This Ecomm Site Breaks All The Rules And Still Wins Big

Key Takeaways

um [Music] hey what's up welcome to the copyblogger podcast thank you everybody for tuning in you are catching us mid conversation this week because i am observing something really really interesting with the data and the metrics of our own podcast of the show that you're listening to right now and um i was talking through with ethan hi ethan what's up how are you my friend i hope you're having a great week and ethan said hey like this is really interesting we should hit record so we hit record and and we're just going to jump right in here here's the deal i send the podcast out on my personal newsletter on timsas.com every week and we also send the podcast out on the copyblogger newsletter each week obviously the copyblogger newsletter has like a much significantly bigger audience and we tried something this week which i didn't really think too much of it was just a little bit of an experiment but this is fascinating to me so i'm going to share my screen we've been getting a pretty big audience on youtube the last couple weeks let me just make sure i don't have like any bank accounts or any [ __ ] like that i gotta close the first secret plans to take over the world so check this out ethan i want to get your viewpoint on this because this is like really fascinating to me so we're going to start with my newsletter my newsletter letters got seven went out this morning to 7403 people congrats thank you i've been working really hard on it man i'm very proud of it so i guess you have to kind of see it i'll give you a little bit of a breakdown my newsletter always follows the same format there's my weekly blog post at the top and then there's the podcast which is the second story so the podcast is always number two i i guess the last six months or so on the podcast i've always had the click here to listen to itunes and then click here to listen to spotify link and then today i just threw in another link that said show notes and full video are available here and this is the link that goes to the actual website for the podcast which is copyblog or pod.com and i was just looking at the data and it turns out the the vast majority of the people who clicked on a link for the podcast clicked on the actual website 20 people clicked on the website what is this uh people clicked on the spotify and then three people clicked on itunes so that's like uh i mean five four to one five to one average and then if we go to the actual copy blogger newsletter this one out to 121 thousand 122 000 people um just under and we see the same thing 245 people clicked on the actual website on the copyblogger pod link that has the video and the show notes in it and then of a small fraction of the people clicked on the uh on the itunes link uh yeah 171. yeah it's not right that's not quite as bad but i'm still surprised i'm still surprised i'm surprised man i would think the podcast just goes straight to itunes or spotify but but what is this do you think it's the youtube video do you think people are actually interested in the show notes like why do you think this is happening i don't know i don't know but one of the reasons i thought we should record is because i hope people will like you know holler at us and let us know if you're one of the people clicking on that link what is it about that you're so interested in i so i know some people who love they like to watch podcasts you know they'll watch like a three hour episode joe rogan which i get i think that could be like it kind of replaces tv when you think about it is that what's going on and should we be focused a little bit more on the video or was it just like those show notes or are you just not like maybe maybe there's a certain group of people that are not spotify or apple users but that seems a little bit less likely i mean i'm saying that because it's me like i get i'm uh i'm on android and i listen to my podcasts on anchor so uh i would be one of the weirdos who clicks that other thing yeah you're the weirdo for sure but you know what man i think you're on to something here i think podcasts are becoming more and more like shows and i will tell you exactly why i think that i realized after we did last week's episode another reason why there was such a huge disparity between the subscribers and the listeners was because i've never actually watched miss rachel on youtube i've pulled my remote and i spoke into the remote and i said play miss rachel on youtube right and so i also noticed the same exact thing that i do on saturdays because i kind of have like a saturday morning routine jules is studying and i enjoy listening to the all-in podcast it's like a cool little wrap-up about markets it's like very bro-ish you know i can kind of listen to some dudes shooting the [ __ ] it's like a good way to start my saturday night and the same exact thing like i never listen to it i always speak into my remote on the tv and i say play the all-in podcast on youtube and i wonder if it really is about the youtube if people are becoming more and more inclined to like participate in podcasts as like a all-encompassing viewer experience and less as you know let me throw on a podcast when i'm on the treadmill type deal that's super interesting yeah it's also a good segue kind of into another note that we should probably talk about so just for context for anybody who didn't catch last week's episode when he says miss rachel he's talking about this youtuber that we kind of described i guess it was last week right yeah it was last week and she's incredible her and her husband are building uh in a business and they have just tens and tens if not hundreds of millions of views on their videos and so we broke that whole uh system down there the episode went live wednesday and then a listener joey dowd actually followed up and wrote like sort of some additional notes on twitter related to what we were saying so some of the interesting things and i just wanted to call this out because i thought you know tim you and i were talking about this before we recorded his points were really interesting we always love hearing from people who are actually talking about the show offering their takes on things and he had a couple really interesting points and he is big in this world in this world of like video marketing too so he runs a company called new territory media they do a lot of things one thing is like video marketing for brands and i don't want to talk too much about it because i don't want to misstate the way you would describe his own company the other thing that they do though is they like award-winning documentarians and so yeah you got a lot of cool stuff going on so he knows this space and he had a couple interesting notes about what we had said related to this rachel so some of the things that we called out were that it was really fascinating that her viewer count was so high compared to her um subscriber count which you know i i don't think i was trying to make any kind of particular point about that from a business perspective except that it stood out to me because you know typically from my perspective it's rare to see somebody who gets way more interaction on their content than they do even in the size of their audience you know like so for me on twitter i've got whatever 4 000 ish followers but i've never gotten 400 000 likes on something and like miss rachel's pretty consistently seeing engagement rates that are way beyond the size of her audience so you said the sub metrics it doesn't say a ton lots of views for lots of channels come from non-subs which i think is what you were talking about there so this is for people to keep in mind in case you decide to take action on any of the things we were talking about last week yeah but the other thing that he said that i thought was really interesting that which i totally didn't key in on last week was we were talking about some of the estimated revenues for her channel and they were quite substantial but he made a good point he said because her videos are made for kids that limits um ads and targeting so they usually have like a lower cpm than normal but he said you know with 500 million plus views she's still definitely making banks so she wanted to call out joey because those were some pretty interesting insights great points to like i think it whenever you're considering opportunities in a space like it's important to have an accurate representation of uh like what the real opportunity is and so if there are these little things they're like oh yeah well it's big it's a huge market but here are these things that sort of change the picture a little bit i think it's really cool it's uh when somebody can kind of bring that nuance to the table so shout out to joey for for that did you look into him anymore yeah we've been talking his company is actually really interesting i'm i'm gonna send him a list of questions to do a case study on him because uh it's the kind of company that i dig it's like the sort of get your hands dirty but take advantage of like a real opportunity um kind of thing i was talking to him on twitter i was like hey man i've been swamp and got back to nashville didn't have time to send you the questions but we'll see what happens nonetheless i thought it was a fascinating thread i thought joey brought some really cool things to the table and most of all like thank you because we genuinely generally really like it really makes my day when i see people coming up with their own interpretations of the things that we talk about it's like very rewarding and so joey we we really appreciate it we'll make sure we link that thread uh in the show notes of this week's episode which is on copybloggerpod.com so check it out notes that everybody is clicking on yeah yeah all right ethan you have been hyping up this week's episode all week it sounds like you have a really fascinating story and a really great case study so uh the mike is yours my friend let's see this bad boy up yeah well i actually think starting with joey was a pretty fitting beginning because last week we ended we ended last week's episode talking about these interesting like product drop type companies and you and i were talking i'm actually curious to hear a little bit about whether you found anything in this space i know you've been digging but again just to give people a little bit of context because this is almost a part two of the conversation we were showing these product drop companies who have basically built their entire followings on instagram and it's very difficult to order from them some of them don't even have order pages at all or they started and like ran the business for a year or more the only way to order from them was by a venmo or sliding into their dms or something and we just were your top we were talking about how fascinating it is that people can run successful businesses basically doing the opposite of what all the conventional advice is like hey you need your conversion rate optimization in place you need your ads on point your website's got to be beautiful all these things okay and we kind of left the last episode saying like i wonder if there's other businesses that are doing this so by pure happenstance i spent uh part of the early part of this week just cruising through some of the top 100 lists of like the top 100 sellers on amazon or etsy or like walmart marketplace and uh in doing that i found a really really interesting case study of this and it's like these little instagram businesses that we found but at a way bigger scale so have you ever heard of woot.com w-o-o-t yep no never okay i hadn't either and i'm kind of surprised that i hadn't because it was a little bit of like a cultish internet thing and i kind of come from like this internet yeah i mean it was like yeah i wasn't like a super nerd growing up you know like i've been into like internet stuff for a little while let me set this up i'm also going to share my screen too because there's a visual element to this right now that i know everyone's tuning into the movie so woot.com and i know it hasn't shared yet i'm going to share right now woot.com was this daily deal site and if we have here's the problem with this story this was totally new to me and it completely blew my mind this is one of the one of my favorite entrepreneurship stories recently but anybody who is like familiar with this it's gonna be like me describing amazon to you like have you heard of amazon.com you know like there's this guy jeff pesos and he was working on wall street and like anybody who's super familiar with this is just gonna be like yeah bro this is like this was it was a it was a big deal okay so i i should probably keep this up by saying root was a big deal back in the early to mid 2000s and it was a daily deal site started by this guy named matt rutledge so matt was an electronics wholesaler and so that means like he used to um the wholesaling business for people who don't know is sort of interesting what you do is you go out and you can buy inventory from manufacturers at like large quantities like bigger than even a retailer would buy and because you're buying in such large quantities you get a really good deal and then the goal is to sell that to either directly to customers at a deal that they couldn't find anywhere else or even to retailers because you got it at such a steep discount you can even sell it to them cheaper than making it from the manufacturer so this whole like wholesaling business works out really well he does well there wholesaling electronics and eventually he starts this company called woot.com which was a daily deal site that he would use to offload inventory and it was kind of interesting because uh for like for three reasons first it only ever offered one thing for sale every single day there was no product selection at all you came to the website you either liked the thing or you didn't second they would sell that thing until they either sold out of inventory or until the clock hit midnight and then every day at midnight like the clock would refresh the page would change and they have a new product that comes up and then the third thing that and this is what really set wood apart is that they were actually i have a quote here that i want to share because i think wikipedia put it best but they said he encourages copywriters to be quote entertainingly frank about the shortcomings of the often obsolete products that were sold on the site and that's why you're seeing okay so you're we're looking at this page i'm showing tim a page from the internet archive this is a woot.com listing 2004 yeah yeah yeah oh five yeah december 405. and you know it's a it's a coffee maker but so he would sell this stuff that was like not super cutting edge just kind of like junky stuff and the way he would keep people coming back just aren't comfortable with the feel good wood grain birkenstock vibe booking stock vibe that surrounds coffee these days they can't bring themselves to listen to the wise middle-aged singer-songwriters you say the word barista coffee for them isn't an indigenous communal beverage yeah it's just it's crazy copyright it's amazing copywriting okay so that's that was the business daily deal site meh products amazing copywriting and he would just sell them like crazy okay the internet loved this thing by 2008 i believe it was they were rumored to be doing 164 million dollars a year they've grown 39 year over year and they had a whole bunch of sub brands so he had this like he had like justboot.com then there would be line.line.com i think they had a t-shirt brand as well and so they had started to expand to like other categories but they all did the exact same thing one product a day and you either came here and you bought it or you didn't okay then in 2010 they sold to amazon and amazon did what amazon does whenever they buy a business they amazon it up they started optimizing everything and adding add-ons and all kinds of extra stuff until eventually like you could barely even recognize it now woot.com is still around still an amazon property and this is how i found them they're actually one of the top amazon sellers in the world which shouldn't be very surprising because amazon literally owns them right but the his story gets funny because matt like two years after selling with his non-compete running out got tired of seeing his baby sort of like twisted so he jumped ship and he started a new website called matt.com and meh is a perfect reboot of woot.com now i'll give you the i'm gonna i'm gonna i'll give you the quick wrap up here and then we'll dig into what i love about this but like matt is one of six brands that he now runs under a single parent corporation the parent company is called a media a mediocre corporation and here i'll show you this they literally have they're called they call themselves an uh event driven retail and what that basically means is yeah they're all direct competitors with boot.com they pretty much the models vary a little bit from brand to brand but basically each one of these is some sort of like deal site so meh is a almost perfect shameless reboot of woot.com then there's side deal morning save which kind of operate in the same way casemates is something that allows you to buy like wine and then like split it with friends mediocrity is really good for t-shirts yeah yeah yeah that's so stupid it's awesome and he um this is really cool so every monday and thursday at 11 a.m they spotlight an indie artist with two of their designs so it's it's really cool like it's like event driven retail but so i'll i'm gonna pause it for a second but here's like the really cool secret thing about this company it's not just the e-commerce like and again the reason i brought this up was i think this is this is the mega example of what we were talking about last week where last week you have these sort of little scrappy creators who are building cult followings around what they're doing and and because of that they're able to like break all the rules he's doing the exact same thing at scale and so like if you go to meh you you get to choose from one thing every day and that's it like there is there is no there is no can you go to it i want to see the site i'll go to it but okay i'm gonna go to it i have to caveat this though which is okay matt is a daily deal site and of course the one day that we decided to record this for like a huge public audience no it's it's it's like the value pack of vibrators that's what's on sale for today it's like uh remember like when you were a kid you'd be sitting around watching a movie at home and it's totally innocuous until your parents walk into the room and then all of a sudden like the craziest sex team comes up that's that's the sight for us today but oh my god this is perfect but you can see thrill the skin was i say shiver yeah it's i don't know it's like a combo pack of vibrators but like if you look at just look at the look at the copywriting so when the company is called something like skin you should know exactly what kind of wellness he uh we're dealing with here so let's just get straight to it this is a bundle of three differently shaped vibrators and a stimulating job and like it goes on and on and on but like all the all the bullets are like the wellness we're talking about here is sexual wellness if you haven't figured it out yet and then the kicker at the very bottom of this is hilarious and this is what i was getting at a second ago it's not just an e-commerce company this is a media company disguised as an e-commerce company the thing that keeps people coming back to this and i'll show you this in a second this is crazy one of the things i love about this site is that at the very bottom they track all their stats every single day so those shows buying this crap yep so for people listening they've got so far today how many people visited how many people clicked meh which the i like part of the shtick of this site is if you don't buy you just kind of like click meh there's a button for like you can just you know to show you like you just click meh and that's it but that's the whole thing yeah it'll show you how many people engage with that so that's kind of like that community building thing right it shows how people got there the website's 95 percent direct traffic people just typing in math.com straight from the browser and then of the other five percent like a significant portion of it comes like look at this from mediocrity so that's one of their other brands from and from side deal uh which you can see up here so their brands flywheel each other what else do they do 31 grand in business today so uh so far and they're sold out so that's not going to go on that one product yep yeah and it's like this every single day like they they do pretty serious volume and it shows you who's buying this crap so it's like a geographical breakdown how many people are are buying like one two three sets and then they'll always have some kind of survey here and so what's so fascinating about this business not uh aside from the scale like this this is these are big numbers we're putting up but aside from the scale is that they are basically a media company who keep people coming back day after day with their hilarious copy and the way that they interact with people and build a community let me show you another example of this and i have to stop sharing my screen for a second just to make sure i'm sharing it the right way because i'm gonna need audio so this is my favorite thing i've ever seen isn't this amazing and it's like i've never heard of them before and like i said up top like there's some people here who are are they just become an idiot for saying that but okay so this is how they launched it oh i said one you know the 95 of their traffic is direct and then it has a breakdown it says the other five percent of you came from and then there's five things listed there and i've checked this day after day typically only the top five so they don't do like a long trailing breakdown so but you know it's typically twitter and then some combination of their other sites they don't run ads this website for people listening is super ugly there's nothing i mean it's hideous but i also kind of love it because it's really simple if there's like an image there's the copy and then there's like a whole bunch of community stuff so they've got forums attached to all this but it's not like a super slick i think the people at shopify would literally have a stroke if they saw this let me show you how they funded it so that not funded it because like i said the dude sold this company for 110 million bucks so they he was doing fine when they decided to start this but in order to get the ball rolling and i would say this was more for to build the community than anything else they did a kickstarter so they did a kickstarter with the target of raising ten thousand dollars and i think i'm sharing audio tell me if you can hear the audio on this i'm just going to play like the first couple of seconds of their kickstarter video because i think it speaks to the way that they approach community building and like their voice in general so here it goes can you hear that yeah hello potential sucker i'm here to talk to you about an exciting business opportunity for me i mean an exciting business opportunity for me see i'm the spokes troll for a new slash old online retail experience coming slash coming back cern to an internet near you it's called mess and it's the return of the daily deal it goes on like that for a little while it's hilarious though like we'll link all this stuff up in the show notes people can check it out but they they're just really funny and here's something that a lot of people don't know the last company root.com same thing he built that company around a blogging team before they really built out i mean they they actually i i shouldn't say for certain because i'm not sure precisely what the team was structured like uh early early in roots days but i do know that he brought his brother on as one like the early co-founders early leaders of the company and his brother ran geeklife.com which was one of like the big kind of like tech nerd blogs back in the 90s 2000s i think and they you know they they hired five writers pretty early in that project so they um from the beginning have thought of this as like a content brand a media brand that just happens to sell stuff and so i love this i also think that there's a huge opportunity to potentially replicate this for other creators who already have that following and so we can talk about it in more detail but i just wanted to show that to you because i think it's hilarious this is phenomenal i cannot believe that you found this especially that you stumbled upon it like the week after we just talked about that product drop model right all right a few things come to mind one is that i've done not nearly as much in my career but i've done some e-commerce in in particular there's a company called 89.com it's one of my best friends his name's ray he started this streetwear brand out of miami and it's been running for like 25 years it's one of the coolest clothing companies ever i've tried to buy a piece of his company like a gazillion times and he won't do it which i'm still slightly resentful for but anyway we always used to go back and forth about how important product copy is and ultimately we just landed at this idea that the image is more important and like the specs are more important you know like the the inches around the chest right like the shoulder like that kind of stuff really matters when you do an ecom and i mean who knows maybe we're totally wrong because we're always thinking about optimizing content for like conversion and for benefits but maybe it's got nothing to do with that right maybe it's just about like building a like an identity around your content like having a voice and then on that note similar but not quite the same i just checked to see if they do it and they don't one of my favorite companies um the hundreds there's a guy named bobby hundreds and he was like he really revolutionized fashion because you're the first one to ever like create content marketing and incorporate it into e-commerce and so he he since redesigned his site but for a long time like the blog was the big generator of sales and he would do cool stuff like just personal stories about local hip-hop artists especially in la and like about the skate scene about the art scene he used to do like art basil in miami all the time it was a piece that i really look forward to and so when i saw this i went to the hunters.com where you were telling me to see like what their product pages look like and there's nothing there there's just the typical product picture shop now button and then like the specs underneath it and all bullet points you know and so i don't know i'm sure there's a lot of data that these people have and they they must do it the way they do it for a certain reason but this guy's just breaking all the rules and especially a brand like the hundreds who already had such a cool identity around like streetwear and street art and skating and i mean yeah they could have such a voice you know um i don't know i'm i'm like everything i thought i knew it was all alive man oh my god it's so funny too like they'll do these youtube videos where they write new songs like that troll character sing songs yeah sock puppet i'm glad you brought up the 100 so because that was exactly the the brand that i thought of when um really well yeah because they they've always been so good i read bobby hundreds book on community like i think it's called this is a t-shirt no i think this is not a t-shirt oh it's okay or so it's the opposite of what i said it's the same just opposite yeah it but but it was really interesting i hadn't heard of them before that but he has such a a unique community building approach and i think that's really the key rutledge does really well is build community around this idea and like for him the idea is almost like i i would be willing to bet a non-trivial percentage of people who buy from matt every day they just buy because like as part of the community you know like they don't even want the stuff you know like literally when we kind of made their name on a product that they named so they had the monthly bag of crap and here let me read the i'll i'll i'll i'll read the um the posting because it's hilarious like the copywriting on it was just amazing i got to pull it up from the web archive so it might take a second but the the whole idea is that oh okay here it goes here i'll share my screen so you can see it too the whole idea is that they're building community and that the community sort of like agrees oh this stuff's not important like we're not gonna take ourselves too seriously you know this is just like a dumb product that you might want and literally actually let me before we get into this let me show you one other thing which is oh you shared mine so this is man's twitter account it literally says last year's stuff tomorrow's price and you want to talk about imagery like they have the most hilarious images it's almost like what you do on your blog how you use those stock photos with your face which i think is amazing every single day they have all their whatever oh my god vibrators being dropped out of a bomber i have a bomber [Laughter] and then here like when i was just scrolling this i thought i thought they literally were selling swim trunks for dogs but it's not they're they're men's wicking performance mesh shorts and for people listening they've photoshopped them onto some kind of like yellow lab that's just jumping into a pool like so they do these hilarious images they definitely don't take themselves too seriously this was a vacuum that they were selling like a uh what's that little robot bag yeah it's similar to that so they always do these funny things they don't take themselves too seriously i think that's the key they're community building it's not just about the product somebody like the hundreds they have that advantage which is that they built that community and i think other people who are listening to this man community is such a moat i mean i think there are some companies that really are product first and that's cool the problem is in this day and age you know it's so possible to copy a product like product products to be reverse engineered copied opens like open source can do almost anything like it it's just not enough to lean on the product anymore you have to really be building community in some way so here's the random bag of crap it's one dollar plus five dollars shipping and handling [Laughter] tired of clicking all over the web and looking for the lowest price on the finest merchandise with the best features from the most reliable retailers give your inner consumer's reporter a break by indulging in a purchase that no one would mistake for a good deal another one of woot's famous bags of crap and the picture is just like a random briefcase so you don't even know what you're getting you don't even know what's in it yeah hey when this crap arrives at your house grousey not that you've been had we've and uh we're admonishing you in all caps that what we've got here is crap look and this is like all craps it says caveat m tours suckers this item consists of one bag with oh let's say about three pieces of crap inside if you order fewer than three craps for your bag it's really not that cost effective but don't let us tell you how to waste your money after all you're the one who buys this crap so like and then the rest of the thing i won't read the whole thing in full but we'll link to this listing too so how about like yeah the rest of the listing is all about how to control your disappointment when you get this bag of crap it's all about like you look don't have that don't have high expectations in the first place and all this other hilarious stuff so all that to say yeah the community building is is just really really strong on this one and i think the hundreds like so i've i've studied the hundreds pretty closely actually one thing that they're doing these days i think is really interesting that a lot of brands could take advantage of if they uh so chose is live ecom and so what they're doing like i stumbled across this they do these like live behind the scenes um breakdowns of t-shirts where they'll have some guy come out and one of the artists or somebody at the company will come on live stream they'll talk about the most recent product drop and then people will tune in and you can you can buy the shirts while you're watching right there and they have a custom viewer so that you don't even have to leave the live stream in order to purchase shirts and stuff like that those are all similar examples of ways that building community can really bolster e-comm and uh and the most it gives you yeah so i suppose the cop-out example is harley-davidson right that's always like the the example that gurus write about in books but what are some more but what are some more nuanced ones like um the other one that comes to mind is chuck taylor's like have not changed their shoe design and what like 80 years you know i don't even know when that came out maybe less maybe more don't don't quote me on that but it's like such a community driven brand econ brand i think it's cool to focus on ecom because like it's it's a community built around a product it's not a community for the sake of a community right so i think it's important to make that distinction yeah um i don't know what are some like women's brands it's i i can't i don't shop for women's stuff really well yeah the last time i bought women's clothing i i don't know i can't answer that but i'm sure i'm sure there's a bunch and the what last episode plus this episode sort of show is that the opportunities in this space are growing not shrinking and the reason for that is because there's there's like an exponential growth in the numbers of opera or opportunities for community building so you can just keep like adding features to your demographic in order to create a new audience and appeal to a new type of person so i mean to your point the simplest version of this you could literally do math for women right i mean today they do all sorts of different products and i think that's largely a result of their wholesaling model but there's a really interesting thing going on in the world today where because of the kind of bullwhip effect of supply and dem or supply chain disruptions on retail recently a lot of retailers here in the us have way more inventory than they can handle and i mean they can't they can't manage returns anymore they don't have warehouse space for all the stuff that they have on the shelves prices are cratering and so i think there's a world in which retailers start looking for more help from liquidators soon which is not quite the same thing as a wholesaling model but you know if you were to build a brand around liquidating a very specific types of products and then it's a content-driven brand community-driven brand i think there's just going to be a lot of opportunity in that space you can do this exact same model for the outdoors industry specifically or like you said you know certain i don't know if it might be more complex with fashion because that's a little bit more yeah there's lifestyle involved yeah and also fashion is already so brand heavy like nobody's heard of you know that or like the little flying saucer robot that they are selling it's not it's not a major brand that you've heard of before i don't know it's just really interesting so i wanted to call that out the other thing that i'll just say which i think we may have touched on last week is that you don't have to think too big about this like there are a lot of local super local i see this a lot with restaurants ice cream places bakeries all that kind of stuff that are using this model and it's giving them an edge inside an industry that used to be a lot harder to compete in so you could imagine using the same type of approach for like even local services like dog day cares or something like that i don't know at some point it it becomes so broad that we're that we're just kind of talking about content marketing but exactly you're talking about just having a personality yeah yeah what i like about matt is that it shows you you can break the rules and you can totally break the rules yeah well said and man this is just so like you can take this conversation in such a million different directions right like you can focus on e-comm you can focus on content you can apply like this idea of having a personality to anything really one of the things that stuck in my head though i think i think what i'm getting from it if there's a thing that i can apply to be better at it's what you said that like community is such a moat with ecom and i think ecom has been just so like amazon right it's been so commoditized that um there's no way to compete on price anymore because you just you can't out amazon amazon is it's impossible so the only thing you have left is your uniqueness you know because if you're both selling the same coffee maker and you can't sell it stupid than amazon what are you gonna do you're gonna be you know what it comes to mind actually is one of my best friends has a um a youtube channel and he's really into over landing it's just like kind of a new phase right now where you basically say like [ __ ] society i'm gonna buy a jeep and just like drive in the desert like always in like forever that resonates with me yeah and their community is so thick like it is so thick and they spend crazy money on i mean they're it's expensive gear you know if you want to buy a tent that props up on the top of your jeep and is safe and can legitimately like withstand the rainstorm especially like three four thousand dollars and they buy it so i i know this is like a little bit tongue-in-cheek but for some reason the first thing that came to mind is is like industries like that where the the community is kind of already baked in to the to the product you know and like how do you take that and then just double down on it so that you can get so that you can steal like a small piece of the pie from amazon totally and i think this actually speaks to something that uh the met team included in their kickstarter campaigns there's this little bit at the end where the little troll guy is like i'm just kind of paraphrasing it but he says like you know this is going to be like the most amazing thing until it eventually becomes just one other daily deal site and like it's overloaded with a whole bunch of disappointing blah blah blah and i think what they're alluding to there i know they're kind of joking but the reality is all businesses eventually abandon their original user base in like in order to scale and so some people i think might think that that's a bad thing but what it means is that there's always going to be an opportunity to come in and be that new name that's like really authentic and you can get your foothold you know i was just talking to a couple of guys about uh newsletters and they were asking you know how do you sort of like define where you want to start with that and i said something similar which is like well i think one thing that helped the hustle early on was they took a look around and just asked themselves what do i wish was here because you can't out amazon amazon you can't out morning brew morning brew but you can go into those spaces and be the voice that is not represented right now and that when when the hustle first started it was hey we're gonna be like your best friend but just like talking about tech and business news nobody's doing that everybody's trying to make tech and business sound really important and like you know it was entrepreneur it was forbes it was all these people we're just gonna be like your best friend yeah should be like your best friend texting you and you you'll always be able to do that because you know just think about the communities that you belong to and this is what i'm talking about when i say like this kind of like a fractalization of communities yeah doesn't it doesn't matter what big dogs exist you just need to be in touch with what you wish was present kind of in the space one other thing related to that i actually didn't plan on bringing this up but it is so well said man it really is there's a big lesson there thanks yeah well that actually ties in with this next thing which every once in a while we do something here where it's like i feel like we'll sort of highlight miss rachel was a version of this there's it's like just go do the thing that you are so interested in you know don't worry so much about where there's opportunity or you know what's going to pay off those things matter that's but that's why we say start with cash flow right like have your job and then when it comes to creative stuff just go do what you are really passionate about and eventually the audience will come and then once the audience is there you can build the products on it and i found an interesting example that the other day so i well actually what i should say first of all is there's a lot of really big examples of this right now so one that we may have talked about before here i mean you know cameron haynes right the bow hunter yeah yeah we talked about him yeah so he's a kind of an interesting example because it you know you wouldn't think that like bow hunting is something that would put you in the mainstream or give you a best-selling book or any of those types of things but he was just out doing his thing and then he caught the interest of somebody who had the audience already right and you can't plan that but it happens way more than people think so i was just watching i i um i just found this new analyst that i really like to watch his youtube videos his name is uh jake bro and he's so interesting to me because he he talks a lot about the economy he'll talk about these different wars that are going on or like international conflicts and he has a very interesting take on it the first video i saw of his was related to ukraine and russia and so i don't know if people are watching a lot of these ukraine russia breakdowns but a lot of people there's sort of like a battle map that's available somewhere on the web that shows you know where the front line is kind of drawn and then every day it updates with whatever land was taken by russia or ukraine so back and forth and there's a lot of analysts on youtube that sort of track this movement back and forth well the first video i saw from uh this guy jake he says a lot of people are attracting this battle map i've been tracking a different battle map and he pulls up the price of crude oil and then he lays out this entire economic argument for why crude oil is really the thing you're gonna gonna have to pay attention to it's gonna be the thing that kind of decides this war and so what i i like about him regardless of where you stand on that conflict is that he thinks different than most people right like rather than just looking at the situation on the ground or the map that most people look at he is looking at different resources for some sort of insight into the same situation and i love people who think like that even if i disagree with them on certain things i try to find them because they're such interesting thinkers so i really like this guy i've been watching stuff and the example that i found recently of like just make your thing is he was reporting on jake big bro was reporting on a festival a ukrainian festival in canada and he was trying to find videos of it and he says like i can't find videos of it anywhere but i did find this one kid who plays the accordion and he was practicing the accordion and he has a youtube channel he's like he's practicing the accordion for this festival he has a youtube channel he had 500 followers the day that jake posted this video which was uh the day before i saw it so 24 hours before he had 500 followers and jake just said he literally just said hey look if you like these videos and you want to kind of surprise this kid i'm going to follow him on youtube and if you like accordion or you think he's cool like you can go follow me yeah yeah right who doesn't love the accordion so i had i saw this video like 24 hours after that was posted you want to guess how many followers this kid had i was guessing a thousand okay i'm glad you guessed it thanks man for guessing relatively low so that i can actually shock you with this it's more than that yeah dude hold on a second i'll show you right here let's see what it's up to now i'm not sure i'll show you what it was yesterday yes he's up to 6 000 subscribers uh what is that 12 times his audience grew 12 x what's that ukrainian wedding merch yeah okay so here here's the this is the video yeah that's the that's the festival so here's a kid who was you know i don't think he started recording ukrainian like accordion videos because there's like a huge pending market for that he was interested in it you know he was interested in it and he built enough of an audience and there just happened to be this moment where his world collided with somebody who had the audience and who was interested and wanted to see it and now he's got like a really significant audience and i don't know what his plans are for it but i just thought it was such a great example of just go do your thing man who cares make sure you have your cash flow first yes that's really important but do the thing that's most interesting to you because the audience will come over time i got one more example and i love how this this episode is going on a journey where take me because that's the central point if you were to talk to matt rutledge and he came to you 20 years ago he said yeah i'm gonna make a multi-million dollar website where i basically put a random thing up and then i talk about all the reasons why you shouldn't buy it what this is awful but it was his thing um whether it's like ecom or community being remote and all that stuff like that's cool and a little bit more technical but it was his thing and he had a unique way of viewing the world and he expressed that you got this recording guy that's another example all right we're going to revisit a recurring theme in this podcast which is my dad my dad hasn't been doing his podcast too consistently but he really has been doing it he's been doing it i'd say like one episode every 10 days or so and you know he's out of work and his shoulder blew out because the surgery and the whole thing he's got like a bunch of screws in his shoulder now he's doing maybe not screws he's got a bunch of scars is what i meant to say from the from the surgery he's doing really great he's actually like never been happier it's also really weird because you're still in a great deal of pain and so seeing him and like it's been giving me some lessons just about the difference between like your physical life and like your mental and your spiritual life you know and so i've been learning about that the point is he made this random ass video and he sent it to me and he was so proud of it and i was like wow dad like that's really cool good for you pop he's got this hourglass you know and he flips the hourglass and he says okay this is the past like this is what you can never get back and this is the future and this is the thing that you worry about and you can never see and all you have is and this is this quote quote unquote the action zone like where the sand passes from from the past into the future basically there's an analogy of like this is your present day and like don't waste it because like this is all you get this is your action zone put this video out there a bunch of his old friends and stuff that he hasn't talked to in years send him messages he's sending me all these screenshots about like well just things haven't been going that well and one of his old friends their dad also had alzheimer's and for some reason like she showed this video to her dad and it was a moment for her dad where like he was able to comprehend it you know and like it was cool you're sending me these screenshots anyway the point i'm getting that is one of the people that reached out to him is somebody that's creating a brand new program in philly where instead of emergency responders it's i figured exactly what he called it i want to say in home paramedicine but that's that's not the technical term for it but the point is instead of racing and taking a lot of uh um like civil money you know like government revenue taxpayer money basically and spending it on ambulances and bringing them to the hospital they're creating another program that like meets them at their home and can treat them at their home without that whole trip and without the hospital bill and without the overnight stay and all of that and he saw my dad's video and this is the exact words he said this exactly he said you know you've been an amazing paramedic you're like a legend in philly for being on the force for so long and i see that you're putting yourself out there that's exactly what he said and he offered this he offered my dad well i i can't remember exactly was uh there was a bonus involved and it was like a chance to come in and speak about possibly like launching this new program that is being funded by not the city by delaware county it's a subset it's like a suburb you know so that's awesome crazy right often this like ridiculously cheesy video that i honestly made me want to barf when i looked at it it's funny that you say that because i got the chills a little bit when when you described it i was like oh that's good that's good right but i'm one of your dad's bigger fans man i've been listening to the podcast it's cool i'm so proud of them uh that's such a good point though it's like you never know which one is going to be the one yeah i don't know dude i had my mind changed about this recently too because the thing so i one of the things i struggle with especially when it comes to creating is like perfectionism i have a lot of ideas and i tend to sort of trap them in notebooks or to-do lists they i just never end up taking action on them and part of the reason for that is i just build this idea in my head of how good it has to be before i could ship it i mean things that we've all talked about a million times here yeah but recently i forget what i what it was that actually caught my attention on this i think it was actually sean uh puri who is talking about some throwaway tweet that he didn't even expect to be popular that ended up being massively popular for him and people reach out and like to this day they still reach out for him and i started thinking about it i'm like you know what there's something about that where it's actually like you you almost don't have the right not to share ideas that occur to you right because you never know yeah because you don't really know what's going to be the one that's actually good for people like what what meets people where they are and and really changes somebody's day and so i've been thinking about that a lot more and also just yeah i guess duty is probably a good word and that i don't want that to sound douchey because like well it's my duty to stand up here and share my ideas maybe your responsibility like you have a responsibility to put yourself like god given right no but what i'm getting at here is like i think i get in my own way when it comes to this and what i found more and more recently is you are actually not a very good gauge of how good your ideas are the world decides that so don't worry so much about what you think is good what you think is bad or censoring yourself or trying to filter for your best stuff like just keep putting stuff out there and i'm trying to do that more and more because you don't know what's going to click with people yeah and i think your dad's a great example of that you just have no idea you have no idea i mean we talked about that when i had my first ever like viral thread that got me those four thousand like i had no idea i published a thing and then i went to the gym and then it was a wednesday and i only bring my phone into the gym on wednesdays because i have like a quick slack meeting with my executive team for stadzi and so jules knows it and that's why we save like i i can't do doubles because my back but she does deadlifts on wednesday because like she could put in her headphones and i do the uh you know like the hex bar it doesn't make me bend over so much and so i do like hex bar squats and the only reason i had my phone on me which was a wednesday and you know two hours later i looked in i'm like what the [ __ ] it's got like 2 000 likes and thought nothing of it so you just you never know like you never never know you got to put it out there have you ever heard of um big magic by elizabeth gilbert no okay so that is should i well uh she's the one who wrote uh eat cray love which you've probably heard of oh okay yeah totally yeah so she's pretty rad actually i hadn't gotten into any of her stuff until like two years ago i think i was i was it was right when i was trying to figure out how to become a writer so i started getting real deep into travel writing again and obviously he pray loves like the book about travel writing you know so i listened to it and kind of fell in love with her voice she's hilarious and she's just very insightful very thoughtful and so i've listened to some of her other stuff and she's got this book called big magic which is all about creativity and uh kind of the creative process and and one thing she talks about there is this theory she has that ideas actually don't belong to you that they are like kind of beings in the universe and they're trying to find somebody who will bring them into the world and so they go around looking for the right person and that's like when the idea occurs to you it's almost like the idea knocking on your door and if you wait too long it'll it'll leave and they'll go off and find somebody else hopefully or you know you should kind of free ideas that in one way or another either by bringing them into the world or by kind of letting yourself let go of it and i just love i love that way of thinking about it and i think that ties in with this concept that we're talking about here and more and more when things occur to me i try to just kind of put them out there and like not maintain this long list of ideas for some day uh just put stuff out that's kind of imperfect and is fairly representative of what i was thinking and just see what happens that's such a cool way to think about it man i'm i'm gonna like take that one with me you know how i can't oh yeah that that thing i said about focusing on the one thing that matters like that was a real that i felt that like your ideas don't belong to you i don't belong to anybody they're like looking for a place to go and that is so cool like it takes all the pressure off because like what what are you actually doing it's not like you're presenting something that you can be judged on it's just this this you know this idea showed up in my door yeah like hey look look there's like a puppy that showed up on your doorstep like hey guys look look what i found yeah that's a good way to look at it like hey look what i found right that's pretty cool yeah that's good [ __ ] yeah dude this is a great show yeah i enjoyed it hopefully listening to this got uh got a kick out of this one let us know what you think like we said we shouted out at the top uh love the fact you guys are listening and and saying stuff like when you tell us what you want more of or what you think about this like we can adapt it and we'll call you out and all that kind of stuff it's great to kind of interact with the group so let us know what's up we'll include links to everything we talked about in the show notes if anything else you want to tell the people before no no man just feeling really good i'm enjoying this so much and it's so cool to see not only that it's popular but i genuinely feel like people are getting stuff out of our experience and that makes me feel really good like it doesn't go unnoticed and it doesn't go unappreciated i'll see you guys next week later [Music] you