#95 with Craig Clemens of Golden Hippo - The 9-Figure Business You've Never Heard Of

Shaan and Sam are joined by the founder of Golden Hippo, Craig Clemens this episode. Craig talks about Golden Hippo's brands, how he got his start, how to launch a new product, and a bunch of ideas for potential businesses. Joined our private FB group yet? It's a page where people share each others million dollar ideas or what they're already working on: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ourfirstmillion. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:07Sam Parr?

  So today we have, Craig, what's your title, actually? Are you CEO or founder? What are you, what's your title?

• 0:14Speaker 01

  I just use co-founder because I do too many different things.

• 0:17Sam Parr?

  Okay, so co-founder, Golden Hippo. I don't know how you describe you guys, but I've, Craig, I think I met you originally at a conference and we became friends and you just tweeted something the other day that got thousands of interactions and it caught my eye and we chat just as friends, but you tweeted this thing. What did you tweet the other day?

• 0:41Speaker 01

  It was the 10 things we learned at Golden Hippo after spending a billion dollars of our own money on media.

• 0:48Sam Parr?

  And our own money. So what is your company?

• 0:52Speaker 01

  Company's called Golden Hippo. We build brands, direct to consumer, and we are self-funded. So that's where the own money comes from.

• 0:59Sam Parr?

  How, so like, what's a brand? What's, can you give an example or can you say what you guys sell?

• 1:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, I can give an example. So we partner some of the world's top doctors, people of influence, people of expertise, and we help them bring their ideas out to the world. So probably the brand we're most well-known for is a brand with a doctor named Steven Gundry, who is a world-famous heart surgeon. He's an inventor of a device that is used in 90% of all heart surgeries and we partnered with him to bring nutritional supplements into the world based around his ideas and philosophies.

• 1:37Sam Parr?

  Okay, and so what are examples of products that you guys are selling with Gundry, Dr. Gundry?

• 1:43Speaker 01

  So Dr. Gundry's philosophy is that we humans are a condominium for bugs, AKA bacteria, and he calls it hollow-bionics. And what that means is if you take care of the bacteria that lives in us, you know, the 25 trillion bacteria in our gut, you guys are all familiar with microbiome and on our skin, that they will take care of their home, which is your body. So that's something all the products have in common is that they're designed to nourish the bacteria that call you home.

• 2:16Sam Parr?

  So Dr. Gundry has like, how many SKUs? Like, how many, like, is it like, just like, one or two products that you're selling to his audience? Or do you have like, a whole store with like, dozens of different things?

• 2:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, it's like, I don't know, 50, something like that, you know? We have everything from specific digestive health supplements to coconut bars to coffee creamer, you know, the whole gamut.

• 2:40Sam Parr?

  And is it all physical stuff? Or is there any information?

• 2:45Speaker 01

  The information is available on Gundry MD when you subscribe to our newsletter. You know, we send out a high-quality email newsletter, we do a podcast, we do a YouTube channel, but the information's all free. The products are what people go to.

• 2:59Sam Parr?

  And how many, roughly how many brands like him do you guys have? Like dozens or hundreds or, or like six?

• 3:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, more like, you know, in the 10 to 20 range. I actually don't know exactly because we're always launching new brands and shutting down brands that don't work.

• 3:15Sam Parr?

  Got it.

• 3:17Shaan Puri?

  And at the beginning, you said self-funded. You said, well, the tweet storm that went viral that caught my attention and many others is, you know, here's what we learned spending a billion dollars of our own money on paid media. And it was, it was about marketing and it was about how to spend money. Well, self-funded, is that because you had a big win before this? Or is that because you bootstrapped this kind of slowly, but over time accumulated a big cash flow in business? So give us kind of the, the brief history.

• 3:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, great question. So self-funded because we bootstrapped, though this is not my first company. And I was really fortunate in my younger days to have an amazing mentor who taught me all this shit. You know, I was one of those kids who barely graduated high school, had a 1.7 GPA. I went into the lucrative field of

• 4:04Shaan Puri?

  1.7. What is, what even, how do you even get a 1.7? I didn't even know that's a thing.

• 4:09Sam Parr?

  That's what I had. That's what I had. It's a D+.

• 4:11Speaker 01

  My boy. Okay. So let's see if it was for the same reason. Mine was because I just hated doing homework.

• 4:16Sam Parr?

  Yeah, same.

• 4:17Speaker 01

  Yeah. So hated doing homework. Never got the projects in on time. You know, had to go to summer school. I wasn't even supposed to walk in the graduation. But my mom was a teacher in the same school district and she kind of schmoozed the principal. And on graduation day, I get up there and they're calling the other Cs. So they're like Clarkson. And then they go to whatever C comes after Clemens, but they skip my name. And so I walked up and got my diploma, but my poor grandma was sitting in the stands and she never saw me.

• 4:47Shaan Puri?

  Just waiting.

• 4:48Speaker 01

  She's like, where's Craig? You know, it's, it's

• 4:51Shaan Puri?

  You're still just trying to live down that disappointment. Disappointed grandma. It's like, okay, I need to, to change the world now.

• 4:56Speaker 01

  Yeah. Like Donald Trump is always trying to impress his dead father. You know, me with my, my grandma.

• 5:02Shaan Puri?

  And so, so you, you're a crappy student and Sam, you were also a 1.7 GPA type?

• 5:07Sam Parr?

  I graduated with a two, a two, two, which is a slightly above a C average.

• 5:12Shaan Puri?

  Oh man, I'm a Rhodes Scholar compared to you guys with my 3.1. Um, all right. So Craig, were you like business motivated at that time or you were just wandering?

• 5:21Speaker 01

  I had zero motivation. I went to community college because my parents' dream was for us to go to college. And went there. I was delivering pizzas. I then really stepped my game up and started waiting tables, which is a lot more in the tip jar than the pizza delivery. And then I got a job as a telemarketer. And that was a real game changer for me because it was the first time I was getting paid actually to use a skill. Now, don't get me wrong. I was pretty good at delivering pizzas, but this time I was actually doing one-on-one calls with people. And the job was selling tools and industrial supplies. So I'd call these farmers out in Iowa. And I'd try to sell them drill bits and wrench sets and things like that. It was pretty bizarre.

• 6:06Shaan Puri?

  At this point, were you, were you motivated? Like, you know, Pursuit of happiness where you're not going to put down the phone. You're going to try to get 10% more calls than everybody else. Were you, did you transform in that way or what was it?

• 6:18Speaker 01

  You know, I really wasn't. I always had this thing against working hard. I think it was some sort of rebellion against my mom or something who was always telling me I need to work hard and go to school or I wouldn't amount to anything. And I think because of that, I didn't want to do my homework. I didn't want to put the hours in. So I had an eight hour shift at a telemarketing company. And then I got a better telemarketing job at a company that did credit card merchant accounts. And that was like a legit corporate gig. You know, there were people there that were making six figures, wearing suits. And I showed up there, a 21 year old kid. I would wear my collared shirt that I would wear at the nightclub, you know, to the office to at least have some sort of upscale attire. And it was straight commission.

• 7:00Speaker 01

  And I told the boss, I walked in there so cocky because I was pretty good at the tools and all that. I said, hey, how many sales do I got to get in my first month to get one of these corner offices? And he says, if you get 20 accounts, you can have a corner office. I didn't know what 20 accounts was. So my first day, I sat there pounding the phone and I got one guy who was kind of interested. Finally, I stayed there till 8:00 PM and got him this fax in his form to sign up the credit card account. I just bulldozed this dude and he ended up backing out a few weeks later, of course, you know, because that's usually what happens. I got like 12 accounts that first month, but I just really liked partying back then.

• 7:40Speaker 01

  I was 21, I was going to the bars and, you know, waking up with the crack of 11:30. And that's when I'd roll into the office. So even though I wanted to be this hot shot salesman and make six figures, I just didn't have it when it came to being straight commissioned and picking my own hours. My own hours would be like, you know, 11:30 AM to Six or seven PM and then the guy who passes out the leads would see me rolling in there at eleven thirty wearing my shit from the night before and the good lead comes in. There's someone else who's been there at six AM trying to feed his family. Who's going to give the good lead to, you know? So I did make forty something thousand dollars that year, which

• 8:23Speaker 01

  was a game changer for me. I was now rich, quote unquote, and I was still in my boring hometown, which is Thousand Oaks, California, if you guys are familiar, and I hated it there. And all of my friends who did have their shit together that had real grades in college had moved down to San Diego to go to San Diego State or USD. And so I packed up my bags and I moved down to San Diego and I tried to get other jobs doing merchant accounts. I sold DirecTV. I did mortgage loans and I just could not find a job that may be anywhere near that forty grand. And since it was straight commission, I never had to pay the taxes on it. You know, it's like you hold your own money and you wait.

• 9:05Speaker 01

  But while I was running through these dead end jobs, I spent through all my savings. So pretty soon I was like twenty grand in debt to the IRS. And that was a real low point for me because by that time, my friends were starting to graduate college and they were getting the salaried jobs, driving the company cars. And I was still going to McDonald's with like a dollar off coupon for the two cheeseburgers and a Coke. And that was pretty depressing. So that's, that's where I was.

• 9:30Sam Parr?

  And then you said you hooked up with someone, a mentor, and I know, I think I know who's, is this Evan Pagan?

• 9:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 9:38Sam Parr?

  Do you know who this is, Sean?

• 9:40Shaan Puri?

  I just heard about him yesterday when I was doing my research, but no, tell me, tell me.

• 9:43Sam Parr?

  Let me tell you who he is. Let me take a stab at this, Craig, because this is from an outsider's perspective. And this is, I think I could do a good job of relating this to anyone who doesn't know. So Evan Pagan also went by David D'Angelo. I was a customer of this.

• 9:55Speaker 01

  Well, I assume that you're male.

• 9:58Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 9:59Shaan Puri?

  This is the pickup artist guy.

• 10:01Sam Parr?

  Yeah, but I was on the, I'm 31, so I was probably only 18 or 16 when this stuff happened. So I think I'm on the younger age of when this was at its peak. And so this guy had this thing called Double Your Dating. And it sounds sleazy. I mean, doesn't sound sleazy. It sounds like it's trying to like hook up with girls. It's not. It was about how to like build a relationship with people. And I was 16, pimple face, and I was like, fuck, I want a girlfriend. And so somehow I came across this Double Your Dating thing. And you enter your email and he was, he would send these super long, like 3,000 word emails, only texts about these stories and he would get you to buy his book. And Evan, Evan is still around, but at the time, his stage name or whatever you want to call it, brand name was David D'Angelo.

• 10:44Sam Parr?

  And I'm pretty sure, I don't know, but I'm pretty sure he was selling 30 or 40 or 50 million dollars a year of this book on how to date people. Is that right?

• 10:53Speaker 01

  I can, I can get into all the details of that for sure. So I was in your shoes when I was 18. I only kissed one girl and I, no, I kissed two girls in high school. The, the first one was legit. The second one, I was at a party and there was a girl who had thrown up. She was 20. I, I knew her kind of from my martial arts studio. She had finished puking and she was walking back to the party and she was grabbing the back of my head and made out with me. So that was my second kiss.

• 11:19Sam Parr?

  Great.

• 11:20Shaan Puri?

  But how are you only kissing two girls? You look like Mark Wahlberg. What's going on? Did you grow into Mark Wahlberg later or what happened?

• 11:26Speaker 01

  So, you know, I left out the part about me not graduating college and stuff. I was a virgin all that whole time. I was a virgin until I was like 22. I was really bad at the age. So I was in these forums, talking about how to meet girls and I just wanted to find a girlfriend. That's all I wanted. I was like saving my virginity to have a girlfriend. So that was my goal. I wasn't trying to be a pickup artist. I just want a one, but I was just not socially able to do so. I was super shy. I won, uh, you know, they have the high school hall of fame. So in junior high school, I won most bashful. I was voted the shyest guy in the whole school. And so in high school, I decided to do something about it and I would buy these books like I remember

• 12:11Speaker 01

  there's one called 92 Tricks for Success in Personal and Business Relationships. And I would read these things and I'd test them out. So I'd go up to like the cool guy at school and I would say, "Hey, man, how was your weekend?" And he'd say, "It was good. How was yours?" I'd be like, "Oh, it was good. I, you know, rode my bike around and stuff." "Well, enjoy the rest of your day." And he'd say, "Okay, cool." And I'd be like, "Yes, I had a normal conversation. I did that. I was able to speak with him and I wasn't an idiot." So I was really bad, but I worked on myself. And so, yeah, I was in all these forums talking about meeting girls and I met a guy who knew a guy, et cetera, et cetera. And he said, "You should meet this guy, Evan, because he's also based in Los Angeles." And Evan was also a dating nerd.

• 12:54Speaker 01

  So I meet him. We hung out a couple of times and lose touch when I moved down to San Diego. And then I'm working at this other telemarketing company. And what you do at the end of a telemarketing shift, because the room has these speaker boxes so everyone can hear the calls, is you start prank calling all your friends. And so, you know, we grew up on the Jerky Boys and we had epic prank calls. So I had this prank call that was pretty epic. I would call people up. And well, Sean, to give you an example, what's the name of your current or past girlfriend?

• 13:36Shaan Puri?

  Past girlfriend, Jessica.

• 13:38Speaker 01

  Jessica, okay, cool. So let's say Sam and I are buddies and he'd be like, "Hey, call my friend Sean." His ex's name, is it ex or current?

• 13:45Shaan Puri?

  Ex, happily married now.

• 13:46Speaker 01

  Okay, got it. So call you up, say, "Hey, Sean, this is Steve Johnson with Longitude International, the revolutionary penis enlargement pill guaranteed to add two to three inches in length or three to four inches in girth within 30 days. We're having a special right now. I can get you two bottles for the price of one and you don't pay anything out of pocket until you see the results. How would you like me to send it out to you?" And they'd say, "No, no, I'm not interested in that. You know, I'm good." And I'd say, "Well, you know, Sean, man to man, I mean, I'm good down there too, but I mean, couldn't we all just benefit a little bit from some more length and especially a little more girth?" They'd say, "Ah, no, no, I'm really good. I don't need that shit."

• 14:28Speaker 01

  Like, well, Sean, that is free to try. You don't get billed unless you actually use it. And if you don't look down and see more girth, it's not going to cost you anything. So let me just send you out a sample, no obligation. And if you like it, great. I'll charge your credit card. If not, you don't pay anything. Nah, nah, nah, I really don't.

• 14:50Speaker 01

  Okay. Well, Sean, I wasn't actually supposed to tell you this, but

• 14:56Speaker 01

  turns out you were referred to us.

• 14:59Speaker 01

  Does the name Jessica ring any bells? Then they'd be like, oh, fuck.

• 15:03Speaker 01

  Okay, here's my address. Send me that shit. Friend on the phone and tell him they got fucked. So

• 15:10Speaker 01

  lot of good times at the office there. So I

• 15:13Shaan Puri?

  Hey guys, I want to take a second to answer one of the most common questions I get, which is, hey, I got this great idea. Or, hey, my company's doing really well and I just need a developer. I need somebody who knows how to code. So that I can either bring this idea to life or I can grow faster. And you know, I've been there before. I've dabbled in the no code tools, trying to make it work. Sometimes that works. Most of the time it's not good enough. Tried to learn programming myself. That was a waste of time. And you know, I've looked at overseas platforms to say, hey, can I find an affordable developer? You know, I can't afford somebody here in the States and California paying some Silicon Valley prices. But maybe I can afford a developer in the Philippines or in Eastern Europe. And the big challenge has always been finding somebody who's actually like good, like they're vetted. Like I never know if somebody's going to just take my money and run if they're actually a good developer or a bad developer.

• 15:58Shaan Puri?

  And how do I know? If I knew how to code, I could judge their stuff, but I don't know how to code. So what, what I really like about this week's sponsor lemon.io is that they have a vetted marketplace of remote developers from Eastern Europe. So I know the founder pretty well. His name's Alex. And what they do is they filter and they test and they basically have a reputation system of any developer that they have on their roster. So you know, if you go to lemon.io, you're getting a developer who is actually good, is good quality is going to get the job done. And so what the way it works is you go, you type what you need. Hey, I want to build this app or I need to add an extra fun and developer to my team and I don't want to hire. Within 24 hours, they'll match you with the right developer. If it's not the right developer, you just tell them and they'll switch it, you know, basically for free. It's a replacement guarantee.

• 16:42Shaan Puri?

  And they're actually cheaper than the other outsourcing platforms. So you know, you get one big savings when you just go outside the US or outside of Europe and you, you get somebody in kind of in either Eastern Europe or in Philippines, Southeast Asia. You know, you know, you save money there, but lemon.io is actually half the price of the other platforms that try to do this. And so it's stupidly effective. I would just kind of take advantage of this as long as they, they can offer these rates. Pretty amazing. And Alex basically told me that for any My First Million listener, they will offer a 15% discount on the first six weeks of work that you have done. So if you want that done, if you want a developer who is vetted, who can build your projects, go to lemon.io/mfm. Again, that's lemon.io/mfm, like My First Million.

• 17:27Shaan Puri?

  All right. Enjoy. Back to this week's episode.

• 17:29Speaker 01

  There. So I decided I wanted to prank call Evan and I dialed up the phone. I hadn't talked to him in a year or so, and I decided to do it myself because I didn't think he'd recognize my voice because I didn't know him that well. It had been like a year. And so I call him up. I say, Hey, Evan, it's Steve Johnson with Longitude, the revolutionary penis enlargement pill. And he goes, is this Craig? I'm like, oh, fuck. So didn't get to pull the prank call, but we get to talking and I say, what are you doing these days? He said, well, you know, I wrote a book with the dating advice that I've been giving out for free in the forums. I call it Double Your Dating and I've been selling it as an ebook. I said, what's an ebook? Is that like Amazon? And he goes, no, it's a, it's a file, like a PDF file.

• 18:11Speaker 01

  And I said, what do you, you charge them for this file? He goes, yeah, I charged 40 bucks and then I sent him the file. I go, wait a second. So people you are sending you 40 bucks? You don't even send them a real book? And he's like, no, no, it's information. I was like, dude, you're going to jail, man. That sounds scammy as fuck. And he goes, well, I actually sold $4,000 worth of ebooks last month. I said, okay, you know, not bad. I talked to him a month later. He sold $17,000 worth of ebooks. I talked to him a month after that. He'd sold 70,000 worth of ebooks. So at this point, I was like, okay, man, I'm coming to work for you. I'll shine your shoes. I'll get your coffee. I'll wash your car, whatever you need. I don't care if it's a scam. I just need to know how you're making 70 grand a month selling these ebooks.

• 18:53Speaker 01

  And he goes, ha, ha, thanks, but no thanks. Cause he knew I was just, you know, party animal that didn't have any useful skills besides harassing people on the phone. So I go to the website, as Sam can probably remember, and it's not even a real website. It says, one sentence, it says, "You're about to learn secrets most men will never know about meeting women," and then it has three or four bullet points of what you'll learn, like how to get a girl's phone number, you know, how to kiss a girl without getting rejected. It says, "Put in your name and email address." That's it. That's the whole damn site. So I put in my name and email address, and I start getting these huge newsletters like Sam was talking about with these dating tips and advice, like, you know, first date ideas, or, you know, what to do if you're fresh out of a relationship, all this stuff.

• 19:38Speaker 01

  And I'm reading them, and I'm like, you know, I can write this shit. And so I sit down one day, and I write one. I'll never forget. It was called "Two Tips to Kiss a Girl." And I was careful to write it in this exact funny style that he wrote in, which was very conversational, single-sentence paragraphs, and it was copywriting, but I didn't know what that was. I wrote it and sent it to him, and he wrote me back. He said, "Okay, now we can talk." And he gave me a job at $3,000 a month, which was life-saving at the time. And I actually didn't get hired as a copywriter. I got hired to do link exchange. Do you remember those days when you trade links with someone? And I started doing customer support, but not like, "Help me download this ebook," but

• 20:22Speaker 01

  more when people write in, they'd say, "Hey, I'm 30 years old. I just got divorced. Will this book help me get back in the game?" And so I'd write, "Yeah, it absolutely will help you get back in the game. There's something on page 36 that'll tell you what to do to build your confidence." So I was getting into the minds of customers, doing that customer support, and that made me a much better copywriter later. So the numbers in that business, at the time I joined, you know, that's about what I was doing, 70 grand a month. Soon it was 150. That men's dating brand eventually got up to about 8 million a year, but then we started one for women that was called Catch Him and Keep Him. And the women's market was even more rabid. I don't know why.

• 21:00Shaan Puri?

  Wow, that's counterintuitive. I wouldn't have thought that.

• 21:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think men are more desperate, need more help.

• 21:05Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 21:06Speaker 01

  But here's the thing, the women's ads converted much better, but it wasn't all trackable. And the takeaway that we had, and I'm not 100% sure if this is true, but you know, Sam, did you ever tell any of your friends about that dating book you bought?

• 21:19Sam Parr?

  Never in a million years.

• 21:20Speaker 01

  I didn't either. I wouldn't even tell people I worked at this company. When people would ask me what I do, I'd just say, oh, I do.

• 21:25Sam Parr?

  This is the first time, and that was 15 years ago, that I'd ever even said that.

• 21:29Shaan Puri?

  I took the cover off the game when I had the book. I was like, oh, yeah, that's a bible.

• 21:32Speaker 01

  There it is.

• 21:33Shaan Puri?

  You don't need to work. Yeah.

• 21:35Speaker 01

  But women, they'll buy this book and they'll tell all their friends and they'll have a book club about it. So I think that's why it was selling more because women will talk about it. But then the other interesting thing, the backend for each business was CDs and DVDs of live seminars. And the men would buy those like crazy. The men were way more valuable on the backend. The women were not spending $100 to $300 on these expensive courses. Maybe because that made them feel desperate, maybe because they weren't as desperate as the men were. Who knows? But it was really interesting getting to be on the ground floor of those.

• 22:09Sam Parr?

  So how big did it get?

• 22:11Speaker 01

  Got to 20 million with those two combined. And then, you know, this is early, this is like 2004, 2005. And people are asking Evan, hey, I'm a golf instructor. Can I do books on how to play better golf? Or hey, I train guinea pigs. I want to do an ebook, teach people to train guinea pigs. So he decided to launch a business course called Altitude that showed people how to create their own information product businesses. And so I ran this little incubator that we had there. By this time I was proficient in copywriting and marketing. I was, that became my college education. I didn't listen to music in my car for three years. I only listened to like audio cassettes by Jack Trout and Our Rise and Good to Great and, you know, Gary Halbert shit. You know, some of the stuff we talked about when we first linked up.

• 22:57Speaker 01

  And that business took off.

• 23:01Speaker 01

  And I don't remember the exact numbers on that, but that's what Evan is still doing today is the altitude thing. And he's sold the dating companies to a couple of the top employees, if I remember correctly.

• 23:14Sam Parr?

  And so just to give people perspective, can you say how big Golden Hippo is now? I mean, I just, I just want, I want people to be like, okay, this guy is worth or not worth listening to. And oftentimes, numbers are the best way to do that.

• 23:26Speaker 01

  Sure, sure. So I can tell you that we are almost 900 team members. We're not public on revenues, but we've grown to about 900. A big chunk of that is customer support too. So we've got about 400 agents in Salt Lake City, Utah, at a call center. And we do all of our own fulfillment. And of course, email and chat support is critical these days. So we've got about 70 people doing that also.

• 23:47Sam Parr?

  So if I, if I had to guess, I would say hundreds of millions in sales. That, that's what I would guess.

• 23:53Speaker 01

  I can say in the nine figures is accurate.

• 23:55Sam Parr?

  Okay. And what makes you guys a little bit different is, and I think I, I said something negative about you guys. And I'm gonna, I didn't mean for it to come negative. But you guys do a lot of long form copy. And what I said was, a lot of people, I think I, I used the word scammy. And I didn't mean to say that. What I meant to say is that a lot of people perceive that as scam stuff, because a lot of scammers use that. I didn't mean to say you guys were scam artists or anything like that, because I don't think you are. But you guys do do a lot of like long form copy. Is that correct?

• 24:29Speaker 01

  Well, we do, and it's the same model that we did with the dating advice. So if you remember, you signed up and you got these really new, really long newsletters with free tips and things like that. So that's why our stuff is long is because we lead with education. So I like to say that we have two offerings. We have education and then we have great products. And if people just stick around for the education, don't buy anything, that's fine. You know, we try to lead people better than we can.

• 24:56Sam Parr?

  Do you have tens of millions of email subscribers?

• 24:59Speaker 01

  I actually don't know, but I would think that that would not be true. I don't think it's that many, because we have a different business model than some people. There's other very successful businesses in the spaces we are in that grab emails.

• 25:18Speaker 01

  And then sell backend. And that is what we did with Double Your Dating and Catch 'Em and Keep 'Em. Is we would go for that email with those capture pages. And at Golden Hippo, we only email, for the most part, existing customers. We don't do a lot of email capture. Though it does work very well for profitable brands in the space. Not against it, it's just.

• 25:43Shaan Puri?

  Why would you do, why, why did you go away from that? That seems to be like the standard protocol, like, hey, email, they're willing to give it. And once I have that, I can start to sell them drip by drip until they're my customer. Why'd you move away from that?

• 25:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, no particular reason. I've seen it work very successfully, as I was saying, you know, and I don't know if it's something that we wouldn't necessarily do in the future, you know? I know we have some quiz funnels and things like that, you know, that ask for it. And so I would say a percentage of our people are first timers. But also, if you've ever run a company that does a lot of emailing, you learn that the more people on your list, the harder it is to get your email in their

• 26:30Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 26:31Speaker 01

  inbox, you know, especially in their like real inbox. And so if you're emailing millions of people, then you get on all kinds of weird lists and things like that, that Gmail automatically puts you in the promotions tab or automatically in the spam. And it's really hard to figure out why. So we found that just emailing customers cuts down on the bulk of it by a lot. And so that was the, I think, original reason. And so not to say we wouldn't do it again.

• 27:02Sam Parr?

  So let's talk about some ideas. So the space that you're in, if I, like from an outsider's perspective, it seems like because you're launching new brands, you're constantly looking at opportunity. And maybe before you got into this, you had no idea that Stephen, Dr. Stephen Gundry, like that people ever even bought anything that he was interested in selling. What, uh, what are you currently surprised about in your space? And where's there opportunity that you think you guys are not capitalizing on because of it's just not a priority?

• 27:30Speaker 01

  Well, I can tell you things that I'm not allowed to do legally that are pretty interesting.

• 27:36Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, let's start there.

• 27:36Sam Parr?

  Yeah, okay.

• 27:40Speaker 01

  So, I mean, it's not gonna be anything you haven't heard before, but I can't fuck with CBD, which I think is great. I take it myself for sleep, but it's still not federally legal to ship state to state yet. It's like gray area. And so I get asked all the time by, you know, celebrities, doctors, whoever, if I want to start a CBD brand with them, and I have to say no, because we have too much to lose. But I don't tell them to not start it, because I think the laws are heading in that direction where it's going to be totally fine soon, but right now it's not. So I can't mess with it.

• 28:17Sam Parr?

  How would you spin that up?

• 28:19Shaan Puri?

  Twenty-four-year-old Craig Clemens with nothing to lose would be like, you know what? We'll figure this out. The laws will get there.

• 28:26Speaker 01

  I didn't have anything. Yeah, and I encourage people. I've had people come to me that were more entrepreneurial and say, hey, do you want to do this together? I say, no, but you should do this on your own, because it's a big category. It's something that gives results you can feel, which I think is really important when you're doing something in ingestibles. And it's something that helps a lot of people.

• 28:47Sam Parr?

  How would you get your first customers for that? I mean, I think that the CBD thing is easier, because there's so many people already making it. Let's say you just wanted to sell it. What would you do?

• 28:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I like to lead with education with everything. And I think one of the reasons that our advertising is successful is we give value. That's definitely why the networks love us, is because people click on our ads and they learn something interesting. And something interesting to a CBD customer could be, why is this not marijuana? I mean, think about it, you know, your parents, like, do they know the difference? They probably have fears around that. There's such a huge education opportunity around CBD right now, because it's derived from marijuana. Marijuana has been, you know, blacklisted since Nixon or whatever, you know, they've been hearing this shit's bad for them for so long.

• 29:39Speaker 01

  Why is this good for them? That's a huge education opportunity. So I look for spaces where there is an education opportunity and then give that education. I think it's a great way to cut through the noise of the 4,000 ads people see every day.

• 29:52Sam Parr?

  So you'd write a blog post about, titled that, and then it would be like a thousand-word blog post, and you would drive traffic to it from like, let's say, Outbrain or Taboola or something?

• 30:02Speaker 01

  I think Facebook is the best network in the world to do your initial testing on. And the reason is because you can target so tightly and then go broader and broader. So what I would suggest is, you know, the blog idea is a good one. And you can do different types of blogs. You can do it on your own domain. You can do a sponsored post on, say, well and good or something like that. You know, or even LA Times or some of these will take sponsored posts. So you can do that type of educational presentation. And then, yeah, I'd suggest they go on Facebook and they look for people who have raised their hand

• 30:41Speaker 01

  and said, I follow this back pain group, you know, or whatever it is that people are buying CBD for the most. You know, a lot of people buy CBD for anxiety in their pets. That's a, that's a big one, you know, so you could target anyone that is in a, I love dog videos or cat videos group. And then start off and get your advertising to where you can convert those folks that are really targeted. And then uncheck the box on, say, cat lovers and see if it still works for just a dog lovers. Then uncheck that box until you can go broad. That I think is the key to scaling up and that's a great thing about Facebook.

• 31:22Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I love that. That's extremely tactical.

• 31:24Speaker 01

  You can even say it in Google AdWords in a way with, with type and traffic. You know, you can go in the more targeted terms, you know, like buy CBD for my dog's anxiety during flights. You know, like you can do this until stuff or, you know, but you eventually want to get to the place where you can convert on CBD or on back.

• 31:44Shaan Puri?

  So when you're, when you're testing a brand, a new, new idea, I don't think back to the last idea you guys spun up or you were involved with, what's the timeframe you give it? Do you say, okay, we're going to spend six weeks on this and we kind of know within the six weeks, we're going to be able to validate this or is it not time based, it's something else?

• 32:02Speaker 01

  Yeah. So in my post, my 10 things post, I think it was number five. And I said, nothing is more expensive than a just okay converting ad campaign.

• 32:13Speaker 01

  And not many people got that one. I got a lot of comments on the other ones, like when I said social media is influencer marketing is for companies like Burning Money. Got a lot of good back and forth on that. But that one, not too many people got, except someone who I really respect, Jeremy Liu from Lightspeed retweeted just that number five. I even wrote, I was like, I think you're the only one that actually got this. And what I mean by that is that if you have something that shows a little bit of promise, it keeps you putting money and time into it. Totally. And you can just chase that rabbit for freaking ever, man, and just dump money into it,

• 32:54Speaker 01

  you know? And so I actually would much prefer putting something up that completely tanks, or does really great, and not doing that. You know, I've lost a lot of money trying to build brands where I've partnered with someone who I really like, maybe I really liked their product ideas, or their philosophies, and then the world just didn't respond. But since I liked it so much, I kept going for it, and going for it, and going for it.

• 33:21Sam Parr?

  What's an example of a metric that says this is taking off? I mean, like, do you want like a, do you want to put in $1 and get out 3?

• 33:28Speaker 01

  I think that's different depending on the brand, you know? So if you have a subscription model, for example, you can spend a lot less upfront, you know? Like, if you look at Guthrie Ranker and Proactive, they're losing money on every sale, and I think they have like an eight-month turnaround, or something like that, you know? If you're doing something that is low LTV, like maybe you only have one product, yeah, you gotta make your money back pretty quick, you know? So there's no like real set metric I can give you. It's different for every business. But I would suggest define your metric, and...

• 34:08Speaker 01

  Try to go for a home run or a strikeout.

• 34:12Sam Parr?

  Is there a product that you guys created where you're like, where you weren't, I mean, I'm sure that many of your successes you were shocked by. But is there something, what's the one thing that took off and you were like, oh my gosh, I did not think that this was going to work as amazing as it does.

• 34:26Speaker 01

  Shoot, that's a, that's an interesting question. I'm trying to think of which one to share because that happens all the time. And one of my other points in that tweet.

• 34:34Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I know.

• 34:35Speaker 01

  How long have you been doing this for? You're going to be wrong a lot. Well, the one that's popping into my mind is when we were doing heart health, which we still do, but we had a particular campaign that we were starting off for it. And the ads had the picture of a beating heart, you know, and some copy around that. Conversions tripled when we switched the ad from a heart to a foot.

• 35:05Sam Parr?

  Weird.

• 35:07Sam Parr?

  What the fuck?

• 35:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. So the reason why is because people who are looking for support with their heart typically have circulation problems that affects their feet.

• 35:18Sam Parr?

  Right.

• 35:19Speaker 01

  And so we did this, this in the heart health space and it worked really well, so well that we were running a ton of media for it. And then we partnered with another doctor who has, I think, one of the greatest products that, that we make. It's a foot cream called Footmedics. And this product, when people start taking Footmedics and putting on their feet, they, they never stop. It's, the LTV is insane. But we needed to run the, the foot banners and, and Facebook ads and all that to sell Footmedics because it was a more natural product. So we did this deal, we created Footmedics.

• 36:04Speaker 01

  And, well, actually, we didn't create Footmedics. We, that was a kind of like an acquisition slash takeover, whatever. That's a different story. But because we were doing so much media in the heart health space, putting feet all over the internet.

• 36:20Speaker 01

  Some of these networks got together and they said, you know, these feet on the websites aren't a good look and they banned advertising that has feet in it. Now, you can get away with like a sexy woman's shoe or something like that, but if it's just like a random person's foot, it's not allowed on the networks. It's a random thing that they don't want on the site. And if you think about it, if you've got some nice looking website, there's just a random foot there, you know, it's not the best look for your site. You know, everyone, I would say, everyone wants the BMW ad because you get this sleek car, maybe a sexy couple, and then no one clicks on it. No one leaves to go buy a BMW. They stay on your site and watch more ads. So that's everyone's dream ad. Their nightmare ad is an ugly foot that someone clicks on and leaves their site because they're so interested

• 37:03Speaker 01

  that they buy the foot product to never go back to the Facebook newsfeed or whatever it is, you know. So we ruined the foot banner for everybody and then we had this great product, FootMedics, and we had no way to advertise it. And it's still around, you know, and it does a little bit of business, but not to the scale it would have been, had we still been able to use feet.

• 37:21Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I want to, I want to go back to one thing you said, which is something that has stuck with me as well. It was a thing we put on our wall at my old house, which is mediocrity is expensive, which is kind of what you were talking about. And I used to say, the worst thing we could do is be in a just okay or mediocre business because it's going to drain us of our most valuable asset. It's going to be really expensive on time and it's going to be not that expensive on money. And we're going to justify, keep going, keep going, keep going, when it really, we just want something that's going to break out. And the thing that's going to stop us from finding something that breaks out is spending all our time on something that's just okay. If it fails, it's obvious. You don't even have to be smart. We can just move on and it won't be so expensive on time. So I definitely agree with that one.

• 38:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, there does need to be a good way to measure it because then you got guys like Gary Vee that are like, you need to hustle 12 hours a day for, you know, give up at 20s and, you know, work on this same thing that just converts okay and one day it's going to blow up. And that's not true for everything. I think so many people waste so much time cranking on these business ideas that don't have real proof of concept. You know, they get a couple of customers, but they just never break through and they think it's because they're not working hard enough or long enough or whatever it is. But really, it's just because you're making something that people don't necessarily want.

• 38:41Shaan Puri?

  Right. Yeah. And I think that you have to, the way I'm like, how do I figure it out? How do I know when I should be the guy from Pinterest who was like, yeah, we just kept going even with growth was flat and then it started picking up years later. It's like, how do I know when to be that guy? You know, when do I be the tortoise and when do I be the hare? And because there's examples on both sides and then there's a graveyard of people failing because they took either approach. So it's hard to really tell. And my, my, just my answer to myself, and I don't know if this is right or wrong, but I like it. I use it is go against human nature. Like if my, my human nature is to be really hopeful. So I know that. So what I should actually do is be actively skeptical about things because I know my default is going to be to see the, the one customer that it's working for and not the 99 that, that has rejected it that have, you know, totally

• 39:25Shaan Puri?

  don't care about this. And so I, I just try to work against my own human nature because that keeps me honest. Whereas if I feed into that, if it's like my nature is to be optimistic, delusionally optimistic, and then I'm actively like, yeah, I should just keep going even when there's no evidence of keep, to keep going, I'll end up, you know, at an extreme dead end.

• 39:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm the same way as you. Fortunately, my brother, who I run the company with, is a classic pessimist, shooting down every one of my ideas. And then I gotta fight for the ones I really like to get them executed on, you know? But I know if he agrees with me on something, it's probably going to be a good idea. So it's good to have that balance. It has something that'll check you.

• 40:06Shaan Puri?

  What's your hit rate with brands? So I know you said, and when it comes to marketing, for example, you never know what's going to work. You'll get surprised all the time. You'll be wrong more than you're right. Well, one thing I've seen as a pattern, I'm curious if it applies to you guys, is there's all these people, I bet people who, once they become masters at things that are what seem like, you know, hit businesses, like I have, I have friends who do viral videos and I talk to them, I'm like, oh yeah, viral videos, it's lightning in a bottle. Who knows? And I was like, what's your hit rate? And they showed me their, their, you know, Set of their catalog and it's like nine out of 10 and I was like nine out of 10 are going viral. He's like, yeah, but like eventually we figured out what emotions we're tapping into. We filter out bad ideas early and then we have a distribution system that kind of ensures

• 40:46Shaan Puri?

  success. And I was like, wow, so something I thought would be low hit rate. These guys over time have gotten to be very high hit rate. I'm curious for you, are you guys, what's your hit rate on new brands or new products you roll out? Is it more like eight or nine out of 10 or is it more like one or two out of 10?

• 41:02Speaker 01

  So I'll answer that on both sides, new products and new brands. New products, we never fail because we're asking the customers what we want, what they want. We do a survey. We say, you know, which of these 10 products would you like next? So we don't fail on new products as they told us, you know, I mean, well, once in a while, because sometimes, you know, people tell you what they want, but then when it comes time to pull their credit card, you know,

• 41:26Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 41:27Speaker 01

  They just aren't copyrighting. So once in a while, we don't, uh, so I would say, you know, let's say eight or nine out of 10 on new products.

• 41:34Shaan Puri?

  Yep.

• 41:35Speaker 01

  And maybe it's seven out of 10 because also too, there's human emotion involved on our side. And sometimes you end up getting that product in the line that someone in formulation really loved, that they just championed all the way through and then it was their dream and not the customer.

• 41:52Shaan Puri?

  Right. We forgot the customer at some point.

• 41:54Speaker 01

  Yeah. So, and I've been as guilty as that as, as anyone at my company. So I'd say that's on the product side. On the brand side,

• 42:04Speaker 01

  60% maybe, you know, I'm always surprised by what fails.

• 42:10Shaan Puri?

  It's still pretty high though.

• 42:13Speaker 01

  I mean, we're still in business. So, you know,

• 42:17Shaan Puri?

  But your failures, I'm sure are pretty cheap. You know, when you launch your, the new brand, I don't think it's gonna, I don't think, I don't think you're putting in $10 million into each one.

• 42:24Speaker 01

  It's cheap if it fails quickly.

• 42:28Speaker 01

  If it takes a year to realize it's a failure, that's when it's really expensive. You know?

• 42:33Sam Parr?

  How much money do you invest to launch a new brand?

• 42:36Speaker 01

  Uh, you know, let's say, I, so I'm not a numbers guy at all. I'm the marketing positioning guy, so I'm just gonna guess a million bucks, something like that, you know, maybe 1.5, but by the time it's said and done, including resources and things like that.

• 42:53Sam Parr?

  So like five or 10 people?

• 42:55Shaan Puri?

  Well, it's not mostly people cost though, right? You're talking about the whole, the marketing.

• 42:59Sam Parr?

  Well, what I mean is you throw five or 10 people at something and then you give them a little bit of a budget to, for marketing.

• 43:06Speaker 01

  Uh, that's not the way our company does it. We do it differently than your standard incubator or whatever. So for example, our formulation team formulates all the products for all the brands. There's not a brand that has a specific formulator, for example. There's not a brand that has a specific, uh, copywriter.

• 43:30Shaan Puri?

  You're vertically integrated. You, you manufacture your own products. You're not.

• 43:35Speaker 01

  We don't manufacture our own products, but we formulate in-house.

• 43:38Shaan Puri?

  Okay.

• 43:39Speaker 01

  I have a team of people with deep backgrounds and science coats and all that stuff that are amazing at formulating products with high efficacy, that taste really good and are, you know, cost effective and still best in class. But I will just say quickly, if I can do a little, uh, pitch or whatever, we're looking to make acquisitions right now. We're looking to acquire great consumer product brands. We're looking to acquire startups in, in finance, you know, personal finance, like debt repair, credit repair, things like that, you know? We're expanding into some new categories this year. So if people are listening.

• 44:16Shaan Puri?

  Who should get it? What type of company? I'm the type of company that's A, B, and C, I should reach out to you.

• 44:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 44:21Shaan Puri?

  How do they reach out?

• 44:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, Sweet Spot is like 1 to 20 million in revenues, you know? So some proof of concept there that could benefit from working with people who are experienced in scaling. That's something that is, is we, uh, really a strong point for us that we can help with.

• 44:35Shaan Puri?

  How do they reach out?

• 44:37Speaker 01

  They can just, you know, hit me. I'm pretty easy to find. At Craig at Instagram. I read my DMs or Twitter or, you know.

• 44:47Shaan Puri?

  Okay, cool. Sweet. All right. So now to the ideas.

• 44:51Speaker 01

  Okay, so we do this for consumer product brands. Someone needs to do what we do for personal brands. There's a couple of companies that do it, but they have a slightly different model. So there's Mindvalley that partners with authors and speakers and they put them in the Mindvalley educational program, where I think it's like a Netflix for personal development, if I, if I understand it right.

• 45:14Sam Parr?

  And I, I was looking up Mindvalley last night. So it's like a 70 million, it's owned by this guy in Thai, where is he? In Indonesia?

• 45:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, you should have him on the show, actually. He's awesome. He's a friend of mine. I'll introduce you guys. His name's.

• 45:26Sam Parr?

  Yeah. So it's like a $70 million information brand and they sell to dumb it down. Like, I think one of their biggest products was like a $300 yoga course.

• 45:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's built an incredible business and he does a bit of what I have in mind. Though I think there's an opportunity for a company that just helps people in the thought leader space that don't want to learn marketing, really go big on their own personal brand. So my wife is a perfect example of someone who needs this. That's how I thought of it. My wife is a holistic health practitioner. She has a book coming out with Hay House that helps women with body image issues. She puts out amazing content. She's got a coaching practice with women all over the world that work with her 101. She's created courses, but she doesn't know how to market. She's actually become a great copywriter, but she doesn't know how to like run paid media and build out funnels and all that stuff.

• 46:21Speaker 01

  And so if there was a company that worked with people like her, and I also host an event in Los Angeles. If you guys, next time you guys are in town and you're allowed to see people in person, let me know. But we do an event where we, it's kind of like a mini TED meets pool party. We bring in speakers in all different areas and so many of the speakers say, Craig, I want to start doing courses and things like that. I don't know where to start. And, you know, some of them end up doing great products with Vision, but I think there's more of an opportunity also to partner with people. On a smaller scale than Vishen does, because I think he has like 40 or 50 people, but maybe run, you know, three to 10 amazing thought leader businesses under one umbrella and share resources.

• 46:58Sam Parr?

  You know what it's like is, do you know Tucker Max's company?

• 47:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, Scribe, yeah.

• 47:03Sam Parr?

  Yeah, okay, so it used to be called Book in a Box, which was a good explanation of what it is, but it wasn't a good name, and he changed it to Scribe. And what Tucker does is authors come to him, people who are consultants or like thought, kind of thoughty leader people, or people who just want to leave a legacy for their kids, they give him 25 grand, or he gives them 25 grand, and you sit with a ghostwriter and you tell your story and they turn it into a book, which sometimes that book is just, I want to give to my kids because I want them to have like a cool story about how I grew up, or I want to get speaking gigs, or I want to get consulting gigs. And what you're describing is almost like a service where you probably wouldn't want to pay upfront. What you'd want to do is find people like your wife, or people who are high caliber

• 47:47Sam Parr?

  folks, and you're like, look, we could turn this into a blog and then a course, and we'll get a percentage of the revenue.

• 47:53Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 47:54Sam Parr?

  That's interesting. That's interesting.

• 47:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 47:56Sam Parr?

  It's almost like a modern day Harper Collins, or a modern day Penguin, or something like that.

• 48:02Speaker 01

  That's the way to describe it, because it's not just about the book anymore. People want all that digital content.

• 48:07Sam Parr?

  Right.

• 48:08Speaker 01

  Brands like Double Your Dating and Catch and Keep them would be great examples for that. And Evan was actually getting into that with that incubator, where he had me teaching them copywriting, and he was going to bring them under the umbrella, and then he went into the biz, biz op space, you know, and got away from it. But yeah, that's one idea number, one idea that I think is waiting to be executed on, and I would love it if it existed. Okay, the second idea is something I came up with during an ayahuasca trip.

• 48:36Sam Parr?

  Oh, boy.

• 48:37Speaker 01

  I went on this trip really hoping to have a personal growth moment and a breakthrough, and I ended up building an app in my head for eight hours. I'm not a programmer or an app designer, so it was... Maybe a complete waste of time, but I hope someone builds this thing someday. Maybe that person is listening, so I'm gonna share it. So it's a message aggregator. You know, you get the messages on your email, on your DM and Instagram, on your Facebook, on your Slack, all that stuff, and they're just all over the place. Then you gotta go to 20 different things to answer all your messages every day. So this thing has a wheel that looks like a wheel facing you, like a slot machine wheel. And it puts all your emails there, and you can scroll through. But it also merges them with your to-do list, because a lot of those go together.

• 49:20Speaker 01

  And right now, emails and to-do lists don't connect. And they don't connect with calendar either. So imagine that wheel is your email, and then you can swipe over, and you can see the next wheel that comes up is your to-do list. Swipe over, the next one is your calendar. And you can swipe through, and it's all your messages from all those platforms combined. And when you hit one, and let's say you answer the email, it says, "Do you want to archive your to-do list item two? Do you want to take this off your calendar?" Or if you go and hit the to-do list, it pulls out all of the messages that might be related to that, whether it's on Slack, whether it's on Facebook, whether it's on Gmail. And it pulls them up, so it's got it on your screen, so you can just address it and get it done. And then it's a gamified system like a machine gun. So if you imagine the wheel like a machine gun turret, and it just keeps throwing emails

• 50:02Speaker 01

  and tasks at you, so you just bang them out and get them through your day to, you know, hopefully get to inbox zero, which is something I know nothing about, I've never had it before. But yeah, someone please build that thing, because I don't know how, and I would love to use it.

• 50:15Sam Parr?

  We've talked about Superhuman and Hey, hey.com. Have you paid attention to those?

• 50:21Speaker 01

  I pay Superhuman $30 a month. I've only used it a couple times. I've been paying for it here. I do like it, it's just a lot to learn with the keystrokes.

• 50:29Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 50:30Speaker 01

  And I haven't been able to figure that out yet. I haven't seen Hey, I have an invitation waiting for me in my inbox also. Though, I got a little turned off by what appeared to me from outside looking in. Now, I didn't go deep in it, but it seemed like this whole whining about Microsoft, your App Store taking money and stuff. Clogging up my Twitter feed, and I was just like, I don't want to have any part of this, because isn't that common, dollars that the App Store is gonna take their piece?

• 50:59Sam Parr?

  Right.

• 51:00Speaker 01

  I don't want to go down a tangent, but whatever.

• 51:03Shaan Puri?

  Okay, so the ultimate, I like the message aggregator side because I have the same problem. Twitter DMs, Instagram, email, text messages, whatever it is. And you sort of have to like, it's like, you know, when old people have to take all these pills because they have like all these conditions and they have this pill pack that's like, oh, I gotta, it's Monday, I gotta open these seven different lids and I gotta take these seven different pills and then by the end I'm zonked out. That's how I feel when I check my messages. And so if you could either make it fun or at least put it all in one place, in theory, I like that. I also, this, this is something that Paul Graham, the founder of Y Combinator, has talked a lot about, it's like, email is essentially a to-do list. Why is it not designed to work as a to-do list or with a to-do list? Somebody needs to do that, that will make a lot of money. And he wrote this like seven years ago, eight years ago.

• 51:48Shaan Puri?

  I, I think some people have tried, of course, people try everything, but no one's nailed it.

• 51:52Sam Parr?

  I, I like that and I think the hard part with that is monetization, but it's, it's something that Superhuman and Hay are doing that in a million years I never thought would work, but I now completely agree is charging money for it. Like you're, you know, like the, most people will be like, yeah, we'll make money from advertising or we'll get like a billion users and hopefully something turns out. But I think monthly fees for services like this is actually 100% the way to go.

• 52:15Speaker 01

  Are you guys both Bay Area guys?

• 52:17Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 52:17Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 52:18Speaker 01

  Okay, so I was up at a Google summit a couple of years ago and I was talking to a, a woman, I forget what company she was with. But she was talking about how Larry and Sergey back in the day were big proponents that you should never sell out to the man, meaning the advertisers. And then they acquired Google AdWords, which was called, I think, GoTo at the time.

• 52:44Sam Parr?

  Or DoubleClick.

• 52:46Speaker 01

  Okay, yeah, one of those.

• 52:49Speaker 01

  At the same time when they were debating, should we charge people $4.99 a month for Google? And that, that move right there. Ruined the world because now it's an advertising driven thing instead of a subscription thing. And she was telling this to me as though I should have known this and this was some type of thing that everyone in tech knew about. So I'm curious, is this something that you guys have heard before and believed in? And is there protests in front of Google? Or was there back in the day? Like, because that was the first time I'd heard of it.

• 53:19Sam Parr?

  There's definitely a revolt amongst high end insiders. And I have heard that story that they were like, we're never going to do advertising. But Google is, I think, pretty good for advertising. Like, it's like, high intention, or it's intent. Like, if someone's searching for something, they're

• 53:33Shaan Puri?

  It's effective. Yeah, for sure. It's effective to advertise on it in the same way that Facebook's really effective to advertise on it. But I think, I think you're bringing up a more philosophical first. So first, no, I actually hadn't heard that story that Google was sort of at a fork in the road moment, trying to decide whether they, hey, do we charge for our product? Or do we do this sort of free and then make money off ads system? And I do know that the sort of ethos went from like, advertising is a necessary evil, you know, for Facebook and for Google, early on, like, Zuck had no interest in ads, probably still doesn't have that much interest in ads. And it was sort of like, you know, can't be, or don't be evil was, you know, the phrase for Google, as their marketing message as far as how they're going to run things. And then now today, like, you know, the suits have taken

• 54:16Shaan Puri?

  over. It's a, you know, it's a public company. They have to, the, the, the job is to make as much money as they can. And so that's why you see things where, you know, if you look on the Google front page, it's like, everything is an ad until you scroll type of thing. And like, oh, how the, you know, how the times have changed. And so, yeah, it's different. And same thing with Facebook. Facebook was not, like, there's, there's interviews of Mark kind of casually sitting on an interview like this, talking about advertising and how it's kind of lame and how he doesn't really want to do it. Evan Spiegel, same thing. He thought advertising was creepy, the way it was done. It's like, that's their business model. So what are you going to do? You're going to hate your own business model? Or, you know, that's not going to work.

• 54:50Speaker 01

  I think long form copy is scammy, but

• 54:53Sam Parr?

  No, hey, I, look, I use long form copy. I, not everyone who uses long form copy is scammers, but a lot of scammers use long form copy.

• 55:04Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 55:05Sam Parr?

  But what's your

• 55:06Speaker 01

  I use your email, cold email technique.

• 55:10Sam Parr?

  Did it work?

• 55:11Speaker 01

  To get, it worked right away with

• 55:17Speaker 01

  Um, like a, a, oh, top 20 celebrity in the world?

• 55:22Sam Parr?

  Oh, man.

• 55:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I don't want to say it was, but it was, it was a, a pretty, pretty good move. So.

• 55:28Sam Parr?

  I need to charge some money for that. I think it's out there for free. Well, it's all trend subscribers have that, but yeah.

• 55:33Speaker 01

  Awesome, man. Can I pitch trends? I, I, you know, you and I only met for like five minutes at a conference.

• 55:38Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 55:38Speaker 01

  Hey, talk once in a while, but we're not like homies, you know?

• 55:42Sam Parr?

  Right.

• 55:43Speaker 01

  Pitch it. Trends is fucking awesome, man. It's so high value. I tell people to subscribe for trends. I actually wrote back once, or maybe I said this to you directly. I thought it was too good. I thought it was too much content to digest. It was just too long and too much great information, but I tell people to subscribe and the paying subscription to trends all the time. I think it's the, the best business newsletter that's out there.

• 56:02Sam Parr?

  I'm gonna, uh, clip this. We'll probably have this clip right now of me saying this in the ad and we're gonna run this as an ad. Thank you.

• 56:08Shaan Puri?

  The smile on Sam's face. I, I, I've never seen this guy smile like this. Uh, all right. I love it. You had a third idea as well.

• 56:16Speaker 01

  Okay. VR, I'm holding up an Oculus for people who can't see. Yeah. It would fit this on my dog's head. I don't know what it is, but it would fit. And how much fun would a dog have in VR chasing virtual tennis balls? You put like the haptic bite thing, you know, you'd be the device so they can bite on the virtual tennis ball and the dog just has like the greatest day every day. And the technology's here right now. Maybe it would need to get a little bit lighter, but it's, it's here, man. You know, the weight thing would definitely work with a bigger dog, German shepherd or something like that. You know, maybe in three years you can put it on the Shih Tzu, but this is, is here and no one's done it yet.

• 56:59Speaker 01

  And this thing like this, for example, what if there was a dog adapter for this actual Oculus? What if I could put this on my German shepherd and I'm not using it? Cause I don't wear this thing that often. You know, that is a billion dollar business.

• 57:11Sam Parr?

  Okay. So what you're saying sounds like a crazy person, but I want to give some perspective on this. Um, dog VR, you were just said dog VR and on the surface, that's a laughable idea. But when I, when I, as a dog owner and someone who's involved in a couple of dog businesses, I know you're involved in the pet business too, right?

• 57:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 57:29Sam Parr?

  Pet owners have the highest engagement I have ever seen. So like the pet companies that I'm associated with, and maybe you can verify this because you're a pet business owner. Is that the highest engagement amongst customers that you've ever seen? That was a loaded question, but.

• 57:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. You know, I'm just so far removed from the numbers, I couldn't exactly tell you. It's not as good as we thought, though, as far as.

• 57:54Sam Parr?

  That's interesting.

• 57:54Speaker 01

  Buying everything. We thought they would be more fanatical of buyers than they are. I will say what we did expect as, you know, I own four dogs. Once they start on the dog food, they don't want to switch because it's a very, it's the healthiest option with a convenience and it's just bad to switch your dog's food a lot. So that is true. But they don't like buy, that's been a hard business for us to get margin on because of the food costs and shipping and all that stuff, you know?

• 58:28Sam Parr?

  There's this company that was, that just raised $10 million today and they claim that their dog, it was either a pill or a food, that they're going to add one to four years to your dog's life. And they've hired all these scientists, they raised $10 million. And in my head, I'm like, can I, can I eat that food and/or can I eat the dogs that are eating that food? I'm like, what can I do to, what can I do to capture that?

• 58:52Speaker 01

  But. That sounds like a company asking for a lawsuit, though, because there's been huge lawsuits against companies that have made those claims in the past. So I don't know, did they do a 20-year study with 100 dogs or something? That sounds crazy. I'd love to know the name of the company.

• 59:07Sam Parr?

  It's called, I think they raised $10 million today. It's called Celivity. So C E L E, so like the word celebrity, C E L E V I T Y dot co.

• 59:22Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 59:23Shaan Puri?

  This is the fourth business idea. We're just going to collectively sue them and we'll make 10 million bucks. Pretty easily, so that's.

• 59:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, we get all of our dogs eating it and then we get the class action.

• 59:32Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I'm in.

• 59:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, big props to them. I'd love to check it out, you know? I'm going to pitch our dog food since people are.

• 59:41Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, do it.

• 59:42Speaker 01

  It's, you know, you should always be pitching, right? Have you guys seen the documentary, The Dog Doc?

• 59:48Sam Parr?

  No.

• 59:48Shaan Puri?

  Oh.

• 59:49Speaker 01

  You own dogs too, Sean?

• 59:50Shaan Puri?

  I have a dog and my dog is the pickiest eater and we've tried all these different dog foods and I'm trying to get her to eat something healthy and not like, the only food I know she likes is chips.

• 59:59Speaker 01

  Okay, well I'm gonna send you some of our dog food, but watch the documentary The Dog Dog. It's produced and directed by the same woman who produced Buck, the documentary on the horse.

• 1:00:07Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:07Speaker 01

  It's like an Oscar-worthy documentary and the star of it is a veterinarian. His name is Dr. Marty Goldstein. He's famous for saving Oprah's dog when every other vet said her dog was gonna die. He saved Martha Stewart's cats. He just has this little practice in Connecticut where people from all over the world would come, bring their dogs. He's actually retired now, but this is what he did. He would help all the dogs that no one else said could be saved and he would do it with nutrition. He'd take them off the medications and put them on his nutritional therapy and the healings are miraculous. And the documentary highlights it and it shows that not everything is perfect. You know, there's some cases that he couldn't help. It's a really great documentary and that is my partner for our pet food line. It's called Dr. Marty's. I sent you some, Sam. Did you give it to your dog?

• 1:00:53Sam Parr?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. You sent me that like three months ago? Yes, he's eaten it all.

• 1:01:00Speaker 01

  Cool, cool.

• 1:01:01Sam Parr?

  And we're good and he's healthy.

• 1:01:02Shaan Puri?

  Sam's dog literally eats everything. Like I've seen Sam, when he's done with his plate, he puts it on the ground and his dog eats the whole thing.

• 1:01:08Speaker 01

  Awesome. Well, you know, it might not be Dr. Marty's anymore if it's, I don't know if I sent you a six-month supply, but.

• 1:01:14Sam Parr?

  No, it was not six months, but he ate all of it.

• 1:01:17Speaker 01

  Good, good, good. Well, you know, hopefully that, that gave him some extra.

• 1:01:22Shaan Puri?

  So, we're kinda over time, but A, first you're a fucking great storyteller. I think you, you know, I'm smelling a regular friend of the pod who comes on with some regular cadence. This is great. I wanna ask you a question. So when exactly did you start Golden Hippo?

• 1:01:37Speaker 01

  Well, you didn't.

• 1:01:38Shaan Puri?

  2010. And so now.

• 1:01:40Sam Parr?

  Oh, five. He said five, right?

• 1:01:41Shaan Puri?

  Oh, 2005.

• 1:01:43Speaker 01

  So I got hired at Evans Company in like 2003, 2002, 2003. And then we parted ways basically the end of 2008.

• 1:01:56Shaan Puri?

  Oh.

• 1:01:56Speaker 01

  Uh, when the recession hit. And I had a lead generation company also. That also had to be basically shut down with recession. And that was a, I didn't get into that story, but it was a troubling time for me. I went from making really good money to making zero in like 30 days. And then in the midst of the recession is when we started Golden Hippo. And that's another reason why we didn't raise money. Aside from the fact that no one was going to give four jackasses with no college degrees a cent of VC money. You know, it was a recession and people weren't writing checks like they are today. So.

• 1:02:31Shaan Puri?

  So the thing I was gonna ask is now D to C has, you know, been hot. Me and Sam always joke, Sam loves to say, you know, if I see another brand that's just millennial pink lowercase, uh, you know, lowercase brand going into some established category, raise $10 million and burns it. Um, you know, we have friends that have been super successful with D to C e-commerce and that sort of thing. But you know, you see a lot of this happening. What's been your, A, what's your reaction as you've been seeing that? And you're like, dude, I've been here at this party for a while. And then also, um, how do you differ from the model that you see Silicon Valley chasing? And what do you think of that model?

• 1:03:09Speaker 01

  I don't know what they're doing, you know? It's, it's, it's, I, it impresses me because I don't know anything about it. Like if someone gave me $10 million, I wouldn't even know what to do with it. Instead, go start a new brand like, what do you do with $10 million? I guess if you're that dog company, you go, maybe now you do the clinical studies or something like that. You know, uh, I'm impressed by some of these brands. At the same time, I worry for some of them because I feel like you raise that money. And then you're going towards your next money, then you're going towards your next money. And then hopefully some big conglomerate grabs you before the rug's pulled out from under. That's what it feels like the business model of all these brands are to me. I saw a quote from Gary Vee that.

• 1:03:51Speaker 01

  Said, "Most of these DTC brands are out of business. They just don't know it yet." I don't know if that's necessarily true, but it's something I don't understand, you know?

• 1:03:59Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 1:03:59Speaker 01

  So, I am quite impressed by the companies that do that. And I read, I just got on the Twitter. You know, that was like, you know, my fifth tweet that wasn't about like, you know, "Here's my pizza I'm eating today." So, I just started reading the direct-to-consumer Twitter and I got on that Clubhouse, too.

• 1:04:20Shaan Puri?

  Yep.

• 1:04:20Speaker 01

  And most of the time when I see someone's theories on what you should do to start a DTC brand, it is not, they're not things I would do. So, they talk about, "You need to build a community." "You need to be omnichannel."

• 1:04:37Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 1:04:38Speaker 01

  "You need to do influencer marketing." I don't get that. I mean, it does work. I mean, Vital Proteins just sold for, you know, several hundred million dollars to Nestle on the back of influencer marketing. And I have heard that their EBITDA was next, was very low.

• 1:04:53Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 1:04:54Speaker 01

  You know, and it worked. So, I'm, you know, proud of them, but I just, it's not something I understand.

• 1:05:00Shaan Puri?

  Love it. Yeah, I like having the sort of, the other perspective, because I think it's really easy to just read the articles and be like, "Oh, that's the formula." But like, I'm more interested in somebody who's actually got a working formula that didn't, like fundamentally working formula. And yeah, I was curious about your take on that.

• 1:05:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, there's a lot of different ways to do it. Like I said, like some of my direct competitors will grab the email first. You know, it's just, just different ways of doing things. And I don't think there's a right or wrong. It's just what you're more comfortable with. You know, if I had come from Silicon Valley and had a college degree and, you know, worked at a Sequoia before I started this company, maybe I would have started it with 10 million bucks, who knows?

• 1:05:39Shaan Puri?

  Right. Sam, anything else before we go?

• 1:05:41Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I just had to ask you one more question, which is, we have a lot of people, this is similar to what Sean asked, who have raised a whole lot of money. And sometimes that's great, sometimes that's not great. But the stories that you're saying, you're saying that you went, you have a home that was confused for Mark Wahlberg's house, so you must have a lovely home. It's not, you said you have 900 team members and nine-figure company. How are you guys financing, financing all this? I mean, has it just been crazy profitable from the beginning? Or do you take debt? Like, what do you, how does this all work? And how are you able to cash flow so much?

• 1:06:21Speaker 01

  Well, it wasn't a choice, you know, we didn't have any money in the bank. And I came from a company that didn't have any money in the bank either, you know, Evan bootstrapped the dating advice brands. So, we just started, we had, there's four of us, three of us put in 20 grand each. We loaned our fourth partner his share, you know, so it ended up being 60 grand total. And then we just, you know, didn't have a choice, like it was either it's gonna make money, or we're gonna try something else.

• 1:06:53Sam Parr?

  And have you guys been crazy profitable every year? Or did it just start laying in?

• 1:06:58Speaker 01

  Just ask me the EBITDA, Sam, ask me the EBITDA. I mean, we, yeah, we've been profitable since day one, or else we would have had to go raise money, right? So, didn't need to take on outside funding. Now, we're talking to some people now, you know, we might take on some funding for some of these other categories we're getting in, like, you know, for example, like, dog food has been a tricky one, and that is a brand that I could see as potentially needing some cash for to really scale it up. You know, dog food's expensive, shipping's is expensive, it's hard to get the capacity in the manufacturing, you know, so, it's not something I'm ruling out, it's just not a world I come from. And had I known that world, maybe I would have, after we took that 60 grand and built

• 1:07:43Speaker 01

  it up to, you know, whatever we did the first year, I think we did, I don't know, half a million in revenue the first year, or something like that, maybe if I knew that world back then, I would have gone and done a VC roadshow and done that. I just don't come from that background, you know, I just, like, had no idea that that even existed until I started going to, like, Summit Series and meeting other people that had similar brands to mine that had raised money. And they also had these things called exits, and I didn't know that was a thing either, you know, so.

• 1:08:14Sam Parr?

  Well, that's why I'm bringing this up, because Sean and I, we're kind of middle of the road in terms of bootstrapping and not bootstrapping, but a lot of our friends are, they raise lots and lots of money, and sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. But, and I love having my frame broken and listening to other people do different things, so, it certainly is simple but hard, what you did, right? Like, you just make profit, I mean, that's, duh, that's like how businesses work, but that's what, it's always cool to see, whereas, a lot of people are starting stuff and they're waiting to exit in order to get their big payday, whereas you were kind of able to get paid along the way. And I think that's, I like talking about that and sharing those different stories of, there's a lot of different ways to make something happen.

• 1:08:51Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. One of the reasons the podcast is called My First Million is because I wanted to show all the different ways that people can make it. Like, there's no formula. There's no, you can't copy any of these, actually. But if you hear a hundred different stories, you'll start to be like, oh, okay, there's so many ways to win. And I'm going to be inspired by these people and I'm going to take parts of their stuff, their story that is relevant to my context and make it happen. But like, like Sam said, we want to hear the variety of different paths, not just like the same story over and over and over again. Then you think, oh, there's only one way to win.

• 1:09:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, that you're, the podcast name makes me laugh too, because I once met a Russian guy and he said something I'll never forget. And he said, we started talking about business or whatever. And I said, hey, you know, tell me about this and that. And he goes, never ask a man how he made his first million.

• 1:09:39Shaan Puri?

  Dude, that should be the intro of the podcast. A Russian, a Russian voiceover just saying that.

• 1:09:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, but then you hear about, you know, these people, you know, it's like, like Sam, I think I saw a tweet that you did that you like Andrew Carnegie's biography or whatever.

• 1:09:53Sam Parr?

  Loved it, yeah.

• 1:09:54Speaker 01

  And the guy was insider trading. That's how he made all his money.

• 1:09:58Sam Parr?

  All those guys were. Joe Kennedy, they all were. It was all illegal shit.

• 1:10:04Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, Hamilton Blenders started off selling sex toys, you know, and then it like turned into a blender because they had that like vibration technology. How many people made their money in prohibition and, you know, smuggling alcohol? It's just a funny saying. So I like that you guys are digging in and asking that question.

• 1:10:20Sam Parr?

  Yeah, most people would be shocked. Like Joe Kennedy, he made his first million by Hertz, which at the time was a cab company. He, George Hertz was like, hey, you gotta make my stock better. And so he would buy all the stock and then hurry up and sell it to a pool of investors. And it was not, it wasn't illegal, but it was probably unethical. But of all the biographies I read, a lot of it starts that way.

• 1:10:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. I had, I had made my first before I started Golden Hippo. I had also lost it all. So, you know, it's, it's a different thing, keeping it and making it.

• 1:10:52Shaan Puri?

  Craig, do you have kids?

• 1:10:54Speaker 01

  Uh, no, but trying to.

• 1:10:56Shaan Puri?

  Okay, so let's say you you have a son or a daughter. They just turned twenty two and they're like, Dad, I want to learn about copywriting. What do you what do you point them to as like kind of ABCs of copyright? Where would you where would you send somebody for the first kind of thirty or sixty days of going down that? Try to become great at it.

• 1:11:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I always tell people to read a book called My Life in Advertising, which was written by Claude Hopkins. He's one of the greatest copywriters in the nineteen twenties.

• 1:11:20Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:21Speaker 01

  The psychology back then is the same as today. And I tell them to read My Life in Advertising, which is his biography, not his copywriting book. Because it talks about how he built all these great brands that are around today, like Hoover Vacuum and Goodyear Tire and Pepsodent Toothpaste. And it's just really fascinating stories. And if someone doesn't enjoy those stories, then copywriting is not going to be for them.

• 1:11:41Shaan Puri?

  Gotcha. Okay, cool.

• 1:11:42Speaker 01

  And I also tell people to buy that one because it's free. You can just Google and you can find it as an ebook. And it often is alongside his copywriting book, which is called Scientific Advertising. So you can knock them both out of it.

• 1:11:54Sam Parr?

  Do you know that story, Sean, about Claude? Basically, uh, toothpaste didn't like it. Toothpaste wasn't like that good of tasting, but he made this ad where he says, if you rub your tongue above your teeth, you'll you'll feel film about, uh, and we're going to get rid of that film with toothpaste. And then he also said it like something to the effect of like, it hurts in a good way. Like the way that you feel that like, that like crisp feeling in your mouth with toothpaste. That actually, that that way you know it's working. Like he would, he would do things like that. So people like it became a habit. He created, he's the one who like helped make toothpasting it, uh, toothpaste a daily habit.

• 1:12:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, people, only five percent of people were brushing their teeth daily in the United States. Before Pepsodent came out, within ten years, it was eighty five percent.

• 1:12:37Shaan Puri?

  Wow, that's kind of amazing. I always have felt that copywriters and comedians are the the truth tellers of society. They they understand people the best and they're they're able to, because they understand people. You can't be a great comedian if you don't understand people, if you can't tell the truth. And you can't become a great copywriter if you don't understand people and you can't can't tell the truth. And then there's a whole bunch of jobs that are the opposite.

• 1:12:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, definitely. We should jam out maybe next time since I know we're out of time. But there's so many stories like that about these daily life things that were created by marketers. Like orange juice, for example, most people don't know that was invented by marketer. Bacon and eggs was invented by marketer. It's like all these things I don't even want to get. It's such a deep rabbit hole.

• 1:13:16Shaan Puri?

  Fascinating stuff. All right, well, you got to come back on. This is dope. Thanks for doing this. This is fun. Fun to meet you. And yeah, I hope everyone enjoys this episode. Yeah, thanks for having me, guys. This has been a blast.

• 1:13:26Sam Parr?

  This is great. I appreciate it. Thank you.