Breaking Down Two +$1B Companies Hidden In Plain Sight

**Shaan Puri** (0:00)
There's stories where she's raising funding, and a guy leans over the table and was like, so why should I trust you to be the CEO of this company? And she leans back over, she goes, because I'm a complete and total animal. And the guy leans back and he's like, all right, I'm in.
See you then.

**Sam Parr** (0:29)
Okay, what's up? We're here and I got two little special announcements for you.
First one, we got merch. The boys got merch. We're a little late to the game. We're a little slow.
Most people start selling merch as soon as they get a following. It took us four years, but Sam, we figured it out. You got to sell t-shirts on the Internet and hoodies.

**Shaan Puri** (0:48)
But that's I think that's all we have.
We'll add more stuff, but we have a few stuff. It's pretty stupid that neither of us are wearing it today. Mine's in the dryer at the moment.

**Sam Parr** (1:00)
Again, slow and stupid.

**Shaan Puri** (1:04)
But yeah, it's pretty cool. We have stuff that has some of our favorite sayings. And, dude, there's no small boy stuff shockingly caught on, caught on in a big way.

**Sam Parr** (1:13)
I'll tell you something. I don't know if you listen, but I did an episode with Samir from Colin and Samir, and they basically are like, they're YouTubers that study other YouTubers. So they're like, always studying creators.
And he handed me two things when he came to the interview. He handed me a newspaper. Did I tell you about this?

**Shaan Puri** (1:29)
No.

**Sam Parr** (1:30)
He handed me a newspaper that was, they made their own newspaper edition, like one edition, special edition for their, like they hit some milestone. So they printed a newspaper and it was like, all of the like kind of content or interviews from their show were like, it's like, here's the monthly magazine or whatever, here's the thing for our stuff.

**Shaan Puri** (1:51)
Dude, let's do that. That's a great idea.

**Sam Parr** (1:53)
It's a great idea. It looked like a normal thing, but they made it using their content. And I was like, I love this. He gave me one. He's like, this is the last one we have. I don't know if that's true or not, but man, you know how to make a boy feel special when you say that. The second thing he handed me, this hat, that was a dope hat that says, press published, it's like this blue hat that has super high quality and I was like, this is like much higher quality than normal merch. And he goes, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. Here's how I think about merch.
He goes, if you're Logan Paul or you're Mr. Beast, you make consumables. Think prime energy drink, it's a consumable. I'm selling this to you, you're gonna drink it, use it, whatever.
And he goes, Mr. Beast, chocolate. He's gonna, or even Mr. Beast merch, his T-shirts. These are all just consumables.
And he goes, we don't make consumables, we make collectibles. He goes, if you're a creator, you should pick one of the two paths. And I love this collectibles idea, he's like, because what you want is, you want a way, look, you don't need to make a, you're not gonna make a fortune, you don't need to make a fortune through your merch. Which is why we've never done merch, because it's like, I don't know, do we really care about making a couple thousand bucks on T-shirt sales? Never been a motivator for us.
Because we're rich, if you missed that part. All right, so, but the reason is-

**Shaan Puri** (3:06)
Oh, my God, what a, should we put, like, is that our new collectible, like, Douchebags R Us?

**Sam Parr** (3:13)
Yeah, yeah, coming to a store near you.
But the collectibles thing made total sense to me, where he's like, you want the people who are like, kind of your thousand most, but most like, kind of devoted people, people who actually give a shit about what you do, they're all about what you're all about. They think the way you think, they act the way you act, they're very similar to you. They're like, for them, this is like, collectible badge of honor. So make a limited edition number of units.
And when it's gone, it's gone, it never comes back.
And on top of that, it's a signal, so that anytime anybody else sees them with that, they know, oh, they know you're part of the tribe. They know you're part of the tribe. Like if I meet somebody, Ben said this to me the other day, he goes, oh, you know what I like? Because what he'll do often is he'll talk to people who come through my DMs or email us or whatever. He loves to go meet them and talk to them. And I'm like, that's great. You get a lot of energy from that. I'm more introverted. Don't like doing that as much.