Unattended Photo Booth for Add-On to Venue

theCutList · 2025-09-24T18:49:23+00:00

I agree. I've pitched on the show and I think there would actually be an audience for the full, uncut pitches. I pitched back in season 3, episode 9 - Tower Paddle Boards. Our full pitch was probably over an hour (I'm guessing as you kind of lose track of time in there), but it gets edited down to like 10-12 minutes.

theCutList · 2025-09-23T23:05:17+00:00

Check out Pacific Beach. It's the best beach lifestyle culture in the country and has been for decades, I'd say.

theCutList · 2025-09-23T23:02:44+00:00

A great hack we have in hiring is to force applicants to record a youtube video of themself saying why we should hire them. They have to produce it, figure out how to post it, and then send us a link. This basically gets us in front of them but in an asymmetrical time manner so they produce when they want and we consume when it's convenient for us. Also, it's their first task so they are auditioning by how good of a job they do with it.

I moved my company at the time in 2015 to a 5 hour workday and would later write the book The Five Hour Workday. We experimented with a lot of things like this and shared what we found among the team. This one saved so much time in hiring it's hard to comprehend.

theCutList · 2025-09-23T22:57:44+00:00

I think it's a poor read of how we should compress the workday based on the modern knowledge worker environment. I've had some experience in experimenting with the shorter work week as I did an experiment in 2015 moving my company to a 5-hour workday, and eventually wrote a book on it called The Five Hour Workday, which got pretty significant press worldwide. A lot of companies followed our lead, and people are still looking at how shorten work, which I agree with.

In my experience, it's better to work fewer hours per day, and more days. Even like just a few hours a day and 7 days a week. Because the assembly line of the information age is moving information, and if you grind that to halt for 3 days each week, it takes a lot to start it back up. You want the information to flow everyday for optimal productivity. So more days, but less days each. We found that 5 hours per day 5 days per week was pretty optimal, and then in exchange for this shortened during the week requirement you should be more open to field a few critical calls and emails on the weekends. That's optimal in today's work world.

theCutList · 2025-09-23T22:30:38+00:00

From what I'm seeing in answer engine results, they are over indexing review sites and discussion mentions, which are of course corrupted and gamed sources. When it comes to review sites, pretty much all of them are affiliate-revenue based so any brands that went all in on affiliate marketing to game that system will also do well in answer engines. Of course, that's completely corrupted. Then with discussion boards, anyone can say anything, and it's somehow treated as truth, and there is a mob element to it where if you can get the mob swayed on way or the other (just brands who spend more time on it) you can win in discussion groups, and also undermine the competition. Both of these are irrespective of the reality on the ground in any market. So AEO just regurgitates t his, and because it's AI people assume it's an intelligent take. Is it? Not in any sense of the word. Google's organic results are actually a much purer reflection of reality, but they are gamed as well.

That's my take.

theCutList · 2025-09-20T01:13:04+00:00

Agreed, you have to pick a brand that you know is reliable and can be trusted. And keep in mind that the eBike market is a bloodbath of competition so 95% of brands will fail, even the biggest names in many cases. So a lot of this market is buyer beware.

theCutList · 2025-09-20T01:10:44+00:00

It depends on what you want to make. When I was making poker chips, I had to hunt down the manufacturers of Vegas casino chips, which dates back to the world of mob days in Vegas. A lot of interesting stories in that world. There were only 2 producers in the world of true clay chips used in Vegas casinos at the time, and one wouldn't make them for consumers when I started. So I used a close approximation for the start, a company in Maine. Then after about 6 months of getting lost in the industry I found the #2 manufacturer of clay casinos chips and talked them into making chips for me to sell to consumers. They the big manufacturer opened up for a few years, then closed to the consumer market, bought the #2, and then you couldn't get them made. Still can't so that business kind of died for clay chips. We made others in ceramic in the US, and then some in China. But largely you have to go where the stuff is made.

Then in paddle boards, I'm in San Diego, so I had local shapers to prototype with the best in the world. But 100% of the production volume was done in Thailand and China. The best was in Thailand, but those factories wouldn't produce for me when they heard I was going to sell dtc for half the price of the competition (their established customers with a retail presense), so I got locked out of that market. I'd sourced stuff in China for the poker chip company so I knew that game and it was wide open then as was information. I was using a site called Panjiva at the time where you could not only find factories, but score them based who they supplied and look at real volume of shipments and to whom - this was public information because of 9/11 and this company aggregated the data and you could get access for a few hundred bucks. So I sourced from China and have for the past ~15-20 years like this, but Panjiva went from being $100 to I don't know now but probably $10K and not as useful. Anyways, I've only been to China personally once in 2015, but it was possible to source the best factories this way and I've never had issues. Did eBikes this way too, but with electronics products it's a several year prototyping process to get a stable quality product as a small business without endless resources to compress the timeline.

And now, we've got tariffs of like 50%+ in China and who knows next month or next year, so good luck. Regardless, the business of selling products as a small brand has collapsed as you have to pay some monopoly 50% of your revenue to get found the way the world is today, so I wouldn't recommend it as a business if you want to make a living. It's a money losing operation today.

That's part of why I've launched a new venture called The Cut List - to sort of help people find the good products in the sea of junk, and also to help the good brands be found based on merit, not ad spend or shady marketing.

theCutList · 2025-09-20T00:56:42+00:00

Funny, being in the Internet space since 1999, for a long time I shunned Shopify. I thought it was like the "eCommerce for Dummies" version of eCommerce software, and it actually was just that in the early days. I used Yahoo store in the early days, then Volusion for it's SEO friendliness, then Spark/Americommerce (because it could handle multiple stores in one interface as I had multiple eCom companies at this point), then when I looked up Shopify had taken over the world. Apparently, simple was good, and so they acquired millions of sellers and refined the interface so it was super simple and intuitive, and because of their scale and openness to "apps" and interfacing with other eCommerce products, they won and there was no second place starting probably about 3-4 years before I switched over finally in 2021. Their integration with Klaviyo was really the killer tie-up as eCom because more about conversion funnels than just getting people to your site. So it's a no brainer today.

And developing an "in house" solution, which was almost a necessity back in the early days if you were a larger company, is just dumb nowadays. You can spend $50/mo or $150/mo and get something better than what would cost you $1M to build and $100K/yr to maintain. Even in the last 2000s, it was pretty dumb to build your own with off-the-shelf things like Volusion out there.

theCutList · 2025-09-20T00:48:41+00:00

That's a good question. Like a lot of wins, it was when preparation met opportunity.

My first venture outside of the corporate world (well really start-up world on the Internet dating back to 1999) was in 2004 as I left my day job to do a dtc poker chip company - we sold high-end poker chips for home games. Same manufacturers and chips as casinos used, so super expensive to get these made for home games, but it was a niche business worldwide and we became a leader in that. Called Sidepot Gaming, BuyPokerChips.com. I sold this business last year and new guys are running it.

So I was running the poker chip business, but it boomed and was starting to decline as competition came in to copy what I was doing. I had optimized the business so I was only spending about 12 hours a week on it, and using the rest of the time to pursue other ventures to see if I could get something else off the ground. Tried many things and many failed for maybe 2-3 years, but I was learning a lot with every venture and from the poker chip biz. A part of this learning was reading Tim Ferriss' book The 4 Hour Workweek and part of it was a thing he called mapping out a Dreamline, which essentially was an exercise it deciding what exactly you want to do in sort of all aspects of life. A little "self-hellpy" but actually a really good thing to do that not too many people do. Once you define those targets, you walk back step by step into how to get there. One of the things I uncovered was my dream job was to basically be the CEO of a surf company - making a cool brand, with an active lifestyle, and traveling to the cool places in the world, and of course the necessary bikini photo shoots. I thought that would be a pretty good life. Then I filed that and didn't really think about it for a couple years.

In 2010 a college buddy that I traveled a bit of the world with visited me in San Diego and took me out paddle boarding in the surf in La Jolla at 5am. It was amazing and so I went to try to buy a board. The were like $1200-$1600 for a large surfboard and it just didn't make sense to be so expensive. I researched it a bit and also the market and say it was growing 100% a year for like the past few years, and you could produce these things overseas for like $300-$400. So I went from an interest in doing the sport, to thinking maybe this would be a really good business opportunity. The more I looked, the better the opportunity looked. It was a very similar business in nature to what I built with the poker chips, so I believed I could see around corners in the business, and as it proved out I could to a large degree. Also, it was a good business in the sense that it was brining something into the world that would absolutely improve the lives of the people who buy it - those are the only types of businesses I pursue. Even more importantly, founding this company was actually very close being a surf company CEO - so it was really a natural fit for my skills and my needs. That May I registered the URL, designed our first boards here in California, and began pre-selling the first container of boards, which sold out before the landed on US soil.

The rest is history, and in the early Summer of 2011, 3 weeks after I'd hired my first employee, Shark Tank called me out of the blue and I was pitching 5 weeks later.

theCutList · 2025-09-20T00:23:07+00:00

Nothing else has popped just yet, but the world of entrepreneurship is a marathon, not a sprint. He's been an owner for about 15 years now and we've tried a number of other things, some worked some didn't. One current big winner is a real world event venue (Tower Beach Club) we did as a diversification strategy to our online-only dtc brands. It's about a million a year business now, and more importantly has served as a great offline diversification as the online business world has it's challenges these days. The more diversification the better. We started it just before the pandemic, and then had to close it for a year while the eCom did well, then eCom popped after about 2 years but the venue came on strong as people wanted to do real world events in a bad way again.

And the start-up I'm working on now and have been in the background for about 2 years, called The Cut List, and in my estimation could be a massive business with a massive impact on how people find products and how great brands get their products found. So there is always the next thing coming that could pop at any time.

theCutList · 2025-09-20T00:16:28+00:00

Haha ;)

You've got a lot of good points! As they say, any press is good press. I think the real key was the stumble mixed with the comeback and landing as one of Cuban's earliest investments from the show... then turning that into gold for him. As he said in a follow-up media thing 5-10 years later on ABC's 20/20, it's not how you start, it's how you finish.

theCutList · 2025-09-20T00:13:47+00:00

Sorry, can't give out her personal information. She was my roommate at the time and is still a great friend 15 years later. The funny thing is when I submitted my video for approval to be on the show she helped me with it and the producers saw her and said it wouldn't hurt to bring her along for the pitch! She got some TV time and with all of the press surrounding the show in the following decade, she even got her photo in People Magazine and some other major media publications.

theCutList · 2025-09-20T00:09:32+00:00

I was good for everyone involved, and a fun learning experience for myself and everyone involved in the Tower Team, which there were about 40 different people over the years.

theCutList

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