I Launched A Viral Water Brand In 8 Weeks

0:00 So this is like A canned water brand, a high school basketball player, and a TikTok meme walk into a bar and out comes this and and this is the the story of that. I feel like I can rule the world, I know I could be what I want to I put my law in it like my day song. On the road, let's travel. Like I'm Dana White in the UFC.

0:23 Because we have here The most entertaining man in business, the guy with the most illustrious career. He started Teach for America. He created the viral hit game draw something and sold it for hundreds of millions of dollars. He worked with Are Emanuel in the talent world. Then he built the best amateur basketball league on the planet in affected culture. And now he's here today telling us about. His new ventures, his new brands, new things that he's he's building along the way and how to do it. So Dan

0:54 Welcome. You are the reigning defending Undefeated. Most entertaining man in business. I appreciate that. You know, sometimes people go nineteen and no and then they don't win the Super Bowl. So I gotta keep winning until

1:07 I guess I'm in the grave. So you are a teacher a professor N My U and so is Scott Galloway. Who's the better professor and who has more street cred at on campus? Who's got bigger pull? He's richer. And more famous And I'm humbler.

1:23 So I guess that's that's how it goes. Um okay, so dude, I wanted to talk to you because You texted us something and uh confused me. You're building a water brand now? Well, you've done this crazy water brand thing. Can you you gotta tell this story. I don't think anyone even knows the story. Yeah. Kind of. So this is like the unlikely story. Of like the fourth most Followed water brand in the world.

1:51 on social media and so to take a step back I don't know if everybody knows what N I L is. N I L is name, image, likeness. It's like a revolution in college sports where uh You know, for years players could not make any money, Reggie Bush lost his Heisman trophy, people would lose their eligibility.

2:10 And then a year after we started our Bassetball Lee and started paying players Supreme Court ruled and all of a sudden there was NIL. So now every college and many high school players in America can make money. The difference is they can't get paid to play the sport, but they can get endorsement deals and so forth. Their name phase like you You're in school. And your roommate has, you know, is a rapper and has a song, and your other roommate is a YouTuber and makes money.

2:41 And you hooper play football and you can't make money. It doesn't really make any sense. Right. Especially when the schools are making a lot of money off of those sports. And so The players today give a sense of the scale of this. So how much is an N I L like top players, top basketball players, football players, maybe a you know, I don't know what Cooper Flag was making last year, or you know, a SEC quarterback. Give me a range. Like are they making tens of thousands of dollars, hundreds of thousands of dollars, millions of years, tens of millions? What are the best players making through this N I L stuff? So if you look at a top

3:11 Power five quarterback, SEC, whatever, seven to ten million dollars. A year. Why a year, a year to play for one season. Wide receivers, running backs, best defenders, a million to three million. Uh a guy on the bench, two hundred and fifty K.

3:29 And like the NFL salary for a For a fur if you're a first round pick. As a quarterback. You would sign so sh Caleb Williams in twenty twenty four. He was the number one overall quarterback picked.

3:42 He signed a four year thirty nine million dollar deal. So he signed a deal that made it paid him ten million a year. You're saying that. College guys are making, you know, sort of that same range, seven to ten while they're still in college. They can absolutely make that sense. And by the way, does this trickle down like if

3:58 If I'm like a woman's lacrosse player somewhere, soccer player And we're not. powerhouse, SEC football, blah, blah, blah. Am I still, you know, hundreds of dollars a month doing local stuff with the car wash nearby? Like are are is everybody eaten or is it only the people at the top right now? It's really the people at the top.

4:16 Top top basketball players, one to three million. I have about four or five players who played in my league who are making over a million dollars in college. And it's kind of a waterfall. There is a there's a softball player in Texas who makes a million. But it definitely it kind of falls off. The cliff because those are the sports

4:36 Marge Madness on television, football on television, that generate a tremendous amount of money for the schools. And so Those are the sports that they wanna win at at the highest level. And then in fact a lot of NIL Legislation. says like You you have to still support all of the other sports, the Olympic sports, the women's sports, the less popular men's sports. Right.

4:59 and and so forth and so But in women's basketball on the college level You think about NIL You know, there's all there's not a there's not a large number of of WMBA teams.

5:11 Uh and in fact there's only there's three rounds to the WMBA draft. And if you're in the second or third round, you usually don't actually make it onto a team. So if you think about from the women's side, college basketball is a much more lucrative opportunity for them. than the W MBA because the path to it is just so small. It's just a numbers game. There's there's not enough. So but are swimmers and lacrosse players making hundreds of thousands of dollars? Currently they are not. Right. Okay. Uh okay, so NIL, good thing for the athletes overall getting getting some money. So now how does this take take us to

5:45 You building this water brand. And in a very short period of time. Getting it to go viral, making it one of the most followed water brands in the in the in the world. Yeah. So this is like Uh a a a canned water brand, a high school basketball player, and a TikTok meme walk into a bar.

6:04 Uh and then out comes this and and this is the the story of that. So To take it back, you know, we have this basketball league overtime a lead. It's the second most followed basketball league in the world. behind the NBA is over twelve million followers and many, many fans. A lot of people watch the games. Uh and there's a player.

6:23 In this league. Taylor and Kinney they call him TK his initials. He's gonna be a senior this year. He's being recruited by Louisville and Kentucky and UConn and a bunch of schools. He's a great player, and he's actually a great guy. He's just like really level headed. funny but just like works hard, no drama.

6:44 Great kid. Um And so last year. You know, one of our teams is on a beach somewhere and uh he and this other player joking around And the player asks him some question.

6:56 And his answer is six. Seven. You know, so forth and he moves his hands like that. It's a line from a rap song by Skrilla. Uh about two months later, somebody text me from our team and says You know there's like

7:11 Millions of views on TikTok. Where they've taken his voice. And they've said six seven. And I'm like what? Um

7:20 He hasn't done anything and we haven't done anything. This kind of one off comment that he's make Basically just kind of explodes all over TikTok. And you get into kind of the the spring, the f the fall, you know, part of last year. Page Becker's, you know, how you training, six seven. They're asking Cooper Flag, how many hours of sleep do you get a night? He goes, I don't know, six seven. And it's like

7:47 And it's one of those things, it's like New York real estate. It's like every time you try to buy an apartment in New York, you think it's so expensive it can't get any more expensive. And then a year later, or like Palantir stock. It's so expensive, it can't get any more expensive. And then it just keeps going up. Like it just doesn't stop. Uh and then you're like, wow, I should have bought that expensive apartment two years ago because it was so overpriced that now it's twice as expensive. And this is the same. This like meme, it keeps moving. Now on TikTok, you know, middle schoolers are going up to their teachers and saying, What's twenty three A plus fifty four and the teacher's like sixty seven. Oh, six seven. And it's the thing.

8:26 And it's like you explain it to anyone over the age of twenty one and they're like, What does it mean? And you're like, It doesn't mean anything. No, no, it's literally a week. So hold it up. I saw you drink from it. You have one there. Hold it up real quick. Alright, so you so you told me about this w you were like Dude, we have this water brand that's exploding. You sent me some of the m the stats the uh about the growth of it. And so I looked up the brand six seven. I just and you were like yeah.

8:50 This player, Taylor Kinney, whatever. So I just assume he's six foot seven. I didn't even think about it. I was like Two weeks ago. Then last night I'm sort of preparing for this and I realized the kid's six one. So I'm like, why is this called six seven? I'm I'm thirty seven years old. I'm clueless to this trend, right? I don't I don't leave my house, let alone talk to a lot of like

9:08 What the memes of the day are. So last night, dude, I'm watching Literal PowerPoint presentations explaining the origin of the meme. It's and like the and how it started and why the hand motion and then the song. The song's called like Boot toot or something like that. I don't even know what the song is from some rapper I've never heard.

9:28 And then the kids are going crazy with it and then there's handshakes and then it's going viral and then famous people are saying it and then they're tricking their teachers into saying it and then there's whole world of TikTok where the teachers are like Okay, guys, if a student comes in and asks you a question and then the answer's gonna be six or a seven, be ready. They're gonna say this and you're gonna wonder what it means. And it doesn't mean anything, but that's why they love it, because it doesn't mean anything. There's like no meaning behind this. They just want you to ask and wonder and they just find it funny. And and so it's like this meme where

9:57 There's not even a a satisfying backstory to it. That's kinda what makes it cool. You know, I could be this it's like so out of my realm that like I mean if you if you think about it at the core, first of all, it's the It's the like

10:11 Definition of postmodernism. Right? It nothing means anything into it. In and of itself, it's the meaning that we ascribe to it. Uh which is obviously the generalized postmodern condition in art and literature.

10:24 Um but also It's like What it really says is that like young people have an ability to impact culture and they can create things and they can mean things whatever they mean. Right. And that's all about their power and their media as opposed to this idea of top down culture that we create. Right. And they both exist. Stranger Things exists as top down culture and six seven exists as something. And it's like I get them too, like every summer camp, everything like that. And every grown up being like I don't know what this means.

10:53 So TK is like, I wanna take advantage of this. I should sell t shirts. And I'm like, uh, it's like there's gotta be something in life beyond selling t shirts. And so You know, he's trying to figure it out.

11:07 Uh and we're trying to support him because it's really him. He's the young entrepreneur, he's the creator of it, he's the face of the brand. We're kinda like the back office in this. And we just start talking about water and like why do we talk about water? Because Water's just not that complicated. And I I've tried to make a lot of products. A lot of people have tried to make a lot of products.

11:29 Five years ago I tried to make like protein rice crispy treats. Oh, they were too chewy. They weren't chewy enough. The flavor wasn't this. This couldn't happen. And I'm just thinking like okay, memes and trends don't last forever. Like TK, what about you making water? And he's like, Oh, I I wanted to make an energy drink and I had to want to make something else. But I'm like, the thing about water is like You don't like it's just water. Like, let's go. Tomorrow you could be making this thing. Right. And so it's just like you're not tasting it. You don't need a formulator or anything else like that.

12:05 He gets totally jazzed. I wanna make water. He said it's gotta say you hacking family on it. 'Cause that's my other phrase. I'm like, I don't know what that means. That is not hard to do. Um and so we try to find a water manufacturer for him. And the designers do stuff. For people who are just listening on audio, they can't see you'cause you know, half people watch on YouTube, half are on audio. Can you just

12:29 I'm not gonna profile you, but if I was a police artist sketching you And I'm thinking about this kid who's how old is he? Fifteen, sixteen years old, something like that. He's seventeen, I think, yes. He's seventeen. And can you just describe who you are, the unlikely co founder duo hero du duo of this. I am in my

12:48 Late fifties. Um And I'm wearing a button down collared linen shirt. Uh and I don't poop. Uh, and I have no bars. Uh, and I wear glasses and I'm not

13:04 Super athletic. But I guess my superpower is I believe in young people and I'm good at listening to them. Okay, great. And like I overtime is a platform for them. You know, people are like overtime is a hundred million followers. In in that

13:20 Kind of demo and I always say I don't make the posts, I don't write the captions. I just create the platform for creative young people to reach other creative young people. And I love culture and I love music and I love all these things. And so my job isn't to make this. My job is to build a platform for TK to figure out how he can build this product that he wants to do and is Family wants to do

13:44 And just be like Kiss, right? Keep it simple, stupid. Like just like really focus on the sport where the Puck is going, and then there's the people with the brooms on the side. And they're just shaving the ice, or like smoothening the ice for the thing. Curling. Curling, yes. I'm the ice shaver and curling. Exactly. All right, so everyone talks about content and how you should do content marketing to get more customers. The problem is that it's really hard. How do you make something that blows up, that goes viral, that actually gets you customers? versus what most people do. They make something that's completely ignored.

14:14 Well, when I ran my last company, The Hustle, I had to study this and I eventually made content that reached tens, sometimes even hundreds of millions of readers. And so we were able to dial in between what works and what doesn't, and we made it fairly repeatable. And so with the help of HubSpot, I made a guide called The Twenty Ways to Craft Irresistible Content. That looks at the books that I read to learn all of this, but then also the tactics, the twenty different tactics, the twenty different strategies that we used at the hustle in order to help things go viral. So we actually got customers from the content that we made. And so if you want to create content that people actually read, you can check it out below. There's a QR code that you can scan, or you can click the link in the description. Now back to the episode.

14:55 And so I just say to our designers, let's make a bunch of stuff. T K's like I like this, I don't like this. He doesn't have to be a designer. And within eight weeks

15:07 There's a water brand. Like There's a Somebody in in Michigan who's pumping out cans of water and everything else like that. And TK is like here's a plan like

15:17 We're gonna we're gonna launch it on June seventh. You know why? Six seven. Right. And so we're just like, Oh shit, we gotta we gotta help him make this water brand in eight weeks. And so on six seven It just drops. He makes a launch video. It's just him messing around. He's from Lexington.

15:36 Kentucky with his friends. And then he Uh and a bunch of his Friends and some are social people, they just go to these basketball tournaments and they start giving it out. And it just starts

15:48 Going crazy. Like every influencer, every basketball person is picking it up. All of a sudden, like there's five thousand, ten thousand, twenty thousand followers. Like a dad is offering a hundred dollars in cash. to buy a can of this, but you can't really buy it anywhere because he's just made it. We're just trying to figure it out.

16:09 Uh we talked to him and we're just like, Where do people want to buy this? And he's like А та гащен. So like if it were me and I'm some corporate executive, I'm like we gotta go do a deal with publics. We gotta go do a deal with whatever. And I'm like the gas station. He's like, Yeah, that's just like where we go buy stuff. Cause if you're sixteen, you have a car. I'm a New Yorker, so I think about bodega, that doesn't really exist in the rest of the country. And then you're always being driven by your parents somewhere to go play in some sports tournament and there's a gas station. So

16:38 He sneaks into a couple gas stations for the video and puts it in the shelf and pretends that he's found it there. Um and the account just keeps growing. Light. You know, kids start making their own commercials for it. People start pouring it on each other like it's holy water. And it's only been sold a couple of times. And we just throw up a website. Twive thousand people sign up. And they're like, I wanna buy this.

17:03 And that's as far as we've gotten. We have almost a hundred and fifty thousand followers. Some people are like, Oh, you made a You know, you made a liquid death for Gen Z for the urban crowd. It's canned. It's kind of gold on holding it up because you want people to it wants to look good on social media. You want to see people across the court. But all that really happened was like There's a guy who's good at basketball.

17:27 He accidentally created a meme We supported him to make a product that was we could make fast and easy, but was like not a T shirt. We went out. Everybody who's a fan went crazy about it. Every grown up I talk to has kids or they're like, Can you get my kids some of that six seven one or they don't know how to get it? And so I don't know, we're on the thirty yard line.

17:48 I know I'm using a football metaphor. The ten yard line And like How does it go from here? So TK selling a hundred million dollars worth of water in twelve months. We haven't really figured that out. He doesn't really know. We don't really know. We just made something big and now there's over 150,000 followers. Like if you look up most water brands, they don't have that many followers. And like

18:10 All of the You know, except for You know, liquid depth, which is hugely inspirational and very successful. And all kids mess with it and now every player is coming up to me and they're like Dan Dan I got this idea I got this idea for this product

18:24 And I think what's cool is like number one It's like Youtubers do this, but athletes haven't really done it. You know, number two, seventeen year old athletes haven't really done it. Um and number three is like it has this whole overlap with NIL.

18:41 So now if you're trying to recruit TK to come play at your school. Like maybe you're gonna buy 10,000 cases of six w seven water, and you're gonna make it red because that's your school colors. Oh yeah. And you're gonna tell everyone buy this and TK's gonna commit to our school and it all is covered by NIL. There's no eligibility issues, there's nothing else like that. So you've unlocked this whole kind of creative superpower. And if you ask him Like and you ask the people who support him from our team, they'll be like six seven isn't a water brand, it's a movement.

19:15 It's a vibe. It's a feeling like When you're just like having fun creating culture And everything else like that. And listen, his number is zero. Maybe six seven water in nine months is called double zero water because it's really just about the concept and all of that. And so maybe the meme dies, but it takes other shapes and forms, or maybe he goes to the MBA and he is another thing, but you recognize the gold can and you recognize everything else like that.

19:42 So it's really like I'm talking to you. In this process where like he's figured out a little bit, we figured out a little bit. But I can't tell you how You know, Pepsi is acquiring this for five hundred million dollars yet because everybody's making it up as they go along.

19:58 And that's what I love about this. You know, we do a lot of episodes with people after the fact. Oh, you sold draw something, right? And and you you'd made all this money. Can you go back and tell us what happened fifteen years ago when you started that business and hey, by the way Everything has changed and none of that will really work anymore, but hopefully you get some inspiration, maybe a few nuggets I can steal from there. That's

20:19 Typical podcast. And then the other one that we do is like here's an idea. I think it'll work. I don't really know. It's not like in motion. It's not in flight. It's just an idea and hey, it's blue sky. This is a very unique thing. We I've I'm in the middle.

20:35 You're just at the point where it's not nothing. But it ain't done yet. Right. And so I'm like, Oh, that's interesting. I've never actually talked to somebody at this stage of the thing of a fun brand like this. So just to give this per some perspective, it's now We're recording this August fifth, so it's been Almost exactly what, two months? Since the launch. So six seven was was uh J June seventh.

20:56 We're about two months in. So if I'm just looking at Instagram. Uh your six. If just for simplicity here for a second. So like The Instagram is al almost at a hundred thousand followers for the water brand. Okay. Let's just look at a few other water brands that I can think of just off the top of my head. All right. Dasani water.

21:19 eighteen thousand. Okay, so you got five times more followers than Dasani, less Aquafina? Seven thousand followers. And like, you know There's literally like Ten comments on a post.

21:30 Uh so n no engagement, no nobody cares. And there by the way, there's like A full social media team. That they hire. Like there's There's like half a million dollars of salary working on on on their social media at all times, at the minimum. Um okay, let's even think of okay, maybe I'm picking on the the most boring brands.

21:47 Let's go to vitamin water, right? Big exit. Owned by a big company now. uh what fifty cent was involved long time ago. They certainly gotta be big. Eighty one thousand.

21:58 You're bigger than vitamin water. Let's go in literally less than like two months. You know what the best part of this is? The best part is like T K asks This guy Tom What's the what's the marketing plan? What are we doing next? Tom's like Dan, what are we doing next? I was like, here's the marketing plan. I'm going on MFN.

22:17 And like I'm just gonna talk like Ben and Sean Sean are gonna hook me up. And some listener is gonna be like Yeah, I own five hundred gas stations. Call me up and I'm gonna put you in this. And then when they write when I do the third podcast when I come back on in a year and it's like how I sold this, how the seventeen year old entrepreneur sold this, it was like I came on your podcast. And then when we went to the moon. Exactly. You you need the gas station owner, because I was gonna say we don't really have the whole like

22:46 Yo youth culture stuff going for us. If you want like a bunch of people who you know, work remotely and wanna, you know, take a picture and put it in Slack, they can do that. But uh but you probably have five listeners who know everything about the beverage business. See, this is what you get This is what you get about media that most people don't. Right? You're like, Cool, I'm gonna go here because there's gonna be five people that either know everything about the beverage business, they were the early distributor of this, blah blah blah. Or

23:13 They own a chain of like sixty gas stations that they're a huge M F M fan and they're like, Yeah, I'm in You're like, that was a great hour of time for me to do that. And you know what TK is gonna do as the as the founder of this brand, as the basketball player. He's gonna train. He's gonna get buckets. He's gonna commit.

23:30 To go to college. And he's just gonna keep being him, and that will just keep growing the brand. Which is what I love because when I looked at the content, it wasn't like some advanced brand strategy, some like cool slick er anything. It was literally this This kid who's obviously he's a great basketball, but what's even more likable about him is he's not like a LeBron where He looks like a grown man even though he's seventeen, he's not some man child.

23:56 He's like a child child. Like he like looks young, he acts young, he's a great dude. He's not grown into his body fully yet. He can hoop, he can dunk, he can do some amazing things on the court, but he's still got like a very young energy, which is cool. And so like just seeing the only seventeen year old out there Building a billion dollar brand that's not vibe coding. Yeah, that's true. That might be true, actually. Um okay, so I wanna s kind of steal what's replicable about this. Now, uh so let's break down a couple of the elements here. So the first is

24:26 You were listening. to the trends. You're listening to the memes, you're listening to the culture, and you didn't sort of just write it off. Or be too busy to listen. Right, you run a a company. How many employees do you guys have? Four hundred. How much money have you raised?

24:39 For overtime. Two hundred and fifty million dollars. You run a big ass business. And for you to be like, Yeah, someone on my team was talking about how one player on one of our teams

24:51 said a random thing and then some TikTok editors chopped it up and mixed it with a random song that like, you know, is not even like it's not like some huge it's not Drake, you know, doing it. Yeah. And you were like Huh. That's cool. Like

25:05 Let's let's talk about let's have a brainstorming session. That's interesting to me. Is there like a principle or a philosophy you have that served you well that's that's like that? I might be asking. You know, Steph Curry, how do you how exactly do you shoot a jump shot? He's like, I don't know man, I just do it. I I think there's a couple of things. One is like If I think about like it's like twenty fifteen, twenty sixteen, and I'm launching Over time.

25:28 As an example. I you know, we start filming some players playing basketball in New York with some iPhones or whatever. And making some posts and all of a sudden kinda realized that like They're players that are getting tens of thousands of views and they're not even top hundred ranked players.

25:46 So my understanding is like here's high school basketball, here's the top ranked players. Here's the people who was fired to go. Tashawn's alma mater, Duke and play and hoop and everything else like that. But the reality was the deeper I looked, I realized there were all of these networks and subcultures of young people who were connecting that had nothing to do with the grown up view of the world. Um, and everything from like I'd find one of them and then I'd be like, Who does this person follow? And then I'd go through and I'd look at every single person who they follow and and so forth and so on. So in a way

26:19 Culture is culture. It just makes things But if you're attuned to it and social media is a cheat code for decoding it and you start to go in deep, you can just observe and find these things. It's like If I try to explain at the most elemental level, I'll say Anime. Like most Half people in America have no idea what anime is.

26:40 But it's like once you s and you're like cartoons, what is anime? And then once you see it. You realize that it's everywhere. So it's like I remember the first time someone's like anime or whatever years ago, I go on a trip to Rome for vacation. Every T shirt in Rome in the store has an anime character on it. And then all of a sudden and then I'm sitting next to a kid on the plane and he's reading, you know, a graphic A manga. And I'm just like, wait, I didn't see it anywhere and now I see it everywhere.

27:08 And it's kinda like you're digging down the earth and all of a sudden you find gold and oil and all of these other things like that. А не он сют. You just you assume that most people don't bother to see it and that's where your opportunity lies. Hey, let's take a quick break. You know, Hubspot helped Tumblr solve a big problem. Uh Tumblr needed to move fast. They were trying to produce trending content, but their marketing department was stuck waiting on engineers to code every single email campaign.

27:33 But now They use HubSpot's customer platform to email real time trending content to millions of users in just seconds. And the result Was huge. Three times more engagement and double the content creation. If you want to move faster like Tumblr, visit hubspot.com. Alright, back to the show. There's actually a a a a neuroscience nerd way of explaining this. There's a a part of your brain that is made to do this. As you call it reticular activating system. And basically

27:59 When I learned about this it was pretty interesting. So it basically said Look. As a human, imagine If you had If imagine just all the different fill uh inputs that are coming into your your mind at any one time. So your eyes

28:12 Like in this room right now, there's a whiteboard, there's a piano, there's books, there's this, there's a guy sitting over there, there's this light over here that's shining in my eyes. But I need to be focused on you. So really I'm telling my brain this is what matters. Don't tell me about that sticky note on the wall over there that's yellow. If I look now I see it, but like Most of the time filter it out. Same thing with noise.

28:31 I'm telling my brain, not important. Ignore, ignore. If if you're at a cocktail party, there's a hundred conversations going on. Your it just all sounds like noise to you. Until somebody says your name and then suddenly It's like whoa, my brain was actually listening. 'Cause I heard my name.

28:45 But I couldn't tell you the other ten things they were talking about,'cause it was just chatter otherwise. And so basically the brain has a defense system which just says, Yo, throw away ninety nine percent of all inputs. You're not gonna need it. We'll go crazy if we try to take it all in. But there's a bouncer at the front that's looking at the ID of every little thing that's coming in and saying, All right, you get to come in. And then the trick to life is when you ch you tell the bouncer, Hey, add this to the list, add anime to the list, start paying attention, let anime in.

29:11 Then you start seeing anime everywhere. This happens if you buy a car, you're like, Oh, I'm looking for a like a B MW. suddenly you'll just start seeing that BMW everywhere. Yeah. It's not like it just appeared. It was always there. You just weren't paying attention to the BMWs around you until it became highly relevant. At that point when everyone's like, my phone is listening to me. Right. And you're like it might be, but but what you're saying might be true too. I I do this thing in my class at NYU where I'm like look around the room and find everything that's blue. I'm gonna quiz you on it. And then everybody close their eyes and I'm like, name me one thing that's red. You only see the thing that you look for, and then there's a ton of red things in the room, but nobody sees them because they're looking for something else. And in a way, that's

29:52 Part of the reason why I've never been a a massive fan of business school or hiring MBAs. Because I feel like What business school does is it trains everyone to look for blue.

30:04 And what you as an entrepreneur building a company want is somebody who's Whose focus isn't narrowed, but who's incredibly w wide. And it it they're like, Oh, there's yellow, there's red, there are all of these other things like that. And we we tend to be like, Oh, well, you've got to refine your skills, but like if your whole process is just Seeing blue, like you're never gonna see the other colors, and then your ability to create or add value becomes extremely limited. So there's a great story about this, um, in the early PayPal days. I don't know if have did you ever read like um Paypal Wars or any of the early like PayPal books. Yeah.

30:39 A couple of them are are pretty good. Um one of them tells a story about Basically that you had Elon Who had His company was X. Uh, not like what Twitter say, but he's loved this this idea of a company named X for a long time.

30:52 And he wanted to build A bank on the internet. All your financial services, your mortgages, your loans, your b checking, your business accounts, your credit cards, everything on on the internet. And he was He was right, he was just like twenty five years too early, right? Like that's happening today. With

31:06 Ramp and Mercury and other companies like that. But he wanted to do it back then. And he had this top down His view of the world. And he just wanted to like make that thing come to fruition. And it was like kind of not working very well, but it was a big idea. And he was obviously a really like relentless entrepreneur. And then you had

31:23 PayPal. Which was this like small thing that was like, Hey, you could email money to a friend. It'll sounded like Venmo or like, you know Just like some little game you could play. It didn't sound like transforming financial services fr using the internet's technologies. And what they but the key to PayPal's success was not blindly following the top down

31:43 Sounds good on paper vision. But it was somebody, I think it was David Sachs, or so somebody in the customer service department that was like hey Um You know, we noticed that like all these eBay sellers are asking for like a a logo that they can put as a badge on their thing. And you know, legal's like, No, no, they can't use our logo and then other people are like, Wait, wait, why do they want our logo?

32:03 Right. They're actually like interested. They're curious. What's red over there? It's like they want our logo'cause they're trying to say we take PayPal. And like They looked at their data and they're like, Wow, the people who actually use PayPal are all eBay sellers. And like then it turns into their strategy and e eventually

32:18 They changed the name it wasn't even X, it became PayPal and it that became the killer Killer app essentially that made it a billion dollar company. And I feel like this idea of You start with a vision. It's hard to start without a vision.

32:32 But if you stay blind and you're not looking for clues of what's actually happening, like what you're talking about, where you're like, I don't know, I just look at culture. I don't try to Apply my view of what should be happening or what what is good and what is bad. I just look at what is and I Try to play in that. That lane.

32:49 Is that something you did in the past, like withdraw something or an anything like that? Is there any could we connect the dots here? Yeah, I I feel like That Uh a vision. It it's really just a premise. It's just an idea of like

33:04 This is what I think the company's gonna be. But I don't really know anything because I haven't done anything yet. And as soon as I get out there and I do something Then I start to learn and it it really fucking annoys me when people are like, You pivoted, you pivoted, you did this. Pivot being a basketball term. Um

33:23 And I'm like I'm not Pivoting. Like I'm adapting. Like

33:27 I see this and I see opportunity and the thing that I think sometimes people miss is like you start your company And let's imagine like You're on a track. You're running a race and you're on that track.

33:39 Well, all the other tracks that are next to you are what's happening in the world around you. And you can't ignore those. So you start in the gaming business, you're like, I just want to make great games. Woom, the iPhone goes by you, woom, Facebook goes by you, woom, Xbox goes by you. And your job isn't just to be like, Oh, I'm blind to all of those things. Like All of those things are changing. And You have to be able to make

34:02 tons of micro changes around that. And I remember like even when we started overtime I went into a pitch meeting And all we were were like five people who You know Like sports a little bit, running around with a bunch of iPhones, filming basketball in New York.

34:18 And the guy's like, Well, what's your distribution plan? Like, how are you gonna grow? And we were like, Well, now we're gonna go to LA and we're gonna film some basketball. Then we're gonna go to Houston, then we're gonna go to Oakland and film some basketball. And he's like Yeah. You know, week ladies like we pass, we just don't think that's the right distribution strategy. And I was like

34:37 Great,'cause two days ago we also gave up on that distribution strategy. Cause like whatever, you're just trying to figure it out. Like the real strategy is like we're gonna figure it out because we're gonna try a bunch of different stuff. And it's like you judge everything like it's this moment in time, and everything the company does is an absolute certitude. You know, it's like Final, this is our decision. But instead You're moving in space, right? You think about the best basketball players. Luca, Iverson, it's like their ability to m Kyrie, like they just move into space. They find where there are nobody there.

35:12 As opposed to somebody who comes down and says I'm gonna run the play, you run to the corner and we go here and you give it to him. I'll dribble three times, and fake, step through, and I'm gonna make the shot. It's like yeah, we wish it worked that way. It would be nice. Yeah, and listen not not to be like too sporty, but like it's a live read situation. You're like that guy just flew his coverage. Do you get accused of being too sporty a lot? Do people just look at you and they're like you're just too sporty then? I mean I do a lot of sports conferences and podcasts, so for them they're like you're not at all sporty. Like they like wouldn't you play in college? And I was like uh I was the jazz DJ on the radio station. Yeah, exactly. Piano. But but in in the case of this, I don't want the non sporty people to be like, Oh, this is going deep. I want you to have is I want your watch time to be really high. So I appreciate you looking out for me.

36:02 You know, you're just you're just improvising and and and you're you're figuring it out and you're just paying attention and the The other thing I'll say is like Like you don't need a massive data set. to be able to understand where these kind of opportunities and slight tweaks are. And I I always say like

36:23 When I used to be in the ап бізнес. You could do like a really good user test. And by the time you got to the sixth or seventh person, see what I did there. Not the six hundredth person, but the sixth or seventh person, like you already knew what wasn't working. Like you only need one or two people to say something that's really deep and you're like, Oh, I totally got it. And so in a way like If you're very attuned to small data, it usually has some level of of scale around it, and you can You can constantly make iterations.

36:53 to make sure that your product lands and the second that it lands, all of a sudden there's A new platform or Netflix changes their strategy or Spotify changes their strategy and you're just Out there with everybody else in the ocean trying to Kinda tread water and figure out how to get to land. All right, listen, the two most beautiful words in the English language.

37:13 are email subscribers. You need more email subscribers, I guarantee it. I don't care how many you have, you need more of'em. I need more of'em, you need more of them. We all need more email subscribers because email is an amazing way to build your business, to build an audience, and to build a direct relationship that's not dependent on The TikTok algorithm, the Instagram algorithm. It's how you get people to engage directly with you. So you can get them to trust you, to like you, click your products, uh, check them out, check out your stuff. That's how you build a relationship with people. And so email subscribers are key. And they're free. And it's an amazing tool. And the tool I use for my email subscriber base is Beehive. It's a tool that was built by the folks who were actually running Morning Group. So they were running growth at Morning Group.

37:50 They grew it to four million subscribers. And along the way, they had to build out all these special tools in-house that made Morning Brew great. It helped it grow faster, helped it make more money, helped it uh nurture the email subscribers. And so they took all those tools that they built internally and they said, Could we provide those as a separate Star up. for anybody to use and not just Morning Group. And so that's they made it available to everybody. Because before Beehive, you were duct taping five different apps together. Google Docs, MailChamp, Stripe, a spreadsheet and your dream. It was all bundled together. Well now

38:20 Beehive is just one tool that does it. And it's a single purpose thing. It's what I use for my newsletter. I send a newsletter out to over a hundred thousand people and that's what I use. And so for listeners of My First Millionaire, I should do in a special code. So if you're thinking about, hey, I should have a newsletter, I should have subscribers. I kinda wanna build an audience that way. Well check it out. Uh they'll give you 30% off. Use the code MFM30. Go to beehive.com. That's B-E-E. H I V dot com.

38:42 and use the code MFM30. I'll put the link in the description to make it easy for you. Start scaling your content today. You know you said something else here'cause I think it's amazing that in eight weeks you've built the uh you know water brand that You know, I'll call like a ten million dollar water brand. I don't know if it is whatever. But the interesting thing about that, and I just threw out a number there. The interesting thing about the number is

39:04 You didn't start out by saying We st so we went out there and we put it up on Shopify. We started selling cans and we ran some Facebook ads and then we sold some more cans. And we look, we've sold You know, we've done you know, whatever three hundred thousand dollars of revenue in the first five weeks, that's success. And the reason I found that interesting is because You said some of the opposite. You're like we started giving it away.

39:25 And then we put some on the in the cooler at the gas station. And we would go to games and we would you couldn't even buy it. If I go to the website right now, it just says join the wait list. You can't even buy it. And so I've seen you kind of do this before. You do this kind of grassroots brand building long game shit. And it's so different than the way I play, whereas like

39:44 I normally if I start something, I'm like, Cool, let me see if people want this. And I'm trying to validate my idea and I'm trying to go sell as much as I can and I get my own conviction and validation and my insecurities t start to melt a little bit, the more tangible concrete proof I have that this thing is valuable, which is measured as dollars to me.

40:03 You seem to play the game differently, and I love it, and I wanna know more about it. So can you just describe your approach and and why you think that might be interesting here? Yeah, I don't I don't I've never Thought about it.

40:16 Or categorized it, but I don't I agree with you. Like, I don't know. I'm just a very Bottoms up. type of person in terms of

40:27 creation and marketing and and I think about like To use a sports example, when people were not watching as much sports, a lot of people in the sports industry were like, We need more stats on the screen. Let's show their heart rate. Let's show how far they've run. Let's show all this stuff and I'd have meetings with them and people on the team would be like, We need to show more stats that's gonna bring people back to TV. And I always say like

40:50 Who asked for that? Well, we just think that that's what people One. And it's like Who asked for that? Who s who knocked on the door and said, Hey I got a question for you.

41:01 I'm not really interested in watching sports on TV, but by the way, if you put their heart rate up, I fucking changed my whole schedule and now I'm just gonna do nothing but watch sports on TV. And so it's like The amount of stuff that starts up here, whereas like, and I don't know, my my mom was a sociology professor. And She did she just really liked sociology, anthropology. It's just listening and study people and like Sometime in the nineties, I spent a summer in Starkville, Mississippi with her just driving around, listening to local people talk about economic development and their little businesses and everything else like that.

41:39 And I I just think that Like I could read a million business books and And watch a lot of videos, but like there's some magic in those things that people are talking about. And as a CEO

41:53 I've always like wanted to hear the opinion of every single person who works for the company. Because somebody has some insight or observation that they don't even think is like that deep. And they say one thing. And you're just like Damn.

42:09 That really is true. I haven't thought about it that way. And then you start to be able so in a way it's like My approach is To be in the right place at the right time in the room where it happens to to hear what all these people are saying and to try to parse through that. And

42:27 To say like if I can find that Insight like People care you think they care about that, but they care about this or anything else like that. How do I figure out how to make it that much bigger? And even on the water side, some of it was like Yeah, you know what? It'd be better if young people drank water than things that have a hundred grams of sugar or a hundred grams of caffeine in it or anything else like that.

42:50 Um And listen, sometimes you're wrong and sometimes you're right. But if you can't if it doesn't come from the bottoms up, I I don't know who the customer is. Like I'll give you a really non-sport. Great example. At some point

43:04 I was like I'm gonna write a book. And I'm gonna pitch this book. And I was working in the talent business, so I not knew a lot of book people. And this guy sat me down, and this was kind of like. You know. Barnes and Noble is still decently big, but I I use Barnes and Noble as a visual representation. He said, listen. When I go to sign an author to buy a book

43:23 I just say to them What section are you in at Barnes and Noble? Like I get it, you have this idea, this and that. I'm like, go to Barnes and Noble. psychology. Bizness

43:34 Whatever, you tell me what section you're in because that's essentially the distribution. Then I know whether I want to buy this book or not. But if you're just telling me you have this idea and it's like kinda self help, but it's kinda you're not in any section. And I can't buy it. And so it's like this kind of like The ground up isn't just the idea, it's the distribution, it's like all of those types of things like that.

43:57 Um, and it's just some level of I think paying attention to it. And then also Having the recognition that If your idea is like I wanna make a toothbrush with a removable head, because why do I have to buy a whole new toothbrush every time?

44:11 Oh yeah, I've actually been around long enough to know that a hundred people have tried to do that, and there's actually a reason that doesn't work. And y I think about apps I've been pitched a million times. Let every fan monetize their Fans directly and you're like They actually just like being on Instagram. And it's like you've seen 10 of them and none of them have worked. So sometimes if you've got a little pattern recognition and you overlay it into paying attention.

44:36 about culture and what people talk about and stuff like that, that that just tends to be how I do it and maybe you and I will collaborate because you're smarter than me and you'll be like, I'm gonna turn this into the five step process and you and I will go to Barnes and Noble and you'll be like, damn, that's the shelf your book is gonna be on. Well the the one I wanted to write with you. Early on when I was building the milk road. And me and Ben called you. Yeah, are you call uh you emailed us, you were like, Hey, this is cool, or something like that. And we were like, Holy shit, that's Dan Porter. I I don't think we knew each other maybe at the time. No. And

45:09 You were reading it. And so we we did a call with you. And on that call you talked about 'Cause I had seen the rise of overtime. I didn't know what caused the rise of overtime, but I had seen the outward manifestation of it, right? I saw it go from A n a brand I had never heard of. To basically the most popular youth basketball brand on Instagram, which was

45:29 It's not nothing, right? Like that's so hard to do in a crowded social media space. to build the number one brand. And not only that, like They were wearing T like. Top players Zion, these guys who Nike is paying them millions of dollars trying to sponsor them and they're like voluntarily putting your shirt on and throwing your old logo up.

45:47 And cameoing in your videos and I just thought like And any time I would see a dunk clip, it would always be for overtime first. And I didn't know how you guys were always getting there first. Turns out you had this army of volunteer grassroots kind of camera and that were doing stuff. It turns out that that hand signal was something that you literally were sitting there, you're like, We need a sign that when one person sees another, you could throw up the sign, like a gang sign, you know, or like a like a team sign, or like, you know, and so you started studying bands.

46:14 And cult and you started studying people who have built these types of Real organic tribal movements. And you were Picking out the best practice, the best ideas from them and saying, Okay, what's

46:26 That's interesting and you know, in European soccer they have their songs. That's interesting. How do we do that? And not every idea hits, but like Enough of them did where you built a real brand. You gave us advice from Milk Road where you were saying You were like cool. What I like about you guys is that Yeah, you're into crypto. You're a believer.

46:44 But you're not like super technical or super like Audacio, you're not you're not taking yourself too seriously. Everybody else is trying to like overdress. And they look like a sort of a kid in a big baggy wearing his dad's suit. And trying to be taken seriously and you're not because you're doing that.

47:00 And so you were saying like, hey, when they have their Uber Serious conference You need to counter program against that. And throw the like two beers, you know, conference at a at a op at a bar and just give every bar like You know, a two hundred dollar tab. for your readers to go and enjoy. And you gave us some ideas like that that I really like.

47:18 There were zero people in my life that think that way and it was very intriguing to me, like Those are the types of things I love. Like you talk about ideation and marketing and distribution. Um But to me the thing that I pay attention to the most

47:33 And maybe the thing that I'm a little above average on Is positioning. And I don't think people talk about positioning as much, but positioning is kind of like Where you sit in the mind of the consumer. And when people talk about white space. It's often related to positioning, and the best way I can explain it is like the most simple way.

47:55 And once you see it, you'll understand positioning forever and you don't have to watch twenty videos on it. Is If you go and you look at breakfast cereals. uh in the supermarket.

48:07 They have a left to right And a top to bottom. Usually left to right. Is Like

48:14 Least healthy to most healthy. So like there's not it's they're not Mixed up. Right. So on the left you've got the most sugary cereals, and as you start to walk down to the right, at the end you have like Ezekiel eight twelve whole grain cereals like shit that looks like it should be re refrigerated or whatever. So that's left to right. Top to bottom.

48:36 is adult To kid. Kids cereals are most often at the bottom. Why? Because that's eye level for kids, and therefore adults are at the top. And so if you think about it almost as this diamond with like, you know

48:51 Adult kid is top bottom and like sweep. kind of super healthy left right. Every serial has to find out where its position in that market is. Are you Upper left, lower right, or anything else like that. And I think that that's

49:06 Positioning it it encompasses everything. It's like where is the market opportunity? Where's the white space? And the other thing that it it's it does as kind of like a sub factor is that the way you compete with somebody Who is much bigger, is better capitalized, or anything else like that. Is you you make their success their box the box that they get trapped in. So if I go out and I make a sports platform, right? And I have to compete against maybe ESPN, the market leader, twenty-five billion dollars of revenue, everything else that they do, and every other sports site. What's ESPN's

49:44 Superpower. It it appeals to everybody. It is the de facto W now for sports. Well, okay, so if I come out and I'm like I'm appealing this demographic that's massive, right? Forty percent of all global purchasing in five years will be Gen Z and stuff like that. Like

50:02 And all I do is focus on appeal to them. Well, if I'm the incumbent, I can't start being like That's the lit. That play was fire because what happens to all the 50 year olds who are following that? They're like, I don't get it. So you take their success and you almost make it a box or a trap that they can't get out of. And then you can own something, and that's visual, language, product features, simplicity, complexity, harder to use. Sometimes people make things that are really hard to use because They don't want the mass audience. They want something else like that. Um

50:34 You think about like the classic business school example, like the kind of IKE example where it's like, how do you compete with everyone else? You you actually have them build the furniture themselves'cause it allows you pricing power. All of a sudden you have a different level of ownership over that. It's not scary. You know, there's no words on any IKEA instruction manual. There's Pictures.

50:57 And so in a way, to me, a lot of those roll up to positioning. But nobody's like, Oh yeah, I just graduated from Warren, I majored in positioning. Right. You're like marketing, finance, other things. But positioning what your position is in the market and how you make that happen and understand that. Is very visual. And to me, that's how I kind of think about everything. And then as you start to be successful, you think about. From going to play offense to the things that you want to do to protect that position. So all of a sudden I create this thing and I have this massive position in basketball and everybody's coming at me and I'm like, We're in football also. And all the people are like, Oh shit, we're mini overtime in basketball.

51:40 Now they're just on the side of the road'cause now half of Overtime's business is in football and they were they're called hoop this and ball that and everything else like that. And I have a very kind of name that could go across any type of sport. And so you go from playing offense to defense to offense again in your positioning, but you're this vibrant organism that's kind of growing and expanding all the time. And that's That's literally just a brain dump of how I think about approaching it. That's great. I have this uh ism that's very, very related, which as I say Uh all positioning is counter positioning.

52:14 So I I'm like you, I think positioning is super underrated. Any entrepreneur knows positioning is underrated because you've gone into markets. Thinking you're so great. My product is so great, my team is so great, my service is so great. And come to our come visit us. And nobody wants to visit you. Why? Because you can't differentiate. Then you're like You spend your whole life differentiating and then you look at a few other people who

52:35 Started out. Figuring out the point of differentiation. Figuring out Where they live in that that That map that you described and they found white space. And for them, they don't even have to start with the best product or the best service or any of that.

52:48 They will organ they will have time to build it and make it better because they figured it out. And so this idea that like All positioning is actually counter position is important because the what people the mistake I think people make is When they think positioning, they think they just start naming positive attributes about themselves like it's a self help test in people magazine. And they're like, Oh yeah, we're our positioning is that we have you know really high quality Service.

53:11 And you know, we move fast or like, you know, we have great Um Whatever, great customer service. You know, it's like something that every brand is also trying to claim. And so you're you know, what even if you did it The problem is you can't claim it'cause everybody else has also claimed it. You're gonna have to go

53:27 Come up with some unique way to show not tell to even get anyone to believe you, right? The the way the way I I I I totally agree with you. I'm actually obsessed with this idea from this guy, Roger Martin, who's like this business thinker, and he says something that I'm gonna butcher, but it's like If the opposite of your strategy is stupid. Then it's not a strategy. So if your strategy is like we have the best fucking customer service out there, and the opposite of that is what company out there says, Yeah, our strategy is we have the worst. Customer service. The best products. Oh yeah, our strategy is we make the worst products. Well, if if the if the opposite is so stupid, yours is not a strategy. That's right.

54:11 And then I just started to like Think about it as applies to everything. It's like Our strategy is on this family vacation. We're gonna have fun. Well, who says our strategy on this family vacation is we're gonna fight all the time and have no fun. Right. So it's like not realize that the opposite is really dumb. Like what you have is not a strategy or really a a plan. This is the same about company values. People will be like, Oh, we make company value high integrity. Uh discipline, hard work. Yeah. Again, nobody would agree with the opposite. Mom, I just got a job at this company out of college. Their values are low integrity, no teamwork, and hostility. It's gonna be amazing.

54:49 Actually, that actually might be interesting'cause the opposite would not be stupid. They might actually pass the if they said that. But like uh Mark Zuckerberg had a good example of this. He goes Oh somebody along the way taught me this and he goes, um Your values are meaningless unless there's a trade-off baked into it. So if you don't if you don't acknowledge that there's a cost or a trade off to doing the thing you say you're gonna do. Then it doesn't count. So you know, the famous Facebook value that we all remember is move fast and break things.

55:19 If it was just move fast, we would not remember that they're that what that that's Facebook's value. The fact that it was move fast and break things, it acknowledged the trade off of moving fast and how fast we're gonna move and this is gonna happen. We accept that trade. That's what's unique about us, where other companies are not willing to accept that trade. Theirs is Move as fast as you can, but if you make a mistake

55:39 Then you shouldn't have moved that fast. Right, which is how actually most companies operate. That's so good. It works at the values level, it works at the strategy level. And here's a example of who did it right. So like Who competed with Facebook was Snapchat. Snapchat strategy was We're photo sharing, but all the photos are gonna self destruct in ten seconds.

55:59 It's like well, I could actually argue why that's a very stupid strategy and why the opposite would be very smart. You should save the photos. That's People want memories. People want to go back and look at it again. If you told my mom about that, she'd be like, You're gonna destroy this photo? No, like That's blasphemous. But it worked for a certain use it it actually unlocked a whole other behavior and use case.

56:18 Which became, you know, pretty mainstream to the point where Facebook had to like try to clone it fifty times. And Th they did the thing you talked about too, which was they intentionally made things harder. So it's like well

56:29 Social networks are cool until all your aunts and uncles show up. Right. Like it's not so cool to post all my photos from this weekend, knowing that like all my teachers and my aunts and uncles are gonna see everything I post. So s the way Snapchat worked was like Intentionally kind of like confusing. And there's like Grown up proof. It's like a

56:47 You know, like medicine has like a child proof Top. They had like a grown up prooftop, which was like You know when you wanna do the face mask? There was no button that said like push here for face mask. It was like No, you gotta know to hold on your face for four seconds.

57:00 Then the secret door appears and now you could do the shit. Like Only could be spread. Like a secret password from one kid to another. And most parents thought it was too hard, too confusing. They're never gonna figure it out. And so that was like a intentional strategy for a while. That

57:14 Like what I like about the trade off too is like When we launched our basketball league in the first year before MIL. All the players essentially lost their eligibility. And I always just say they didn't lose it. The NCA took it away. Every college basketball coach in the world Hated us.

57:35 Like hate us. I got so much hate mail. And I used to say like I guess if we're not pissing people off, we're not trying hard enough. Like that's the trade off. Or I even in the early days of Teach for America, I remember I went to pitch. uh the board in Seattle Washington to let us come And the teachers union hated us and somebody came and they punched me in the chest in the middle of my speech. And I was just like I didn't even know what to do other than to keep talking.

58:00 But I guess if you're not like if your trade off is if you're not pissing off enough people, I guess you're not trying to do something that's different enough or revolutionary enough in in that aspect. So I like that. I'm gonna put that up there with my opposite is stupid. You you also have a thing that um When we were at our hoop group event and We ask everybody like, Hey, can you give like a tiny version of a TED talk?

58:24 Like we'll put seven minutes on a shot clock here. And Everybody in this room is world class at something. Dan, your world class at brand building. Can you just tell us like a brand building brain dump of like everything you did. To make overtime.

58:36 have a hundred million followers or whatever many stupid number of insane followers you guys have. And the very first thing you said was You didn't say how you went viral. You didn't say how you grew the market. You didn't talk about an algorithm. You didn't talk about

58:52 You know, scaled processes. You go In the first year I replied to a million comments or something some some absurd number. Yeah. You go we replied to a million comments. And you go, We built this in a very grassroots way, bottoms up.

59:09 And I that's I've that stuck with me. That was like three years ago. I still remember that one line. Uh, because it was so counterintuitive and surprising to me that that was like A pillar for you of like how this how does this empire get built? You don't You don't really understand where the studs are. Like where are the beams? That this whole thing is built on and you showed me one of the beams.

59:28 With that. Can you talk about that, uh that little part'cause I think that's something that more brands should do. Yeah, listen, I think everyone wants awesome growth hacks and the best way to get a lot of views on anything that you write ever on LinkedIn or whatever is like the C three secret growth hacks to do this. The viral growth tax. But

59:48 Like most of those are post facto and they're hard to replicate. And to build something meaningful. You've got to build a real connection. And I'll I'll preface it by saying I've seen this a couple of times and it it's it's

1:00:02 It's taught me a couple times. I I remember I went to A concert at at State Farm a little baby concert. And everybody had their phones up. And I was gonna film because I wanted to show people I was cool and I was at a concert.

1:00:18 And I realized that everyone was filming themselves and I was filming the stage. And the concert was actually a backdrop for them to create content. And it reminded me years ago, right when The iPhone was coming out. Somebody came when I was at Virgin to our office. And they said Hold up your phone and take a video.

1:00:36 And and they said at the end, everyone under thirty has the camera pointing at themselves, and everyone over thirty has the camera pointing out. And we looked around the room and it was true. And I think from those insights. You just have this idea, and I kind of like crystallized that into this point of view that sports media is talking to people about sports and overtime is about listening to people. About sports.

1:00:58 So okay, that's like a different point of view. It's kind of rooted in these anecdotal observations around me. Well, how do you listen to them? And the easiest way was they're all talking to you. They're DMing you, they're in the comments. Like what are we gonna do that no one else is gonna do? We're gonna respond to every single one of them. Because the other thing you see in media is like

1:01:20 Ten people leave a media thing and they set up and they launch a new media thing and you imagine a bunch of Men and women in front of a computer pumping out articles and And uh, you know And videos and and I think well who asked for that? Nobody. They just thought it was a good idea. And I I remember a young person had told me, Yeah, I respond to a lot of people on

1:01:42 Mine, he was a kind of a smaller version of something. And he said, You know what? Once you respond to somebody when you have a bigger account over a hundred K one time. they become a fan for life. So I was like, Okay, how are we gonna get our first million fans for life? We're gonna respond. People used to DM all the time. Yo.

1:02:01 Literally that was the whole deal. Yo. And so we'd be like, yo, what's up? And they'd be like, Oh shit, I didn't think you were gonna respond. Like you just jumped out of the corner and you scared them. Um And in the early early days, I used to take screen shots.

1:02:16 of those conversations and post them in the story. Uh and and all of a sudden people would start to say, Does overtime respond and stuff like that. And we had this kind of Apex moment early on where I I hired this guy who had been a Uber driver and a hooper and he was a friend of someone, but

1:02:35 various things he had tried hadn't kinda hit yet. And I was like and I realized he's just really funny. He used to like to make funny videos on Instagram. And we were like, Your job is just to be funny. And so he'd go in the comments. And if somebody commented, he would go to their personal IG account.

1:02:53 Find a picture of them and just make fun of them. Just like roast them. Just be like, bro, what's up with the mom jeans? Like you gotta get your fashion, whatever, stuff like that. And to the point where it hit this fevered pitch where people would just comment on overtime video and they would just say, roast me. Right. And he would go in there and roast them. And all of a sudden you actually think it's about the video and about the dunk or the whatever, but it's actually about the mass of conversation. All these people who are like me, me, me, me, you know, who who wanna be who wanna be picked from the audience. And you interacting. And I think it was just a really different version of media and it put that Put that into practice.

1:03:32 And I will say that we have community managers now who just talk to fans all day. I'm in a group chat with two hundred and fifty fans of the City Reapers on Instagram, which is one of our basketball teams. About once every three weeks I hop in and I answer a question and everyone's like, Whoa, wait, who is this? And I'm like, Yeah, that's not happening'cause I run the company and I just said so and they all go crazy or whatever. And then I'm like, Gotta bounce because I could get trapped in there for two hours. Um And I just think like

1:04:00 Your fans aren't just mindless, faceless people there. They like Dare They're about it. They're the consumers of your product and you wanna live with them and you wanna talk to them and you wanna make sure that they know and I think like You know, I was looking at like

1:04:15 Sabrina Carpenter just had different fan accounts announce the track name for her new album. And every single one of them. And then she announced the final ones and it's like There's so many Lady Gaga, there's so many musicians who are so good at being like I wouldn't be anything without you guys. And Taylor Swift used to like jump into comments or like show up at people's weddings and stuff like that. Right. And I've always taken inspiration from that. And I just wanted to have a company that could

1:04:42 be meaningful and do stuff like that too. I I have this idea where like I'm gonna send one of my guys out anywhere in America and the first person he sees with an overtime shirt is gonna give him a thousand dollars. And be like I'm in the Ohio airport right now. And it's like I'm at a playground in in Oakland or whatever, and it's just like, Oh shit, I literally feel seen right now. And and that's what I think that's what uh everyone wants, including this generation. Have you seen what the all American rejects are doing? I haven't school me. So

1:05:14 Okay. I I didn't prep this out of them, though. I don't know much about them, but band that was popular, like I don't know, nineties or late two thousand, some some type of th thing. Kinda been off the map. Off the grid, not popular, whatever. So for their comeback

1:05:26 What they did was really interesting. They started Crashing actual like house parties for high schoolers. And they would just show up. And play a set in someone's backyard.

1:05:36 And that was their comeback tour, is that they're just going around America right now. And if you go look, dude, the it's Instagram Like liquid gold, dude. The the actual content, the way it looks. When they just show up at somebody's back yard at some high school house party right before prom or whatever. And they just start playing a song. They surprise everybody. It looks cool. It looks nostalgic. It looks fun. It like fits them. They're not trying to be

1:05:59 Like Super they're not trying to come back and pretend they're super relevant when they weren't. And they're sort of building back up in this bottoms up way and almost reinventing themselves as this like Like this band that's kind of like of the people and it just it's amazing what they're doing from a marketing point of view.

1:06:16 I'm gonna lock that away and I'm gonna figure out the sports version of that. Yeah. You once you watch one video, you're gonna be like that. I need to create that moment. 'Cause that was an amazing moment. I'm literally the second this this podcast is done, I'm gonna start tapping into that. And I think to me it's kind of like Listen, I work in sports with the vertical. You can work in music, you wear a B to B Sass. It doesn't really matter what your your vertical is.

1:06:40 Most people only take inspiration from other companies in their vertical. I'm just like, how can sports learn from this band? Right, like a lot of my ideas. I watch gaming, I'm a massive consumer. of Korean and Japanese non scripted television and various forms of reality and game shows. And like I always get ideas. Give me a recommendation. Give me a uh example of a shell I need to be on. Man, there's so many Um

1:07:08 There there's actually The audience is gonna be like these shows are terrible. What does he see in them? Your taste is your taste, maybe recruitment. I have conviction in my taste. There's there's one there's a Japanese one that I just watched this summer where they take ten Japanese people to a town in France and they take away their phones. And they just have to find each other and realize that they're in the same show and then Some of them fall in love.

1:07:35 And it's like glacially slow. And you're kinda thinking, Okay, well, it shouldn't be that hard to find the other Japanese person in this. And then when they're like they're like, Let's meet up, they're like, Well, what time? Well in front of the bakery. What bakery? And they can't look it up or anything. And so I just I love all those shows because It's all about the game design, right? What makes those shows work is the game design and inherent in game design are the principles of marketing, distribution, all of those elements. Uh, there's another one that's a little older called Nineteen to Twenty, where it's just a bunch of Korean kids who are in there basically last year of being kids who grow up who come together and

1:08:16 And I just like I learn so much about other cultures. I learn so much about game design. Uh, I learn about things that the US market doesn't think about, and then they go through my brain and they come out as things that we could think about because If you're looking for inspiration from the same place as everyone else then you're just gonna do the same thing everyone else does. You gotta look in all those little pockets. And that's not unrelated. To me saying I pay attention to a meme that uh seventeen year old basketball player creates because I'm also looking in those places where other people aren't looking.

1:08:49 I love it. Uh speaking of, you're big on chess right now. Why do you why are you so bullish on chess? Why give me the the pitch of why chess is The next big thing. So I I think first of all, you know, we talk about positioning and people are like oh overtime is a high school sports company and I always say overtime is about the audience. I mean my goal is to get A hundred million Gen Z fans to

1:09:12 Love overtime. If I thought they wanted to watch Grannies play three on three basketball, I would show grannies playing three on three basketball. Like you can't get confused with that. And so I've always been looking for opportunities to do things that don't feel like high school sports. to better explain the superpower of what we're doing. My Co founder Zach is like a twenty two hundred Drink chassis.

1:09:35 Stuyvesant chess champion, the Penn Ivy League chess champion. And Chess is one of those things that's like Kind of not very accessible. Right.

1:09:44 First of all, when you watch it, they're like A eight to C four, like you've no idea what's going on. The games are like six hours. Everybody is a mad genius. And we were always like If our goal at overtime is to see things that other people can't see. To make things that feel niche mainstream, like what's the most out of the box thing that we could do? And we were always like, Well, Zach likes chess. Can we do anything in chess? You kinda look at it and you're like

1:10:11 I don't know. And you start to talk to people and they're like, Oh, you're gonna do a chess championship and Magnus Carlson's gonna play and that guy's gonna play and you're just like, Yeah, that's kind of already been done. And it's already obvious. And so one day Zach comes in, he goes So you know what the biggest movers in culture for chess are?

1:10:31 And I'm like, yeah, Queen's Gambit. Right, that kind of started before that searching for Bobby Fisher. Yep. And he's like, Yeah, those are probably the two most relevant things in culture. What do they have in common? I was like Their movies and TV shows? He's like, no, they feature prodigies. Young prodigies, yeah. And I'm like, Oh, prodigies. He's like, there's something about prodigies. Then immediately I think about because I play the piano. Every eight-year-old I've ever watched on YouTube who plays

1:10:57 guitar better than BB King who plays the piano and everything else like that. And you're just like, how does that person know how to sound like Herbie Hancock and they're eight years old? And I'm like, oh yeah, I see it in my own life. And we're just like Prodigies. That's it. They're accessible. They're interesting who they are in and of themselves. And I always think about This

1:11:20 thing that my you know, my son who was a poker player used to say is like Like we used to play like Uh, Texas hold him and he'd never look at his cards. When I get my two cards, the first thing I do is look at them. I'm like, What are you doing? He's like, I just look at the other people. He's like, I spent a lot of time watching the other people. Then I look at my cards because then I know what to do. And so you think of this idea, oh, you play the players, not the cards. And then I'm just like, okay, so you have all these prodigies. It's not actually about the chess.

1:11:48 It's about these incredible young people with these crazy gifts. And then you start to think six hundred and fifty people or million people around the world play chess. And like I could have a prodigy from India and Argentina and all of this other stuff like that. And then you're off and running. So I'm working on this thing that we're Trying to

1:12:07 You know. Pitch and create call The Prodigy Cup. And it's like these chess prodigies, and it's a one night live event. And we have spent

1:12:17 Actually, when I get off of this podcast today, we're going to do a shoot in the studio, we've spent over a hundred hours. Filming chess. To make it so easy and fun to watch. That if you and I didn't know the difference between chess and checkers, we could watch it and it'd be super entertaining. And I think in there is the unlock. So

1:12:37 To me, I'm actually the perfect audience because I don't like chess and I'm not very good at it. And I don't know the Sicilian opening or any of these other things like that. So I just watch it and then I look at my watch and I'm like, I'm bored. Right. And I'm like, Okay, we gotta figure out how to do that. So it's just It's this kind of opportunity where it does everything, right? It taps into this thing. that isn't is is this growing trend, but it's the unexpected part. It's not the obvious way. It's great for the positioning of the company because overtime is about something bigger than high school basketball and what better way to choose to do chess.

1:13:10 And then it's just a lot of experimentation. And some prodigy in the middle is gonna say one thing and you're gonna be like, oh shit, that's the unlock. Yeah. And you're gonna pivot the whole thing around it. And I hope that A year from now you're watching it on a major streaming service. And three years from now I walk up to Madison Square Garden and there's a line of a thousand people and they're like, Yeah, I just bought tickets. It's these two prodigies playing. I'm obsessed with this kid and I can't wait to watch it. And it's all this IP that just came out of something that was very bottoms up and organic.

1:13:44 I love it. I I love how you keep using your Weakness as your advantage. So for example, you're like uh Okay, ESPN, the worldwide leader of sports, you're like Oh man, I'd be h I'd hate to be them. They have to cater to everybody. They're boxed in by their

1:13:59 Main streamness And I could do stuff that they can't do, right? I can I can uh have this like, you know, Gen Z brand, we can say that things are lity and there's Riz and there's all this. And that's gonna become our advantage is that we can cater to that audience in a way that if they did it, it would be way too try hard, but we could do it because we're starting fresh. Or like you know, with chess, you're like cool. I don't know anything about chess. That's my advantage. I couldn't watch that if I wanted to, right? It would be too boring for me to watch traditional chess. So Of course I'm gonna make something that's more accessible because I couldn't access that. I can only make something that's it that makes sense to me. And so

1:14:34 It would make it. It goes it goes back to that thing that we talked about before whereas if you took If you train people to look for blue and you tell them to close their eyes and you're like, What's red? They're like, I don't see any of it. Right. If you could train yourself to look for every color at every time. It's you know, I I love the education system and I'm a professor, but it's not an accident that some of the best entrepreneurs dropped out. Because they just saw things. That were broader

1:14:58 And I I I think you know It's it's just it's just a different way of looking at the world. I don't know why that happened to me. Maybe my brain was wired that way. Maybe that's how I learned. Uh maybe I didn't go to any I never studied business, but I think again it's it's about seeing what I think other people

1:15:19 don't see and and and being able to stick with it. And there is a lot of third mentality and so forth. And it takes Either a a lot of Courage. Or obliviousness to just go and do something that's different than everyone else's doing.

1:15:37 That's why I always respect people who do some crazy gap year. They're like, Yeah, everyone's gonna go to college. I'm actually gonna be a goat farmer for a year. And they're like, You deferred college for a year to be a goat farmer. Like why would you do that? And they're just like I don't know, it just feels fucking cool. And it's like those people are are the people I'm gonna bet on long term. I love it. Um

1:16:01 The Madman brand builder. Uh, this is fun. I love I love this conversation. If we Fast forward, I don't know, a year. Say or actually not even forget the year. That's too far. What are you most excited about for six seven water next, I don't know, ninety days? What's the what's the next play, the next move, the next experiment that you're gonna try?

1:16:20 To get a bucket here with uh with six seven water. Ooh, get a bucket. I think that You know T K has

1:16:29 Created Taylor and Kennedy. TK has created This phenomenon with his water that we've supported him on and helped him on the infrastructure. And I think everyone's like, Well, six seven is a trend. Have you sold a million cans yet, or anything else like that? Um And so I think we all

1:16:48 Wanna figure out how do we parlay this kind of Massive social media following in this kind of Ground up. something based in a kid who's just a grade kid. Into selling a million cans. And maybe it's gonna be in the gas station.

1:17:04 Or maybe it's gonna be in some place that's like completely not obvious. Um And maybe I'm not gonna know and he's not gonna know what the answer is until Monday when we wake up and we're like, Oh my God. It's actually Selling in ice cream trucks.

1:17:20 You know, where something else like that and that idea that you Don't know. It's like nobody wants to play a video game where you don't know what what is gonna happen next. And so I think that aspect and then unlocking that. And then doing it again with one or two amazing other athletes who are super genuine and have a massive audience connection.

1:17:42 I think is really cool and always doing it from The bottoms up to something that makes sense and resonates. with their brand I think that I'm really uh I'm really excited about.

1:17:55 I think it'd be great. I love your uh N I L recruitment idea. Where basically if a if Kentucky wants them, but no UConn wants them more. I think we're gonna try to do that. Who knows how much legal and IP and other stuff. We'll lock that down. But you imagine he's like, I'm gonna go to the school that buys the can with the color of the school and the most amount of cans. Just like show me the love.

1:18:17 Yeah. Who's with it? Who who who So I just want to go to the place that's the most with it. And then they basically gotta figure out how to Create a stunt out of it, right? How to sh speak the language that he wants to speak with it with the water brand and I think that would be really cool. And I think that would be also like Kind of like one of these like beachhead moments where like 'Cause when you said that my brain broke a little bit. It's like oh, I thought I knew how

1:18:40 College recruiting works, I thought even N I L I thought I understood what that is. Okay, great. Kid goes to a school, and then after they're at the school, then they're gonna start to get maybe some endorsement deals, and it's gonna look like endorsements, but just a younger age. And then I was like oh no. So if he has this Vehicle. The school could kinda like pump his vehicle as part of the recruitment. That's actually like pretty genius. So it's like your your wife is gonna be like Sean, why are there twenty seven blue cases of water out? And you're like, I gotta get my guy DK to do. Yeah, exactly. I gotta do my part. Drink up.

1:19:16 Drink up, money. I had this I ha when I was like in my twenties, I ran this uh nonprofit in education. And we eventually started some of the very first charter schools in the nineties in New York. And I had this guy who was on my

1:19:35 And he had been like a sixties activist who eventually became a successful investment banker, but he was the first person in a board meeting I ever heard say no and said a yes, and I didn't know you could say no. And he had said this thing to me, which now he's in his eighties and I had lunch with him and I was like, You said the most impactful thing to me ever. He goes, I don't remember saying that. And he said, You know They say you gotta crawl before you walk, and you gotta walk before you run. And

1:20:04 If If you do that, you spend your whole fucking life crawling. And I don't know, I just always like I was like, Yeah, it's a really logical I want to spend my whole life crawling. I don't want to get into the running part. So uh he's like I don't remember saying that. I was like you said that to me, I was only twenty seven, you changed my life. So you know, that that's how we think about going after all these things. You almost spend your whole life crawling. All right, well if if anybody's in the beverage industry, if anybody's got gas stations, if anybody who's listening to this drinks water

1:20:36 Drink up. What was it? What was this other catchphrase? You hack in family. Yeah, that that's what I that's what I say. You have to fail with it. The best part is it says on the back, it says, Attention, if drinking six seven water doubles your vertical Please contact your coach immediately. Ha ha ha.

1:20:57 So good. All right, Dad. Thanks for coming on, man. I appreciate you, brother. I feel like I can rule the world, I know I can be what I want to I'll put my law in it like my day's off. On the roadless travel, never looking back. My friends, if you like MFM, then you're gonna like the following podcast. It's called Billion Dollar Moves. And of course, it's brought to you by the HubSpot Podcast Network. The number one audio destination for business professionals. Billion dollar moves. It's hosted by Sarah Chen Spelling. Sarah is a venture capitalist and strategist, and with billion dollar moves, she wants to look at unicorn founders and funders, and she looks for what she calls the unexpected. Leader Many of them were underestimated long before they became huge and successful and iconic.

1:21:43 She does it with unfiltered conversations about success, failure, fear, courage, and all that great stuff. So again, if you like my first million. Check out billion dollar moves. It's brought to you by the Hub Spot Podcast Network. Again. Billion dollar moves. All right, back to the episode.

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