Brainstorming +$1M Weird Business Ideas With Morning Brew’s CEO

**Shaan Puri** (0:00)
All right, let's take a quick break to talk about our sponsor HubSpot. You know, I started a new company recently, and I haven't announced it yet. I'm not going to announce it here, but I'm going to tell you that we use HubSpot for it. We're using it for our sales process. It's actually pretty great.
And you know, it's quarter one now in 2024 We all have goals. We all want growth.
But what you don't want is your salespeople just stuck in the mud where they're spending all their time just scheduling, trying to track down leads, looking at data, and it's not organized at all. That's why HubSpot has this thing called Sales Hub. That's pretty great. We're using it on a daily basis. And the goal is you want to move customers in the pipeline from just being a contact to actually being a customer to signing their full-on contract and ultimately managing and forecasting your sales so that you know which direction the business is going. And so check out Sales Hub from HubSpot. It is focused on we're helping you work smarter, not harder so that you can get all of your New Year's goals, close more deals and get on track for your best Q1 yet. Explore the new HubSpot Sales Hub and AI tools like Chatspot at hubspot.com/sales. All right, let's get back to the pod.
Dude, this is a great idea. This is why we started this podcast for somebody to come on and say, yeah, I just built a $100 million media company, but guys, smoking meats is where it's at.
We got Three Amigos of Newsletters. The short story of Austin is out of college, create Morning Brew, sold it for, I think I read $75 million, so you don't have to correct me if I'm wrong, but $75 million bucks, you still run it, hundreds of employees, amazing. You have a doc here of a bunch of topics.

**Austin Rief** (1:41)
Yeah, someone sent me this deck like last week and I was gonna text Sam about this. I was like, you know what, let me wait for the pod to talk to you guys about this. This is, I feel like a My First Million special. So I've been super excited about a bunch of these post-COVID, get out of your house, do exciting things that's not go to a bar and just drink. I think that's pretty boring. And there are a bunch of these in New York. I don't know how, if they have where you guys live, but they have ping pong bars and pool bars and they get more and more out there. And I was tweeting about this and some guys sent me a deck. He goes, I got something interesting for you. So if you have your computer up, look up Bingo Loco.
Right, this guy sends me this deck for Bingo. I'm like, well, what the hell is this? Right, Bingo Loco.
It's basically a club meets Bingo, right? So boozy Bingo, performers, confetti showers, the whole thing.

**Shaan Puri** (2:36)
This looks like a Tiesto concert or something going on.

**Austin Rief** (2:40)
I didn't know people played Bingo off of cruise ships. Like I thought Bingo was either for old people or cruise ships.
He sends me his deck. I don't want to disclose their numbers, but he goes, check out one of our competitors, Bongo Bingo USA. I'm like, there's no way there's a whole industry for Bingo raves, for Bingo parties.

**Sam Parr** (3:00)
Dude, the websites are exactly the same. They just copied each other.

**Austin Rief** (3:04)
It looks like, again, he just sent me a deck. Apparently, people in the industry, so these Bongo Bingo guys, apparently, pre-COVID, were doing 20 million a year in revenue.

**Sam Parr** (3:15)
No way.

**Shaan Puri** (3:17)
Explain this model. Do they own the place or they're just going and doing a pop-up Bingo night at someplace?

**Austin Rief** (3:23)
No, I think they go all, it's actually really smart, right? Because what they do is, I believe they go for pretty off nights for certain places, right?
So nights where a club or whatever, wherever they had these, wouldn't be that popular, but they still bring that environment, right? So they still use a lot of the infrastructure that these venues have.
And they bring, it seems like the whole show, the confetti showers, the performers, everything. And what I think is interesting is they keep you there with the Bingo, right? So there's a shuffle boarding place in Brooklyn, right? They keep you there because you play shuffle board for hours and hours and you're just buying drinks. And that's like the schtick, that's the hook to get you in. And this is the same thing, game of Bingo. I'm sure they have performers mid game. And they keep you there for seven hours. You just buy a bunch of drinks. So I thought this one was awesome.