Welcome to Nerdpreneur,
where we have fun
conversations with people making
money with their nerdy passion. As always,
I am joined by my co host, Frank.
Hello.
And today we have a very special guest. His.
His name is Justin McMahan.
Welcome to the show, Justin.
Hey, thanks, Chris. Thanks for having me.
Yeah, we're very excited
to chat with you today.
So to kick off this interview, Justin,
what is your nerdy passion?
Yeah, my nerdy passion is fantasy
sports and sports betting.
But it really is like the daily fantasy
sports is really my deepest passion.
Fantasy sports. Well,
for those people on our listenership
that are not really into sports,
because I think we got a lot of nerds
that maybe don't have as much crossover,
Frank being one of them.
Could you tell us a little
bit about what fantasy sports is,
even as just a concept for
people maybe who don't know what it is?
Yeah, absolutely. So fantasy sports is
where you are picking real people
on your fantasy lineup and then depending
on how they play in their real life. Games,
you're scoring points.
So it allows you to have like
a different level of fan engagement.
So instead of just watching the
games and rooting for your favorite
team or maybe your favorite player, you
actually are competing against your friends.
And in my case,
in the case of my customers,
they're competing for a lot of money to
see who can pick the better players that
are going to play the best in those games.
So it just adds a whole
new level to being a sports fan.
If you're digging into the numbers
and kind of geeking out on the analytics,
it gives you something to do. Since
I don't get to manage any pro sports teams,
I don't get to make any real life decisions,
but it makes you feel like your time spent
researching it is actually worth something.
So if we were
to ground this in say, football, which is,
I would guess the biggest of the fantasy
sports is NFL fantasy football. Right. Like,
I've done a little bit of fantasy football.
I only got into it a couple, three years ago.
I'm about to do my third
fantasy draft in a few weeks, so.
And maybe actually at the time of this release,
maybe like next week. So
I found it was a total game changer
in terms of actually engaging
with the game and caring about it.
Basically you just, you know,
put a fixed amount in and over the next 16
weeks you have all these different players that
you're following on different teams and trend,
it tracks all these different
stats and there's some math involved,
some things like that,
but a lot of these apps
just kind of do it for you.
And yeah,
like the individual players,
how well they perform in individual games
actually makes a difference to your overall
team score that week against other teams.
And I mean,
you're obviously somebody who's
created a whole business around this.
Could you give an idea of like,
just get over what is your actual
business around fantasy sports and betting?
Yeah, so the business side
is just creating content.
So it's a subscription service.
I like to say we're basically a glorified blog.
We're just writing content about which
players we think are going to play well.
And we've got a lot of people that are
looking for help with their team. The thing is,
there's so much news these days that is
constantly breaking about all these teams.
There's so many reports coming out of teams
where there's some inside source will say that
this guy might get more playing time this week,
or they're hearing this player might not play,
so therefore the backup would get to play more.
And it's just really impossible for the average
person who lives their life and does other
things with their time to keep up with all this
and actually make sense of all the news.
So that's where you kind of have to
join a service like mine and get content
if you actually want to be competitive.
If you're just playing in a
league for 20 bucks with your friends,
it's probably not a big deal.
If you miss some news, it's, oh, well.
But if you're going to try to play for
hundreds of dollars on a Sunday afternoon,
you really need to know if that backup
running back is going to end up getting a
lot of touches because you're probably going
to lose to all the people who did know.
So that's where
a service like mine comes into play,
is more for the
serious players who really want to, like,
actually dominate their leagues or they're
playing for more money every week now.
Frank, you were
in our league one year. You were, I feel,
the not so serious player at the time.
Yes, exactly. So also, can you. I don't know
if we got the name of what your business is.
What is it called?
Yeah, So I actually just launched a new
company in the space a few weeks
ago after I had started a company,
ran it for eight years.
I recently started
a new one called reallygoodpicks.com
and I paid $9 for that URL.
So I'm pretty stoked.
I couldn't believe it was available. Yeah,
I was like,
is this name so bad that no
one is willing to use it? Because I will. Like,
I think reallygoodpicks.com
is a hilarious name. So that's.
That's what we rolled and picks,
as in when you pick something off the shelf,
not like pictures. Right?
Yeah.
Right. Yeah.
Okay.
So, yeah, because. Because they call and
it really works for sports betting.
It works for fantasy all the time.
Because we're making picks, right? Like,
we're saying, like, Chris, you'll love this.
Lamar Jackson is a great pick this
year because all the reports out of the
Baltimore training camp says that they're
going to increase the pace of their offense
and they're going to throw the ball more,
which will both really help Lamar.
So all the Ravens
receivers will all get a boost. So, Chris,
I knew you'd love that as a Ravens fan.
So Lamar Jackson's like my big pick this year.
Chris always goes with the birds.
That doesn't change my. Yeah,
it doesn't change my strategy
at all because I was always. I don't care.
I picked him every year.
If I can get him, he's on my. My team.
Which I imagine is not
the best way to make sports bets,
is based on how much you like the.
Actually, to some extent it is because it just.
The whole point is to have a lot of fun
and to get it to be more engaging. Right. And
so if you're going to watch those games anyway,
it's way more fun
if you're rooting for Lamar Jackson,
and if you're already going
to be devastated if Lamar Jackson sucks,
you might as well just double
down and have him on your fantasy team.
Exactly right.
I will say that one time
I played with Chris and a crew.
Chris was picking people based.
He would pick teams
based on if they were birds, as I recall.
It was kind of like, I remember.
Him telling me about this strategy. Yeah.
And I think it's
really interesting because to me,
I chose people based
on how cool their last names were.
And so that was.
That was like. I was like, okay, well,
if Chris is taking this approach,
I'll take this approach. And I mean,
I didn't place.
I won't go into my story right now.
But what's interesting that I
want to bring up is just like you said,
it's having that fun.
And I think there's
a way for anyone to get involved,
whether they're as hardcore and nerdy
as someone who wants to get those
insider tips or someone that's just like,
I want to play and be social and have fun,
but I want to just.
I like certain colors.
So any team that has green in their color,
I'm going to pick them.
You've heard how we make picks
based on birds and colors. Okay. Like that.
That's what it is. But, Justin,
you run a business around this. I'm
guessing that's not how you're making picks.
People are paying money for your picks.
Can you tell us a little bit about, like, okay,
how did you get.
Get to the point of being a person
with the positioning and authority
to be running a business
where people are paying for your picks?
Yeah. So we did put your
bird theory to the test,
and it ended up not being the most predictive.
So we had to.
We had to dig deeper,
find some other strategies.
Good.
So, yeah, I got into the whole thing
when I was in high school, and technically,
you can't play on these websites
until I think you have to be 18.
But everybody really signs up in
high school in America. It's, you know, like,
all the age restrictions. You start early.
So I'm playing in high school with
one of my friends for, like, five, ten dollars.
We're building a lineup every Sunday,
and it just became a passion
of ours to just keep up with news. And then
we'd spend all Sunday watching all the games,
and it just made it more fun.
And so when I went to college,
I was there on a scholarship,
and I had a stipend for, like, $1,500
a semester of spending money.
And we really didn't need it at all
because they covered all of our expenses.
So even all the.
There were so many events you
go to on campus that were free. So I was like,
what am I going to actually spend $1,500
on when they pay for my laptop,
my books, like, everything, my food?
So I decided to put it onto
one of These sites called FanDuel,
where you can, like,
compete against other people in fantasy sports.
And I figured out something pretty early on
in baseball that was really working for me,
and I just kept growing that
amount until I eventually won $100,000
on one contest and I qualified
to go to the live MLB final.
And they were hosting
it at the Playboy Mansion that year.
And it was actually.
So they flew me and
three of my friends out to la,
and they had to sneak us wristbands
to say we were 21 because we were, like,
19 years old. And we're like, dude, we're
not going to this party. Like, a dry party.
Come on. So they're like, all right,
we'll get you wristbands.
So it was the last party
at the mansion before Hugh died,
and it was rumored that that was probably going
to be the case because he wasn't doing well.
So a ton of extra models flew out and
voluntarily attended the party, which is cool,
because usually these parties,
as you can imagine,
are mostly a sausage fest. Like,
so we actually had a really sick party there,
and I came in first place,
and I won the whole thing,
much to the Dismay of the FanDuel staff,
who told me to lay low.
Then I had to go up on stage drunk
with my friends and accept the trophy.
So it's funny, there's
a book written about the industry, and I.
My only mention in the book,
they actually spend, like,
20 minutes talking about that
Fanduel mansion party and that event,
and the only mention I got somehow was
some kid no one knew won the contest.
So that's how I kind of, like,
broke onto the scene,
and I started posting
my pics on Twitter for free,
and I just started accumulating a lot of
followers that wouldn't work today. But, like,
eight years ago, that was.
There weren't a lot of people doing that yet.
So I was kind of picking up Steam,
and people saw me on the leaderboards,
they'd see my name. And luckily,
I was fortunate to have made my
username just exactly my name, Justin McMahon,
which is also my Twitter handle.
So it made it easy for people to
see me win a contest and then look
me up and then find me on Twitter.
Most people's usernames
are something like Two Girls, One Cooper Cup.
You know, like, it's. It's something, like,
really bad that you would not want to be, like,
associated with on the other main platform.
My username for years was the Human Cesspitus.
There was a baseball player, There's
a baseball player named Joanna Cesspitis,
and of course, the Movie. So, because
we all made these accounts when we were, like,
15 years old. Right.
So everyone has the dumbest usernames
and you're not allowed to change them.
But luckily on this site,
my name was Justin McGregor,
so I was able to kind of start
building up a following that way.
Wow, that's. That's
a crazy story, man. I mean, like, at 19,
to go to the Playboy Mansion,
that's like a fantasy of. Of, like,
every teenage boy ever, probably. Right?
Right. I say, no matter
what you're a nerd into,
you're probably like, that's.
That's cool. Right? Like,
I think everybody would like to do that. Yeah.
Yeah. And I mean, so this was a
baseball fantasy contest
or tournament? I guess. Was it, like, global,
or was it just the state?
I guess so you had to qualify for it.
You had to be one of, like,
the top 100 fantasy baseball players.
And then you got.
You win another event to, like,
qualify to get flown out to that event.
They put you up in a hotel, they fly
you out and take you out to dinners and stuff.
It's like the whole.
They really do it up because they want.
They want you to be, like,
really invested in getting there year after
year and being one of the top players.
So.
So for, like, the last six, seven years,
I've gone to multiple
of these live finals every year,
but I kind of just decided with my wife
earlier this year that we're probably
going to stop going just because
it's kind of repetitive, you know, Like,
I've been so many times it's the same routine,
and I'm really glad I
went a lot when I was really young,
because it was so cool when I was 19.
And now that I'm Getting older,
and I've been married for a while.
It's just like, all right,
it's not quite the same. You know, like,
the guys want to go clubbing,
and I'm just like, I don't know.
I think me and my wife are gonna go to sleep.
And so, I mean,
do you look back on that and say, okay,
I was lucky,
or did you really, like,
figure something out as, like,
a hack for, like,
where did this kind of story
emerge in terms of a skill set for you?
Yeah, so eight years ago, the strategy
was different than it is today.
My skillset back then was that I
was really identifying some stats
that other people weren't valuing enough.
And so I was just building my lineups
entirely based on those stats, overweighting
them intentionally in my projections,
knowing that they were
being underweighted in other people's.
And so my strategy has always kind of been,
if I believe in a guy more than everyone else,
even if I still don't think he's the best play,
I want to use that guy instead of someone
that I believe in less than everyone
else who still projects a little better.
Does that make sense? Like,
if you have a guy and most people agree
that one guy is going to score 11 points,
the other guy is going to score eight.
If I have them at 10 and nine,
I'll use the guy I have for nine,
because I just know how
much more unique that's going to be,
and that's the big
strategy to winning these contests.
And so from playing
it almost every day for eight years,
that's my real strength now.
It's like building the projections is.
Has become something that's pretty ubiquitous,
where everyone is within
a point or two of each other.
There's actually, like,
just such consensus models now of how much,
how much you're supposed to
weight all the stats for each sport.
So the real skill set is knowing
what everyone else is going to
do and figuring out how to be unique.
And so that's what
I help our customers with. I say, hey,
I've seen a thousand slates like this one.
Everybody is going
to pick the Rockies bats tonight.
I think you should
go with the Oakland A's instead. So
that's kind of where I've seen it all play out.
I know how much other
people are going to pick each player.
And so that's where I
think the strongest edge is today,
is kind of understanding
what other people are going to do.
So, okay, so this is where I get to step in and
ask some silly questions or obvious Questions.
So it matters.
The uniqueness of the pick is important.
It is in Daily Fantasy,
which is like FanDuel
and DraftKings because there might.
Be 10,000
people which are two brands.
Those are two of the big brands. Yeah.
So those are the two
big brands that people play on.
And the way it works is that every player
has a price and you have a salary cap
and you can buy any player you want.
So you and I can make
the exact same lineup in theory.
And so that's why you want to be unique. You
don't want to have the same lineup as somebody
else because the prizes are very top heavy.
It's like a hundred thousand to first and
by the time you get down to tenth place,
it's like 1,000.
So you really want
to go aggressively for first place.
And so if you end up having
the same line of it's 50 other people, then
you're all just going to chop that top spot.
You can't really make that much money.
So you want to have a unique lineup.
And so if everyone has the same exact
opportunity to pick the same players,
it's actually becomes pretty predictable
what most people will probably do.
They're just going to
use the guys that project the best.
So you actually want to
use guys that project pretty well,
but not quite the best.
And so that's where you kind
of need to use a site like mine
because it's just pretty difficult to,
to nail that on your own.
So then this kind of ties into this
other question which is around
scalability of this kind of business model
and other influencers that are out there.
And I'm sure there's like some big
names that people follow and they get
their picks that are for free, quote unquote.
And so you get a lot
of people that follow those influencers.
Now how does that
relate to your business? Because, you know,
ideally one,
a business like yours that has a
subscription model where people can
sign up to get the insider knowledge. You know,
if you end up scaling to a point where you have
like millions of people paying for your site.
I don't think it's that scalable.
Oh yeah?
Yeah, I don't think it can. I don't
think it can be scaled that large.
That would be awesome. You know,
I wish that could work. But yeah,
I think that you're kind of
capped out at probably like 10,000 users.
I think when you exceed that amount,
I think it starts to hinder the other users,
that it's growing too much.
And now you're all doing the
same thing in the same contest
to an extent where it's hurting you.
So that's part of what
made me leave my original company.
And ultimately I just closed it down.
And we had launched that
company and spent years pursuing growth,
and it was just all about scalability.
And we reached the point where we had 30,000
users and only about 8 to 10,000
of those users had ever purchased anything.
The rest of them were consuming free content.
And I had been told by people in the
industry that what really matters in
this industry is revenue and user data.
You want top line metrics.
And for years that's been true.
That's what Silicon Valley was investing in.
And all the big companies that were being
sold or purchased in my industry were all
really being valued on a multiple of revenue.
And so I bought into that,
I subscribed to it,
even though I thought that does sound
kind of crazy to ignore profitability.
But that's what everybody's doing.
And that's what, you know, we explored
selling in 2020 and we only got, you know,
a 2 1/2x revenue offer,
which wasn't bad.
But I was like, well, hey, we're profitable.
Like these other companies are losing
money and you're giving them the same
offer as us. Who's profitable? And they said,
we don't care about that because we're
just going to pump so many users in
that your current EBITDA doesn't matter.
So that was
how I was approaching the industry, right?
So then I said, all right,
well then we're not going to sell right now.
We're going to invest more
into getting more top line revenue, even
if it comes at the expense of being profitable.
And as I'm making that adjustment,
the market is making the opposite shift
where everyone just goes the other way. So now,
fast forward two years later,
I go back to the table and say, hey,
we're ready to sell.
And the guy says, well,
now we're just only valuing based on ebitda.
So I was like, well,
now we're not profitable. He's like, yeah,
you're gonna have to get back to
exactly where I told you to leave, because
now we're only doing EBITDA multipliers.
And I just kind of took
a step back from the whole thing.
And as we went through
the process of looking to sell,
this was early this year, in 2023,
as I really dug through the numbers,
I realized that our tech guys were screwing us.
And I had always
believed that you should just like,
silo yourself in the part of the business that
you're an expert in and let other people who
are experts in other domains take care of that,
and that you can't wear all the hats or
you'll just burn yourself out. And, you know,
I don't know if that's terrible advice,
but you have to understand things,
at least enough to know if you're
being strung along or kind of misled.
And the thing with tech
is that it's just really
hard to call out somebody like, you know,
they send over a
spreadsheet with billable 300 hours,
and there's just 100
line items of things they did.
And there's no way for me to know
if those things actually took
30 seconds or if they took four hours,
because I don't know what they even are.
So what I realized is that I needed to
start all over because the operation
had scaled to the point where I couldn't
possibly take over the tech on my own.
But I knew if I started over,
I could launch a very basic website.
I think I could
serve the customers just as well,
which I think I am.
And the customers actually
are preferring the new basic,
simple platform I built.
And my wife and I can just
run the whole website ourselves with, like,
the occasional upwork developer
that we pay 30 bucks an hour, too,
to help us out a little bit. But, yeah,
we built the whole site for, like,
less than $1,000.
Damn, you've really leaned it out.
Yeah.
Yeah, that's awesome.
We were spending.
We were spending about ten grand
a month on tech at the other company.
And I was like,
this just can't be right.
And when we looked into selling,
we were actually the company that was really.
That actually put an offer on the table
and wanted to buy us earlier this year.
Not the original one I thought I would sell to,
but a different one.
They were looking at our books and said,
you guys are way overpaying for tech.
We want to cut your whole tech team,
and we're just going to use ours.
We don't want to retain
anybody that's been a part of this.
And that's what really made me realize, okay,
obviously mine is messed up.
And no one else had
ever gotten that inside of a look,
because I would have family
and friends look at it, but they say, well,
we don't understand the operation well enough.
But this other company is like, well,
we do the same thing as you,
and we're paying a third of what you're paying,
so obviously you're doing something wrong.
And so that's.
That's when I Realized, okay,
I just have to get away from.
From the tech team. And, you know,
I could go into the whole
details of how we did it, but essentially they.
They just didn't. Weren't willing.
I tried to fire them.
They wouldn't let me. You know,
they were just like, no, these guys, they
don't know what they're talking about. They're.
They're lying to you.
They just kept telling me I was
being lied to by the other company,
and I was like, well,
they have no incentive to lie to me,
and you have a lot
of incentive to lie to me. So ultimately, the
only thing I could really do is just walk away,
because it was just like, I would
have to take them to court to really, like,
facilitate anything to
get total control of the company back.
Because they
have access to the code, right? So, yeah,
I have some access,
but do I really
know how to take all of it? Not really.
So it just became
simpler and easier to just start over.
And I'm really glad I did.
Damn, you were spilling that tea, dude.
All that drama,
all that juice.
I was on another podcast, like,
a couple days after I announced my new company.
I went on one,
and they were like, well,
how do we know that you're telling the honest
side of the story, right? Like, couldn't they.
And I said, well,
reach out to them for comment,
and I guarantee you they will not want to.
They will not talk to you.
And that is how you know who's being honest,
because they are not talking.
They haven't said a single word on.
On any social media or anything,
because I think they knew they were just
overcharging a young kid who didn't know
enough about tech to call them out for it.
So they don't. Yeah,
they don't want any part of talking about it.
So how did the.
So you ran this company until fairly recently.
You just sold or kind of stepped
away from that in the last year, is that right?
Yeah, I only stepped away from it about
a month and a half ago.
About a month ago.
And I closed it down and
just made an offer on my social media.
The nice thing is, you know,
email lists are great
if you own the whole business,
if you're a partner, like I was,
even as a majority owner,
a social media following is
way better because I own that, not the company.
So I could just take
my social media following and say, hey, guys,
my content is now on reallygoodpix.com
and just like that,
everybody converts over to the new site.
I was able to bring almost all the customers
without having to take the email list,
without having to take
any assets from the original company.
I just walked away and said, all right,
you guys can have it now
because it's worthless anyway. Second, I leave,
all the content's gone, so it just,
the whole site's just dead now. So yeah,
that's where the, that's
where the value of kind of owning your
own social media is valuable and also.
Having and
maintaining your positioning too, because
that's something you've consistently, I guess,
had in order to be able to do. That
is the people who follow you on, I'm guessing,
is it Twitter is your main social media.
Twitter is where all
like the sports content is hosted.
I guess it's X now, right? But yeah, but yeah,
they basically trust, you know,
you and they believe in what you're doing.
So the ability to have that
relationship direct with your audience,
I guess is super powerful
for you to be able to say, oh,
I'm doing this new thing. So this is.
If you want what I do,
this is where it's going to be.
That's really powerful.
I feel like we've
skipped over so much to get to the,
the most recent thing that you've done,
which is sort of like start up this new thing.
But I'm curious because you've,
you like won this hundred thousand
dollar prize thing and you did like,
was that what made you kickstart going into,
into business or like,
how did that idea to say, like, maybe
I should start a business around this emerge?
Yeah. So it's actually really
funny how it got started.
I was studying abroad in Hong Kong for a
summer after my freshman year in college
and I'd been doing really well in fantasy,
but I hadn't really thought
of starting a business at all.
I was reading a book called How Google
Works and I thought it was going to teach
me how the Google search engine works,
which I was just curious about,
and it didn't at all.
The book is fantastic,
but it's really all about company
culture and how to build a team
culture that people want to be a part of.
So you learn nothing about the algorithm.
And so a family friend,
I was visiting him in the Philippines
because I was already over there.
I thought I'll pop over, see him.
He saw me reading the book,
asked me how I was enjoying it. I said, well,
I really want to learn more about
the search engine optimization
stuff that I was kind of hoping
I'd get an insight into. And he said, oh,
I have a friend in tech that does SEO.
I Don't know him all that well,
but I can connect you and see if
he'd be willing to teach you about it.
So I got on a Skype call with
the guy who became my tech partner,
and he said the best way
to do it is to just build a blog.
Can you write about anything to make a blog?
And I'll just show you how
to set up the SEO and optimize it,
and that'll really teach
you better than anything. And I said, yeah,
I could write about fantasy sports. That's
the one thing I could write about, Right?
It's that or
being a kid in college. Like, who cares?
So I was like, all right,
I'll write about fantasy sports.
So I started it just with the intention of
learning about how SEO works. And ironically,
I never learned how SEO works because, I mean,
I did to a very basic level. Right. But, like,
the second it got started, I was like, well,
I'll start tweeting out these
articles and see if anybody's interested.
And so people were interested.
And then the site started getting visitors
so quickly that the guy was like, hey,
we should turn this into a real business.
I'll just manage the SEO for you
so you could focus on making this content.
Cause clearly people want it,
so let's make this into a business.
So I gave him 15% of
the company to manage the website,
which I now know is incredibly
simple to manage a WordPress blog. Like,
it literally would have taken me, like,
an hour to figure out how to do it myself,
but I just had no idea.
And he offered to do it, and I thought, oh,
this is nice.
And I think for a long time,
his intentions were good.
I think it's just as the money
starts coming in more and more,
and I kind of feel
like a tech person is similar to, like,
a cleaning lady or a cleaning man,
where the longer they've worked for you,
the lazier they get,
but they also expect more pay.
Like, I feel like I know my grandma
has two cleaning ladies because she doesn't
have the heart to fire her original one,
but she's terrible now.
So she literally has a second cleaning lady
who comes and actually cleans their house.
So she doesn't have to fire this lady
she's had for 25 years because she
says she's basically family at this point,
I can't get rid of her. Yeah.
So that's how. Yeah,
so that's how I feel
like it got with this tech guy,
where it's just like he stopped putting
in any real effort and started
Demanding more and more money and.
But anyway,
so that's how it got started.
It's just the blog to learn SEO
and then it just turned into a business.
Well, this is such a common situation
that I think a lot of entrepreneurs,
when they're just
getting started in businesses, they can,
they don't know what they don't know.
And so you make decisions based
on what you think is right at the time.
But as it goes and goes and goes,
usually staff or people who you hire
are working with a team becomes these
like traps for entrepreneurs in some way,
like you were saying.
And I can't tell you how many times when I
was developing other sales managers and
franchises essentially for my old company,
where somebody had like the worst receptionist
who was really a recruiting assistant,
someone responsible
for filling their office with reps,
and they just didn't want to fire them,
it would be like, oh, but you know,
I work with them and they'll get better.
And then it would be like, you know,
they'll hum and haw about it
and then debate and avoid the
conversation for like three or four weeks.
And meanwhile their business
tanks for the next three or four weeks.
And then finally when they're at the
point of desperation, they're like, okay, fine,
I'll find someone new.
But then they have to worry about scaling
up with that new person and teaching them.
And I mean, yeah,
that's a very valuable
lesson to learn I think, at this moment. And
maybe I would love to hear more about, like,
how do you think about employees and
hiring and like partnerships and stuff
now after having gone through that experience.
What are some of the things.
Yeah, I'm so, I'm so anti permanence now. Like,
I don't want business partners to have
equity because you just can't get rid of them.
And I don't even want to have full time
employees because I employed a guy
for four and a half years and working
at my company full time is one of the
greatest jobs that you could possibly have.
I think this guy probably
worked about 15 hours a week,
collected a salary that was double what
he was making as a teacher and got to
write about fantasy sports all the time. Right.
And he got to be home.
It was a remote job.
He got to be home with his family.
He told me constantly
it was a great job. He loved it. Well,
I finally had to lay him off
earlier this year because I was
going to close the company down. So I was like,
you need to go do something else.
And he was so mad at me and like, oh,
you're putting my family out on the street.
Like you're taking the
food all the table for my kids. And look,
he reached out and apologized.
Weeks later, he's like, hey, I get it. Like,
tough spot for you,
tough spot for everybody.
But no one likes to be let go ever.
And you can think, oh,
I did this nice thing for this person,
employing them for four years.
I had a really good job and a good, you know,
this is better than most jobs that exist.
But most people think of it the opposite way.
They think they're giving
you their time working for you,
like they're doing you the
favor by being there as an employee. Right.
And it's just made me really
want to lean into part time employees.
So I have 20 part time employees at
my new company and no full time employees.
I'm the only full time person there.
I would so much rather supplement a
role with two part time people
than to put in a full time person
that now their livelihood depends on me. And
it's so much harder to just get rid of them.
If I want to cut the part time people,
I don't feel bad about it. But
if I want to cut the full time people, it's,
it's like Chris was saying, you hum
and all over it and it's like, oh, I shouldn't,
I don't want to have to do it.
It's going to be an uncomfortable
conversation and they're gonna hate me.
And so yeah,
I think I feel like firing employees
is like breaking up with a girlfriend. Like,
if you're even thinking about doing it,
you probably should,
but you still drag
it out longer than you should.
Yeah, yeah, well, it's.
They always said like, you know,
hire slowly and then fire quickly
was one of the things I learned in my.
Business and I did it the opposite way.
Yeah, that's a hard way to learn.
And I've often found that, you know,
when you start bringing people on,
you learn very quickly what to look for
in say a good or potential employee too.
And it's not always just their skill set,
but more also like the person that
they are and how they approach work or
how they are in other areas of their life
is usually how they are in your job too.
And so I'm curious,
when you were hiring all these people
because you've clearly hired quite
a few people over the eight years
and maybe not fired too many people,
but you've definitely hired some people.
How did you think about,
or how do you think about
hiring practices for maybe nerdpreneurs?
Who want to start delegating things in
their job that they maybe don't want to do.
Yeah. You know, the best shift that we
made on the hiring process is we
had them fill out a really weird
application where we asked questions like,
is a hot dog a sandwich? Justify your opinion?
And that type of question
where there's no right answer.
Like we'd say, you know,
tell us about a player that you think
is going to have a good season and why.
Like things that they're not at all
used to answering in job interviews.
I found that to be better because
you could actually see the
end of their personality a little bit.
And some people will answer
these questions in a way that is
so combative that you wouldn't believe.
Like one of them is like, are aliens real?
And you'll get people.
I don't give a shit what you say. You know,
like you could say they're
definitely not or they definitely are.
I just want to see how you,
how you handle it.
And sometimes people will just completely
eliminate themselves from getting an interview.
And it saves me a lot of time from
interviewing people that I get on
the call and I'm just right away like, ugh, no.
And so it's,
I think it's helpful to put some
sort of screening that's beyond a
normal question that they might just be
copy pasting from another interview
they already wrote out the answers to.
Because yeah,
people will put some stuff like that's
just so out there that not just out
there in a way like that's unique opinion,
but out there
in a way where you're like, whoa, I don't, I
don't really think I would trust this person to
walk my dog. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. Because
that's what you're really looking for, right?
Like whatever I get,
whatever a what I get.
I probably had a hundred reference
calls from people who worked for me and
then went on to work somewhere else. Because.
Because we do mostly part time people.
I've probably hired 150 people and
most of them have gone on to work at, you know,
they get offers that we've
had people go to the NBA, work at espn.
So. And I always tell people use
this as a launching pad.
Like I'm paying very little for part time work.
This is really to build experience in
the industry and launch into something
else if that's what you want to do.
Totally on board that.
So whenever people call
me for like a resume check, I almost always,
as quickly as I can,
just get to what they really want to ask.
That they legally can't. I just say, yeah,
Chris is a normal person.
He's a normal guy.
Yeah.
And they're like, oh,
thank you for telling us that. That's.
We really appreciate that.
Because they can't. You can't ask. But that
is all they're wanting to know. Right. Like,
they're calling like, well,
tell me about a time. I'm like, hey, look,
Chris is a normal guy. Like,
he's a great employee. I'll be just.
I'll be disappointed to lose him. And.
But he deserves to go. I
usually say he deserves to go somewhere better.
And that's really all they want to hear,
is just a normal person that's
going to not have a big issue at work.
They're not going to
emotionally break down when you ask,
prove that a hot dog is sinner.
Yeah, exactly.
That's a good point.
That's a good example of, like,
what people should look for
if they're starting to hire
people and they've never done it before.
Yeah.
You know,
what to look out for. Not just.
Not only the hot dog sandwich question or
one of the things that we have, which is soup.
Is soup a cereal or cereal.
Right. That's on our application as well. Yeah.
I'm not kidding.
Yeah. So instead of, you know,
not only having those,
but just kind of like, okay,
what are the kind of things that I should be
looking for when hiring someone? And that is,
are they a normal person? Because, I mean,
I don't even. I mean,
I'm tempted to dive into, like,
an example of someone
that really was not a quote, unquote,
normal person to work with and
maybe a lesson that came out of that.
Are you asking him to out somebody right now?
As a crazy person, you don't have.
To out anybody,
but if there's a good story in there,
I would not mind hearing that.
Don't have to delete.
Yeah, no. Yeah. I was
nervous to give any names, but, you know,
we had a guy that seemed like he, like, was.
He just wasn't really interested in following
the protocols that we had already laid out.
And he was delivering a pretty good product,
but I would definitely not have described him
as normal after a week of working with him.
This is early on when we hired people
pretty easily and kind of would
give them a chance. Right. Like, all right,
let's give them a couple of weeks
to see how they do and then
decide if we want to keep them or not.
Which is tough because at that point,
they're kind of making friends on the team.
And they have to be pretty
bad to actually get rid of them.
So it's better
to do a tough screening up front. So anyway,
this guy was just like,
I could sense that he was not interested
in learning from other people on the team,
which I would describe as an abnormal trait
and one that we're not looking for. Like, you
want people who want to learn from others, even
if they're the smartest person in the room,
you want them to be trying
to learn more from other people.
And this guy didn't
seem interested in that at all.
That was the big thing that I was like.
That's the red flag
that stands out to me. Well, a month in,
another company reached out and said, hey,
I'm sure you're not aware of this, because
I know you and you wouldn't be doing this,
but your MMA articles have been
just straight up plagiarized from
our website for the last three weeks.
And that's what this guy's role was.
And when I confronted him about it,
he really wasn't even that apologetic.
He was like,
they make good content.
Our users want good content. Like,
I don't see the problem.
And I was like,
how do you not see the problem? Like,
you're plagiarizing someone else's work. So,
of course we fired him. But
that's an example where it's just like. Like,
I don't feel bad
talking about that guy at all, because
I think that's just clearly wrong. Like,
I don't think.
And that's where the danger is. Like,
when someone is demonstrating sort of, like,
abnormal emotional qualities,
their ethics may
be weirdly compromised as well. Right? Like,
I don't care if someone's, like,
abnormal in the way that they're just like,
all I do is play video games.
It's, like, fine. Like, I don't care. Just.
I just want to get the
sense that you have, like, empathy, you know,
in a way that's, like,
normal that you would
expect to have another human being. Like,
there's a lot of people.
Artificial intelligence.
Yeah, exactly. Just
some baseline emotional intelligence.
I think when I say normal,
what I really mean is just
some level of emotional intelligence.
You don't have to be super,
super high intellectual quotient,
because we can teach you the basics
of how to research how to read these models,
how to read the projections,
and then how to write the article,
and we'll have an editor
fix it if you make grammatical errors.
The thing that we just can't teach
is the emotional intelligence
to interact with your colleagues.
And to talk to
the customers a little bit. So, yeah, that's.
It's hard. Hiring is tough. There's no like,
silver bullet that's just like, oh, do this
and you'll always hire good people. It's, it's.
And good people can turn into bad people.
So it's not, you know,
they get real comfortable in the job
and they stop trying as hard as they
did when you promoted them or whatever.
So it can be tough.
Yeah.
Yeah, That's a great point though.
I appreciate you elaborating on that.
I'm curious about. If you.
I'm curious about. Did you.
I found that in my experience,
if you have a mission or something
greater than just yourself that your
company or you as an individual is trying,
trying to place out there in the market,
you can get more
people to keep working or, you know,
be not get lazy,
but actually find ways to work harder.
And I'm fairly mission driven.
So like when I work for a company, I tend to.
I only work for
companies I align with their mission,
let's put it that way,
that I believe in what they're doing.
And I think that's a good advice for
generally most people so that you actually
do keep working and staying productive.
But did you have values or a mission
that you were promoting to your own
people that helped align them to keep
working or moving in the right direction?
Yeah, we did. And I think at the new company,
I'm actually doing an even a better
job of that than at the original one,
because at the original one we changed
directions so many times that I think maybe the
mission adjustment didn't trickle down, like,
didn't get communicated well enough.
Whereas at the new company,
there's just three clear goals.
We want to deliver great content
that the users are happy with,
and we want to make
sure that the users are having fun, and
we want to make sure our team is having fun.
And I think the third one got lost
in the last company because we were so
focused on growth and if we had to choose,
we were always putting the
customer first and we were
always putting the content quality first.
And that made people
a little less excited to work for us. And
therefore they really expected to be paid more.
And that's where everyone just kind of
kept expecting to be paid more and more.
And that doesn't fit the culture of a company
like this because it's just not. There's not.
It's not scalable enough for everyone to
be able to just like make a full salary
off of writing fantasy content, you know,
it's more of a hobby job.
And so at the new company,
I've set it up where so far,
all the employees are telling me,
this is really fun.
Like, making this content is a blast. It's
so much better than the old format. And
the customers are loving the format, too, so.
And I'm communicating with
them every day in our discord.
And our customers are in there talking,
asking our opinion on things,
and I get to ask them all the time,
what do you guys think of this? What
do you guys think of the way we're doing this?
And so gathering all that
feedback and building community is like,
a really big value that we had
at the beginning of the old company.
And then when we were told,
you guys need to add
more users and you need to scale, we
lost sight of that value of building community,
and instead we thought, okay, well,
it's not scalable to build
a community group chat with 100,000 people,
so we need to basically cut communication with
the customer to build a more scalable product.
And while it did scale,
I think we lost some level of customer
loyalty by dropping the community aspect,
and it made it less fun for everybody,
both the customers and our team.
And so it's hard to say I regret doing it,
because everyone was telling
me that's what I needed to do. Right.
And so we're trying
to grow this company to sell it,
and that's what the
buyers are saying we need to do.
So I don't know if I would do it differently.
Of course I would do it differently,
knowing how it goes.
But I don't think if I could go back in time,
I think I would do it exactly the same way,
because you're trying
to sell it to this company,
and that's what they're
telling you they want you to do.
So it just didn't work out.
But I'm glad that we've gotten
full circle back to valuing community,
valuing having fun,
and really not trying to grow
it into a huge thing. I'm like, you know what?
This is a good business.
It'll support my wife and I.
I have fun with it. I mean,
what more can you ask for, right?
Yeah. So I feel like I would
be remiss if I didn't ask. Since
we have a professional picker on our show,
and I am about to pick my fantasy
sports team very shortly for football.
How do you feel about giving us
a couple of your, you know, who I mean, like,
picks that I should be thinking about?
Do you think you can talk about that?
Yeah.
Definitely now they
need to be bird related teams.
I will stay. I will, I will abide.
I will abide.
If they're mostly birds, I'm okay.
I'm okay with a few. Like, you know,
I can have a few cats.
I'll give you one.
One non bird and then I'll stick to birds.
So starting with the Ravens, like I said, I
really think they're going to pass a lot more.
I like Lamar Jackson a lot. Going
over to their ancestral relative, the Falcon.
I think that the Falcons are
going to run the ball a little too much.
I think people are too excited about.
They have way too many receiving options
and they have a quarterback that runs
and an offense that has really stated
their intention is to run a lot. So I don't,
I'm not getting
too excited about the passing there.
Now going to the Cardinals, I,
I actually really like Marquis Brown.
Write that name down. Chris Marquis Brown.
I think he is a fantastic pick.
He was so good last year when they didn't have
DeAndre Hopkins and they got rid of him.
So I think he could really have a great year.
And then your one,
my one non bird pick for you.
I'll stick in the animal kingdom
and go with the Buffalo Bills.
I think Dalton Kincaid, he's a,
he's a rookie and typically rookie
tight ends don't really get much work, but
they're really viewing him more as a receiver.
He's not really doing a lot
of blocking like a tight end normally.
What he's really just running routes as a
receiver and he broke a lot of records
in college as a receiving tight end.
And I think people are missing the
boat by looking at him too much as a,
as a tight end because rookie
tight ends historically don't do very well.
They should just look at him more as a general
pass catcher in a really good offense.
And I think if you look at him that way,
you could take him in
the last round of your drafts,
storm on your bench for a few
weeks and just see how involved he is.
You can drop him if he doesn't look good,
but if he's involved,
then you'll be really glad
you snagged him in the last round.
Nice. That's really cool. I
appreciate those picks right there.
You're welcome.
Yeah, I'll hit you back in 16 weeks
and let you know how they went.
Yeah, let the viewers know.
In the description of this episode,
we promise there's not that much
football talk you could just skip
through if you really don't care at all.
Just when you start hearing the football.
Just hit the forward 30
seconds until you stop hearing football.
Exactly. Exactly. We don't have.
That's what we
aim to do every time. It's like, well, we
talked about fairy wings in that one episode,
but we really hardly talked about fairy wings.
Yeah.
This time, honestly,
I will just do a little quick shout out. That's
an awesome episode for businesses, actually,
if you haven't listened to it,
she's got a lot of good things about it.
It's not just about fairy wings.
That's true. Well, let's go ahead. And, Chris,
if you're good on questions,
I'm suggesting we
transition over to our random role.
Let's do it.
So, Justin, do you have that digital roller?
Digital dice roller.
All right, it's rolling. It's rolling.
This one. This.
This rolls for a while. Oh,
I have to hit stop. Okay, 48.
You can have one Godzilla level pet.
What do you choose?
Wow. And Godzilla, as in
size or superpowers included?
All the above. Now, you can, of course, choose.
There's an option here. You can, of course,
choose from the franchise.
The existing Godzilla creatures.
No, I think I'll invent something.
Yes, exactly. Yes.
I think. I
think I would go with a standard poodle,
and I think I would give them
the haircut that my dog had growing
up where you shave down the body,
but you leave their arms and legs really poofy,
and it makes them look super buff.
So then you add, like,
the Godzilla component,
and now this poodle just
looks like an absolute killing machine.
Just jacked to hell.
Yeah, Just
absolutely jacked. Poodle. Oh, my gosh.
No, I. You know, that poodle. I gotta say,
that resonates with me because
my mom had a standard poodle
and she had the grooming on point.
Yep. That's my mom. That was my mom, too. Yep.
Okay.
All right.
We come from similar places.
Nice. Yeah.
I have a follow up on that.
If you could have that poodle
destroy or rampage through any city,
do you have a specific
location that you would love to see?
Oh, man, I don't know. That's. That
question just feels too direct. I feel like.
It feels like,
what city do you hate?
Right. And then whatever I pick, it's like, oh,
what happened to him in that city?
Let me try to twist it a bit.
If you could put that
Godzilla poodle in any environment, what
would you like to juxtaposition it next to?
The Hollywood sign? You know,
the Red Rocks of Arizona?
I think I would want it
to stand on the Golden Gate Bridge.
I think that would just be a really cool shot.
And I guess if
it had to go wipe out a town. Let's just.
While it's there.
Yeah, okay. Yeah, that's not bad. I mean. Yeah,
I can't say anything to follow up on that.
I like San Francisco fine,
but it would be.
It would be interesting
to watch it rampage San Francisco.
Exactly. Yeah. At least have a good
backdrop of mountains and things.
Right? It would just be a cool shot. Yeah.
All right, guys,
there's no mountains there.
What?
Not mountains,
but it would just be a cool.
I would just roll.
Depends how far you look.
If you look way, way east, you.
Might not far away from mountains. Yeah.
But anyway,
I grew up in that area.
I'll just say right now,
you're not going to find a lot of mountains.
Well, this Godzilla poodle can see a long way.
Yeah, from the top, I'm pretty
sure they can see mountains.
Don't worry, Chris. I got you.
All right, let's roll it again.
All right, 15.
What is the best or your most favorite
Halloween costume you have ever worn?
Ooh, I was a fireman when I was little.
And we still reference the picture to this day.
I just was such a cute little fireman.
And the reason it's the best is just
because whenever I would show it to people,
like in high school or college,
when girls would be like, hey,
I want to see what you look like as a kid,
I would just use this fireman picture
and every girl would be like, oh, my God,
you're adorable. Like,
it was just always killed, you know?
So I'm just like,
that was the best costume
I could possibly have put on.
It is served.
It's got a long tail.
Yeah, exactly. It's served way
more than just one Halloween.
That's awesome.
What a great segue into
our next and final section. Rapid fire, quick,
sometimes silly questions that may or may
not be on the topic and that you may or
may not answer correctly. Totally subjective.
So the first one I want to ask you is,
who is your top pick from a
team with green in their team color?
Ooh, I gotta think about that.
I guess I would go with Jalen Hurts,
the Eagles quarterback.
I think he's just gonna
have another fantastic season. And dominant.
There's a bird for you.
Other bird.
Yeah, he's my backup quarterback. If I.
If I.
It was a two part question. I.
The bird part was implied and then the green.
Yeah, yeah. What would
be your favorite nonfiction book?
I love the book,
the Art of Thinking Clearly.
It's by Rolf Dobelli.
And it's a bunch of, like, micro chapters.
They're like two or three pages long,
and they just rapid fire attack a bunch
of cognitive biases that most people have.
And it just blew my mind.
I try to read it every couple years.
I buy it from people all the time as a gift.
I just think it's such a fascinating read
and even people who aren't big readers can
get through it because it's like, all right,
I'm gonna read a chapter every day,
takes five minutes.
And then you can really, like, ruminate
on what you read and think about it a lot.
It's better if you do it that way
instead of trying to blast through
it in one sitting so you can really
think about each one and just be like, wow,
that's really interesting that
our brains are wired to work this way,
but it would actually be better
if we could steer them this way.
I love that kind of stuff. I love
those quick little kind of tidbits. I mean,
there was Tools of Titans, Tim Ferriss, and
then there's another one that I heard about,
which is 101 essays.
I think 101 essays that'll change
your life or something like that. But it's
the same kind of concept. Next, rapid fire,
which is nerdier Football or foosball?
Fantasy football or foosball?
Let's make sure.
Still foosball. Love both.
Both passionate about both. But yeah,
I think foosball is nerdier.
Sure. Yeah, sure.
Fantasy football is pretty.
Pretty mainstream at this point. I
don't think there's a lot of die hard foosball.
Nerd is very mainstream.
So I think it's mainstream
because nerdiness is mainstream. That's my.
I like that.
Yeah, I will argue that point. I think
foosball is more lame and
nerd is cool now. So anyway, zombie apocalypse,
weapon of choice.
Ooh, flamethrower. I think.
Oh, you're gonna run out of juice.
I don't have a limited ammo. I mean, come on.
I don't. I mean, yeah.
Zombie apocalypse. Do you.
I don't know, man. I feel. I feel like
you're gonna burn yourself. You're gonna.
They're bowling two guns.
Me and my wife are just
gonna go ahead and quit. You're gonna rage,
quit right away.
You're gonna.
You're gonna fight some
flaming zombies and then be done.
The actual thing is usually
those flames are gonna spread. So, yeah,
maybe you won't need more ammo.
And when you explode,
you'll Save everybody else in the party.
Now, one of the. What is one of the
weirdest events you've ever been to?
I, you know, I was in France for the
Cannes Film Festival and
I went to a like modeling
gala or something and it was apparently a
big deal gala and I knew nothing about it.
And just watching like a modeling event,
if you've never been to
one and you really have no concept,
is just really bizarre. Like,
it's just a weird experience
and not in a terrible way,
just in like a. Wow.
This is so different from anything
else that I've ever been a part
of and probably won't attend many more.
So it's just like a.
I was just really like,
this is a very unique experience
that I'm trying to take in and appreciate,
but it's also kind of really not my cup of tea.
To be clear,
they were modeling the clothing or the model.
Yeah.
So it was like,
it was like Runway,
like Runway modeling clothing.
And then there was like a,
like an auction that would happen in between.
And then Jason Derulo performed, which I loved.
That was like the.
That was the highlight by far to me. Yeah.
So that was just a.
Had a lot of interesting parts.
What is your go to karaoke song?
Ooh, that's a good question. You know,
if it's like a room full of just, you know,
just normal American whites, then
probably just go with Mr. Brightside. You know,
always a big time crowd pleaser.
Everybody will sing along,
everyone will enjoy it.
If it's like me and
the boys trying to get rowdy, you know,
then I might go with Peppers.
What?
You know that song Peppers P E P A S?
It's really not a karaoke song at all,
but it's just like a hype up the room song.
It's like they played at soccer games.
I recently like was at like
a bachelor party where a guy was like,
were doing Pep Oz
for karaoke and everyone was like, what? Like,
I don't even know if that's
how you say my peppers.
And we got up there and the whole like,
everyone just got like lit.
Like everyone was just like,
this is so hype.
So now I was like, all right,
that's going to be like my go to.
If it's like a Vegas bachelor party
and it's like just trying to get rowdy.
Nice.
Well, Justin, this has been awesome and
thank you so much for coming on.
Where can people follow you, support
you and potentially get some pics from you?
Yeah. So you can follow me on Twitter
usinmacmahan
I tweet about entrepreneurial stuff.
Sometimes I tweet about,
I have a thread that's pinned on my account
right now about all the things I learned
from running a business for eight years.
Some of the things that we didn't touch
on in the show you might find interesting.
So if you just want to go read that,
you don't even have to follow me or anything,
you can just go read that.
It's pinned on my Twitter account.
If you are interested
in getting fantasy football picks,
you can get my full rankings, all
my analysis for the season on reallygoodpix.com
it's like 29 bucks and you can get all that.
You can download my rankings.
You can even upload them into sites
that allow you to upload your own ranking.
So one of the biggest advantages if
you're trying to beat your fantasy league
is most people are just going to
use the default rankings on the platform.
So if they're using espn,
everyone will use the ESPN default rankings.
So if you use my rankings instead,
you're just going to be really unique.
So everyone in your league is reaching for
the same players and you're just going to
get all these guys that they're not like
necessarily thinking about because the default
rankings don't have them in the certain order.
So if you want to dominate your league,
it might be worth 29 bucks to you.
Even if you can't win all that
much just to just to crush your
league mates and have the bragging rights.
And if you're serious about and you
actually want to like bet on games and stuff,
then you can subscribe for
longer than one month. But yeah, I could see,
I could see someone like Chris being
like a one month user type of guy just.
To beat his friends 100%.
100%.
I was like,
I am joining up,
grabbing those and yeah, we have a.
Lot of people that sign up in August and cancel
after a month and it's like totally fine. Just
use it for whatever you want to use it for.
Awesome. Awesome. Well, thanks.
And as always everybody,
keep it nerdy.
You just finished the cut down
version of our interview with Justin. We
talked to Justin for another hour after this.
Some of the topics we covered were how
he grew his company 30% each year and
reached a Twitter following of over 30,000
people in his niche.
When to hire great people and how
to scale your business running
a profitable business versus one
made for sale at the highest value. The good,
bad and ugly of developing an app.
Some more of his top picks for the NFL
season and even more bonus
random rolls and rapid fire questions.
Go to patreon.com
nerdpreneur to sign up and be a
member of our awesome Nerdpreneur board.
Thanks for listening and keep it nerdy.