"We're in a TikTok gold rush" - 5 Business Ideas To Start Before 2025

all right Sam in the next hour I am going to flood you with business ideas I am going to create an absolute lunchroom food fight slinging business ideas at you you are going to be drenched and covered with ideas are you prepared for [Music] this great analogy the lunchroom one did you just that up yeah that was very good by the way all of these ideas very half-baked came to me you know I would say 75% of them I thought of this morning because we had a guest cancel and we said let's record anyways and

how about we do some business ideas let's give the people what they want it the season of giving and we're going to give the people what they want which is fun business ideas well the first one you actually have a lot of intel on right you actually use this the first one I have some bets I have some bets on horses and those horses are are currently paying out and I haven't been talking too much about it but I think it's time so Tik Tok let's talk about Tik Tok Tik Tok right now if you

open up your phone do you have Tik Tok on your phone no okay for some of you you might have trouble opening the app because there might just be millions of dollars jammed in the app and it's a little bit like stuck so it might be hard to open up because there is so much money available in Tik Tok right now like do you use Tik Tok as a user of course I'm a Tik Tok addict oh that's why I don't use it I I had it and I deleted it I I love Tik Tok

I have a lot of fun on it um but I also have a couple of business bets that are doing really well in this space and I think right now people are sleeping on it when you say business bets do you mean things that you own or Investments of other people I own equity in companies that are doing this that's what I'm asking okay so you invested in companies that are doing this not something you fully own and not operating correct I'm trying not to operate anything at this point yeah cuz that like Insight is

a little bit different yeah yeah but these are all like uh there is something in between so there's like Angel Investing which is you write the check sort of passive uh you're on the outside I would say you're on the other side of the fence they lob you updates over the fence and then there's things where you own you know 10 20 30 40% of the company and you're active you're more actively in in the loop you're not active dayto day with your hands but you're active with your ears and your mouth all right so

anyways right now on Tik Tok um Tik Tok today is a little bit like Facebook was maybe 2012 to 2014 and if you remember you at that time were working out a place called Founders dojo and um there was a guy who used to work there named Mo Ali and mo Ali today is more famous because he started a brand called native deodorant um you want to give the like two seconds of what it was like being at the founder Dojo when he was creating native basically it was this guy who went to Harvard Harvard

Law I think and so he was like clearly smart and he had a small Ecom startup that he sold for like $4 million or something like that so very promising but still like you know he he was young and he's like what am I going to do in the founders Dojo which was like my little uh 10 person office that I shared with some other guys he was looking for something to sell he thought mattresses he thought a few other things eventually he landed on deodorant and right in front of us literally every day he

learned how to use Facebook ads in in a very short amount of time scaled his deodorant business from zero to just an idea to something like 30 or 40 million in Revenue in literally 18 months eventually sold it for $100 million in cash in like 24 months all right in front of us yeah 2 and a half years end to end uh from time of start to time of exit $100 million sold to practor gamble okay so why did he do that one he picked a interesting category but he was doing something that not every

not a lot of other Harvard graduate smart people were doing and at that time on Facebook you could get traffic for very cheap you could get sales for very cheap and he was able to build up a consumer base at the right place at the right time basically by the way I saw his sheet uh we wrote an article on it and he like sent it to me I think he was spending $4 and the each customer who we spent $4 to acquire was then spending $16 with him I believe that was the numbers so

it was like a moneymaking machine okay yeah I'm not sure the math but it was something like that it was sort of like you know four to1 5 to1 six to1 payout on on every dollar okay so which is very hard to achieve today today uh you know 1.5 is the new four to one right so basically you put in a dollar you get a150 oh that that same machine used to give you $4 for every dollar man those are the good old days well the good old days are right now on Tik talk and

so what's actually happening so here here's the breakdown of how this actually works so you create a product of whatever type could be digital could be physical great product now I want you to look at something go down on our sheet there is uh on page four there's an infographic and it's from a brand called goalie you know what goalie is it's apple cider vinegar gummies so they just sell gummies like gummy vitamins but specifically ACV apple cider vinegar which was kind of like a health Wellness Trend and craze now goalie dude first of all

you could put anything in a gummy I guess like in a like it started with weed understood then like I do creatine that way now you could do the the last thing that I thought you could possibly do in a gummy which is vinegar yeah yeah and actually if you drink apple cider vinegar tastes horrible the goalie gummies taste great it's like you know it's apple cider vinegar without the pain okay so goalie itself was a business that grew like crazy from zero to hundreds of millions in Revenue I think they ran into financial trouble

they they had to sell bankruptcy something like that they were like they got way ahead of their skis the group that bought it has basically restarted it and one of the main things that they're doing is this Tik Tok Creator method that I'm talking about so look at this infographic this is a Rewards program for Tik Tok creators so if you're a Tik Tok Creator not only do you get a little Kickback on what you sell but if every month you hit a certain sales Target you can get something so low tier you know, 1500

gmv you can get an iPad all right cool 4,000 gmv meaning you sell $4,000 worth of product you you get an iPhone all right let's keep going up 15,000 in gmv you get an all-inclusive trip to Aruba 50,000 you get a Rolex two and more you get the Aruba trip the iPad and you get the Rolex right they're stacking now let's go to the high tiers there are people that have done a million dollars they get a condo in Miami if you do a million dollars I think this is in a month um of your

your gmv Target and so they're going to creators they say hey do you want this condo in Miami it could be yours so creator is one way that you can make money on Tik Tok so you don't even have to do the brand or service you could just say I am going to sit here and figure out how the [ __ ] to sell apple cider vinegar gummies and if I do if you get a if you get a million they give you a Lamborghini yeah oh my God and and there's people who have achieved

these targets okay so this is their program right now so this is who you're competing against if you're going and trying to recruit these creators it's like you're a division one college basketball program and you're trying to go get McDonald's all-americans to come play at your your program like there are guys it's like oh man there's this kid in Witchita this guy's just a creative genius he's he just sits in his bedroom and he just figures out the best hooks the best angles and brands are putting them on retainer 10 20 $30,000 a month in

order to get this guy to create for them this is what's happening right now in the Creator space how many views do the big videos have millions tens of millions of views they can get they can get like a million likes on a video so you get a million likes you might have had five million views or six million views this is crazy that like there's a guy dressed up in Scrubs talking about it I have no idea if he's actually works in the medical industry but because he's wearing scrubs I'm like all right what

do you what do you got to say all right my friends so a lot of you guys who listen to the show you listen because you want to start a company but you're not sure what idea to choose or you may not even have an idea and you like our podcast my first million because we've done a lot of the work for you on researching all these business ideas well my friends we've made life a lot easier for you because HubSpot they just put together together an entire list of all the resources that you can

use to find a market opportunity to validate for your next business idea so if you're looking for a market size calculator or tools to identify market trends or a huge list of ideas to get started so if you're interested there's a link below click it and you can have access to the whole thing it's completely free now back to the show okay so goalie did this gurunanda teeth whitening are you familiar with this I think the teeth whitening area is full of scammers and I think that you are not a scammer for using Tik Tock

shop but I think a lot of these scammers use this [ __ ] this like Tik Tok thing like this way and so it doesn't surprise me that a teeth whitening company would be using it I'm not by the way I'm not saying these guys are scammers at all but you know what I mean yeah but but I'm also not saying they're not no no no no no no I have no idea about this brand but I know I've seen a lot of like [ __ ] teeth whitening companies and I like look into the

research and I'm like oh this ises nothing yeah I I don't know the effectiveness of any of these things all I know is that these uh they're selling a lot of product I think the guru nand teeth whitening is the number one selling product on all of Tik Tok and Tik Tok is the number like kind of the most used app in the country basically right so you have this like top selling product on the top selling network uh it's pretty insane and so if they're the top on Tik Tok how much revenue do you

think they do I have tried to back into this I don't I don't know the exact I don't want to say a number that's going to be way off on this podcast would it be crazy to say like 5 million bucks a month I don't think that would be crazy no okay let me put it that way the brands that are doing this strategy well are doing really well and you and and by the way this creates a halo effect right so you you sell the products directly off that one video but then people hear

about it and then when they see their ad the ad performs better because I've heard about this product before oh yeah I've seen 10 10 videos about this product so now when you put the paid ad in front of me those 10 organic Impressions paid off or I go search for it on Amazon Amazon then takes that signal and says wow people really are searching for this name maybe we should surface it higher or Google says may we should surface this higher people are searching for this keyword brand so with that product category so in

that product category give it more rank so there's this multiple multiplier effect of this I have to imagine this is fairly mainstream though because marketers are like piranhas like when there's like flesh in the water like they all like one person tells one person and they all flock to it and they eventually ruin it so how much life does this still have and how mainstream is this amongst brands um let's say it's in the Red Zone still so basically it's not as good as when I first discovered it and I didn't want to talk about

it on the Pod because it's too good right like when something's just like absolute Gang Busters right and it's unfair Advantage you feel like you know a secret nobody else knows it's not there however more importantly it's still at a spot where you can go do this today it would still work if you just go and do this today so still works but you're not the only one doing it right both both are true I have you and like 10 other friends in the Ecom world and every business they complain about a variety of things

with software it's churn whatever uh with Ecom the complaint oftentimes is cash flow and inventory you're saying huge numbers let's say hypothetically 5 million a month $60 million a year but is that actually a good business when you're doing this or is this one of those things that if you get big you still are broke look if you're bad at business you'll find a way to lose money in any business even the goalie example I gave you right hundreds of millions of dollars and basically went bankrupt along the way so so there are ways to

lose to to snatch defeat from the jaws of Victory um there are also people that are absolutely printing profitably with this and so I've seen both I've seen both examples I don't think it's about the model I think it's about how well you actually run your business and how much common sense you use one of the great things about this from a cash flow perspective is normal Ecom business you put up the money for the ad you put up the capital at risk in order to get users with this you only put up free product

at risk so you send inventory to the Affiliates the Affiliates create create the content you pay nothing for that ad until the sale is generated dude so if you're a digital product you crush it here exactly so I have a couple of examples of of digital products as well in my list so okay here we go that's a long setup for five ideas that I think you could take onto Tik Tok and crush with right now number one so I want you to watch this video it's uh go scroll down and look at this link

that says Botox so the video starts says face taping is my jam and then the other podcast goes tell me about this and she goes if you had told me 14 months ago that I would not be doing Botox and I would be taping my face instead I would have said you're effing out of your mind so what a hook right so this girl basically saying I used to Bo use Botox and now I use this and I would have thought this is crazy and then the other girl's like tell me more so this video

itself has a quarter million likes uh I don't know how many views this thing has by the way they have it so usually it's like Bros it's dudes like discussing stuff in a podcast setting that that becomes like the meme this is like two pretty women is this even a real podcast or they this one is a lot of people fake these but this is the the wellness process podcast so that video has five 5.4 million views okay so and they're not selling a product to be clear a lot I mean look at the comments

every single comment is what's the brand anyone know the brand cuz she says there's this Japanese face tape and anytime you say Japanese face tape versus just face tape already elevated and everybody's asking for the brand nobody knows what the heck's going on some people are criticizing it's a polarizing thing it's a visual thing these are good things when you want to sell on Tik Tok so idea one is Botox face tape I think you can make $50 million in Topline Revenue I'll say 15% margins so you know whatever that comes out to in the

next 18 months okay let's be more conservative 24 months if you hit this well so you can make you know7 half million dollar profit you could build a brand because there's a lot if you look at the market there's a lot of people that are um on Tik Tok that obviously care what they look like AKA everybody there's a lot of people who are Botox curious but never going to pull the trigger because it's either too expensive like individual Botox treatments are like thousands of dollars or they just feel like it's too extreme and they're

Crossing that threshold into plastic surgery and they don't want to do it for that reason maybe some maybe they'll be judged maybe self resect maybe they have to go somewhere it's uncomfortable it's like hims right there a bunch of barriers reasons why you wouldn't do it dude I looked up if this works on chat gbt the answer is no who knows right health and wellness is like one of these things right like do those little do those little like fa uh Jade face rollers work you know do just putting cucumber slices on your eyes and

and doing a like uh Ari came on here the other day I was like Ari you're glowing she's like I did a chemical peel and I was like I don't know what that is tell me more there's a whole world of beauty treatments that like have some on the spectrum of Effectiveness and cost they you know they land somewhere all I'm saying is that I think this could work I don't know if red light therapy is going to change your skin and your hair but you know it's it's selling is kind of my point right

now I'm not a doctor I can't make Health claims I have a friend who is uh went is a doctor and anyway she does Botox for people and she was at my house and she had her kit with her and she was like I need to like test this out and we were like did you get BOTOX curious I was like looking at her I was like whip that whip that sucker out baby let's do this and so she gave me a little injection like 6 weeks ago where I got in my forehead uh like

like I was like you know I like I don't even know if I want to do this but like I'm a guinea pig you know you got a needle you got drugs like I'm going to try I would love to hear this excuse you're about to make right out you're like I like science and I just thought you know I wanted to be a supportive friend of hers and I wanted more small businesses what are your other reasons that you did Botox tell me let's make a list of Sam's reasons did besides I wanted to

look better go ahead looking dope naked I mean there's like that's the only reason why anyone does anything uh right uh uh but it was I got so many compliments afterwards did you really yes I got so many compliments and it was freead they someone says you look really young people kept saying I looked young and I was like and it made me self-conscious on how I used to look like and oh dude you're hooked have you ever you would never do that you're not into that right no dude come on would you what would

you say if your wife wanted to do it I think my wife does want to do it but she's in that that boat where she's like I I don't really want to do it but I want to do I'm curious like it's the same I bet you if somebody was at the house and had the kid and was like yeah I can do it right now I think she would be like you and I I think her forehead would start looking smooth or whatever it does yeah like she was right here I was like yeah

I mean if the needle's right there like stick it in me like let's let's do the damn thing so ites driving to Taco Bell right now but door Dash if it brings it to me I wouldn't not eat it if it's there so uh yeah I guess you could say I'm Botox curious I think Beyond curious activated all right what's the next one all right next one uh another one the beauty space and there a theme Here Beauty things are tap into a core human desire they are visual by Nature they can have before and

afters and they obviously are you know high margin great businesses when you can build them and so I want to take anything that worked in the D Toc in the in the prior waves of e-commerce and I want to see if I can build a Tik Tock native distribution strategy around it that's a lot of fancy words to say if it worked with Facebook ads I'm going to see if it worked with Tik Tok videos okay so one of the big Winners I think she spoke at your conference was a br called Madison Reed dude

there's a location right down the street from my house I think they do really well yeah so Madison Reed has built a real Empire around hair color and I don't know the full story but basically you know hair color is not a new idea they ex you know there were many brands that existed my mom has been buying this ever since I was a little kid you know she would go to Target and buy you know dark Browns cuz she didn't want gray hair or she in my sister if she wanted to try it damn

you're going to do your mom like that oh D dude if I'm grayed up you don't think my mom's grayed up like obviously obviously and so you know my sister would if she wanted to try having lighter hair for a season whatever go buy hair color so Madison Reed basically built a you know kind of online first distribution strategy so a bunch of Facebook ads and built a huge brand in the space I think Madison re I don't know what they're worth but I would not be surprised I just looked it up Topline Revenue grew

20% last year to uh $150 million in Revenue yeah so the valuation something like 500 million plus so huge success um I think you could do a new Madison Reed on Tik Tok I think that's just a bet worth taking which is same idea maybe you have some new novel angle maybe it's that it's easier to apply maybe it's that it's less messy in your cleanup maybe it's uh less harsh chemical so it doesn't damage your hair the same amount whatever come up with your your reason why this is new and build the brand off

of Tik Tok and I think you could do this again with creators who are going to use the product show the customers build trust build your brand get people searching for your brand because there's not there's always going to be a new wave of people who are interested in this right so there's either people who are whose hair is starting to gray um there's always going to be a new generation and so whatever the old whatever whatever media they consume is where you need to be in order to sell that right like remember like Touch

of Gray or whatever like men's whatever the men's hair color one you know they did it on TV ads and the Madison re did was Facebook ads whatever the next generation is they're probably going to get sold to over Tik Tok and Instagram reals and you know what's funny is uh you said there's a new generation that wants this stuff but you know what has not changed and will always be the same is the hooks that worked in 1910 will still work today so for example there's this Wall Street Journal ad that tells the story

of two young men one young man when they both when they both graduated college one young man got a Wall Street Journal subscription and because of that he got a better career whatever and it tells a story there are so many ads that replicate that story or that idea successfully because if you Google like best Wall Street Journal ad of all time they csite that ad and so what I like to do um is find old ads from as late as the 30s the 40s like it could be like uh print magazine ads and just

see like what's like an interesting line yeah what's like the human nature Vibe of this and just rip it so like for example there's this one very famous ad where it says they laughed at me S when I sat down but then when I started to play the piano dot dot dot and that's called The Curiosity gap which is do you remember the brand you know uh BuzzFeed and then what was the other one called Upworthy it was like uh you know 10 reasons why blank you're not going to believe number seven that's the same

hook as that piano ad and so it's really fun to find old ads and just be like what's the human nature element of this and just replicate it on Tik Tok exactly exactly great way to find hooks okay here's a here's a different uh different category so I did Beauty let me give you a different one self-help so one of the top selling products in the last year is something called The Shadow work Journal have you heard of this no but uh that's a great name Shadow work Journal so you get a if if you

go look on Amazon or t oh I've seen this I have seen this the Amazon listing for this currently has over 5,000 ratings and this is like a self-published type of book and this journal on Tik Tok has sold over 100,000 copies you know you know how rare it is for a book to sell 100,000 copies in like the first year that had ever existed with no other promotion um so this was a was a huge success and basically it was like um people on Tik Tok would they'd have the book open they'd be like

like the gasp I gasped when I read this line and you're like all right what's the line and then they'll read you this like kind of heavy emo-ish quote from this journal and then it's like or they be like you know um I finally figured out my this like my my true Shadow you're like what and it's like you know it kind of gets into like this whole like you know like the gypsy girl type of vibe it's like there's a whole like group of people that love therapy that love like horoscopes there's like these

like weird vend diagrams that you can find where it's like people who are really into sort of the Mystic self and so this book capitalized on that I think today if you were to write I don't know why I said you I should have said me if I were to write a modern-day version of you know Tony robbins's book un least of power within or Mark Manson's book The subtle art of not giving a [ __ ] I think if I wrote a modern version of those and I just pumped let's say nine months and

a quar million dollars of effort into seeding it on Tik Tok I think I could have a by far a best seller I think I could sell you know millions of copies of a book this isn't a book right is this like one of those things where it's a journal it's like two word or two pages three pages of of of writing and then a week's worth of like no no no this is not like a planner it's not like a daily planner it's I mean I haven't read the whole thing but like it's basically

it's a lot of text content but then there are like Fillin the blanks or like what's that for you in a box and you write in your box but it's not like it's not like just it's not just days and you you you need a journal in it yourself have you seen design your life is that what it's called yeah designing your life it's like a book by like you know it hits all the check marks where it's like a Harvard psychologist who spent 30 years studying happiness and lifestyle design Stanford I think yeah yeah

like writes a book on this and then it's a it's a cool book I read it and then now they have like a journal that goes along with it and you could just look at this and be like what works and what doesn't work uh but yeah and by the way the I don't know if this angle would work with you because did you have you Googled the author of that shadow yeah yeah she's very aspirational she's different than me very aspirational little that's not nobody knew nobody can see that when they're when they're buying

the when they're just watching a Tik Tok because it it wasn't like it didn't look like a commercial for the book it was just somebody saying how this line in this book book really spoke to them or how this book changed the way they view things like there's a whole um hook on Tik Tok that's very famous where they say some it starts with somebody saying um do you have any book recommendations and then they Zoom the camera in really close to their nose and their eyes they go I have books that will change the

way you even like look at the world I would I have books that will be so good you will never be able to look at a man again and they're like romance books or whatever like I have books that will melt the frontal lobe of your brain and they go like really intense with it and that's a that's like a common like memed hook that they use so the first it's like the first video by the way I like how you were like I don't know if you could do this this girl's hot was the

thing you basically just tried to tell me well she's a 25-year-old like I'm looking at this New York Times article by the way she's 25 which is just amazing she's like a 25-year-old like really pretty woman and that's like Tik tok's demographic like you know you're like you're a in Tik Tok world the videos are not her uh the videos are whatever uh the videos are from the Creator the Creator just looks how the Creator looks they they don't look like her and this is amazing by the way you know I think at one one

point you were like I feel like I'm riding a horse like a few years after Henry Ford invented the car uh like it's just like it's you can't compete when I see these videos and these plans I think to myself I can never compete in this world of Ecom this is just insane like the way that they St like the way that you were describing Zoom in on someone's eyes if I were in that meeting and trying to figure out how to do it or in my bedroom like at night trying to like figure out

like how do I write this script I would have been like this is like this is like cringe like I can't do this do you know what I mean never be able to push post yeah like I I can't you know what I mean it's really hard I totally get what you mean and I'm by the way I'm not saying that these are easy to do I don't I don't mean to say that I just mean that somebody's going to do these and I think the way to think about this is what are your attributes

so for you and me at this point if we want to do something that's going to be you know successful we have other attributes like well I could just use capital I have a lot of capital I could just invest in things that are already working that's an easy way to make money um I have a good Network I have a unique Network where I know a lot of people who are doing interesting things and they will uniquely let me into something okay that's cool maybe I have this audience from the podcast so I have

attributes if your attributes are I got a [ __ ] ton of time I have nothing to lose and I have pretty Shameless with my phone right 24 and I grew up like mastering this stuff yeah I just been effing around on Tik Tok or I understand the meta game here better than whoever is the brand marketing manager or the head of paid acquisition for Madison Reed or whatever these things are then you're the one right Moyes it's like I get that I can go to Facebook ads and Tinker on this all day in a

way that Proctor and gambles head of head of marketing is not going to do they're going to be buying Super Bowl ads they're not going to be sitting here in Facebook ad manager every day and doing that but but you know you get what I mean right like you have different advantages than the incumbents do and I think if your advantage is that you grew up on these networks or you you're willing to hustle with with in a way that they're not you're willing to sit there and slide into DMS and send out free product

and do all this stuff you can win and you can win in in in these categories that already exist when I was with Moyes during that I mean when I say with him like he was just we know we weren't like we were just acquaintances but I would just see him on his computer and he' like everyone check this out and like she he would track the numbers every single day in this spreadsheet and be like we just changed this number from a 1% to a 1.25% and then it was like now that 1.25 that's

the standard for that day now we're going to add in this one new change we're going to add a yellow or a red arrow pointing at this one thing boom we just got that 1.25 to 1.4 tomorrow we're going to do that like it was like a methodical like it was basically like I would joke I just call I was like dude we're all just spreadsheet monkeys cuz like all tring to do is he was just doing was just staring at the spreadsheet turning 1.4 to like 1.6 you know what I mean right well I

think by the way he's not he wasn't just like that kind of at the beginning and now he's like oh he's made it so he's different no he's he's still the same way dude I had a question for him about our econ Biz I was like hey here's how we're keeping track of this we're trying to use this I don't know if I should trust this or if I should trust Google analytics or if I should trust [ __ ] whale or I should trust Shopify analytics they're all give me slightly different numbers like how

do you how did you you do it and I just figured I just figured he'd be like you know I just you I just kept it simple I just did this and he goes he did say I just kept it simple and I was like oh okay cool so which one did you just you just picked one and he goes no I just kept it simple every day I went in and I wrote down the numbers for all the platforms every single day here's my sheet and he was still doing it now this is like

10 years later the guy's animal yeah $100 million later and he wakes up in the morning and he sits down he triangulates and he tracks he goes yeah they never drift between you know more than 4% but I just do it anyway so I'm just like it's kind of like um almost like a daily practice almost like a like a almost like a religious act he would do every day a spiritual act he would do sort of an offering to the economic Gods if you're a chef at a bakery and you've worked there for 20

years you know that if you leave the dough out for an hour versus 45 minutes before you put it in the oven you're going to have a very minor difference because you've done that thousands of times and that's basically like the same thing you know what I mean like you notice these very small differences uh I admire his um tenacity uh towards things I don't think he does anything in a not tenacious way uh all right let me continue I got two more ideas for you okay so I did beauty stuff I did a book

or self-help and by the way that's how Mark Manson made subtle art of not giving a f like tens of millions of copies sold he was blogging before that and built a Blog audience and he used the blog audience to launch the book and that was dude a Blog audience seems like so old school uh like when I'm hearing this because a Blog takes 10 years and hundreds of thousands of words and potentially hundreds or thousands of posts dude I've told this story before but I'm going tell it again because there's a lot of new

listeners there was a time when I was building an at about you know five to 10 years ago where I was building an app that we thought would be a big hit in high schools oh dude teens teens will love this app so I said well what are we doing we're all just 20 to 30y old guys sitting in this office we got to let's let's go show this to some teens so we went first we stood outside of a a Chipotle we said free burrito if you test our app they looked at us like

we were creeps but they took our free burritos tested the app said all right we we need to get more people saying yes right now only one out of 10 is willing to take a risk I said how do we just go to where they're a captive audience they're trapped so we went to a school we said hey I'd love to come in and teach a class on business and it and at the end I'm going to tell him about our new app is that okay so they said yeah sure we came in we basically

got to be a substitute teacher and I remember going up in front of the class I think this is like a n9th or 10th grade class and I was like uh we're telling them about their app and they're like all right like we'll try it like just give us the app I was like cool so um you just got to get the test flight and we put a uh link on the uh said can we just pull up the link and then you guys just go to this go to this URL uh just go to

this link and then you'll get the app and there's was it was it like sean.com J l498 whatever I was just like just write it down it's just a just do this link and the guy in the back just looks up and his phone was all like cracked and whatever he just looked at me he just goes links are gay and I can tell you there was no recovering from that and he said that the whole class just stopped typing they're like yeah he's right links are gay links are gay that's what's like today blog

it's like if I said hey I'm starting a blog because I really want to use this as kind of like building my audience to promote my book I'm going to do they'd be like blogs are gay is what like that ninth grader would have shouted at me just like absolutely humiliating me dude but what's old is New Again it'll come back eventually hopefully hopefully uh all right so two last ideas candy candles click this link and uh if you're on YouTube You'll see this on on our video screen it's important to look at these because

these are you're selling a visual product so go down and see where I put candles just watch that video right there oh my God it's all right a mason jar holy crap wait those are not are those real Oreos so it's a mason jar with a lady dipping what looks like Oreos and animal crackers is as if she's making like a Oreo smoothie with whipped cream in a mason jar exactly but the but instead of the Smoothie it's wax that's wax I thought that was realing cuz this is a candle no this is a candle

these that's wax I don't know if the Oreos are real or not I can't tell but that's what I'm saying I can't of course it's not real look at the numbers on this video all right it has 600,000 likes holy [ __ ] how many views does this have I don't know this so this woman had as and she's just like a lady she's like a baker she just made that video so I saw that video and I was like oh man um this could be a product why do I believe this so one just

like I said I wanted to take things that worked in the Facebook ads Heyday and be like could I translate this into with the new distribution engine another version of that is take anything that sells well in an MLM because Tik Tok kind of works the same way Tik Tok is basically you you give your product to a bunch of people they go and then shill it to their Network and their Community that's how an MLM kind of works without the the pyramid part of the the scheme but this lady's work is so good like

I'm clicking there St it's like it's like Frappuccinos and [ __ ] like coffee that looks like it makes me I want to eat it I want to drink it but it's a candle I want to eat it drink it smell it I want all of it right and that's what I'm doing it's a basically a sensory overload and that's if I see that I think this will perform this will perform if we if we armed creators this if we had in a volume this content will always perform it has this oddly satisfying sort of

delicious thing and people who like candles Love candles there's actually I said that wrong there's nobody in between you either don't use candles or You Love candles there's nobody who just kind of likes candles uh that's a candle purchaser and so that's why if you go look up successful mlms and I did this one night and I should have done an MFM episode on it but like you can go break down successful mlms and you could try to figure out what product categories are they in because those are categories that you could go into and

be successful with if you just took out the MLM same product has the same desire but use a new oils yeah there's a bunch of them and so like candles is a huge one so I think I think candy candles could be a category that somebody goes into and I'll give you one last one um 23 and me so 23 and me was this like really interesting company it got really big but the company is blown up it is like self- imploded it still does $300 million a year of Revenue but theyve basically the board

all resigned they quit the company's losing money the stock is in the tank it's like worth nothing now dude they had a major hack too I remember they lost six million people's DNA dud my dumbass I did it when they first launched and like it's been on there forever and I get an email saying your shit's like hacked like someone else has email yeah yeah it was horrible like it was like the wor that's probably has to be the second worst hack behind besides your bank account yeah it's terrible but I think and there's others

in this space ancestry has an ancestry DNA product I think you could sell that through this network so I think a new way of acquiring customers I think that type of product which is a kind of a mix of a digital and a physical product a subscription product have you seen the food ones where no as allergy or what is it yeah so you can so the science behind this stuff is iffy it's not you know a lot of people debate if it's legit but that never that never sensitivity is what you yeah where it's

like yeah where it's like which foods are you sensitive to based off DNA and bed off your saliva like it might be [ __ ] I actually think it is but a ton of people do myself included I think it's [ __ ] that's why I do it that's twoyear annual subscription yeah yeah so I think there's a huge opportunity this is five ideas I thought of this morning but I do think that uh the the upside of it is I think that unlike the cliche you know people the cliche is that you can't get

rich quick you know blah blah blah there are ways that you could get rich quick you know Moy selling native for in two and a half years for $100 million that's pretty quick it's the best way to get rich is quick as Mo says and so I think that it is not and I and by the way I've seen this firsthand in a couple of the companies that we've started or or incubated that have been in this space I guess what I'm saying is the growth here is quicker than I've seen pretty much anywhere else

um I don't think it's easy to do I think it's I think you're competing in like you said sort of Sharky Waters it's not that a lot of people are competing but all the people who competing here are very smart and very H very Scrappy but there's a lot of categories out there and if you can find a category where the traditional incumbents aren't doing this I think there's a lot of money to be made dude listen to this story really quick so do you remember there was this company called Elite Daily do you remember

Elite Daily was like a Blog right yeah so Elite Daily was a Blog launched maybe in 2012 and within one year they scaled Elite Daily it was basically a Blog that said like um a a lot of stuff they said was like controversial so it was like you know why men should do this or women should do that you know and which a controversial take and then sometimes it was like just a variety of lists but the the guy who started it his father was Jacob the Jeweler you remember Jacob the Jeweler the rapper the

guy who like yeah that was his supplied the rappers right yeah supplied the rapper that was his kid and so he started this blog when he was 22 and this was when Millennials were the genz years so Millennials with the young guys and within one year it got to be the most popular blog on the internet when sh was getting something like a 100 million monthly uniques they did it in one year about 18 months in or something like that I went to their office in New York City and their office was a bunch of

like New York kids like 22y olds who are being paid like $15 or $18 an hour or something like that and they had just rows and rows of cheap Ikea tables and everyone just sitting there on their computer just like banging out headlines to articles and then they would like write just a couple words they would see which ones like they would post it on Elite Daily cuz they had so much traffic they would see which ones get a little bit of traffic and then they would go and write out the Articles and then eventually

the company sold for $60 million which in the media world it was like the biggest thing on earth and so Elite Daily if you Google like Elite Daily acquired it was like the it was just like massive how fast was that how many how many years H this was like 10 years ago so I don't remember but I think it was something like two years like it was like really fast like they were doing like tens of millions in Revenue uh literally within 12 months like it was almost overnight and I remember going to their

office and I thought that this was like a legit publication it was just like these like they built like some software that like could guess what was going to go viral and it they were just banging them out in this room and it was crazy because it was crazy it was an example of people who find one little hack and they go all in on it they dedicate their lives to it and they end up building a business that is huge like this is kind of what this Tik Tok thing which is like oh you're

telling me if I just like get this one mom to share this thing oh I'm going to build a whole infrastructure all around this where a lot of outsiders look at this like that's crazy like what are you doing that's like ridiculous like you can't do that and they're like but why can't I like the math says that this one worked therefore I'm going to go get 300 of them and uh this Elite Daily thing it was insane to see this firsthand and I got to talk to those guys it was all wild uh this

is like the new version of that and so I got to see these guys sort of like I I wasn't uh particularly friends with the founders I was friends with some of these employees so I got to see from that angle they got rich overnight basically and it was like the exact same thing of just like finding a little tiny thing and going all in on it yeah I think uh it's not it's not for everybody and it's not easy and all that my disclaimers would be why why am why am I not doing this

well besides the fact that I don't really want to be you know running businesses anymore but but even if I even if I could even if I wanted to here's why I wouldn't do this it's a really frenetic and stressful space to be in that's changing like every day and so I don't like to I don't know what the right analogy would be but it's sort of like sprinting on quicksand and um I just I wouldn't really want to do it right but but if I had no other choice or if I was wired that

way where that's fun for me I okay great uh I'm not really wired that way it's also age age age Makes You Different yeah the second thing is that most businesses like the terminal value you know the exit value is in how durable how sustainable how sticky is this and by definition this is not super sticky super able super sustainable um you get the upside which is a fast Spike that's sort of more than you could otherwise get organically but the downside is 18 months from now I don't know if any of this will work

you might fall off a cliff uh and so I think that's the the upside and the downside of this and then also for a lot of these it's physical products it's e-commerce which is just its own beast in and of itself you have Supply chains you have fulfillment you have inventory risk and you have um shitty margins generally and so like I think dig products and software even if it doesn't grow as fast can still be a better bet to make if you're able to go there so and getting big fast is not necessarily bad

as long as you have the right mindset so for example a lot of people don't talk about this but Jeff Bezos um Amazon they got huge very fast they were also Google's biggest Advertiser when Google first released advertising uh and they got big on the back of Google and it worked because they were like we're going to use this to make ourselves huge and also we know that the customer is always first so we have to provide the best customer service with the best product so if you combine all those things you can create something

amazing yeah exactly I I do think also um one last uh I guess like important caveat on this is if you do this there's sort of a um better and worst ways to worst way to do it and I would say the most important variable in something like this is just the repeat purchase so how much how much of a true brand and um long-term customer can you build there's a lot of people that I see doing this for products that you would only ever buy once it's like man you're going to go through all

the mental gymnastics to get somebody to buy one time and then the product is not a consumable it's not something you're meant to buy again and you're going to have to release a new product to in order another a second product or a third product of a whole different type in order to get there that's playing the hard game on extra hard mode don't I wouldn't recommend doing I think that reason is if I remember correctly I'm just remembering this from like years ago I think that's why Moyes said he didn't do mattresses I think

he was like looking at mattresses and this was right when Casper became a thing but he was like yeah like a mattress is $400 and literally everyone in America needs it which is great but you only buy one every eight years right so like of the products I mentioned the botox thing the it's that's a constant once you get on that treadmill of you know sort of like face Improvement it's hard to get off tell me about it yeah I know I know you're feeling burn right now come a little closer to the camera let's

take a look at that puppy um hair color you got to keep doing it candles you burn them they melt you got to get another one right so like these are things that are consumables that uh that that have repeat purchase in them do we want to end there and save your last one for another one yeah I had a bunch of other ideas not in the Tik Tok game but I think we got excited and used the whole episode for Tik Tok so if you like this we probably have two more episodes worth of

just pure ideas go on YouTube or tweet at us and just comment on uh if you're going to comment on YouTube just be like you know more ideas and tell us your favorite idea of these all right thank you that's it that's the pod [Music]