Hearing the phrase “you’re such a con-artist!” coming from the lips of a potential investor during a live pitch is defiantly not a good look (especially when it happens on live TV broadcasting to millions of viewers).
It happened 10 times when Mark Cuban publicly called out scams when he smelled fish oil on ABC’s Shark Tank.
Sharktank is the place where people’s dreams can become a reality or a total nightmare…
The television program features some of the world’s most successful investors which include: Mark Cuban, Keavin O’leary, Daymond John, Barbara Corcoran, and Lori Greiner.
Since the show debuted in 2009, there have been some pretty memorable pitches. Here’s a video that shows some of the most savage shark tank moments on that were called out at total scams.
Mark Cuban goes head to head with these entrepreneurs, even questioning their ethics. Here’s the 10 times Shark Tank’s Mark Cuban calls out the sleaziest frauds on Shark Tank.
Did you know 60% of professional athletes end up broke within 5 years of retiring? Not Shaq though. Far from it, his personal business investments are growing to Warren Buffet status.
You won’t believe how many businesses he currently owns…
Shaquille O’Neal is one of the savviest businessmen in the North American sporting world who has managed to amassed an incredible $400 million net worth following the end of a successful 19-year NBA career.
Including over 150 car washes across the US…
Here’s a Breakdown of Shaq’s Investment Portfolio:
Shaq owns 10% of all Five Guys (that’s 155 locations)
Side note, Shaq is also the owner of one of the most pointless website on the internet…
Pettiness aside, here’s a video where Shaq breaks down his investment strategy:
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How Much Does Shaq Make on Endorsements?
In addition his business portfolio, Shaq makes a killing monetizing his personal brand too.
Shaq has endorsements with VitaminWater, Pepsi, IcyHot, and Taco Bell. All combined nets him a cool $20 million a year.
But that isn’t where he makes his fortune…His real money he prints while he sleeps in the fleet of carwashes he owns. All 150 of them, where he makes a majority of his earnings.
In 2012, Jack Conte and his wife, Nataly Dawn, were known as the indie band called Pomplamoose. They were bringing in roughly $400,000 per year in revenue from tour dates, merch, and on ads viewed by their 1.5M followers on their YouTube channel.
But then a mental breakdown a few years ago changed all of that…
After spending three months producing an elaborate music video for their song “Pedals, (it’s pretty impressive for a self-production). But the production came at the heavy cost of maxing out all of Jack and Nataly’s credit cards.
The Conte’s sunk their life savings into making the video popular on YouTube. So far the video has 2.3M views, but the confused couple received almost nothing for their efforts from YouTube…
They spent $10,000 and three months to make just the 1 video go viral on YouTube. He soon realized that, even though he receives an average of one million viewers on his YouTube videos, he’d only make $160 in ad revenue. Kind of a shitty reward for the time and effort they were putting in.
Jack knew there had to be a better way…
So he came up with an idea for creators to get compensated directly from their fans and cut out the middle man.
That’s how he came up with the idea of launching Patreon. He sent a sketch of his idea to his former college roommate, an engineer, who started coding for it that night. They launched soon after, with Jack being Patreon’s first official creator. Within two weeks, he was making six figures…
Wait, What is Patreon?
Basically it’s a membership platform that helps creators to get paid. Creators perform an artistic service and return, their fans and supporters (aka patrons) use Patreon to support them by means of payments. This way, creators can spend more time creating content instead of looking for funding.
There’s a few business models that content creators can use on this crowdfunding/membership platform.
Patreon’s Business Model Enables Creators to Charge For:
Community (monthly memberships)
Educational subscriptions
Gated premium content
Pay-what-you-can donations
Jack founded Patreon in 2013, today they have 3 million monthly active patrons generating $100M+ per month on the platform.
At one point for example, author and psychologist Jordan Peterson, was said to be making over $70k per month on the platform just in donations alone.
Patreon currently takes between 5% and 12% of creator earnings (plus a payment processing fee). The pandemic helped increase revenue with over 30,000 creators flocking to the site within the first few weeks of the pandemic. Videos and podcasts are the biggest categories on the site.
Along with all their success, the company is facing an intense amount of competition coming from Youtube, Twitter, Instagram, Only Fans, Substack, and Clubhouse (is that thing still alive?). It seems every platform these days is doing their best to lure creators by allowing everyone to make money versus just the big creatives.
But for now, Patreon has proven their business model helping participants in the creator economy to get paid more. The result of the couple’s efforts so far has resulted in an estimated $8 million in cash.
The companies’ market valuation is currently hovering at $4billion. Which is a pretty awesome accomplishment that a broken husband fed up YouTube created a rival platform that turned him into a millionaire.
“If you’re starting a company, you always want to aim for a monopoly and avoid competition. Hence, competition is for Losers.” – Peter Thiel
Who the Hell Are You Calling a Loser?
In a famous Y Combinator master class, Peter Theil founder of Paypal and Palantir, presented his famous business strategy that requires founders to position their growth for a monopoly of the industry.
‘Competition is for losers’ is one of his mantras. ‘Monopoly is the condition of every successful business’ is another. It is the ultimate test of entrepreneurship to build something that is one of a kind, sufficiently different from what already exists to render the idea of competition redundant.
In this article, we’ll cover how Peter approaches new markets and how to create a monopoly. But first, here’s a brief background on Thiel and why you should even care what he has to say in the first place…
Who the Hell is Peter Thiel?
You could say he knows a thing or two about the tech space. Peter Andreas Thiel is a German-American billionaire entrepreneur and venture capitalist. A co-founder of PayPal, CIA-based Palantir Technologies, and Founders Fund.
He was also the first outside investor in some of the biggest unicorns in silicon valley including Facebook, Stripe and Space X.
His companies and investments have earned him a net worth of $5 billion. He also gives a small number of entrepreneurs $100k over two years to skip college and build their own companies.
You can watch his talk at Y Combinator. Or read the summary below…
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So How Do You Enter a Crowded Market? Don’t…
As Peter explains, especially to tech founders, companies need to be very careful about what markets they enter and especially how they differentiate themselves as not better, but something entirely different when approaching markets of high competition.
Similar to the Blue Ocean Strategy, Theil explains that if you’re entering into a crowded market it’s very difficult (and often expensive) to gain the attention needed to build effective brand awareness. Especially if you offer similar product or service…
Success in saturated markets requires a lot of money to advertise, dramatically lowering your margins and ability to win. This has also been dubbed, the start-up graveyard.
Evaluate the Cost Trap of Entering Saturated Markets
The only way to enter saturated markets with established larger brands (with way more money than you) is to make a product or service completely better and different than everyone else on the market.
But doing so is way easier said than done. That’s where the case for chasing emerging market trends pays off. Emerging companies (especially tech), should forget fitting into existing markets and instead pursue entirely new and emerging potential markets. Even if it’s risky.
Here’s why…
When entering markets with less or no competition, you have a greater chance of success and it’s far easier and more cost effective to acquire the attention you need to scale. Simply because you’re one of a few players in the space.
Even if you launch in an emerging market with an average or similar product at the beginning, you will have more time and opportunity to develop and perfect your average product and service while you’re building your audience and future customer base.
In fact, if you think about it, that’s exactly how most successful tech companies have been able to scale so fast as early stage market players. They rode the wave of the trend and captured all the early attention establishing their future industry dominance.
Conclusion:
Facebook wasn’t the first social network site, Google wasn’t the first search engine, Microsoft wasn’t the first OS company or Apple wasn’t the first computer company. But they were early in the market, they caught the trend and they executed better than everyone else. And when market reached its full potential they became big brands or monopolies.
That’s what Peter Thiel meant by “competition is for losers”…
Meet the Former MMA fighter, high school dropout, and single father who had absolutely zero business background bought a business for $500 on an online business flipping site. 9 years later, his business is doing $35 million a year.
His advice to you? “Don’t start a business, buy one.”
Here’s how you can do it too…
But first, here’s a quick background on Ramon Van Meer
Today Ramon Van Meer is the CEO and founder of Alpha Paw, a website for pet owners that offers products for every dog breed-specific health issue. Ramon bought the business for $300k and has built it to $35M in revenue within three years.
Where’d he get the money to buy it? Through a series of website flips that started with a small content blog about financial credit, a site he bout on Flippa for $500. He promoted it and built a small following and sold it. He did that again about 3-4 more sites.
You can watch Ramon’s incredible exit story below or listen to it in the Quiet Light podcast, but want I wanted to show you, is the site Ramon and thousands of others go to buy and sell websites. Flippa.com.
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Want to Buy or Sell a Website? Meet Flippa.com
Flippa.com is an auction site where you can buy and sell internet businesses. Don’t know how to code or build a membership site or dropping shipping store? No problem, just buy one.
What Can You Buy and Sell on Flippa?
Flippa lets you can buy and sell websites, drop shipping stores, domains, and even mobile apps. The portal is aimed to assist website owners in selling their websites as well as assisting others in purchasing established websites, domains drop shipping sites, and mobile apps.
Sites can range from just created with zero revenue to multi-million in reoccurring sales…
If you’re interested in learning more about how to use Flippa and the pros and cons of the platform, check out this full report and guide from Niches Pursuits.
The Billion dollar Patagonia brand was started by a bullied teenager living off fifty cents a day learning how to be, a falconer…
And the original source material for the products he made, came from the dumpsters he was diving in.
The Bizarre Beginning of the Patagonia Brand
From it’s very beginning, the brand never really cared about being cool or even making money. Instead, it focused on making gear for the sport they loved while being environmentally responsible. Today they’ve become a status symbol for the biggest and richest companies in the world.
Here’s the story of how the Patagonia company was born…
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Patagonia’s Roots in Black Smithery, Falconry, and Rock-Climbing…
Patagonia’s founder, Yvon Chouinard was born in 1938 in Lisbon , Maine and raised in a French-Canadian community that spoke little English.
His father, a hard working blue collar man, moved the family to Burbank CA when Yvon was only 8 years old. An experience that turned out to be a pretty shitty one for little Yvon.
Shitty because Yvon was bullied at school for not being able to speak English. He was also the smallest kid in his class which didn’t help his position. Not knowing what to do, Yvon would just simply run away. He spent most of his time alone in the wilderness. Hunting and fishing by himself.
Then one day, Yvon discovered, of all things, falconry…
He joined a local falconry club where he made friends and learned how to train hawks and falcons. For the first time, Yvon belonged to something.
One of the members, Don Prentice, was a mountain climber who trained the club how to rappel down cliffs to in order to access falcon nest located high up on mountain rock ledges.
So What’s the Blacksmith Connection?
The club became obsessed with the sport. Traveling all over the country rappelling down America’s tallest cliffs. They did it for the most part, without any gear…
Eventually the group turned their attention from rappelling to climbing. Were they’re lack of equipment became problematic (opposed to repelling down, climbing up requires a lot more than a rope).
With only 200 mountain climbers in those days and no store to provide their climbing gear, the group was forced to make their own in the early days of the sport. One of those items were pitons (the stakes mountain climbers hammer into the rock face to clip onto for, “safety”).
“Hey Mountain Climbers, Clean Up Your Shit!”
The problem with the original pitons was they were permanent. Climbers would just leave the stakes poking out of the side of the mountain for others to use later on…It became an eyesore and Yvon wasn’t having it.
Yvon taught himself how to be a blacksmith (in a chicken coop in his parents backyard) where he invented the first sets of removable pitons, changing the sport forever. They even turned out to be stronger and more reliable than the permanent European pitons they originally used.
He didn’t even charge his friends for them in the beginning. He would just hand them to other climbers to help clean up the mountain side. They were an instant success.
From Climbing Gear to Clothing Icon…
Pategonia eventually got into the clothing business after Yvon took a climbing trip to Scotland where he bought a Rugby shirt because the material looked tough enough to climb a mountain in (and it looked cool). Plus he thought the collar would help keep the climbing ropes away from his neck.
Climbing in his Rugby shirt back in the states, Yvonn stuck out like a sore thumb in his flamboyant colored shirt. In a good way. Other climbers asked where they could get a “fancy colorful climbing shirt”.
Here’s a review of some of the original 1980s rugby shirts they launched with:
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So Yvon licensed a series of durable and colorful rugby (I mean climbing) shirts. They sold like hot cakes…
But while the clothing brand famously went through many ups and downs over the years, Patagonia today is one of the most recognized clothing brands on the planet.
All thanks to a badass little kid who climbed his way up in life on his own terms.
Toshiba is a brand that’s been drowning in scandals for years. Including a recent one that involved overstating it’s profits to shareholders by $1.2 billion which resulted in the resignation of their CEO.
The company was once one of the most innovative businesses on the planet, they produced one of the first laptops. They were credited as being the first company to mass produce one. Chances are you owned one…
They were sued and settled to pay $1billion in a class action lawsuit for faulty equipment.
Despite being such an innovative company, Toshiba has experienced some massive setbacks over the years that have resulted from a combination of both poor business decisions and public scandals.
This video y Company Man highlights the most notable ones. Here’s a video that highlights the history of Toshiba’s insane series of scandals.
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The Surprising History of Toshiba
Toshiba traces its history in Japan to 1875. The company rode the post-war Japanese manufacturing boom in the late 1950s to high growth portfolio of unique and innovative products. Toshiba began selling products in foreign markets during this period and continued to expand its businesses across the globe during the following decades.
Today, the conglomerate operates business units on a worldwide scale in a variety of diverse industries, including semiconductors, personal electronics, infrastructure, home appliances, and medical equipment.
Toshiba reported net worldwide sales of more than 3.38 trillion Japanese yen or $31 billion for the 2020 fiscal year. The company employs more than 125,648 people worldwide.
There’s a growing multi-billion dollar industry that’s sprouting up from, of all places, homeowner’s basements. Here’s a peek inside the growing “Microgreen Industry” that one of your neighbors is probably cashing in on.
Here’s why…
The global microgreens market size was valued at $1.3 billion in 2019, and is now projected to reach $2.2 billion by 2028. Growing demand for microgreens, along with recent interruptions in global supply chains have created a local cash opportunity.
Especially amongst innovative homeowners looking to cash in on their un-utilized square footage.
What the Hell Are Microgreens?
Microgreens are young seedlings of edible vegetables and herbs. Unlike larger herbs and vegetables that take weeks or months to grow, microgreens can be harvested and eaten a week to 10 days after leaves have developed. Like baby carrots but for herbs…
These tiny plants only grow to a few inches and can come in 50 to 60 different varieties. Microgreens were originally limited to fancy dinner plates and boutique grocery stores due to their higher cost. But now they’re a multibillion dollar industry.
And did I mention, you can grow them in your basement? The set up cost is low and the growing cycle is super quick, meaning you can be harvesting and selling your first crop in just a couple of weeks.
Interested in this as a side hustle? Here’s an e-Book to get you started…
Microgreens can be grown in a small space and can sell for $50 per pound or more, making them an ideal crop for small farms and “urban growers”. In an area as small as a shipping container, a garage, or basement you could generate thousands per month growing and selling them.
Here’s the full story on how one couple makes $120k/year selling microgreens from the basement of their urban home.
Airbnb was the stupidest idea for a business. The idea was to rent an air mattress in someone else’s occupied apartment. A Literal air bed and breakfast. I mean, who would pay to sleep on the floor of the apartment of a complete stranger?
Turns out quite a few actually. While no longer air mattresses, today Airbnb has over 150 million hosts who’s properties accommodate more than a half a billion guests a year
You Won’t Believe How airbnb Got Started!
Today, Airbnb is one of the most successful short-term rental businesses in the world today. Since its formation in 2008, it has experienced massive growth, starting out with just a few friends renting extra space in their home to an international multibillion-dollar corporation.
Here is the insane inside story of how 3 guys turned that into a $31 billion company.
The story is crazier than the idea. Watch founder, Brian Chesky explain the crazy story of how 3 college kids created one of the world’s largest companies on the stupidest for a business to LinkedIn Founder, Reed Hastings, at a Y Combinator event.
“All my life I’ve seen murders and robberies. I came from that world where everything was dog-eat-dog. If you had money or jewelry, if you couldn’t defend it or protect it, you’re going to loose it.”
– Mike Tyson
Mike Tyson was first arrested at 10 years old. 38 more times by age 13.
Needless to say, he grew up in a rough neighborhood in Brooklyn. If you couldn’t protect yourself, you got taken advantage of. Mike was in over 400 fights in his life.
He quite literally fought his way through life and still is to this day…
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How Mike Tyson Blew a $600 Million Fortune
By the age of twenty Tyson was one of the most famous figures on the planet. Namely for being the most talented boxers of all time. And for biting off Evander Holyfield’s ear off during one of the most televised matches in boxing history.
Here’s that throwback…
During his boxing career he amassed over $685 million and he accomplished to spending all of it. Every last penny…
He not only managed to blow through a half billion in cash, he then eventually owed over $50 million in debts, including another $13.4 million to the IRS.
So What Did Mike Tyson Spend $685 Million On Exactly?
Mike routinely traveled with an entourage so large it rivaled the size of a small country.
He owned Siberian tigers and spent hundreds of thousands/year to care for them.
He bought over $400k worth of pigeons too…it’s a long story
He had fleets of luxury vehicles, a posse of prostitutes, and a 21-bedroom mansion.
He was known to spend over $240k month for entertainment and another $100k/month for Jewelry and clothes.
During his lifetime, Tyson reached the peaks of fame and fortune most of us mere mortals will never know or experience. He climbed from the gutter to the height of success. But even at the top of the world by the age of 20, he still had a darkness inside of him…
Watch Mike explain his incredible life story and lessons of gratitude from his personal experiences literally fighting for his life.
