#166 - Why a Sudoku Company Sold for $640m, "Opendoor for X" & Franchising Tech Companies

**Sam Parr** (0:00)
The very bottom, it says, no, this domain is not for sale. Please do not inquire about purchasing it. All emails from anonymous or unknown companies asking me a price will be ignored. Sorry, last updated, July 2007

**Shaan Puri** (0:12)
Right, so I emailed this guy, and I was like, hey, saw your website. I think it's awesome that you're not trying to sell this, but I'm curious, why aren't you trying to sell this? And he's like, refuses to monetize it, refuses to sell it. I think it's hilarious, what, what is this?

**Sam Parr** (0:40)
Let's talk about business ideas.
First of all, let me give you an update. Did you see someone in the Facebook group launched a pickleball newsletter because we told them to a few months ago? Because we told them to. And it's now their full-time job, and they traveled the country getting their products into stores and things like that. So it started as a pickleball newsletter.
And then they partnered with the Pro Tour of Pickleball, which I didn't know it was a thing. And then they started selling their own stuff out of a van, their own pickleball equipment. And now they're in retail stores.

**Shaan Puri** (1:12)
Good for them. What's their name? Give them a shout out.

**Sam Parr** (1:13)
Thomas Shields. Good job, Thomas. Thomas looks like a young kid. He looks like a younger, better looking version of me.
Let's see. Well, I can't.
Yeah, he looks young. He looks real young. So congratulations, Thomas Shields.

**Shaan Puri** (1:28)
That's great. I think the CEO or the founder of Pickleball either listens to the pod or he messaged once being like, yeah, I'm down to come on. So we can have them on if you ever want to.
We can do an episode about kind of like alternative sports. Basically, do some research and have them on as well.

**Sam Parr** (1:42)
Great. And speaking of alternative sports, do you want to talk about chess?

**Shaan Puri** (1:45)
Yeah. So I have a follow up there. I don't know if you have one or just what I put there.

**Sam Parr** (1:51)
Go ahead. What were you going to say? So the background is we talked about chess.com last episode. I tweeted about it because I was even more interested in it.

**Shaan Puri** (1:58)
People love that tweet. Dude, that tweet had tons of engagement.

**Sam Parr** (2:01)
It was good. And the summary of this is that I actually... We underestimated it. So chess.com gets around 200 million monthly uniques.
They have 60 million registered users. Traffic has grown significantly. If I had to guess, they do at least 100 million in recurring revenue, subscription revenue.
Potentially, it's worth a billion dollars. Super fascinating company.

**Shaan Puri** (2:23)
So we were trying to hype it and we actually were underhyping, even though we were trying to hype it.
And by the way, the guy who started is like an ex-Stanford guy, or the guy who owns it. It was two Stanford guys, which is cool. Like, they didn't go the same track probably as 95% of their classmates, and they're going to outperform 99% of them just by doing something really simple that the world wanted. So, I started thinking about this because we talked about it. You brought it up. Cool topic, really cool business. It really fits the what we call the New Zealand type of business that Andrew Wilkinson kind of coined that phrase, which is it's this independent thing.
It has a cult following. It's profitable. It's simple.
Nobody competes with it. It's like New Zealand. Nobody's going to war with chess.com. The biggest competitor, I think, is called LyChess or something like that. It's basically like an open source, free, kind of like alternative, and it's also doing extremely well. Those are like the two.
But it seems like people kind of prefer chess.com. So I started thinking, okay, what's the next chess.com? What are the others? Is there a whole slew of these guys? Because I think that's where we didn't talk about last time that we should have. And so I wanted to double click in a little bit.

**Sam Parr** (3:34)
And that's a really, really hard question. I've been thinking about it too. I only came up with like dominoes. I looked into solitaire websites. A lot of them crush.
But yeah, that's a hard question to ask.

**Shaan Puri** (3:45)
So I spent 10, 15 minutes on it, but that was enough to tell me something very interesting. So the first one that came to mind was because here's the characteristics that you need. You need a game played by tens of millions, if not hundreds of millions of people that is not owned by a brand. Chess works.