Seriously, Just Call Them | Episode 13

This week David returns triumphantly from the holidays, and it all goes downhill from there. Leading off Gary and David discuss Square and their recent name change and what it all means. The "meat and potatoes" this week is a discussion on how to test out a two-sided market startup with no development at all (FREE!). We wrap it up with a $10,000 Xbox... which shouldn't exist, but it does. Join us for all of the shenanigans.

Here are the links to all mentioned articles/videos in this episode:

The Verge - Jack Dorsey’s Square is changing its name to Block
Marques Brownlee - Why Does This $10,000 Gucci Xbox Exist?
 

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David Baxter has been designing, building, and advising startups and businesses for over ten years. His passion, knowledge, and brutal honesty have helped dozens of companies get their start.

In Biz/Dev, David and award-winning Creative Director Gary Voigt talk about current events and how they affect the world of startups, entrepreneurship, software development, and culture.

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Transcript

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Did you did you get your Spotify rap? Yeah. My son lives on Spotify. I think he had like 40,000 minutes on Spotify over the year. And he says December 1 is my favorite holiday because he gets his Spotify rap. And so he's he's coming to all of us and I listened to Spotify think 2700 minutes. Not Not much. My wife and I have gotten on if you've heard a need to breathe. No, they are a kind of a full rock Christian band. They're not really Christian, but they have some undertones. My wife, she is in the point. 5% fan of neat. Wow. Worldwide. Oh, they should send her a Christmas card. That's what she was saying. She's like, are they gonna know? Am I like she's my other soccer fan. I don't know. Everyone, welcome to the biz dev Podcast, the podcast about developing your business. I am David Baxter back from a brief holiday. I am joined by my co host, Gary Voight. You doing all right, man. That's right. co host status now. That's right. I've upgraded you because of your mad skills in hosting. So we were back back after the break. We took our first week off. Ever I say ever What has it been 12 so long, so but it was weird. I gotta say to not do one last Friday. It was It did feel a little awkward. Yeah. So even though I was still fat and happy from Thanksgiving. We we did take the week off, but I missed you so much chemistry binds. Alright, so I want to talk to you about block. Viewer this block. Yeah, like Legos. Yeah, exactly. It's we're going to talk about Legos, because that's very relevant to our audience. Now we are talking about square who has renamed themselves block. And officially I'm going to try to get this correct. Officially, it says the change to block acknowledges the company's growth. Since it started in 2009. The company has added Cash App title, and TBD as businesses and the name change creates room for further growth block is an overarching ecosystem of many businesses united by their purpose of economic empowerment, and serves many people, individuals, artists, fans, developers and sellers. In other words, we're taking in money, and we're totally going to be a blockchain service. But we're not telling you we're going to be a blockchain service. Pay no attention to the fact that our company name is block. That's where I just I feel like there's a big hole in the statement. I mean, everyone knows so Jack Dorsey. He's the CEO. He was recently the CEO. Well, he was the founder of Twitter. And then he was the CEO. He left and then came back and now he left again. And then like two days later square changes their name. This is not an accident. No, but I think in Jack Dorsey has said many, many times that he is super excited, and wants to do more in the blockchain slash crypto slash NFT. World. He names his big finance company block, and yet doesn't say anything about blockchain. I think that's disingenuous. I don't know maybe I'm wrong. Maybe I'm reading too much into that. What is the TBD? 159? Or six four thing company? I don't really know what TBD is. The only thing I can tell you that when you go to their Twitter profile, which is kind of ironic, is they mentioned Bitcoin in their subject or they have a hashtag Bitcoin underneath them. So I can't tell you exactly obviously there. It's somewhat under wraps, but it is a real company name, which is strange. Well, it seems on brand there has, and then they have spiral, which is their new one. It used to be called square crypto, it is now called spiral. They're just name and everything. But that is their Bitcoin branch. I know you can buy and use crypto and Bitcoin on cash app already. Which I gotta say, I think we've talked about this before. I do not understand why everyone thinks suddenly I'm going to use Bitcoin as a currency transactional currency. It is so volatile, and the transaction fees are so ridiculous. Why in the world ever no one uses it isn't an investment class gizmo. But they they're still hoping that at some point, someone's going to buy a pizza with it and I'm like, It's $60,000 per Bitcoin. So your pizza is like point oh, one. Anyway, I digress. I did see an article recently that I guess a hacker logged into it some blocks Never getting money even Bitcoin and still like $120 million worth of bitcoin and yeah, that just happened. Yeah. In that happens, not uncommon. Um, it's the thing that that's scary about crypto in general is it's not real, right? By definition, it is not real. And so it literally exists in the digital space. And I guess you could say that about now that about all currency. It's not as though I have my $500 in the bank. And it's literally waiting for me there. Right. I know that. But there's something very scary about this, as opposed to one I guess it's because if someone did steal my money, the FDIC will give it back. The government, you're talking about normal currency normal money? Yeah, if I get it stolen from a bank, the government has said we will give it back up to like$100,000, or something like that crypto has none of that. And so they're basically bank robberies, which is what you mentioned earlier, and for lack of a better term, that's what it is. They're robbing and stealing people's stuff. And it's anyway, I don't really want to dive too deep into crypto in general, I just think block is very clearly aiming at that big target. Even the aesthetic of the branding is right in line. Yeah, you know, the current transfer crypto NFT. That whole if you haven't seen the logo, it's it's a square I like it's a it's a cube that's been twisted on itself. I likened it to a what's called a hypercube, which is kind of a science fictiony thing. It's a four dimensional cube. If you ever look that up, they're wild. It's just a strange concept of if you saw a cube in the fourth dimension, it folds in on itself. It's It's wild. It's a science thing. But that kind of reminds me of a very colorful hypercube, which I'm sure that's not what they were going for. But what I think is really funny, have you seen so if you go to squares or blocks, new homepage, there's not much to it. Now, it's just basically download their graphics package for you know, the media, though, but they have a leadership page. And they turned all of the leaders into squares. That is pretty cool. And then I think they release something where you, you could do that on on Twitter now or whatever, you just put your own profile picture into that square and it bends the your forehead over the edge. So yeah, there was a guy who made this and so they start people started putting their, their cat pictures and, and all this stuff into the strange squares. I don't know. I think it's silly looking especially like Jack Dorsey's like he lost his forehead. I don't get it. Like if you look at I'm looking at their page. Now. They're Mike Brock, who is the lead of that TBD guy. And he's got a forehead and sort of the CFO and But Jack Dorsey like has no forehead and it just looks, it looks silly. And I do like, there. You're in the URL of dot XYZ. That's pretty cool. You think that's cool. It reminds me of like something skateboarding would do. To me, XYZ is the one you buy when you can't get anything else. But oh, I'm also on their site in their their logo, bends and moves. Yeah, that's pretty. It's their branding is pretty cool for where it is. And it's super trendy right now. But yeah, I mean, this, I always I think of you every time I see a logo like this, and I'm like, how do you put that on a t shirt? How do you put that in? And now I'm looking at it. They've got their 16 pixel little guide. They've got them in there. They got rid of the gradients, but they're there. They know what they're doing. But I don't know. I think this is interesting that we have meta now we have blocked now. Everybody's moving into this new world. And it's it's interesting. It's like collusion, but not like everybody says, Okay, we're going to now do the metaverse and we're going to build products for that. And blockchain is right in line with that. And they're all trying to work together to build this new future. I'm curious if anything comes of it. It is exciting. It's interesting. And it's also a little scary. Yeah. Yeah. I think in 10 years, it blows my kid's mind. So the, my daughter was born in 2008. The iPhone came out in 2007. And you think how much the world has changed in that period of time? Yeah, I mean, 10 years, everything is different. And I think that this is me putting on my little, my little pointed hat. But I think it's gonna start going up everything changes in five years. Because everything's just so much faster now. And I'm just saying in five years, 10 years from now, we're going to be a different world. We're all going to be wearing weird goggles and, and there's going to be a lot of weird stuff that comes from the unintended consequences is kind of where I'm going with that. But we'll have YouTube celebrities doing reverse mortgage commercials through blockchain. Oh man, it's like replacing I'm trying to think who that does Tom Selleck, Tom Selleck? Yes. All the guys who I grew up with now are doing the reverse mortgage in retirement commercials. So it's gonna be PewDiePie. Mortgage, I love it I want to talk about a topic that comes up pretty regularly when talking to startups. And that is, don't hire a developer, which is ironic for me to say that. But here, here's the scenario. So you have a startup. And that startup is almost guaranteed, I'd say 8080 to 90%. Chance is a two sided market. And what that means is because almost all startups are in some way, shape, or form, think of Airbnb, good example. You have two sides, you have people who have a home, they would like to rent, and you have people who would like to rent it, that is the two sided market. The startup is the guy in the middle who connects those two sides. That is almost every startup you can think of. And that's very common. I, we worked once with a three sided market. And boy, that is tough. What was the third side were they so in that one, and I can say this, because it's been many years. So that one, they were a recruiting company. And the idea was you had recruiters, and you had companies that needed to hire. And then their third side was the influencers, people who knew people who could connect recruiters. And so they were marketing the guy in the middle to try to build up a relationship to connect those two sides. So it was a three sided market that was really complicated. That that they pivoted massively and went off and did other things. But, but that was one of their ideas. So a two sided market is very, very common. Again, most things that you think of are two sided markets. Now Facebook, I guess, would be an example. That's not a two sided market. So they're not all you can do. And I challenge startups regularly, you can do a two sided market for absolutely free, and find out if your idea is worth a darn, that is my my thing. And here's how you do that. So here's an example of a two sided market. This is an idea that came out at a hackathon years ago, I don't think it turned into anything. So I'm not breaking any rules here. But you are a photographer, and you want to connect to people on vacation, who want to have great photos of their vacation. Okay, that is an example. So for instance, you're going to New York, and you're taking your family and you want really good pictures of your family in New York. You don't know any photographers, so this app would connect you to photographers who were there who would do this and offer you a package. There's your two sided market, right? That seems a little weird. I don't know if that ever went anywhere. It was it was an idea that came out it I think it's so niche that it never had any legs. Yeah. But it's a good example of a two sided market. So if I were to say, okay, that's my idea, I want to build this company. So someone would come to me, and they say, here's my idea. I want some tech, I want to build a website that will connect these photographers to these vacationers. And I want to see if this works. And I would say no, you should not build that not because it's a bad idea. That's not my job to tell you. It's a bad idea. My job is to say you're not ready for that. And so what I would tell them is you do not need me to validate this idea for you. What you need is to validate the idea for yourself. And you can do that with a spreadsheet, and your phone. Right? Because all you're doing in a two sided market is connecting people. So if you go as the founder, you're going to you know, blood, sweat and tears time. You find a bunch of photographers who are interested, like say you pick New York City, okay, find 20 photographers in New York City, who are willing, they're getting paid. So they would be so open to this right? That's easy. Yeah. And I'm sure you can definitely find an easy list to just pull email addresses. Yeah, you could throw a dart and hit 10 photographers in New York City, I guarantee it. Yeah. So you've got them. So you call them you make a relationship with 20 photographers, however many you want, whatever you want to consider a quarrel. And then you find 20 People who are going on vacation to New York, these would probably be friends and family, because you you would need to know this is kind of personal. But you can probably find five people who are going to New York, and you can probably convince them that they should try this out. Right? And so you call the photographer you call the interested party who's going on vacation, and you connect them manually, right? Hey, this is Joe. He's a great photographer. Here's Betty. She's going on vacation. You guys talk. Okay. And at the end of that you have a conversation afterwards to see how did that conversation go? How can I make it better? This went in a different direction at first when you said with just a phone in a spreadsheet. I'm wondering, are you using some sort of like app building? software that's just a super easy thing. To make like a prototype on your phone, and then you show it to people, but you actually mean literally mean people and literally connecting to them to talk to each other. Yeah. Because, yeah, okay, you I mean, to get a good app is gonna cost a lot of money. It just is, you know, we've talked about that in previous episodes, things cost a lot of money. And I don't want you to spend that money until you're ready to do it. And if your idea isn't validated, don't do it. It's that simple. Don't spend your money on app that you're on an on an idea that you don't know if it has, because I promise you if your app is any worth a darn, you're going to get very busy with your phone calls and spreadsheets, right? Because word of mouth will spread Hey, Gary knows, you know, is he's got this idea. And he's connecting photographers. And I bet he can help you when you go off to Austin on your next vacation. This is a really cool idea, right? And so you start getting word of mouth passes. And you start validating and you can really refine and learn a ton about your idea. You can learn about you know, after they connect, Hey, how did that work out for you, Mr. photographer or miss photographer? Hey, Miss vacationer, how did that work for you, and you learn and you get more data and more ideas as to how this market really will work. And you could definitely find places, a good pivot point would be to maybe change the idea a little bit and go a slightly different direction, that might be more promising. Yeah, I mean, if the idea is trash, you're gonna know it pretty fast. If the idea is good, you're gonna start getting some inkling that it's good. But you also might find that what you're basically saying is, you might find that an idea that's buried inside of your idea is actually the one that's worth something. Say, for instance, instead of connecting the travelers with a photographer, connect the travelers with a place that will rent like high quality cameras and lenses out for your vacation, like, might be easier to try to be the photographer, you know, yourself, if there might be a bigger audience for that, instead of actually paying a photographer that's possible. I mean, again, the validation of the cheesy idea, I know you're dying to validate this and make it run. No, I'm just trying to give an exam. I'm just trying to give an example of a pivot, where that your original concept, had some length, just not in the same direction that you perceived from the beginning. That's fair. And I think, I think it's important to just keep an open mind. And you can do that. Here's the beauty of this advice. You can pivot all day long, and it costs you nothing. Yes, as soon as you start investing in building your idea, every change every, you know, pivot for we keep saying that word over and over again. But every time you change your mind, it costs you money. But at this stage, it costs you nothing. And all you're doing is learning, you're just learning. And you can get so much out of this, if you actually do it. And I will tell you, we've given this advice, I can't even tell you how many times several, many times how many people do it, I probably can put on one hand. And that's because that, to me tells that tells me the story. If you're not willing to do that, you're not going to get through the slog, you're not going to get through the tough times, because it requires work. And if this kind of this kind of work, the calling the cold calling because you're you're reaching out to a photographer, and it's example that you don't know if this makes you uncomfortable. Man, startup life is not for you. Just go get a job and enjoy your life because this ain't your thing. Because if you don't want to cold call somebody to make your idea work. Yeah, if you can't handle the entry level position, you probably can't handle the CEO position. That's fair. That's what you did. That's fine. I mean, there's nothing wrong with I think one of the things that we found when I did a lot of hackathons in Raleigh, there used to be these cool weekend, hackathons, that people would pitch an idea. And they would go to the Startup Weekend. It was a company that would come here is really neat. I was a mentor. So I do I really do remember those. Yeah, I used to go be a speaker at those. Yeah, I would, I would be a coach for the for the ideas. And I loved I loved it. It's a shame they went away. But they basically someone would come and say, Hey, I've got an idea. And I want to go they pitch it. And then if they got enough developers and designers who would come and help them over the weekend to build it, build a prototype, then they would know whether or not they want to take it. And one of the things I thought people learn more than anything, was I've had this idea in my head for a year. And when I threw it out there, it went nowhere. That's very valuable. That is that is probably more value than I got a little bit of England and I need to sink in six months to a year of my life to make it then find out that it's a crap idea. Right? But I love those hackathons for exactly. That is like oh, man, yeah, I had this idea. It didn't go anywhere. And now I know that and I'm gonna move on with my life and go do something else. I that's very cathartic. Now, out of the people that did this little process this exercise? Did any of them come back to you with that idea? And you've helped them kind of become successful? Yeah, yeah. And here's, here's the next step of that. So let's say you you are this photographer, this fictitional photography company, and you go and do that, and you connected them. And many people are excited about your idea that yeah, man, I love this idea. I'm going to go to Cancun next year, and I want I want a photographer, okay, great. And use your connecting people, it's going really well. And you can also play with pricing there as well, to see, you know, at the middleman, how much cut you can take. But let's say that goes well. So the next step is what I would call the low code environment. Now, now, that means something different nowadays, but I've been using that term for a while. So what I mean by that is, let's create something that's a lot of sizzle, but not a lot of substance. And what I mean by that is, let's give a very professional looking front door, a good looking website, that people can come to the photographers can come to, and The Vacationers can come to and learn about your service. But when they sign up, it really just send you an email and you do it manually behind the scenes, right, you're still very heavily manual, it's not automated. It's basically a fancy contact form, that maybe fills in a spreadsheet for you. And that's as far as it goes. But then you manually call them and you connect them and you still do your spreadsheet thing. That's the next thing that can be as cheap as $10,000. Right? For a highly desert. I mean, I want it, I want a lot of sizzle, right? I want this to look like it's a quality establishment, professional, polished, professional, polished, you've got the logo, you've got everything. But it's $10,000, not $50,000 Because nothing's automated, right? That is what I would call the low code version. And that is your next step. And you can say, Okay, I've got this, I've got a much more professional thing, I could do some marketing around it, I can bring people to my stuff. And see if it goes to the next step. Is it earning revenue? Is it doing this than the other? Do I want to take the next step, which would be the full blown app, and now you need real money. But that's the next step. So yes, that's what we always recommend, let's do the low code version. If that works, you know, six months later, come back to me, we'll build you the real one. That's it's a stepping stone. Very few people do this. And I don't know why they would rather just say, Hey, I've got$50,000, let's go build an app. No, don't do that. Don't do that. It's amazing how much you want to push away money coming to you. It is funny. Yeah. And I told you about that. And an earlier thing we had that come to Jesus moment, when we decided we wanted to help more than make money, right? And that's, that's when we got really opinionated saying, No, I don't want your money. I want your money when you're ready for us, and you're not ready for us. And so and we lost clients, they never they vanished. My guess is they never got built. Every once in a while we would find they went with someone else who did take their money, and then probably died. Right? Because that there were they weren't ready. But they had this pile of money was burning all in their pocket. They hired someone who just took it six months later, they're gone. I hate that story. Well, it could be just instead of taking your advice for what it is and your way of trying to help them, they might have just been hurt. Thinking that you're i You said their idea was not worth it yet. Yeah. And I don't think I've ever done that. I mean, maybe I've thought it I'll be honest, I've thought it Yeah, your idea is not very good. It's not my job, because I am not an expert at your industry, whatever you're excited about. I don't know that world. Most likely. If it's video games, I've got a good idea. But I don't know your world. And so it's not my place to tell you your ideas trash. What I can tell you your implementation of your ideas, trash, that is my job. But the actual idea, I'm not I don't weigh in. They always ask and I'm like, It's not my place. Right? If you got a good idea for law firms, and it's gonna change the way law is practice in this country. I can't answer whether or not that's true, right. That's just I don't know anything about it. And so I rarely tell people that ideas trash, but I will tell you that your plan to attack your idea is trash. That is my job. That is my world. And I'm not shy about that at all. That's part of the transparency. Yeah, try to keep in place. If I can't have an open conversation with you about your idea and how I'm going to implement it. We're not going to get along. We're just not if the egos are that big on both sides. I've got a massive ego. I get it. If your ego can't take the fact that I think your idea your your implementation ideas are not good. We're going to come we're going to have conflicts and at the end of the day, you're going to insist on being the software designer. Yep. And when you insist upon it, you're going to get an inferior app. It's it's no different than having an architect building your house. And you say it's way you can have opinions. But when the architect says, Dude, you need a load bearing wall here, your second floor is gonna crash down, you've got to trust his expertise, right? Right. If you, if it's the same thing, if I tell you, man, you need to build x this way, or you need to, don't forget to and build in some marketing hooks, like into Active Campaign or whatever. Don't forget to build that, yes, it's more money, but you need to do it, or you're not going to be able to get anywhere with this. Or, man, if you do it this way, you're going to completely block this whole future section of stuff. If we have clients, well, I had clients, these they typically don't last long, if I'm being honest, we've had clients who insisted that they were going to do it their way. And that that the friction there gets really ugly. Because at that point, if you really want to be a software designer, you should go find a company that's just going to build the spec and not ask you any questions. Yeah. And that's fine. There's a lot of people who do that. There's nothing wrong with that. But that's not what we do. That's not what I would recommend, because you need someone with an opinion. So that your idea is tried by fire. The iron sharpens iron, right? That's an old saying. And as a reason, you know, when you have two ideas rubbing against each other, you you get a better product, you just do. I do that with my team. Here's what how I'd like to do it. The developers will say this is no, no, you need to develop, develop it this way, because this is what they do. Same with you and design. Hey, I think it should be orange, you're like you're an idiot, Orange is ugly. No, it needs to be this. Right? Every step of the chain, that friction should be there to create a better product. So if you're looking for a Yes, man, you're going to end up with a bad product. But I'm just gonna say it. There it is. Yeah, I'm just gonna say right, bam, dropping my mic, when there is when there is an uncomfortable feeling, knowing that you're building something that's not going to be beneficial for the client, but you're doing it anyway. Because they're giving you money and telling you, you work for me. Here's the money, do what I ask. There's no way that's gonna turn out well, because you could you could tell We've had clients in the past, yes, do exactly that. We're, here's our advice. And sometimes, I mean, in the end, they are clients. And so I'm going to do what you say, right? I'm going to push, I'm gonna push, I'm gonna push, and then I'm gonna let you win. Because you're the client. I don't have a problem with that. But when they take away our agency is when we start to have real issues is when they start saying your job is easy. Get out of the way, you're just a pixel pusher. That's where things get ugly. That's really rare. I don't, I don't want to think that that's common at all. It's, we've had that maybe two times and almost nine years. It's really rare. But it does happen, where someone comes in swinging, that I'm the be all end all and you don't know you're I know more than you do. That's a hard client man. Well, it seems like over the years, typically, your approach and your strategies have weeded out those, you know, ideas or clients from going that far through the process. Yeah, I mean, I'm opinionated from day one, but you're helpful to it's going to be helpful. If you don't see me as helpful, you probably won't hire me, I think that's the easiest way, I want to be helpful, I want to build your idea, I really want you to succeed. And everyone on the team really wants you to succeed. And if you don't like that, those opinions coming at you and stuff like that, you're gonna you're gonna pull yourself out of this conversation real quick, which is right, that that's how it should be. We've gone off into another random tangent here, but I think it's, it's worth talking about. I want to I want to bring it back to full circle, though, because I do think if if you walk away from this podcast, and have learned nothing from this episode, except for one thing is don't rush into development. Take your time, validate your idea, figure out who you want to be when you grow up. And do that for free. Don't do that for $50,000. And then realize you did it wrong. If someone has an idea and wants to validate it, but doesn't have an idea of how to actually start that validation for free. Is that something that you'd be willing to consult with them about? Yeah, I mean, but it's literally I would, at this point, you could almost say listen to this podcast, because I mean, we just walked through it, right? It does. Again, if you have a two sided market, which most likely you do, it's always the same. It's exactly what we described earlier. I don't think there's really any need to consult. Sure. I'm happy to have a conversation with you. It takes me 30 minutes, we'll have a good time connect party a with party B, do the hard work, be the guy in the middle. That's what your app is going to be in the end of the day. Right? Your app is a glorified middleman and most of these cases, and so you, you just just be that middleman. It's great. And when you when you are that you're going to learn so much it's worth every minute you spend on And it costs you nothing alright, so I was looking around for gift ideas for you. Because since you have everything I thought the only way to step this game up was to get you something custom. You're calling me a snob and just poking fun. So, instead of as a regular ordinary Xbox, I saw this video by Mark has browning. Do you ever watch MKBHD? Yes, I do. He is on my subscription list. Yeah, he's great. He's great. And he is showing off the new X Box Gucci collab. Just a small price tag of $10,000 for a Gucci branded X Box in a suitcase. So is it so that is the Xbox made of leather? No. But the suitcase it comes in is it has embossed Gucci logos all over the show of the Xbox itself. Now that sounds pretty cool. Not $10,000. Cool. It's got a blue and red stripe down the controllers. Are they at least the upgraded elite controllers? Are they the regular controllers? I'm out of my league on that one. I don't know. I'm betting they're the regular it because to me, it's like I'm paying $10,000 And you can't even throw the elites in Come on. Because like Xbox sells regular controllers that come with the Xbox. But then there's also the elites that are like$200. And they're they have all these cool interchangeable parts and metal and they're really cool. Yeah, kind of like your mechanical keyboards. It's very similar very much. Where Marquez takes this video is he branches off into the collabs between brands and how now fashion brands and tech companies are starting to collab more. And in some cases, it makes sense. And in some cases, it's just ridiculous like this. I assume they didn't make a whole lot of these. No, it's limited. They only made 100 of them. So$10,000 times 100. My first instinct was their niche market is SoundCloud rappers. Class cloud. Okay, okay, just for the cloud. Just you know, show it off in there. Tick tock about the Xbox with the Gucci brand. You know, this reminds me I saw a similar video. It wasn't Marcus Brownlee. But it was a symbol there was. It was air made air mez I say that wrong every time I say Hermes, Hermes fair. I'm sure we won't get sued for that. Um, they made a boo gaudy a car. And it was wrapped in their leather. Wow. And it was I mean, this rich dude and Dubai had it was walking through they made three of them. I think that is basically just publicity. For sure. That's just to get the word what it was crate so it might not have been a Bugatti it could have been a Pagani. It was one of those redonkulous million dollar plus cars. Right. And they made it was it was you talk about a cool colab I'm off the rails here. But they made it whatever their color is like air maze has a brown. I think it was amazing. Could be not them. But they're that a specific color that is their color. It's a brown. So they made the whole car that color and all of the accents were that color. And then UPS put a sticker on it. And yes, it has their delivery vehicle. That's right. So but they also made custom luggage, like nine bags that would hide in the different cubbies. Oh, wow. It was it was when you talk about a colab it was really well done. However, that car would normally I think it was a $2 million car. It was 3 million just for that one. So as an extra million for that collab. Oh, wow. Yeah, most of these most of these tech and fashion go labs are just just for the hype. The way it works, right? I mean, those stupid a Gucci Xbox is stupid. However, this is not to a YouTuber who gets millions and millions of views every week. And our five viewers are now listening or listeners are now talking about an Xbox Gucci colab. So we're actually exactly how advertising on the Internet goes. You just make something wild something that's going to catch people's attention, whether good or bad. And it'll get out there and spread so fast that the amount of money you spent making the product is dwarfed with how much exposure you're getting free. It has exposure. Seems to me though, at the end of the day, if they I'm assuming they'll sell all 100 of these. So that's a million bucks. Even if they don't they still there's still plenty of advertising that went out for both shorts box and Gucci. Crazy. I just okay. I mean, it's neat. I think they're doing these kinds of things. What's interesting to me though, is from what you're describing the Gucci, except for the embossed whatever's is basically the box. Yeah, it's basically a piece that you're gonna throw away, right? I don't think anybody's gonna throw Gucci luggage. If anything, you're gonna sell it. So weird. Yeah, I mean, I guess who's gonna buy that? I'm gonna walk around my Gucci bag with a big Xbox logo on it. I don't know. Yeah, it's big bright green text on the standard Gucci like tan and brown. I personally think Gucci everything is super ugly. My kids though in that generation Gucci is almost like it means cool. I don't know why my kids talk about oh, that's so Gucci. I'm like, what? Well, it's just Gucci and Louie Vuitton. Those two high end fashion brands have become synonymous with, you know, music icons and just pop culture as saying like, someone from our era would think of Ferrari and Lamborghini as like, wow, that is amazing. So it's just, it's just interesting. I look at Gucci. I'm like, That's so ugly, but that's a $2,000 sweater. Alright, on that note, I think we're gonna wrap this one up. We're gonna try to stay at our at our 30 minute mark up, but we have been woefully inadequate recently, you guys went way over on your last one, and it paid off, but it paid off. That's right. I guess I shouldn't say maybe we need to go to an hour. I don't know. Don't forget to ask for questions. Since we do have like 24 downloads. Now there's probably five people that have questions. Okay, so we'll wrap this up. Don't forget to send us questions. We don't have one. We are going to I keep saying this every week. But we're going to start pushing these on YouTube. We have one up there. But we're gonna keep doing that. And we want to get more questions. We don't have any this week, unfortunately. But that's still a big push. So don't forget to email us if you have any questions. Hello at the big pixel net. We would love to hear from you and we will answer any that come in. Alrighty. I think I'm done. Gary, you got anything else? If you find us on Spotify, go ahead and just subscribe. Fair enough or Apple podcast Don't be don't be a Spotify snob. I'm totally fine with that. But you can subscribe on either. Now, just Spotify, just Spotify. No, I'm just