refining the information. And you've seen tons of other people do this. I think like that was basically like Rich Barton's strategy, right? When he built things like Expedia.

Kinda. Yeah, kinda. But listen, I will help someone do this, or if they want to partner with me, I'll do this. So here's what I'm going to do. I bet you I can make a fair bit of money, like $10,000 total, but like have a business that makes single-digit thousands of dollars. You could do this in 30 days. Here's what I would do. Here's what I would do. So Steph, have you— so we're doing this contest called, uh, I forget what it's called actually, but people are taking our clips and they're turning them into TikTok videos and they're posting them on TikTok and they're getting tons of views. So the hashtag #MFMclips, in a matter of like, I think we only launched it 7 days ago, but I forget, it's less than 10 days, uh, in that short amount of time, that hashtag has around 10 million views, meaning kids have made videos that have 10 million views, um, on TikTok. It's crazy. There's a couple videos, I think there's one video, um, that has like 1.3 million views and then there's a whole bunch of other videos that have about or over a million. And for sure hundreds of thousands. And these guys are killing it. And so the way that they did it, they created like a handle called like MFM Clips or like The Hustle's Pod or Hustler's Diet. Like, they just— they made these things from scratch, and in literally 7 days, a couple of them have a million views. What I would do is create a TikTok page that says, craving a chicken sandwich? Don't eat the Popeye ones, eat— because it has this grams of fat, they use this type of chemicals. Instead, eat the Chick-fil-A one because it has this, or like craving a cereal, don't eat this, eat this. Why? And then you'd be like, you want more? Go to this website. And you create like a Wirecutter style website that does this. And you for sure, for sure can make a, a really good revenue, like thousands of dollars we're talking off of affiliate websites, uh, an affiliate website, and then eventually do brand advertising deals. Without a doubt. Totally. I would bet it, and that would get popular if you had the right face. You need like a hip TikToker, young looking person to do this. It would absolutely crush. Totally.

I mean, I feel like just the TikTok side of things, like that's gonna trend no matter what. And then there's so much search volume for this stuff that like you'd build up that sustainable business over time. And there's so many queries for this. So if people are actually gonna go build this, I want someone to do that, go to Ahrefs, go to the Keywords Explorer, enter healthiest food, and then if you go to matching terms, it'll basically give you this list of terms that are similar. So you can see like healthiest food, which we already talked about, but also like healthiest taco, healthiest breads, healthiest breakfast, healthiest restaurant, healthiest Starbucks, healthiest Mexican food, and you just like go down the line and there's like, how many? There's like hundreds of terms already just like seeded there for you. And what's crazy is I was actually pretty surprised to see that the keyword difficulty for a lot of these was not very high. Like I would've thought if someone told me there's search volume for this stuff, I would've thought like, oh, someone's already tackled this.

No, no, no, no, no. I just Googled healthiest cereal and like PureWow ranks number one. I could outrank PureWow. Yeah, exactly.

It's like Thrillist or like Healthline and you're like, someone should go and create like a site just for this and it'll rank surprisingly quickly if you can target the right keywords. This is just fantastic.

The Eat This is, so eatthis.com, com kind of does that. It's owned by Galvanized Media. So whatever I do is I go to these websites, I scroll all the way down to see who owns the copyright. Galvanized Media is a website that owns like a ton of different stuff. They own Eat This, Not That. They own Travelicious. They own CelebWell and a bunch of other stuff. I would, I bet you I could figure out how much money these guys make, but I would imagine like in the $20 or $30 million range, if I had to guess based off the website. Um, Probably a really good business. Wow.

And I mean, you can start with healthiest stuff and then obviously like expand past that, but that's actually like a surprisingly, well, I mean, I guess not surprisingly, I think that's a big niche, not so niche niche. Wow.

Okay. Let's wrap up with two more things. So you had something in here about chess and this guy Magnus who you, you're like this chess nerd. You're a chess prodigy. You're a chess prodigy. You go to, uh, chess.com and you play there. You're, you're no— you're known for being a chess person. You had some amazing stats about this guy. Can you tell me about this?

Well, so if people don't follow chess, Magnus is the number one chess player in the world. But the cool thing about Magnus, I read this the other day, is that unlike many athletes, if you want to call chess a sport, um, he's actually managed to already, um, kind of build a little business empire. So what a lot of celebrities or athletes do is they focus on like getting paid at the time, but then they really, really struggle to build up any sort of equity in like a product or a brand that they're building, which as most people know, the way that you, you know, actually accrue wealth is through equity. We'll talk about that with Tyler Perry. He's managed to create something—

So this guy Magnus, how old is he?

He's not very old.

Let me look at my YouTube. He's like 31, it looks like.

He was like a GM by the time he was like 14 or something. Wow. And he's like kind of good looking or—

like he's cool looking. He like— it looks like he's kind of charismatic. He's just like, like there's a story here. It's not like he's just good at chess. He's like, seems like a, like a, like a, like an interesting person in itself.

Yeah, he's 31, so he's, uh, he's not old at all. And yeah, there's like videos of him when he's like 12 and they're like filming him at I think like world championships and stuff. So he was really talented really early, um, and now he's only 31. He's built up a little empire. So not only does he like compete in chess to and, um, I think he streams on Twitch and all that stuff sometimes. But he also built his own little company. It's called Magnus Chess. So if you go to— let's see what the URL is— magnuschesscarlsen.com. Okay. Or sorry, it's playmagnus.com. They get redirected. Um, he has this Plus membership. I don't know exactly what you get from it, but it's $14 a month. And here are some of the stats. Um, Basically, his company Play Magnus already is a publicly traded company, has 250 employees, 4 million registered users, and a market cap, because it's public, of $115 million already.

How much revenue does this make?

So, I don't know how much it makes currently, but I mean, let's look it up.

It's a publicly traded company. And it's publicly traded in France, I think. Or is it Nor— I actually don't know where it's publicly traded.

So it's definitely in Europe. Yeah, it's in France. FRA, I think. It's in euros. Uh.

Wow. This is amazing. Who would have thought? Does he own this?

He owns a stake in it. So he owns, um, not a ton, but he still owns, I think, uh, oh, actually, never mind. He owns 85% of the business.

Holy crap. That's amazing. Yeah. So this guy's— this is amazing. And so do you know what's the sales?

So it looks like revenue, um, last quarter was $5 million. So it's doing around $20 million. Actually, it's grown a lot recently. So it was only started, looks like in 2019. 2020 had total revenue of $20— or sorry, $8 million. But it's, you know, last quarter was $5 million. So it's trending towards $20 million.

Wow. And that's recurring revenue. So that's a subscription. Yep. This is amazing. And he owns 85% of this, so he basically has a, has a $120 or something like that million dollar net worth just off of this.

Yeah, so it looks like— I'm getting a little confused. There's something called Magnus Chess and then there's something called Play Magnus. So actually I think he owns only 9% of Play Magnus, but then he owns something else, uh, which I think is like a streaming platform called Magnus Chess. But either way, he owns substantial amount of, of one of them, Magnus Chess, and he's worth several million.

Wow. So we, and we also actually covered chess.com, chess.com. Uh, I think it might be mostly bootstrapped and it gets something like, have you seen what's the monthly uniques of chess.com? Have you looked at that? It's super high. Yes, I have. Like, uh, like 150 million, I think. Chess.com currently has, yeah, 150 million monthly uniques. And I've heard rumors that it's a multi-billion dollar company.

I mean, people pay a lot for it cuz they've actually built in some pretty cool features. So Lichess is a competitor. Lichess, some people like because it's more like indie, but chess.com has like, if you go on there, you can play and then after your game, it'll basically say like, actually, here are all your blunders, your mistakes, and this is actually like exactly where you went wrong. And it's interesting because those are the things people used to pay coaches for. Like when I was little playing chess, a coach would come over once a week and he'd like sit down and I'd go to tournaments and at tournaments you'd write down your moves and then we'd like study them after. And he'd be like, see that move? Do you see how like 8 moves later that really hurt you? But Chess.com has that basically like built into the software where they're like, see, like that's where you went wrong. This is crazy.

This is awesome. Ben texted me or like Slacked me while we were doing this and he goes, Steph's been, uh, spitting fire for the last 50 minutes. So this is badass. You definitely have to come on again. Um, and there's like way more notes here. If I was you selfishly, I wanna say don't share this and we'll do another one in the next, in next week or the week after. Uh, Ben, what do you think? What do you think about this? What do you rate this? I just got, I was getting flack the other day for giving you guys too many A's. Uh, so, uh, I guess that even, but this one really was like an A+. I, uh, Steph, I, I know you've got your course and it's doing well, but you should do another course on like how you do research. People, I, I do kind of want to screenshot this doc. Like Ben, that's what people say to us. They tell me and Sean that. You're saying she's even better? She's better. She's better than you. She's better than you at this.

It depends. I think so. You and Sean are like A+ entertainers. I got to work on that. And I know it's something I got to work on. You guys are so good at like making a conversation flow, all your like funny bits. And so I think like, yeah, I mean, I could share how I do my research on—

Give me some credit, Ben. We do this 2 or 3 times a week. Steph's doing this once every month. It's true. You do it twice a week, but it's just— and so it does like it's a little unequal. Because this doc that Steph has is just like chock-full of really— It's amazing.

Yeah, this is pretty baller. I'm down to come on any time. I was a little nervous to come back on. Every time I come on, like, you know, the first time it was sometime in 2020. You guys had maybe like 5,000 listens an episode. And then like, it's gone up so much since then that every time I'm like, dude, you guys just had like Hasan Minhaj, you've had Gary Vee. And I'm like, I'm just this like trends analyst, or I still feel that way. So yeah, if people like it, I'm happy to come on any time. But If not, we can also just like open source this research. I don't, I don't think I included anything here that I am going to build myself. I was actually previously going to build the like healthiest X thing. And then I just realized like that's been on my to-do list for 2 years. So probably never going to happen.

I'm going to ask Sarah. I'm going to go to the other room right now and tell my wife Sarah. I'm like, hey, do this. She should.

I mean, seriously, this is like the reason I had it on my list is because a lot of the ideas that I've shared in the past, I'm like, yeah, those are cool ideas, but like, can you really do it? And can you do it with not that much money? And is it pretty likely to succeed? Right? Those are like the variables. And this one like checks those boxes.

Dude, that's awesome. Thank you. This is badass. Um, we're gonna wrap up. If Steph, what's your handle on Twitter?

Steph Smith IO or Steph Smith IO. And I'm just gonna plug my podcast again because I'm trying to grow it just like Ben is. Um, it's called The Shit You Don't Learn in School.

All right, sick. Thank you. And that was, uh, you do it with Calvin, your, uh, your boyfriend, your fiancé. Uh, yeah, good dude. Um, all right, thank you. Talk soon. Thanks, guys.