The Wild Story Of 'Mr. Tull' - From Laundromats To $3.5B Hollywood Production Company

Sam Parr
Really? Here's the hook. Okay, so this is my billy of the week. We used to have a billy of the week theme song. I don't know if we still have.

We should dig one up or get AI to make a billy of the week jingle for us.

A million dollars isn't cool. You know what's cool? A billion dollars. Okay, so let me tell you how I got hooked on this. I read the story in the information, and I don't really read the information normally.

In fact, I can't read, I don't buy the, I don't pay for the information. But, you know, like, it gives you the, the preview and then it starts to fade. You're saying, by the way, the information.com. Yeah. And it fades and it totally gets you hooked.

It gets me hooked. But I'm reading the fading part, and as it's fading away, there's a line that just caught my attention. It goes, it's like residents of this small town in Idaho were complaining because suddenly dozens if, like, you know, dozens of private jets were suddenly flying into this private airport. And, you know, like, basically, like armored vehicles were showing up and they're wondering what is going on. They called the mayor and they're like, did something happen?

And they're like, oh, it's just Thomas Tull. Who's that? Exactly. Who's that? And then it faded out.

I was like, oh, I have to ask my friend who's got an information account to bootleg me a copy of this story. And so he did. All right, so here's the deal. Things are changing fast in the tech world and the Internet marketing world. And that's a big deal because you have to know which trends to stay on top of in order to market better, in order to acquire customers for cheap and so you could run your business as efficiently as possible.

Shaan Puri
Staying on top of all those trends is a pain in the butt, though. And so the folks at HubSpot have made this amazing report. It has a very official sounding name because it is a very official document. It's the 2024 state of marketing report. They've looked at millions, tens of millions of bits of data to find the top marketing trends that have the most immediate impact on your business.

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Check it out. So this guy is, I think, kind of a legend. He is a stealthy billionaire. He starts off his career in laundromats. Shout out to Cody Sanchez, then shifts to auto repair shops, then shifts to buying small accounting practices, and does basically a roll up and ends up with 500 worldwide locations.

Sam Parr
For his accounting thing that he put. He put it all under one banner, like american financial services or some shit like that. And no, like, private equity background, just like, a blue collar. He had. He had worked.

He. He first was blue collar, then at some point, he gets. I don't know, he did have a, like, a stint in private equity. He learned a little bit about the private equity business, either as an internship or something else. Um, but I'm pretty sure he quit college or just, like, was moonlighting while he's at college doing the laundromat thing.

Uh, you know, grows up single mom, uh, you know, doesn't have a lot of money. So he's. He's basically like, I need to fill a need. So he's like, okay, I'll start with laundromats. Okay.

This is not a very good business, but, like, gets me going. And he's. The whole time, he's kind of a data nerd. So even with the laundromat business, he starts buying these washing machines that can do surge pricing. So it's like, when there's more demand, the cost goes up.

He's like, why wouldn't it do that? All the rush comes in at one period of time. That's why I need to make money. And so he's a little bit of a data nerd, and he ends up becoming famous because he takes that same data philosophy, and he applies it to a business that never had it, which is the movie business. And so he does what's called moneyball for movies.

So the moneyball strategy that was famous for in baseball, to find undervalued assets and to build a team, construct a team with, like, you know, sort of the. Using data as an edge rather than these old school scouts that are, you know, spitting sunflower seeds and looking at a prospect and being like, I like his ass. He's gonna. He's got something. I always trust a guy with a big ass, you know, like, it's like, what are you talking about?

You see he gets on base a lot. They're like, nah, he's too fat. He'll never make it. They're like, I don't know. Seems like he's got some strong loins.

Yeah, or be like, he's got a strong jaw. I think he's got star potential. It's like, okay, you'll be a leader in the clubhouse. All right, great. And so moneyball was basically like, forget that side of things, the qualitative.

Let's focus on the quantitative. So this guy does that for movies, and he creates legendary entertainment, which is the movie production company, the movie financing company that financed and produced movies like the Batman series. So the Dark Knight, all that stuff. Batman begins, 300, the hangover, on and on and on. Now, recently, dune.

And so he builds this thing up, sells it for $3.5 billion to the richest man in China. And this guy's just like, fascinating. So, like, the whole journey from laundromats, auto repair shops, tax firms, then has a dinner with a guy who's like, I think he's a movie exec, and he's complaining about film financing, and he's like, how does it work there? And it was basically like the old, the baseball scouting thing. Like, oh, this actor, we like this plot, blah, blah, blah.

And he's like, do you guys do any data analysis? And he realized they don't have the moneyball side, but they also don't have just private equity. And he's like, move. The movie business is the largest industry that doesn't really have a private equity focused firm. And that's what I'm going to do.

I'm just going to bring the capital. I'm not going to have the full production system. I'm not going to have the distribution rights. I'll just bring the capital. And so what he did was he partnered with Warner Brothers.

So to start this business, he raises $500 million, which he's like, this is the hardest thing I'd ever done, was raising $500 million for this thing. Wow. And he goes in and he partners with Warner Brothers. He cuts a deal. Like, we're going to co finance 30 movies with you, but here's the deal.

We're going to basically build up a data team that's going to figure out which movies we should bet on and which ones we shouldn't, and more importantly, how we promote them. So I thought this was interesting, because in most of the articles I read about this guy, they're just like, it's like the hand wavy thing. It's like. And then he started legendary entertainment and sells it for $4 billion. Like, what?

How did this guy with no background in the movie business create this company? How did they produce these hits? And, like, what was he doing differently? And do you know what he was doing differently? No, no, keep going.

So there was two or three insights. So the first insight he had was bigger is actually better. So there's this romantic idea in the movie business about, like, indie indie films and, like, let's go back to quality, just, like, real, just genuine scripts and all this stuff. And he's like, hmm. Most of the movies that fail are these, like, mid market movies that kind of cost, like, a medium amount of money, but they don't have, like, guaranteed slam dunk.

People will watch for this one reason. Like, it's got the superhero, it's got this a list actor, whatever. And he's like, they're making the plot too complicated, that it only appeals to, like, an intellectual person. He's like, we need to have movies that have, like, commercial appeal. It should still be elevated.

Like, he did inception and he did Dark Knight. Like, they're still great movies, but, like, Dark Knight is still, like, Batman, and Inception still has Leonardo DiCaprio, right? So he's like, he's like, yeah, I'm gonna have some things that I could take to the bank to actually underwrite these films better. So that was the first thing was like, they need. I need to go for bigger budget films that have, like, a headline reason that people will have to go and pay for to go watch this movie.

So he leaned heavily into IP, so, like, licensed ip, he also leaned heavily into, like, mainstream actors and directors. And he did a ton of great stuff straight out of Compton, the, but with Dune one and two, inception, the Hangover, which was huge Watchmen, Dark Knight. Just, by the way, great movies, still a hard business. I think they've only ever had two consecutive years of profitability or something like that in the ten year run. It's not like every year, just year after year, they were heading bangers, but the movie business, it's a hit business.

So when they hit, they hit really big in those years that they hit, and other years they might lose 50 or $100 million, but then when they hit, they hit 500 million or billion dollars of net gain. And so anyway, sells the business. One of his first movies was beer fest. You're telling me that wasn't a hit? Yeah.

So the big thing was they found Christopher Nolan pretty early. He turned out to be one of the best directors, period. And he was kind of unproven at the time, so it's not all easy. Second thing he did, though, was he's like, China. How do we make movies that have international appeal, specifically appeal in China?

And he's like, China's a big market, and there's a lack, there's a lot of demand. There's not a lot of supply of american films that can cross over. And so he's like, we're going to be international, and that's going to be one of our edges. So he's like, all right, I need a simple minded plot to. So I need a.

It could be well done, but the plot needs to be simple. Good guy, bad guy, right? He's like, for most of these, I need something that will transfer into China past the language barrier and just have, like, simple appeal. Like Batman has simple appeal. And so, and then he partnered with the chinese company, did a joint venture with China Film, which is like a government owned public state company for films.

And he's like, we're going to bring the movies, and we'll do a 50 50 jv with you over there. And so he cuts the right deal there, and it has the right distribution there then. So that was the second good thing it did. The third is the data analysis, the moneyball side of things. So I didn't fully realize this, but in both video games and movies, you might.

If it says, like, you know, this movie had a $200 million budget, that's the, that's the amount they might have spent on making the film. But then guess how much they'll spend on marketing the film. I have no idea. Another 30% more, another 100% more or 150% more. So if they spend 150 million on the movie, they'll spend another 150 million or 200 million on the marketing of the movie.

Shaan Puri
So each movie, each movie is like a, like a meaningful size company that lasts for three years. Well, sometimes longer, right? If it gets syndicated, if it has, like, long term, like, gets going. But I mean, the actual work, the work of making it and then marketing, I mean, it's like a presidential election. Same thing with Grand Theft auto.

Sam Parr
They'll spend, like, $500 million. Marketing grant, grand theft auto. That's insane. Crazy. That's insane.

The big video games, the AAA, like video games, they'll spend hundreds of millions on their marketing. So they'll usually, like, double the amount they spent on making the thing. And so, you know what else spends that much money on marketing? Every DDC brand. And what he realized in the same way that, like, what D two C brands did was they took the moneyball approach and said, hmm, if Proctor and gamble is just, like, doing these, like, random, like, to sponsor the Super bowl and, like, let's just take tide and then.

Or let's take, you know, whatever, old spice, and we'll just run funny tv commercials and, like, is it working? I don't know. Right. The old adage with tv commercials was, half my budget does nothing and half performs. Problem is, I don't.

I don't know which half. And, you know, that's how brand advertising worked. And then what happened is that guys like, Moyes came in and built native deodorant, and they're like, fuck the old spice model. I don't have enough money to do tv anyways. I have to do the moneyball approach.

I need performance marketing where I can measure every dollar and attribute every single purchase to which ad I ran and how much I spent on that ad. And that will tell me if I should do more of that ad or less of that ad or tweak it. And then that's how he builds, you know, a really fast growing deodorant company on the back of Facebook. And so what Thomas did was the same thing with movie marketing. What's a direct response version for a movie?

That's what these guys do. They run Facebook ads. They run YouTube ads. They run to buy tickets to the movie. To get.

Yeah, to get you to not exactly, like, go online and buy the ticket right away, but to get you to be like, oh, yeah, I heard that movie's coming out. Oh, it looked good. So they'll do shit. Let me just tell you some of the shit that they do. So I thought this was pretty cool.

They'll take trailers. So they're like, the trailer is the ad creative, right? The trailer is the thing that needs to get you to say, oh, I want to see that. That movie looks really good. And so they'll do, like, a b test.

They'll do, like, 50 versions of a trailer, and they'll do. They'll take an audience of, you know, they'll take 100 people to put them in a movie theater to play the trailer, and they have a scanner on the seat in front of you that will take, like, a facial biometric reading of you. And they have. They have you wearing a heart rate monitor, and they're trying to see, like, in a movie or trailer or way or whatever. Yeah, like, they're trying to see, like, do you react.

And what part do you react to? Does your heart rate elevate? Does it quicken? Now, I don't know if this is just pr, because the guy who was talking about this was their head of analytics, and they basically poach this guy. So there's some guy that was.

He built a sports analytics company in the moneyball era, sold it, and then he gets a call from Thomas and says, hey, do you want to do moneyball for movies? He said, come in. And so he became the head of analytics, and he's like, we have a 50 person applied analytics team, like, applied sciences team. He goes, that's 49 more than every other movie producer. He's like.

He's like, we have, like 50 engineers, data scientists. Like, all of these people are, like, hardcore data, computer science engineering type folks. And he's like, nobody else even has this department. He's like, or at least they didn't when we started. Do you think they make movies?

Shaan Puri
Like, you know how sometimes when we create content, we think headline first or thumbnail first or whatever? Do you think they think of the trailer as, what's a good movie? That could be an awesome trailer? I think 100% they do. In fact, one of the films that flopped was this thing called the Great Wall or something that.

Sam Parr
I don't know. I never saw it, but it's like, they did the joint venture with the chinese company. They're like, oh, let's. Let's make an american movie. But it's about the Great Wall.

It's like, imagine if the Great Wall was actually built to keep aliens out. And that's what they discovered. The purpose was something like that. Matt Damon's in it and movie flops. China didn't love it.

America didn't love it. It was like, kind of neither. It was. They tried to make something for everybody. It didn't work.

It was something for nobody. And what he said, the analytics guy is, like, going to die on this hill. He's like. He's like, I don't know, man. The data showed that Matt Damon was.

He's like, we're. We were under indexed on Matt Damon in China. I was like, I don't even know what that means, but he's basically like, the price for Matt Damon versus the cachet Matt Damon has with that audience, it was a good trade. And he's like, no, that was a good trade. And people are like, the movie flopped, dude.

He's like, all right. But that was right. That one part was right, which is insane. And so why does he have. Why is he showing up to Idaho with armored vehicles?

So now he's shifted into. So he sells legendary to the richest man in China, and then he still owns, I think, like ten or 20%. But you can't own ten or 20% of a chinese company as an american, that's a big chinese company. And so they give him phantom stock. So he gets only a profit share.

He can't own any equity in the thing. But now what he does is he took that money and he's investing heavily in defense tech. So he invested in Anduril. He invested in some shield AI, like a bunch of defense tech. So that meeting was basically a meeting of the minds of entrepreneurs from Silicon valley who are building defense tech, people from Washington who are like, you know, the lobbyists, the people that they lobby, they know whoever the senators, congressman, whoever those people are, and the generals and the defense contractor.

Like a meeting of the minds of all those people. And they were just like, you know, probably get together and be like, china, we gotta. We gotta stop these guys. You know, like. And basically he's got this flywheel, right?

Because the flywheel is so amazing. The flywheel is you start a defense company, you then lobby and lobby for increased defense spending. So they increase defense spending, which goes to your companies, right? And so, like, that flywheel of, like, wining and dining Washington while then funding the companies that will win the contracts is just a very, very lucrative model. I'm not saying he's doing it in any malicious or nefarious way.

I don't mean that at all. I just mean it's very. It's interesting how that can work, right? It's smart. If that's your model, which is you, you can actually influence the spend through pr, through whatnot.

So you'll see a guy like Joe Lonsdale, and I think he believes this, by the way, he's got defense tech companies, right? He started Palantir. He also started a company called Epirus. He's starting some, like, underwater drone company. Like, he's starting a bunch of deep tech defense tech companies.

But then he also spends a lot of time building relationships with public officials and those folks. And he'll go on CNBC and he'll be like, we got to stop. Tick tock. And like, I don't think he's doing it, you know, just for his dollar. I don't think that's why he's doing it.

I think he's doing them all from a sense of purpose. Like, he genuinely thinks that we shouldn't have tick tock kind of brainwashing the american, like, population while being owned or controlled or the data siphoned off to, you know, the CCP. So, like, I think he genuinely believes that. But it also happens to be a very strong flywheel where if you could shift the public perception or the government, the government's perception to increase the funding in this, that will also benefit the companies that you started to serve that, that need. Dude.

Shaan Puri
And Thomas tall looks like a movie villain. If you google and look at cameo. In Batman, he is actually, like, in the owner's box. You know that scene where Bain, like, blows up the football stadium? He's.

Yeah, he's. Because he. He owns a piece of the Pittsburgh Steelers, too. So the game, the team playing in the movie is the Steelers. He's in the owner's box.

Sam Parr
He is a partial owner. And he gives himself a little cammy. This guy looks like a stealer. He's huge. He's like a big guy.

He was a former college football player. I think this guy's impressive. Let me tell you a couple other random things. One, he's like, I don't live in LA. So he built a Hollywood company without living in LA.

He's like, he's like, I don't. He's a great line. He's like, I just want to make great movies that people love. I don't want to figure out. He's like, I don't want to make sure I have a dinner table at Spago tonight.

He's like, I don't want the Hollywood status stuff. Like, I just want to make great movies. And so that's why I don't live there. I just do my thing from far away. Where's he based?

Shaan Puri
Is it Pittsburgh? Is he based? I'm not sure. So at one point, he bought, like, 150 acres of farmland and was like, I'm going to live off this land. He's like, and what he did was, he's like, I want to use this to learn all of the advanced farming robotics companies, and we'll use this land to try those.

Sam Parr
And he's like, I want to learn the tech and try to see if are we building the future of food? And I want to be living in a self sustainable way. And, like, I'm going to try to. I'm going to try that for a period. I don't know how long he lives or if he does it full time, but this guy's pretty fascinating, man.

He, um. I don't know. He's just done a lot of things in a lot of different places. And the through line for all of it was this, like, moneyball for X, which I thought was pretty fascinating. Great.

Shaan Puri
Fine. This was, that was really good. This guy's so fascinating. We should get this guy on. Does he do interviews or is he really pretty stealthy?

Sam Parr
But he went on Lex, and he also went on Farnham street back in the day. And so I'd love to have him on to talk because you could tell he's like a, you know, like, he's a business guy. He's very, like, practical. Like, he's just, I don't know. He comes across very real.

I watched some of his interviews. He comes across very real, very straightforward. He's like, well, I just. I just thought, you know, like, I just thought x, like, he was like, that's it. Like, and then I just did it.

And he's like, well, you know, for example, he invested in some company doing gene tech editing, and these guys, like, are trying to bring back the woolly mammoth. Have you heard about this? Yeah. I mean, I've read about, in headlines. They'Re state their, their stated mission is to bring back the woolly mammoth.

I loved how he talked about him. Cause it was very real and he was like, which company? What's that called? I don't remember their name. Colossus, I think.

Colossal or Colossus, something like that. And so he's like, they're like, you invest in this company that's bringing back the woolly mammoth, right? It's like a very buzzy thing to talk about. Yeah. And he's like, well, like, he's like, look, I thought they were doing really interesting things with, like, setting, you know, the genome and gene editing CRISPR.

He's like, I think the woolly mammoth thing makes for great pr. He was basically just like, I don't give a shit about bringing back the woolly mammoth. I'm not doing this as some, like, weird billionaire, like, fetish thing that billionaires do when they're just like, oh, I need to, like, you know, resurrect, you know, I need to summon a God. He's like, the woolly mammoth thing is interesting, but it's like, it's like a headline. He's like, you know what I like is that he's like, I met these guys, and they're really smart scientists, and I just thought, these guys are so smart, I need to be around them, and they're going to do really interesting things, so I'll back them.

And if they want to work on this William Mammoth thing. Okay, great. He's like, but I just think the science they're doing is really fascinating. And he goes, also, I like their ethics because he goes, the more I met with them, it was clear that, okay, these guys are in the top 0.1% of intelligence, but there's people like that in China and all around the world. He's like, but they don't all have the same ethical code that these guys do.

We're like, they're going to use this for good. And they're not just going to be cloning random shit or editing things in a pretty reckless way. And he's like, so I just thought it was good these guys needed the backing because I fuck with their moral code, basically. And so I don't know. I like this guy.

Shaan Puri
I always find it almost romantic, but, like, very intoxicating when I read about people who don't have a ton of education but dominate a certain area. So for him, the fact that I don't know entirely what his background is, so I could be off here, but it seems like he's sort of a blue colliery guy who kind of kicked ass at finance and deal making, but he doesn't have that traditional New York City, you know, big bank background. He didn't buy auto repair shops. Cause he's like, oh, I can do a PU roll up and get leverage and raise prices. And he was just like.

Sam Parr
He's like, well, I live in Pittsburgh, and I lived in part of Pittsburgh. Didn't have a lot of money. People aren't buying new cars. So it's like, you got a car. If your car breaks, you don't.

You can't really buy a new car. So the auto shops were a good bet because they were going to try to fix it. It's like, if I can get, like, another year out of this beater, I'm going to do it. So he's like, I just realized, like, auto repair is going to, like, be a thing here because that's what the community needs. That's how we discovered the defense tech stuff.

So he was like, he was doing movies and he's like, oh, dude, I want the fight scenes and the military scenes to be realistic. So he's like, let's bring in advisors from the actual military to tell us, like, what is the weaponry? What would. What would be cool? What would be the cutting edge stuff that if we put in the movie, that would be interesting.

And he's talking to them and he's kind of like, damn. They really don't have, like, as much cutting edge tech as I thought. Like, the Navy and the Marines, like, they kind of wish that they could do XYZ, but they couldn't. And that's when he started funding more defense tech. He's like, sounds like there's actually just a need for this.

And so, like, you know, obviously, you don't know how much of this is, like, reverse pr, where you go back and you make up a nice, wholesome sounding story, but I don't know. I bought it, which I usually am pretty skeptical about this stuff, but I bought it here. I also like people, and this is really easy to read about and to think about, but basically. All right, so you explain his idea. I'm going to do moneyball for movies.

Shaan Puri
And you think about it, and you go, okay, cool. That. I guess that makes sense. Even at the time, you could be like, that's neat. That's interesting.

But to have the courage to. And confidence to believe that you are right, even though you don't really know too much about something, you're a total outsider. To have the courage to do it and to go that big, I find incredibly intoxicating and inspirational because you. I mean, how many people do you think have told him, like, you have no idea about this industry? We've done it this way for 100 years.

What are you talking about? That's not how it's done. But just to be like, look, it makes sense that it's this, this and this and this. Like, Warren Buffett has that. A lot of great.

I mean, anyone who's great typically has that, where it's like, they believe in their own logic and their own reasoning, and they believe that their decision is the right decision, even though most everyone is like, that's insane. I have so much love for people who are that courageous and confident in their own decisions. I think that's very admirable. Yeah, conviction is attractive. You know, one of the things that they talked about with the moneyball thing, it's like, cool.

Sam Parr
Like, you can set, you can read. You can have an analogy like moneyball for movies. And then you sit down, you're like, cool. So what are we going to moneyball? Like, in sports, all of the data is public.

It's all there. Everyone's stats are there. Everything is filmed on tv. So even if you didn't have a stat, you could go back and create it. Like, what are you gonna do for the movies?

It's, like, not the same thing. And so what are you. What are you actually gonna do? And so one of the things they did, they were like, the analytics guy had great statement. He goes, I take this population of people.

He's like, on the left side of the bell curve, there's people who are never gonna watch the movie no matter what we do. We don't wanna spend a dollar marketing to them. That's my goal with that population is don't spend $1 on one impression for those people who are never gonna watch. It's like, then you have the people that are gonna watch no matter what. I also don't wanna spend a dollar on them.

Like, they just. They are dune fanatics. They got a dune poster in their bedroom. They grew up watching the. Reading the books.

They're gonna watch Dune no matter what I do. So then there's the people in the middle, and the people in the middle, they're like our swing voters. And they might watch it. And I need to figure out, then I start slicing and dicing that audience, and I figure out, this mom is gonna watch. Cause she loves that actor.

And this guy's going to watch because he loves a badass action scene. So we need two different trailers that we're going to run in social ads. At each of those, he's like. And then we need a dataset that tells us who actually goes to the movies. And, like, basically need a map between the email addresses that we're advertising to and the email addresses that are used to buy tickets.

And we need to create these clusters and try to figure out, like, what's actually converting. Movie folks weren't doing this. I guess not. Not in a serious way. I don't know.

Shaan Puri
Maybe. Maybe there's other producers that are like, you know, like, kicking the wall right now, being like, God damn it, we all do this. Like, that's not special. I don't know. I don't know the business well enough.

Sam Parr
These guys told the story best, better than anybody else, so it seems to have worked. This is awesome. I mean, the track record's also there, too, right? Like, they had, they just, like, I mean, they built a really big thing in a really small amount of time coming in as a complete outsider. So, you know, that's pretty, pretty impressive.

Shaan Puri
This guy's fascinating. I want to learn more about this guy. Yeah, he's cool. One other point on this, it's interesting to think about where else moneyball for X could be implemented. So I don't know if you've read about Obama's data team or.

Well, I've read about Trump's, Trump's. I've read a lot about Trump's and it is getting into election season coming up, and I hate it because I get so many texts and emails. I mean, they are intense about their marketing, and I know that Jared Kushner kind of hired a bunch of tech guys and they crushed it. But even before Trump, Obama raised something like a billion and a half dollars. And they spent most of that, I would imagine, on marketing.

I mean, what these, what the politicians do in basically a year and a half, it's pretty phenomenal in terms of, like, deploying money for marketing, and they're savage about it. Dude, the presidential election is a marketing contest between two agencies, and they each get to pick their front man, and then they run a marketing blitz and they spend 500 million to a billion dollars marketing over the course in like eight months. Yeah, and like, that's it. So it got two presidents. The last two presidents elected was the moneyball for X.

Sam Parr
They used it in politics, it helped the Red Sox win the World Series, worked in baseball. It built tons of DTC brands. The moneyball approach also is in finance with all the quant funds or hedge funds that are using this or renaissance. So it's pretty interesting to see how you can use moneyball in any industry that is still not data first. So not data driven.

And if you asked how do you guys make decisions? And it's basically some version of gut eyeball taste, there's probably a moneyball variant there. I know a guy who is doing it with H Vac. He has an H VAc business doing 150 million a year in revenue. And he tells me constantly all the data stuff that they're doing, and he's like, no one.

Shaan Puri
People don't do this in our industry. No one is doing this. Where it's as simple as, you know, we're looking at the data of what can we send and how many emails can we send to get more Google reviews. But they just like, changed their, their data is. It's like they're running it like a tech company a little bit, where they have a small data analytics team.

And he says that very rarely is anyone else in the h vac industry doing something like this. Dude, Sam, I gotta ask you, I already know the answer to this question, but I gotta ask you, did you watch UFC 300 on Saturday? The full 5 hours or 6 hours? Yeah, the whole time. It was amazing.

Sam Parr
Did you make like a seven layer nacho dip and just sit there for 7 hours watching it? I watched the entire thing. I think it started at 06:00, and it ended at 01:00 my time. So I want to talk about it, because, a, we're both UFC fans, and it was amazing, but B, there's actually a great business CEO lesson in it that I want to go to. But first, can we just explain for anybody what Max Holloway did?

Because I think the Max Holloway thing alone, if you don't even watch the fights, you need to know that this happened. Well, let's explain UFC 300. So, UFC has been around since the nineties. Uh, they've done thousands of events, but the major events, they number them. UFC 12345.

Shaan Puri
This past weekend was UFC 300. Typically, what they do is a card has five main fights, and then before the five main fights, there's ten prelims, which are no name. Fights that up are up and comers. This time, they didn't have. They had 15 fights, but all of them were famous, great people, and so it created, like, 5 hours of epic fight cards.

Right? Yeah, it was crazy. And one of the fights was for a made up title called the bad mother effer belt, the BMF title. And it was two guys who are popular, but they're currently not at the tippy top of. Of their thing.

Sam Parr
So one guy, this guy's name is Max Holloway, and he's fighting this guy, Justin Gaethje. And they're fighting, and Justin Gaethje is a big favorite. Coming into the fight, people think he's gonna win. Max Holloway has kind of gotten. He's.

He's kind of looks like he's on the back end of his prime, or maybe on the decline a little bit. And so two things happen. One, Max Holloway starts to win. Okay? That itself was cool, remarkable, but nothing compared to what happened at the end.

So the guy. The way UFC fight works is five rounds, let's say. And basically, what happens is, if you're winning, each round gets scored. If you're winning each of the rounds, you have it locked up. So what happens is, let's say you're winning three rounds to two or four rounds to one.

Your corner tells you, hey, your way ahead, just play it safe. Just. The only way this other guy can win is if he knocks you out, don't you? Just play it smart. Right?

That's out of ten. However, this is fighting entertainment, and some fighters understand that, and some fighters don't. Max Holloway understands that. So what he did was he wins all five rounds, so he's not even up three, two, or four. One.

He wins all five rounds. And at the end of the fifth round, and he's basically broken this guy's nose. He's got this guy kind of a batter and bruised. The only thing this one guy can do, and this guy's a power puncher, the only thing this guy could do is knock him out. Max Holloway decides in the last 10 seconds, where most guys kind of just circle around, raise their hands, try to tell the judges they won.

He points to the middle of the ring, he points down, and he's like, stand right here. Neither one of us backs down, and just let's swing as hard as we can and try to knock each other out for the last 10 seconds. Now, this sounds very savage. What this actually is is incredibly courageous and brave and entertaining and reckless and stupid all at the same time. Rolled into one, and they both start just swinging absolute haymakers at each other.

And then he, in the last second of the fight, knocks the other guy out cold. I feel like I can't even do it justice. If you fall, if you watch the fight, you already know what happened. If you don't watch the fight, you probably don't care about this, but it was remarkable to watch. It was probably the best UFC moment I've ever seen, maybe.

Shaan Puri
For sure top. For sure top three, probably number one. And I would actually say it was one of the best moments in sports that I've ever seen. Exactly. It was like I felt so much adrenaline watching this.

I was like, it was in the middle of the night, my baby was sleeping, and I yelled, like, as loud as I could. I was in awe. It was so adrenaline inducing. It was amazing. It would be like in basketball if LeBron James was about to win the NBA Finals.

Sam Parr
And normally they're just trying to hold the ball, you know, stall, let the clock run out, and instead, he handed the ball to his opponent, said, no, come here. Cut. You have the ball come to the middle of the court. Everybody get off the court. One on one right now.

For the game, for the championship, for the glory, and. And then somehow also if he risked getting knocked out in the process. So, pretty insane moment. Mark Zuckerberg, by the way, was sitting ringside, and every fighter would run up to him and start pointing at him and talking to him. It was awesome.

Shaan Puri
It was so exciting. By the way, don't you think that Zuck should lean in more to this? I feel like this is the best pr that Mark Zuckerberg has ever had. It is his own. His own, you know, he'll turn into becoming a fighter.

Sam Parr
Being at the UFC ringside hanging out there, and all the fighters really love it going into the tough man sport, right? Basically. And he looked cool. He looked cool. He had, like, a little afro, and he had a white t shirt on, like, baggy white.

Shaan Puri
He looked like a cool guy. He did. Yeah. He has, like, the oversized tee now. He got, like.

Sam Parr
He, like, went on TikTok shops and bought, like, the oversized tee from some, like, 18 year old who was doing a dance video. And his wife looked cool, too. It's called mob chic. What she was wearing, it was, like, all black. She looked cool.

Shaan Puri
They both looked cool. I googled it. I read a Business Insider article. I learned that word, mob chic. So you know what he should do, by the way?

Sam Parr
This is a little pr lesson for him. I think that he should create his own Zuckerberg bonus. So he should have the Zuckerberg. That's a great idea. The Zuck 500.

And he just gives 500,000 to whoever had the most badass performance. So it should have just been like, max Holloway. It's like, whoever just really put it all on the line. Win or lose, doesn't matter. Somebody who showed the most heartbreak, like, the underdog bonus.

And because these guys don't get paid and Zuck has all of the money, so if he just did that for every pay per view, I feel like that would be its own storyline. He'd get so much goodwill that you. Literally real gladiator stuff. You couldn't buy it. Yeah.

By the way, the singer, Saya. Sia. Sia, she does this for Survivor. So the winner of Survivor wins a million dollars. And Sia is a super fan of Survivor, and she just called into the reunion one time and was like, hey, I just love that guy.

He didn't even come close to winning, but I want to give him 50 grand. And so it became a. See, a bonus of, like, whoever won her heart gets, like, extra money at the end. It's pretty genius, dude. That's so funny.

Shaan Puri
That's awesome. All right. And so Max. Max knocks out the guy. What happens?

What's the business angle here? The press conference at the end is always entertaining. Dana White is a very unfiltered guy. Dana, please, come on the pod. He goes on the press conference, and somebody asked him, they were like, dana, you know, on a night like this, UFC 300, you try to build the car, but after that, it's out of your hands.

Sam Parr
You know, then it's up to the fighters. And, like, how happy are you that it just turned out that way? Like, such a moment. And such a great, great overall night. And Dana goes, you know, people ask me what I do for a living.

He's like, I don't organize fights. I sell holy shit moments. And tonight I sold millions of holy shit moments. Basically, he's like, I sold a holy shit moment to millions of people. And I thought it's a great little lesson, which is, what are you really selling?

What are you really selling in your business? Is he selling mixed martial arts contests? Is he selling an event? Is he selling? He says, I'm selling holy shit moments.

And I thought about this, and marketers for a long time have known this, which is, there's levels to marketing. And I want to give you my five levels to marketing based on the Dana white principle of selling holy shit moments. Okay, you ready for this? Level one, you sell a product and this is every shitty startup website. You go to it and it just says, we are a healthcare CRM using AI.

They're just describing some product and it's not compelling because I don't give a shit about your product. I give a shit about myself. And your product is some abstract, we're a blockchain based web three arcade side scroller. It's like, what? And if you go to most product websites, to be honest, they're just selling a product.

That's level one. This is what failing companies do. Okay, level two. Level two is you don't sell a product. You sell a solution.

And this is effective, but it's competitive. This is like head and shoulders. Head and shoulders says, hey, are you tired of having that dandruff on your shoulder? Use head and shoulders. It gets rid of the dandruff.

Okay? So selling a solution to a pain point. And this is where I would say, okay, if 50% of companies just do sell a product, another 45% are going to sell the solution to a pain point. Okay? Now we get into the championship rounds where we're going to have more interesting ways of doing things.

So the next one, level three, you sell a lifestyle. This is Lululemon. This is slack. So if you've ever, if you don't believe me, go read the Stuart Butterfield, who's the CEO of slack, go read his post called we don't sell saddles here, and I'll spoil it for you, which is he says, imagine you're a saddle company. You make saddles.

We could just describe the product, the saddles. We could describe some solution like, oh, your butt won't be sore on our saddle. Or we could sell the lifestyle the joy of horseback riding and get people to want to be on horseback, to feel free to have the wind blowing through their hair. You make that lifestyle aspirational. And then when they're like, I got to do that now, they're super motivated, and they say, well, what do I need?

You're like, well, you need a saddle. And ours are the best. And so he says that this is how the yoga companies, Lululemon and whatnot, this is how they got popular, too, is they didn't say, here we have the best yoga pants, which was a small market of people looking for yoga pants. They got people into the idea of doing yoga. And once you get into doing yoga and the benefits of yoga, you're going to want to invest in buying better gear as you go.

And Lululemon will say, well, we have the best gear. And so you. This is how you create a category. Or you just want to make your ass look dope. The lifestyle of being a big booty queen.

And if that's the lifestyle you want to be a part of, we are the pants for you. Yeah. The MFM merch store will soon have. Soon have fat margin bottoms and the real bottom lines. That's pretty good.

Shaan Puri
All right. And four and five. Four is where I thought we stopped. There's actually five before is where I thought we stopped. This is the Dana white level.

Sam Parr
You sell a feeling, and I'll tell you that line that somebody told me once I hired this consultant, and I was talking about my content, I did the lamest thing. I hired a consultant for my personal brand just to know, what do these guys know? I didn't ever end up implementing really anything, but I did take away this one thing he said. He goes, I go, you've worked with all the big names. You've worked with you know who.

I don't want to out of my guests, but he's worked with a bunch of big names. I said, what do they do differently than what I'm doing? And he goes, you make content. They give out a feeling. I said, what?

He goes, as any content creator, you are the merchant of feelings. If you give someone a feeling more consistently and more powerfully than anybody else, that's what makes you box office. And I was like, man, I love using the word box office. That's great. And this is what Dana White was saying, right?

We sell holy shit moments. We give you that feeling that you can't really get anywhere else, like, in your life. Can you really get, like, there's a reason you love the UFC my buddy Julian Shapiro loves the UFC like none other. Like, he's like, I can't watch other sports. He's like, I can't watch tv or movies.

UFC has ruined it for me. Well, data White said something amazing. He goes, he goes, think about this. You're at the Super bowl. It's the final down.

Shaan Puri
It's the greatest moment in NFL history. And a fight breaks out a few rows down from you. What are you going to do? You're going to stop. You're going to stop watching football and you're going to go and pay attention to the fight.

That's what people do, and that's the business that I'm in. That's why I knew this was going to be the greatest sport ever. Exactly. And so the greatest brands, let's say Disney. Disney's amazing at this.

Sam Parr
Disney doesn't say, come to our theme park, we have the fastest rides or we have the shortest lines. No, they tell you about the magical family experience, right? This is going to be a lifetime memory for you. This is going to give your kids a magical feeling, a magical moment. All of their movies are the same way you watch a Pixar movie, because it's going to give you this feel good moment.

They give you feel good moments more consistently than anybody else. So the breast parents do this. Louis Vuitton. Louis Vuitton gives you a feeling of status, of importance. UFC gives you the holy shit feeling.

Nike gives you a feeling that you know of the feeling of greatness. When they advertise their shoes, they don't advertise the rubber shoes. They basically show you someone striving for greatness. And it's that inspiration, that motivation that they sell. Okay, so now, level five, level five, I realized, is the highest one.

You didn't sell a product, you didn't sell a solution. You didn't sell a lifestyle, you didn't sell a feeling. You sell an identity. And this is what the religions do. This is what political parties do.

They basically give you a tribe, they give you a label, they give you a purpose, they give you a sense of belonging. It's almost like buying a subway franchise. They're like, here, wear this uniform. Put this logo up. Here's the packaging.

Here's a portrait of bread. Put that on your wall. You now have an identity. We gave you a brand for you to have because you didn't have one on your own. We gave you a purpose.

We gave you something to do. It's an identity in a box. I think that is the highest level of what you can do is you sell an identity to people. First of all, very good. I'm.

This. You've. You've. This was a really good monologue. You tied in some of my favorite stuff.

Shaan Puri
Congratulations. Second of all, were you just watching the UFC, taking notes on this stuff, and just like. No, I heard him say that, and the. I heard him say that, the press conference. And I go, that's exactly what he does.

Sam Parr
That's why I watch, because I can't get that holy shit feeling from anything. What else is as real as that? And once you know the. The stories of the fighters, right, that's really what works, right? If you're personally invested and you understand the stakes, you understand what's in it for each guy, there's like, you know, it's pretty hard to compare that to, really, any sport.

Maybe boxing is the other one. No, boxing doesn't even come close to what these guys do. Like, they're. They're in a league of their own in terms of giving me a feeling. Like I wore.

Shaan Puri
I wore a heart rate monitor one time to see what would happen. Cause I noticed going into the fight, I was so anxious because I was so emotionally invested, my heart rate went up, like, 20 beats per minute, like, before this fight. Like, it was insane. I get so into this that I find myself, like, tired the next day. It's one of the very few times that I felt this in sports.

It's the best. I feel a little bit in the olympics. Cause I get into that. But no, I mean, what he has done and what the UFC has done in terms of. What did you say?

Selling emotions, it's the best. I mean, if you go. Go look at the old cigarette ads if you want to see this. So if you go look at an old cigarette ad, obviously not selling the product. They're not selling a solution to a pain point.

Sam Parr
They're not saying, hey, your lungs need a little more tar in them. They're not doing that. It's all about a feeling and an identity. So they're giving you a feeling of greater self importance. A cool self image.

So all of the marketing around cigarettes was a cool self image. It's a cool guy, and in this cool moment, he takes out the cig and he lights it up. Or the woman doing the same thing. Go watch the Dosekis commercial. Right?

The most interesting man in the world sitting in a bar, surrounded by women, but not paying them any attention, looking at you dead in the camera, making eye contact. He's a man's man, he's done this, he's done that, he's done this. And when he drinks beer, he drinks Dosekis. Right here, they're trying to give you a cool self image. That's what a lot of luxury products and a lot of commodity products have to do.

And so once you realize that, you're like, oh, and I love this because in our world, the tech world, the business world, most people are like, absolute beginner, rookie white belts at real marketing. And even the best in class is just saying, sell a solution to a pain point. Sell the benefit, not the feature. And that's, like, level two. And they just stopped there.

Nobody really goes beyond that. And and so I like taking what is. What does the best in class look like when it comes to, like, you know, marketing and brand and actually doing something that gets people to move and take action? And, you know, how do I bring that into our world? Because then you're, you know, you have.

Shaan Puri
An unfair advantage, and it's not always around violence. So if you're listening to this and you don't know anything about the UFC, go to YouTube and type in UFC. Rose. I'm the best. One of the best moments from UFC is also this young woman named Rose Navi Yunis.

And she's about to fight, and she clearly is scared. And you see her mouthing to herself, I'm the best. I'm the best, I'm the best. And I remember distinctly where I was. She looks like your little sister, and the person across the ring from her looks like the Terminator.

Sam Parr
And so you could just put yourself in that person's shoes. Oh, man, they're about to fight somebody who's clearly just bigger, stronger, faster, everything. And she's mouthing to herself, I'm the best. To kind of like, it's like she's walking into the lion's den, and she's got to believe this, otherwise she doesn't stand a chance. And she knocks her out.

Shaan Puri
She knocks her out in the first round or something like that. And it was one, it was another great sporting moment. So the two other moments, first of all, there was two chinese women fighting, which is the first time it's ever happened for the championship. And one of the ladies chokes out another woman, and she goes unconscious right when the bell rings. So they're able to keep fighting.

She doesn't really wake up until she gets punched again on the second round, which was, like, just epic. And then the third thing that happened was, in the last fight, Alex Pereira gets kicked in the groin. The ref goes to stop it, he waves him off, and then 10 seconds later knocks out the other guy. It was just full of badass moments where this whole thing, it was just, it was epic. It was an epic event.

Sam Parr
By the way, let's just tie this principle back. By the way, uh, I did this with the podcast, so I was like, what is, what are we really selling here on the podcast? Is it ideas? Do people show up because they want a business idea? That's kind of lame.

Like, sure, it's fun to hear ideas, fun to talk about ideas, but if you're really like, you know what? To be successful, I'm going to go to this YouTube channel and find a business idea that these random guys are going to say out loud. Like, that's, like, honestly, that's a bad plan. It might happen, but don't. Don't do it for that reason and the same reason, like, you know, we might talk about the UFC or something else.

Like, that's probably not the most effective thing for you to do every day. So it's not a product, it's not a pain point. So one thing that I figured out was like, and when I talked to a bunch of people and I tweeted this out, I go, what is something you remember? And what's the reason you actually listen to the pod regularly? Like, what.

What keeps you hooked? And the number one word that kept coming up was, oh, man, I feel so inspired after I listen. And they're like, not in a cheesy way, but they're like, literally, if I'm driving and I'm listening, I sometimes will pull over because I got to write something down, right? You guys said one phrase that really stuck with me, and I was like, oh, that's going to be an unlock for me, either personally or in my marketing or whatever. Or it's.

I heard about this idea. I'm not going to go do that idea, but I'm inspired by that idea. Or you tell the story of some billy of the week, some guy who's really crushed it, or some business that's under the radar that's crushing it, and all of a sudden I feel like, you know, success is abundant. I'm inspired to go make my shit happen. I'm not going to do what they did, but I'm going to go make my shit happen.

And so we sell inspiration. That's the first thing we actually sell. One secondary thing, which is, have you ever seen that meme of the kid eating cereal next to his tv box? It's like three, there's three friends on the tv box and he's just like, cozied up next to, it's like me and my four friends, but it's just. Like, oh, that's awesome.

The other one's a photo, and it's basically like companionship. And then people have posted before, like, this is me when I listen to podcasts. It's like, kind of like you're hanging out with your friends except for they're not there, but it feels that way. And so that's the other thing is, like, for a lot of people who listen, what I learned was that even more than the inspiration, the ones that are super sticky, it's companionship. It's basically my real life friends aren't as nerdy about business as I am, or I live in the middle of nowhere, Iowa, or I'm in Belize, or I'm in, you know, wherever, and I don't know, six other people that I can hang out with twice a week and just nerd out about business with.

And so you guys are basically my substitute for what I, what I don't have or don't have the time for in my day to day life. This was an a plus segment. Good job. I dig that. Let me tell you, let me tell you, let me tell you about something.

Shaan Puri
So I launched something a couple weeks ago or a week ago, and I think there's only a 30% chance of it working, but I thought I could, like, reveal some of the numbers behind it. So I launched this thing called Sam's list. It's Samslist Co. Did you see when I shared that online the other day? Yeah, I did.

All right, so let me explain the background. So I was at the airport in January, and I had just gotten an email from my accountant, and it pissed me off that they didn't catch an air that they, I thought they should have caught it or caught. And so I tweeted out, who has an accountant that they love. I got about 300 responses, and I noticed that tons of people were bookmarking that tweet as if they're going to come back and hire an accountant, which was on the tweet. And so I thought, you know, I think I could make a thing out of this.

And so I hired a developer who works on bubble. Do you know what bubble is? Have you ever used bubble? Yeah, the website builder. Yeah, man, it's awesome.

It's like a whole app builder. And so we built this website where we got it was basically, I wanted to create, like, yelp for accountants, like a place where you can identify an accountant that's good based off of your friends. And I thought, like, this could be a good idea, because when you hire an accountant, you don't really have a place to see reviews. You mostly hear about an accountant through word of mouth. And if you hire the wrong accountant, it's basically like a year that you have to stay with them before you find out that they kind of stink.

So I was like, all right, I'm going to create this thing. It's called Sam's list. We're going to build this out. It's going to be awesome. I spent about $15,000 to build it out.

And so here's what I did. I got 300 replies to that tweet. I called all of them. So I got most of them on the phone or some of them via email, and I asked them all types of questions. I asked them, how much do they charge, who the perfect client is?

Who's the not perfect client? What services are their specialties? Things like that, as if I was going to hire them. I think you had told me one time when you went to hire an account and you created your own data room, and you, like, sent it to people, and you're like, who can handle this best? Well, I kind of did, like, a thing like that.

I put them all on this website, on Sam's list, and it took me a few weeks to get it going, and then I shared it, and I want this thing to work. I don't think it's going to. Why are you saying that? Is that, like, some weird, humble, like, no. Are you just doing some reverse thing where it's like, if only the community would rally and, like, what are you doing here?

Sam Parr
Is this reverse psychology? It's not reverse psychology. I'll explain why this will be hard to work. And so here was here. Here is my math.

Shaan Puri
My math was basically, if I can get 500,000 people a month to come to this website, 3% of them would answer the or would contact an accountant somehow. I could charge the accountants $100 per person I sent to them, per lead that I sent to them. And if that were the case, that would be something like $1.5 million a month in sales. I figure that would take years to get to, but, like, if I could get to that, that's, like, an interesting thing. Well, I shared it online.

In the first week, I got 13,000 visits. We made this really cool quiz that, where you could, like, say, like, how much revenue you have do you want this for your business or personal whatever? And then we would recommend three or four accountants that you like or that could fit your needs. We had 6000 people answer the quiz, and we also created this feature where you could schedule a meeting right there on the website with that. With those accountants that we referred you to.

Very few people scheduled appointments, and very few people even submitted their information to the accountants. What's very few? So we had 6000 people take the quiz in one week. I think we had, like, 100 or 200 people, like, submit information to the accountant. But that's not the issue.

The issue isn't the user. The issue is accountants are not clamoring for these leads. My big learning was that there's a massive. And this is for someone who can go and solve this problem. There's a massive shortage of accountants.

There's not a shortage of people looking for an accountant. There's a huge shortage of people who are becoming accountants. And not only that, the people who are accountants, they don't really want to, like, grow their business to be that large. And I thought that they'd be dying to get more customers. They're really not.

Which shocked me. That was, like, a really big shocker. And when I launched this business, I basically copied or I didn't copy, I use. Have you ever heard of smartasset.com dot? No.

So. Smartasset.com dot. I bet you've seen them if you've googled, like, what's California's taxes or California tax calculator. Well, the reason why they have all that stuff is they're actually doing. Well, I'm doing what they're doing, but they're doing what I'm doing for CFA.

So certified financial planners or advisors. And what they do is you take this quiz and they tell you all, like, you answer all these questions about, you know, how old you are, if you're retired, if you're not retired, what you're trying to do with your money. Are you trying to invest it or just live off it? Whatever. And then they recommend, like, three or four people who might fit your needs.

But what I found on that website is if you click around, they have to tell you how much they're paying per person, per lead. And so they actually say, if a person has between a million and 5 million in assets, this advisor is paying $700 per lead. If it's over 5 million, they're paying, uh, 250. Or it gives you, like, a range per, like, uh, per cost, per lead, per net worth. And it, like, tells you all like, how they do their business.

I thought I could just replicate it. Turns out cpas aren't, like, dying for business, and so the. It's the exact opposite. They're actually overwhelmed with business. Um, and so that's why I don't think this is actually going to make a lot of money.

Sam Parr
Uh, I think you're wrong. I think there's a need for this. I think that it will do well. I also think you know that, and I think you're. No, I don't.

I'm gonna shut it. I think you're playing us. Just gonna put it out there. No, I'm gonna shut it down on May 30. No, I went trap on you for a second.

Shaan Puri
That was good. If it doesn't work, if I'm losing money right now on this, if it doesn't start working by May 30, I'm shutting it down. Like, I'm not gonna invest more money on it, dog. Just give it to me. I'll make this work.

Sam Parr
This is so easy. You're just being impatient, and it's gonna fail because you're. You have a much better business that you're busy with called Hampton, and you should focus on that. That's why this is going to fail, and that's why this is a bad idea. But otherwise, it's a good idea.

Let me point out a couple of the product details that I like, and I'm going to tell you some of the things that you should do differently so we can screen share this. All right. I love when I go to the site and it pops up the. So I go to the site, and it pops up, and it basically is like, normally, where there's an email pop up, but it's like, no email, no b's, no something like, let's go. I was like, okay, already.

I think you should just actually call that out a little more and be like, we want to help you. We don't need your email address. And then just have a button that says, thank God. And then they had, thank God. It takes them down the funnel.

I love this part that you did where you read this first and you wrote, I have this many Twitter followers. I asked if they have a CPA accountant that they love. Then I called all them. I asked them how much they charged, blah, blah, blah. Why would I do this?

Because I'm a nerd and I needed an accountant. I thought, well, how about I make this useful for others? Blah, blah, blah. That's great. I love how you do that.

I love how you put everybody's Twitter profile attached to their name. Nice touch. Like your name here. Every accountant, you can go see their Twitter, which for our market is actually a good idea. Most people see their bio, but for us, it's cool.

You should put the prices on the front thing because I think that makes it a lot more value add to the person coming in. It's like, oh, good. These people already went and found what the rates are for these. And you also said, like, I asked them who their sweet spot customer is and blah, blah, blah. Like, what I can't tell is like, you know when, um, you know when you go to cars and bids and Doug D'Amoro has the Doug speech bubble and Doug's like, here's what I think.

Um, I think you kind of need to lean into that. I agree. That's a good idea. I don't trust reviews. I trust review, and I really just trust you.

And so the question is, like, can you not just call them, but call, like, you know, ten of their clients and be like, tell me everything. And then end up with one speech bubble that Sam saying, talk to them. Talk to their clients. Here's roughly what they charge. And like, you know, this is like, people are screaming, endorsing, or they're like, yeah, it's pretty good.

And like, you know, so I think they're solid and they seem to specifically help out this type of customer. I think that would make it better. I think that's a good idea. The reason why we haven't, I haven't done that yet is I would have to hire someone to help me call those people. And I was like, I need to figure out, does this thing even make money in the first place in order to, like, justify all this work?

Field dreams. Maybe if you build it, they will come. Did you see, uh. So a few things. The design.

Shaan Puri
I liked our design. I just ripped it off. It's. We made it look like old Microsoft. And then the image is, I just copied clippy.

You remember clippy from Microsoft Words? It's calci because it doesn't make any sense. It's AI. And on the calculator face, it's only four digits. It's a two, it's a five, it's a nine.

And a queue.

Sam Parr
Putting the queue in as the last letter is. The AI knows something we don't. Yeah. And so anyway, I thought I'd fill people in on this. I think it's hard.

Shaan Puri
I don't want to be in the business of selling leads to small accountants and having hundreds and hundreds of different clients paying me, versus, I think in order to make this work, you actually, what you do is you get someone's information, and then in order to do lead, gen usually only have a small amount of very large companies who pay you a large sum per month for a certain amount of leads versus one off. You know what I mean? Um. So I'm still trying to figure this shit out, but, uh, we'll see if it works out. All right.

Sam Parr
Uh, you got anything else, or we done? No, I'm, uh. You did great. You. That was good.

Shaan Puri
Two bangers. That's what I tell my wife when I go downstairs. How's the pod? Double banger. Double banger.

All right. That's the pod. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it, like.

Sam Parr
No days off on a road less. Travel, never looking back.

Shaan Puri
Travel, never looking back.

The Wild Story Of 'Mr. Tull' - From Laundromats To $3.5B Hollywood Production Company

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1. Early Ventures

2. Hollywood Disruption

3. Blockbuster Impact

4. Strategic Sale

5. Future Ventures

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