I’m Worth $10,000,000+ (Here’s Every Business Idea I’ve Done)

Go and do the things you already love go find an advantage where your it's a green field that you can play your own game. I always like the phrase Zig when others are zagging and do your strengths Do Your Excellence? What can you be number one in talking to you? What? Could you be number one in and you can't be number one in something. You just have to really figure that out.

What

is it B beautiful bastards? It's your boy Grey Poupon. AKA Rabbi. Can't lose AKA Noah Kagan. Today's episode. I am sharing every single business idea I have ever done by the way. There's been at least 24 of them. And as Steve Jobs said, you can't connect the dots looking forward only Looking Backward. So as I was looking back at all these businesses I realized there was actually a lot of connections and what might have seen it random at the time allowed me to progress through each one and learn so many valuable lessons that I'm really really excited to share my best ones with you today.

So if you've ever wanted to learn about starting businesses how to move quickly you're going to love this episode in this episode. You can enjoy three major things. Number one the 10-year rule number two the coffee Challenge and three why you always have to solve your own problems. Enjoy. Those three things plus a bunch more are nuggets along the way before we jump into the episode. Make sure to subscribe to my YouTube channel. I post a lot of exclusive stuff there to help you start or grow your business and overcome fear. That's youtube.com slash. Okay dork. That's youtube.com slash. Okay dork.

And make sure by the way to also subscribe to appsumo.com. It is the number one site online for software deals. It is literally insane deals. I do not know how the team is able to get them for you, but they do check it out Epsom ODOT Cam and a special pre-show. Shout out to listener. Alex are m87. He said value bombs in every episode this episode. There are some huge ass bombs. If you want a shout out in a future episode make sure to leave a review on iTunes or wherever you listen to your shows. I check every single one of them.

I am worth 10 million dollars. That is absolutely insane. But what's even more insane than that is that it took me over 10 years and over 20 different businesses to get there. If I would have just kept my day job at Intel I'd be worth around $500,000. The first site that I ever did was okay dork.com, which I'm still doing today, which is crazy. And so for me, I've always been fascinated with technology. I actually built a site flat HTML. There wasn't a WordPress at this time and I just thought hey, it'd be fun. Well, I was bored at school.

Cool to start blogging and writing about my journals online and I still sleep with this frog today. So okay door to come in. I thought someone buy it and I'm still waiting for someone to buy this domain but next up this is where I had hair when I was writing this that's what happens when you work on the internet. So the first site that actually really started building more businesses and so forth was ever speed.com. So this is a really cool when I was really into import cars and import models, but I don't have to import the models but point being is I just love Honda CRX is and I love all these really cool cars. So I got a brick of a camera and with it. I just started taking photos and

Seen it online and posting about Hot Import Nights and the so the to cool takeaways for this. Of course again, number one is something I was just interested in. I wasn't trying to make a lot of money and to is that I got access to all these events for free because people were like, oh you're taking all these photos already posting about why don't you just come the next site was when I was in college. It's called College up dot org and big Shadow to archive.org as well for having all of these on their on their site in college. I figured Craigslist is for like cities, but for students may be kind of like similar to Facebook ish. This is in.

Or 2003 there'd be a site for college kids and so I built a bunch of it. We try to lie can see a lot classifies Professor reviews. We did a hotter not thing study buddy. None of them really took off people ask me all the time. When do you know if your business is working? When do you know if it's validated you'll know and I think a lot of times I always used to joke. It's like putting hot stickers on a Honda this Honda doesn't go much faster. You just gotta buy a Porsche if you really want to go fast, one of the things that's really key about college up dot org that I wanted to highlight is that the fact that I was building this the fact that I built ever speed and a few other sites in college.

The only reason I got my job at facebook.com as number 30. I didn't know anyone from the company, but I was busy doing things for college students and making things happen. So is easy to show them. Hey, this is all the stuff that I'm doing in school. So next up really interesting site was called come get used.com. Yes, it's come get used.com and it was a College Book Exchange. And so you got to look at what sucks. If you want to start a business just say hey look at the whole day that you just lived and say what was annoying about today or what did I do? That was really exciting today and for me?

You'd buy these books at schools. You'd sell them back to the book stores. They would take a huge cut and then resell them for the same price. You bought I was like yo, that's a ripoff and so me and some friends just started building a site where you could post your books for whatever price you wanted and then other people can just buy him. And so we posted Flyers around campus here. This is old-school stuff paper is another paper and we ended up merging the company and you know, a lot of these things especially if you're younger just get started and even do the typical stuff sells t-shirts do the Book Exchange do whatever it is. That is just getting going to start learning about business because you learn so much through it.

The next business I started creating. This is in 2005-2006 was called hfg Consulting and it stands for hella fucking good. Come on, give me a break and I was a senior in college. I was an RA in the dorms and I was looking through all these students who wanted to get the Haas the business school and they didn't have any opportunities and then I said, hey, well, there's all these local restaurants and businesses that need help marketing to college campuses. What if I could kind of like pair those two opportunities so that that's what you have to do in business or say, what are the problems maybe now or in six months?

Are the advantages that maybe I can use and make it happen. And so I ended up basically going to these local businesses. I would sell them. So hey, it's $200 will do your marketing or will do a marketing review. And then I had all these basically unpaid students doing all this work. We didn't make a ton but it was a great way of kind of merging opportunities together and getting things going the thing. That's interesting about a lot of this especially with HIV Consulting is when you start noticing that just by getting going it created a bigger opportunity. So Kenny Kenny on our team actually came to me one day and he said hey, you know,

What there was this discount card? That's gone. What if we took that and we just did it right? We're already kind there's a bunch of us. We already know a lot of the stores and so we created a ninja card.com and the economics were great we go to these stores. They give us free discounts. We printed a card for about fifty cents and then we'd sell them for $10. And so the economics were amazing and one of the things especially if you sell physical products that I loved about this time is that I loved putting the cards in the envelope. You just put them in and every single time. I was like I'm getting paid and I don't know man that that was just such a great feeling.

That's something if you get a feel, I hope and I always encourage people to the velocity to $1. And so what that means is that every time you can just get your first dollar that momentum is insane and that feeling is so empowering and you're going to want a lot more of it. So a few other actually interesting highlights from the ninja car.com example was how we sold them and this is what still applies today. We went to the fraternities the Greeks and the sororities we said, hey, you sell the cards for 10 you keep five of it and so they sold it like crazy. We still had a great margin and it really expanded our sales team without any cost.

Number two, we actually this is the first time I really started creating tracking and websites and I think a lot of new entrepreneurs what they do is they're like, oh I need a website any of this stuff. It's like do you need a website? Probably not what you actually need is doing it manually and eventually the website is supposed to help you like creating a course don't create an online course go help people manually until you can't do it anymore then create the course and so we couldn't track all the cards manually more. So we created a CRM or tracking software internally for ourselves.

As well as that we started as you can see we made a website early on because if anyone could just sell cars and copyists because it was quick for us to do you have to start again if I can make it easy someone else can so what else can I do that would differentiate we ended up actually scaling to five different campuses, which is pretty cool made $50,000 profit big shout-out Jr. One of the best friends I met through that but the thing that's really interesting is and Zuckerberg said this and I really love this point was if you don't cannibalize your business someone else will so one of the things that happened with Ninja card was after three years the Berkeley student newspaper copied our card.

Because we copied someone else most business ideas are copies. They made it three and they charge the restaurants $300 to be on the card. They basically destroyed our entire business and I had to give up but the point being again is that you need to think about how could someone cannibalize just like the Blockbuster Netflix is such a great example of that after the ninja card. I was working at Intel. I created people reminder.com it's down but basically it was an early CRM. So I just wanna show you that I was down next up though is that if you have a day job a lot of people email me or ask me. Hey, I got a day job. What can I do? I don't know anyone. I don't have any connections.

I don't have any business ideas. So the best way is just to start connecting with smart people. So I was at Intel in my day job hate in my life and I started basically just hosting things and blogging about things like hey, let's try to connect people. And so the thing I did was called entrepreneur 27 dot-org and I just wanted to meet other smart people. So I thought of people I knew that I worked with as an intern and I emailed them said hey, do you know any smart people in the Bay Area and this is how I met ramit Sethi and a few other really interesting people and so entrepreneur 27 dot org was just like yo, let me host some events. I didn't have a network I did.

The audiences but I found interesting people like bleh cross because noble' cross the founder of Firefox and him and a few others and I said yo, could you want to come out to an event and I'll just invite a bunch of people and we'll have a lot of fun, you know, you could see from this the the site as well like we did a cerveza and chess events. We did a ping-pong one. We did a bunch of different events. And this is a way that I was actually able to connect with so many people in Silicon Valley and really build my network. This is a great way to start putting on events put on a dinner put on a breakfast put on a walk whatever it is and just get going and being a hub whatever and it could also be online.

Line or join a group like okay dork.com group come join our free group. Next up is community necks. So a lot of these are evolved, right? So I started doing these small events and this is right after I got fired by Facebook, which is a whole another story and you can read about on okay dork.com, but I said, hey, I got fired by Facebook. There's no events or conferences for social networks and obviously to everything, you know, everything is social but at this time there wasn't anything and so me and some buddies put this on and I just was like, yo, who can we invite that would be super cool. So invited Max levchin from PayPal the hot or not.

Eyes suicide girls Plenty of Fish Guy Kawasaki and it was such an amazing experience me and my buddy Devin and and we had like Hawaiian food and we had free drinks and free coffee all day for free alcohol open bars. And this is before that was the norm and at the end of the day, which was actually really crazy about we did for conferences over 300 people each conference and I never did it before right I never put on it before and I think that's actually an advantage because I didn't know what I couldn't do. Think about that and I ended up making about 50,000 per each conference. And again, I got a

It really amazing people that I still get a talk to work with benefit from today. And I think again just make the stuff that you want to go to if you're not looking forward to your event or your business or your sales figure out what you need to do to make that happen. And guess what then you'll probably end up getting the results. So while I was there, I actually started creating a free blog called free calls to.com and it's still around today. Don't go checking it out. But I think what's really interesting about free calls to that I want to take away. This is an opportunity site and there's two kind of key takeaways from this is basically you go

Here and I put a bunch of ads on it to things that were interesting is one on. Okay dork Commerce. Someone wrote an article about voice over IP calling and I noticed that I was getting a lot of AdSense revenue on one page which was about that. So I created a dedicated site hired Riders at five dollars an article put ads and it still makes maybe about a hundred to two hundred dollars a day. So kind of notice what's working and maybe if it's working, this is something I think we do really well at appsumo.com. If you find something we can go hard on it. But the other thing with that is that I noticed that I only worked on it when I was bored with my main thing and the real opportunity.

Here I did try to optimize it wasn't that large. So really think about how large is the opportunity and if your main thing is not interesting figure out how to really focus are fix that next up though. Oh, this is a fun one. So the next step one is fat cast fat cast is with my very good friend Andrew Chan. If you don't know him or follow him, I highly recommend you checking out Andrew Chen. This is in 2003. I'm still at Intel and fat cast was basically a pre YouTube site, so it was videos online, but it was backed by BitTorrent. So you use BitTorrent to

Make the videos and

then it was also challenged based which means you pay someone to make a video like getting hit in the balls or whatever that is, but it was really interesting and I think the part that I would take away from this experience was just being around smartass people. So Androgen insanely smart the guys who worked with insanely smart and I think sometimes timing when you start a business like YouTube started about six to nine months after Us timing is important. The other thing is that also iterating so we started videos. I think you have to realize bandwidth was expensive all these things were expensive. But all right. Maybe this is a little

Bitterly. Is there a way we can iterate or keep going with it? So one be around smartass people if you can if you have any opportunity to work with them or work for free with them, which is what it was for me and then also timing and important so if it's not working right now, but you think there's a tidal wave of this opportunity coming and you could be a part of it. Keep tweaking it keep tweaking it. That was a really fun one that we got to be a part of so next up though was kickflip and Gambit. I was working at mint. This is 2007 and I hated my job. I didn't really want to be there in my dream don't know about your dream was always to go and run my own business and especially

That

time I wanted to go work on the beaches of Thailand and that had a lot of appeal to me. And so I saw that my friend Amit Gupta posted a nap on this new Facebook platform was like what the hell is that? And I saw a like, holy shit. This is Facebook's got a large s audience and there's going to be a lot of opportunity there. And so what I first did was look at what will monetize this is one of those opportunity businesses. I'm trying to warn you of but I basically saw that the top app was a soccer app and you put basically your favorite soccer team logo on your profile, but I was like, all right. This is really interesting and so from that.

Soccer app I was like well, let me create all the other sports hockey basketball baseball football and I was like well, like if I put their logo on their profile I could just link to an Amazon affiliate link. I'll start hopefully making that thirty five hundred dollars a day. What's really interesting about that as I showed you people reminder before one of the things about working online is such a small place. So the guy who helped me do people reminder that I showed you the site was down. He helped me build this stuff. I think what's interesting is just know what you always want realize you're going to come across people if you find amazing people in anything you're doing if they're the salesperson for a customer support.

They're marketer developer do whatever it takes to keep involved with them and stay with them. Another of the few things are interesting about kickflip when I started building his Facebook games was that I kept my cost of living low, so I didn't really have to make too much and that's something to really be conservative is that if you want to be an entrepreneur if you want to start your own business, we want to be a millionaire keep your cost of living though. I still do I still have my Miata which I love white Thunder and because of that though, I don't need to make a lot and I have to worry if I'm making a lot I ended up becoming the number one Facebook game developer at that time building on these apps. They went super viral and we raised money from Navarro.

Pecan, which was an interesting story and so you can read on ok.com or below why I actually quit mint and went full time on this and I ended up moving to Argentina. And so I did live my dream and ended up doing it. But that's a whole nother story for whole another time, you know during this process. I hated making these games and we ended up building a bunch of different games like excitebike organ Trail all these things and it evolved tattoos, but I never enjoyed it. I didn't really play the games. I don't like all these whiners on Facebook. I didn't want to really be on Facebook. I was still mad at suck for getting fired. And so I kind of had a quarter life crisis and that

Time the team I was working on was like Hey, you kind of have to get back to work and I didn't really want to do it. And so at that time we just sort of like, all right, I'll come back to work with you guys. And so we built a site called better kake.com and it was online sports betting. I don't think I still have it. There's any examples of the site of let me see if I can find it. All right, here's one and so on this site you could see that it basically is you can do sports betting and look I didn't know what else to do the time. I wanted to give up. I didn't want to do the games. My partner's recording of always mad at me and so we built but arcade and it was sports betting which I don't follow Sports the time.

I didn't do any bedding. And so honestly, it was kind of just a drag to do I didn't really want to do it but what's really interesting about better Cade is that we had people buy and sell for chips. And from that though, which is really interesting. We notice that the payment providers were taking large cuts of the amount of chips. We were selling and so Andrew Hunter on our team one weekend was like, hey, let me just see if I can build up kind of a quick version of this for myself and I really want to show you the site because this site did over 30 million dollars our first year in total revenue is that not mind blowing as your

My mind was blown but the point here that's actually really interesting and really powerful about this as a lot of people like I need websites any websites. Do you need a website? We did 30 million dollars in total revenue 10% profit if you can do the math, that's a lot. And so the point is this was our website. And so think about if your business isn't working or there's a part that's not working. Is there any part that's working. Is there any place that you can go and we go there's something interesting there. Let me go further with that part as well. Maybe you don't need the website and so again, but I ended up doing this stuff. We actually grew really well. We got sued by your

Largest competitor Facebook band us and so that's a whole nother story for whole nother time. But what it did lead me to do is quit that company which I ended up starting right? I started kickflip it meant I left to go to Argentina. We did better Kate and then we did this Gambit thing and for me, it was a really interesting experience Rose like my next business. I want to work with Partners. I like I want to work on a problem. I like and I want to work on a problem that matters and so I learned that from working on these different things where all those three things weren't working. The partners weren't working. The business wasn't working and I hated the customers as well. And so the next thing that I noticed was I love marketing.

We did payments everyone just needed customers. Okay, so they didn't need our payment stuff, but they wanted customers. I love marketing and promoting an evangelizing things. I learned that from being a part of mint.com and ultimately I saw that there's a new distribution model called Groupon and Mac Heist as well as software. I thought I saw software getting bigger. So there's basically like these different pockets of things happening like marketing new marketing activity this new marketing distribution this new group of products get that's going to get a lot bigger. And so I said hey, how can I be a part of that? How can I help do that? Because that to me seems high.

Belen high value and also something frankly. I would enjoy and so he started actually three sites when we started out soon. I'll come when I started it actually started three sites at the same time at the same damn time. And so that one of the first sites I started was called reward level and so the idea with reward level.com was incentivize signup forms blah blah. It was complicated don't even worry about that. It was too complicated to explain there's also a lesson in that by the way, but the note to myself is that don't let your domains expire for this shit. So people now have I don't seem like healthcare should so if you have a domain don't let it

Or if

it's a good one, but even more importantly that is that this is where I met Chad. So Chad was actually a customer at Gambon and he was my favorite customer and I told you guys that earlier so if you've worked with someone if a customer is someone I stay in touch in Chad. I was not one of my best friends and still my business partner this day Ten Years Later worked for free just because we had a good relationship and you wanted to be a part of it and that's what started you know building this this business that we been able to build and so through her worth of we built reward level. Another thing we built which I don't have a screen shot of is called software taco and so software Taco was actually the original name of the

Appsumo and so software Taco was basically software reviews packaged in a nice Taco. Anyways, the point with that which is really interesting was that we started doing reviews and then we started doing this reward level site and at the same time then we launched appsumo. And so this is actually the first version of what I've seen would look like it was just an email often. I know my buddy Paul stamets GOP stand.com. Thank you so much. He definitely help me promote and get going early on and the site look like shit. This is now an eight-figure revenue and a significant leap.

Simple business and so this was just daily deals. I was like, let me I don't want to pay full price and I told you those three intersections were coming together of marketing customers this whole distribution thing. I was like, well, let me just go get injure or a product that I would want to pay for but get a discount on it and see if I can sell it and end up selling injure about 200 of them at seven dollars and I was like, all right, there's a business here, but one of the things I want to highlight that's really interesting about these kind of three businesses that we did was that there was only me and then Chad was helping out part-time, but you can't have three

Businesses and I think that's what a lot of us do when we do three because we don't want to fail but it also makes it so we don't do any of them very well and especially if there's only one or two of you it's really hard. And so the thing that I think Andrea, someone asked me was which one can you 10x easier and as I go absolute calm, I think the reviews business now, there's a bunch of these businesses that are large from reviews and reward level. I don't know that I'll ever worked but it was interesting point that I was like the one that context was absolutely own is like just focus just on that and I think that's been one of our successes with appsumo over the years, which is we pick singular.

Also an app similar the first year or not the first year the first year I started taking it. Seriously a first year was to get like a hundred thousand emails and then we had like a goal to get like a certain amount of page views and I'm going to go distant sound like revenue and having very similar goals something I learned from Mark and I think has really been one of our big successes for why we've done well at the company and now there's a team of 40 people working on absolute comments. The number one site online for software deals, and I truly believe and I think when you create something that you're proud of you should go and tell the world about it and I believe if anyone's creating an online business. They should be signed up to the AppsZoom a.com newsletter and check out.

What are the best products in the best prices for tools to help you grow in any online business? So we started appsumo and 2010 we cut out all these other sites. We started doubling down on appsumo some of the ways we grow. I'm going to put in another video but we either go through giveaways we go through amazing deals and then we go through advertising among a bunch of other things. I might look completely air horn bear bear bear bear. Yeah. We were doing awesome at that time. But the thing would have some of those really wild we've definitely had a rocky Journey. So this is 2010 you realize okay dork the domain that I thought I was going to get rich on was in 2000. So now

It's ten years and I'm still poor Abbe Sumo in our first year made a hundred thousand dollars in Revenue. I think I paid myself nothing just to give you an idea and when we did have some oh we have deals and so with deals what's really interesting is that some deals do really well and sometimes dude bad, but guess what? My costs are still the same. I ended up kind of a little bit of a breakdown and I was like man, I don't like this fluctuation of our business. And so we started saying alright. Well, how do we create more products? So that that revenue is more predictable because it was really hard to know which deals are going to do. Well in which ones aren't we?

Took the giveaway software that worked really well for our business. We you did drop box for life and Evernote for life and Netflix for life, and we're still paying to this day 10 years later, but we took the software that we built called King Sumo.com and we actually made that a business. So this is kind of I would call like the agency model of a company what that's about is you agency worker you're doing your business and you're noticing if you're doing anything repetitively create software or a company out of that and that's why it because agencies were like, oh we take my clients and so they always kind of create software and I think that's what we did here with consumer that I like is we want to

Predictable revenue and then really just look at what you're doing repetitively or that you're doing that successful that maybe you can sell to other people and King Sumo was our first one that really did Damien Down Under made it. Thanks mate. He's the one who took it on our team and put it out there. We wanted to keep going on this. Hey build a product have predictable Revenue control the product because or promoting an obscene will install the state, you know, there's a very thorough vetting process, but we wanted to say all right. We want to have our own products. We're basically like our we're doing these deals. We're getting kind of big with the deals, but it's not really growing that much more.

How do we grow the business significantly more? And so for us it was like we didn't really know what else to do, but I did know what everyone was asking of me. So this is monthly 1K.com. And what was interesting with monthly 1K.com is that I kept getting people asking how did you start up sumo because you know, it was a we were making around three to four million dollars a year at that point, but we didn't have any other better idea Kingston was making about a quarter million, which was nice. But the thing that was interesting here is that just notice what people are asking of you and I was like, well if I create a course, which we create a custom software me Eric Chad and Anton spent about a year.

Holding this and working on it, but it would be like if people keep asking this I can't do this manually anymore. Let me put it online monthly one koat.com and now you can just buy it yourself and get everything that I'm going to teach you in person. It is actually available today. So if you have been thinking about starting a side hustle and you're willing to do hard work, we provide the strategy and accountability is only seven dollars why the some dollars because I don't make any money told you already rich and I just want people to take action and create their dream jobs. And so the biggest takeaway from monthly 1K.com was that I hated it.

And so what do you mean you hated it? Yeah, it was hard work. But at the same time I'm very proud of it. We wanted to get 3333. So I told you we do really well when we have similar goals that we care about and so we want to 3333 customers. And so we worked our asses off one by one each customer one at a time to get that I think at the end of the day, you're always proud of the things you work hard on that you wanted always the one of the last thing I would say about this is that if you're noticing that certain parts of your business are draining a lot of energy, that's why I said I hate him on that one cake because it was

Groups of people the doers who they just needed strategy and support and then there's these other entrepreneurs who would watch the videos and say hey, I'm not rich yet and you need to figure out how do you allocate your time on the winners? And on the people that you can't help just start realizing you maybe you can't help them and be okay with that and so out of monthly 1K Chad my business partner was saying, hey man, like, you know monthly 1K were kind of tired of these customers are tired of running this business having you notice Chad and I there's a really important lesson. We'll talk to the Anna but China are always wanting to do new things, which is great.

But also has some downsides and so what Chad notice is that we're really good at marketing. So absolute outcome at the end of the day, we bring people customers. We bring the businesses the most important things in their business, which is customers number one. And so we thought well, why don't we give people the tools to do it themselves specifically run email marketing like appsumo is an eight-figure company now, it's a lot lower but originally it was 90% of a revenue was from email. So Chad thought alright, let's create a tool to collect help people collect emails and look now you see these pop-ups new milk likes everywhere. There wasn't a free option out there.

Did this and so we launched this thing in 2013/2014 and our first year our goal, which I thought was really interesting was to get 1 billion page views across all the sites that were installed on. So we're on The Chive and Tim Ferriss and all these other really interesting people and sites. And so we did the freemium model. That was my first experience with SAS revenues. Well in that it's really nice to have predictable Revenue that each month you kind of know, but I also think there's like this- downside with the SAS business where once turn happens once you slow down or when coronavirus or something crazy happens people.

We'll look to their subscriptions first the council. But again, this is something we built all these tools. We were using all these tools internally and I think there's something really really smart and strong for you to say. Hey, what am I just using myself that maybe I can give others or what? Can I build for myself that I'm excited about that? I can go and share with others so through Sumo.com, which is really called Sumo me. I bought a site called Leo dot IO and what I thought would happen Leo Dario is a Chrome extension. That's kind of like those pretty pictures on Chrome. There's a few other ones that do this now, but I thought hey, I'll buy this extension. I'll put some has to go.

Intercom and it'll work and it did not work. I paid about 25 cents a customer. I try to grow it and I didn't grow it. And so the moral of the story here is that I'm showing you a lot of ideas some made money. Some didn't work somewhere opportunities somewhere fun A lot of it was challenging but the overall thing is keep going and keep trying new things. He doing new things. You never know who you're going to meet through it. You never know. What's going to be working out. So sue my.com from that. We actually struggled a good bit and we started having a lot of competition because these email

Riders started just having their own pop-ups and then between Chad and I we had some disagreements about the future of the business. And so we created a site called meet fam.com how that came to be is that with sumo.com. We were like, wow of all the customers we have these people on Shopify are paying us the most and they complain the least. So we're like, oh, you know, why because when they collect an email address they can have a value to that, you know adjust way more than an info marketer or a blogger consumer and I think one of the things that Chad's done really well and helped us in our company is trying to identify like what's working.

We can do 10 times more of or what things are not working so that we can be reducing and I think that's something that I'll say to you and you're not going to do it. But if you go and look at your business and think about if I want to 10x my company, what could I really do? You probably do a lot less of certain things and do a lot more of things. Maybe you're not spending time on so with family said, all right, let's go further into the Shopify World, which those were our best customers on our Sumo pop-ups and we built this for about six months and it didn't work. Okay, so I spent I didn't work at the day we spent about six million dollars building it. It's automatic email for Shopify stores, which is kind of a confusing.

Nothing, we sent a million dollars to build it it today. It makes about a thousand dollars a month, which is not a lot of money. I don't know if you know that I think one of the major takeaways from this is that we didn't really have a Shopify store. We still don't have a Shopify store and we weren't really building for ourselves more of the story at the same time. You have to kind of learn your customers. So when we went to these people that are using clay view or using MailChimp or using other providers like how we'll switch over and we'll do the same for you and everything is automatic and we realize that people were like one switching cost for higher so you should find that out. If you're being like, oh we're cheaper. I always thought cheaper is always wins or more for

Like the word cheap, but even be more affordable wasn't worth it for people and switching was a lot harder and people also wanted to design their own emails more than we expected. And if we had our own Shopify store would probably know that and I think there's still opportunity where you can automatically create emails and stuff like that. But what's interesting about Fame is that we started having access to Shopify stores and again coming back to it, you know for my payments thing to where I went to without Sumo with fam we're doing email and we're competing it's really was hard for us to distinguish ourselves is hard for us to be like, why are we unique? Everyone's going over here with this email marketing. There's so many Papa.

So many companies so many apps in the Shopify store. How do we win and dominate in our own world war not even worrying about competitors. And so are we ended up doing what that is? We create a site called Hall drop.com. And so what's interesting about Hall drop again. It kind of comes back to the appsumo goes back to what already works and what works is that instead of doing their email marketing. Wish we were like, all right. There's a lot of people I can do I can use instead of you guys. What if we just brought them customers, so we created Hall drop.com Chad's been leading the drive the doing amazing and the idea here is kind of like an appsumo or product.

Or Reddit for e-commerce products. So we do know what products we love like. Hey what hats or shoes? I love Suave shoes, or I know that I love different products like Pele phone cases by peel.com and other products like lifty foil boards. And so this is a great place that people can drop their products and we just promote them which is what we're already great at and there's nothing else like it. We're not worrying about any other business is doing and I think there's a really interesting powerful lesson in that is that go and do the things you already love go find an advantage where your it's a green field that you can play your own game. I always