Welcome to Marketing School, the only podcast that provides daily top level marketing tips and strategies from entrepreneurs that practice what they preach and live what they teach. Let's start leveling up your marketing knowledge with your instructors, Neil Patel and Eric Sue. Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Sue and I'm Neil Batel, and today we are going to talk about what we can learn from the fall of Dan Bilzerian. So let's explain who Dan Bilzerian is first, Neil, you want to go, and then I'll kind of add color to it. Yeah. So, Dan Bilzerian is really popular on Instagram. He got known for posting half naked pictures women and I think maybe even himself and some of the women. I don't think we're half naked. Maybe they were fully naked. And people are like, he's a modern Hugh Hefner, so that they wanted to follow him and he flew up. That was many years ago. Eric, want to break down the fall of him, because I think you know more about that than I do. Yeah. Sure, so Dan Bilzarian, I mean, just to give a little more context. So he is known as the King of Instagram. I think he's got over thirty two million followers or so. To Neil's point, you know, he throws lavish parties. He's got this big mansion, and he supposedly was known for making all his money through poker, and so a lot of the parties that he would throw would cost upwards of seven hundred thousand dollars plus. And you know a lot of these people in especially in Hollywood, would want to go to his parties. So with Dan Bilzarian, what started happening recently was he founded a company called Ignite, and Ignite was a CVD company, and they actually went public on the Toronto Stock Exchange. I think we started at like two hundred or two dollars and fifty cents a share, and I think it quickly lost well like eight percent of its value. Anyway, all that to say is this company, Ignite, is actually in a lawsuit right now, and I believe they've been losing like twenty thirty million dollars a year or so, maybe even more. And Dan's going to court now. And so what Neil and I wanted to talk about in this in this episode is there's a lot you can learn from the rise of Dan Bilzerian, but there's also some stuff to learn from the fall as well. And then why are they seeing him just because the stock goes down when you can sue someone over, No, not because of that, it's it's because of so actually that's a really good question, thanks Neil. So they went through five CEOs, I believe, and then they can a bunch of CFOs as well. One of their their recent CFOs called out the lavish spending. So they were spending like seventy five thousand dollars on like paintball guns, like eighty five thousand dollars on the Star Wars set, and like all the parties were being charged to the company. So the funds were being mismanaged, and you know, the officers had seen enough, and when the officers would call them out, they would get fired, right, So you know, I think what's going on now is that, you know, the funds were being misappropriated. And the other thing is Dan's father, Paul, he used to be a corporate raider and apparently what they're saying is that Ignite the company is actually being ran behind the scenes by his father. So there's just a lot of like stuff that's going on where I think the investors are probably like, this is fraud, we want our money back. Does that make sense, Neil, Yeah, so pretty much they're saying misappropriation of funds. He's not using that to grow the company. He's using it by paintball gums. Correct. There's just a lot of stuff that it seems to me. It's always seem like I respect Dan for building the brand that he's built, but I even looked at an interview that he did with Kevin o'lary and literally it was how Dan Bolzerian owned the sixty five million dollar mansion, and a week later it's revealed that, you know, Dan's actually renting the place for two hundred grand a month, which is still a lot of money. And I don't think there's anything wrong with renting, but I think it's there's this appearance of things look a lot better than they actually are, and it seems like there's the charade is kind of falling apart. So Neil, I want to get your thoughts on what you think about this, and then maybe we can give people some practical lessons. Yeah. So I'm a big believer. I'm reading an article right now like I'm Forbes. They're saying, Hell, he leases his house for two hundred thousand dollars a month. You know, he doesn't pay his own rent. Someone does. I don't see the big deal of someone paying your rent, as in like doing your accounting for it. You want to pay my rent to No, No, not me paying rent, saying someone doing the accounting for you, right, Like I don't do the books for my own company, someone else does them. The house is everything, models, flights, yachts. I think the big issue here is he's expensing some of his stuff to the company, and his brand is potentially driving sales, and it can get into a funny gray area on what should be expense and what isn't expense. I personally just like running things clean, Like you know, I have business partners, and sometimes my expenses are related to the business, but I just eat it personally so that way no one can grumble with me. But that's just how I do things, and everyone has a different way of running things. I also don't have his expenses, Like I don't even spend two hundred thousand dollars on a home per year, per get for one month, you know, So my expenses are really really low. Like I don't have a car. He probably has multiple cars. I don't go on yachts, I get seasick. I don't have a private jet. You know, I'll fly economy sometimes, I probably first class if it's international. I'm speaking because I'll pay for it, but I'm kind of cheap. Yeah. So I think there's a couple of things here, Like the last episode we talked about never polishing a turd, and I think Neil and I both can agree that Dan has done a really good job of building a brand. Again. He's a great showman, Like I know, he's even like taking I think he's taking like models and throwing them off his roof and like they would get injured and it'll be a whole scene around that. But he's always, you know, kind of seen traveling to amazing places with like groups of women, and so he lives the life that everyone wants to live, and he's built up a brand that way. And then I think it was the company he founded, the CVD company, Ignite. It seemed to make a lot of sense because it's the people that follow him that they're in that type of stuff, right, And I think what ended up happening was that the company was mismanaged, and we talked about polishing a turn. You got to be obsessed over customers, you have to be obsessed over delivering. And because the company was mismanaged, the funds were being mis mismanaged and it didn't seem like there was products were being delivered. So I'm like, look, I'm reading an article right now in Forbes, right and it says occurring to accounts flagged eight hundred and forty three thousand dollars in company expenses that appear to be personal nature. These include payments, charges racked up for one of Dan Bilzarian's credit cards, half a million dollar yacht rental, six figure two night trip to London, a sixty five thousand dollars four elements guns and star Wars set, a fifty thousand dollars bed frame. I don't know how bedframe costs. I can get that stuff from my key for like one hundred bucks. Seventy five thousand dollars. Paintball field, I don't know what a paintball field is. And an eighty eight thousand dollars vall. What the heck is in a volve that costs eighty eight thousand dollars to name a few, And I'm not judging his expenses or are not. I am saying some of those things are expensive, but like for me, they are, but you know, for a bill gates, they're not expensive. That's like a dollar. So each their own. But in general, the big thing I'm getting from this article, Eric, is yes, it sounds like there's maybe some misappropriation of funds based on what the article is saying. I'm not here to say he misused or misused the funds or not. That's up to whatever deal he had with his shareholders. The big thing is, if the company is losing fifty million a year, these expenses add up, but it's not even a million dollars. The company's being missed and it's been for years and years consistently. Yeah, but that means a company is being mismanaged. Has personal expensive Sure aren't great, but there's something that's wrong with the company. Going back to what you just said earlier, don't polish retort. If you're losing fifty million for multiple years and you can't see the light at the end of the tunnel, call it quits and move on to something else. There you go so core product value okay, is not being delay, so that is tied in with the mismanagement of the company. So I think the only I are agreeing here that this might be able to be turned around because there is an appetite for this type of stuff, But things just need to be ring like really tightened up quite a bit. We'll just put it that way, So, you know, I don't think it's the at least my opinion is. I don't think it's necessarily the end of danvils Aerian. I think he just needs to focus on what he's good at, which is marketing and sales and doing what he does, and then get really good operators around him because they've gone through so many operators in the last two years or so that you know, the company is really on its knees. Now, you know, anything else to add? Now I'm looking up the revenue. They're doing around ten million dollars a year in revenue according to Yahoo Finance, So they're creaking on revenue. Is just they need to focus more on revenue than nothing else. Do you see that there are other expenses? Don't like the marketing expenses and all that the marketing expenses have been like doubling every year. Well, if you're doubling every year, not doubling revenue, cut back on the marketing expenses because it means they ain't working. There you go. So that is it for today. We've thought let us know what you think. By the way, I think we'd like to do more, more fun analysis like this. Go to marketing school dot ioslash live that's alive to learn about our virtual and our live event, and we will see you tomorrow. We appreciate you joining us for this session of marketing School. Be sure to rate, review, and subscribe to the show and visit marketingschool dot io for more resources based on today's topic, as well as access to more episodes that will help you find true marketing success. Tax marketingschool dot io until next time. Class dismissed

Welcome to Marketing School, the only podcast that provides daily top level marketing tips and strategies from entrepreneurs that practice what they preach and live what they teach. Let's start leveling up your marketing knowledge with your instructors, Neil Patel and Eric Sue. Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Sue and I'm Neil Batel, and today we are going to talk about what we can learn from the fall of Dan Bilzerian. So let's explain who Dan Bilzerian is first, Neil, you want to go, and then I'll kind of add color to it. Yeah. So, Dan Bilzerian is really popular on Instagram. He got known for posting half naked pictures women and I think maybe even himself and some of the women. I don't think we're half naked. Maybe they were fully naked. And people are like, he's a modern Hugh Hefner, so that they wanted to follow him and he flew up. That was many years ago. Eric, want to break down the fall of him, because I think you know more about that than I do. Yeah. Sure, so Dan Bilzarian, I mean, just to give a little more context. So he is known as the King of Instagram. I think he's got over thirty two million followers or so. To Neil's point, you know, he throws lavish parties. He's got this big mansion, and he supposedly was known for making all his money through poker, and so a lot of the parties that he would throw would cost upwards of seven hundred thousand dollars plus. And you know a lot of these people in especially in Hollywood, would want to go to his parties. So with Dan Bilzarian, what started happening recently was he founded a company called Ignite, and Ignite was a CVD company, and they actually went public on the Toronto Stock Exchange. I think we started at like two hundred or two dollars and fifty cents a share, and I think it quickly lost well like eight percent of its value. Anyway, all that to say is this company, Ignite, is actually in a lawsuit right now, and I believe they've been losing like twenty thirty million dollars a year or so, maybe even more. And Dan's going to court now. And so what Neil and I wanted to talk about in this in this episode is there's a lot you can learn from the rise of Dan Bilzerian, but there's also some stuff to learn from the fall as well. And then why are they seeing him just because the stock goes down when you can sue someone over, No, not because of that, it's it's because of so actually that's a really good question, thanks Neil. So they went through five CEOs, I believe, and then they can a bunch of CFOs as well. One of their their recent CFOs called out the lavish spending. So they were spending like seventy five thousand dollars on like paintball guns, like eighty five thousand dollars on the Star Wars set, and like all the parties were being charged to the company. So the funds were being mismanaged, and you know, the officers had seen enough, and when the officers would call them out, they would get fired, right, So you know, I think what's going on now is that, you know, the funds were being misappropriated. And the other thing is Dan's father, Paul, he used to be a corporate raider and apparently what they're saying is that Ignite the company is actually being ran behind the scenes by his father. So there's just a lot of like stuff that's going on where I think the investors are probably like, this is fraud, we want our money back. Does that make sense, Neil, Yeah, so pretty much they're saying misappropriation of funds. He's not using that to grow the company. He's using it by paintball gums. Correct. There's just a lot of stuff that it seems to me. It's always seem like I respect Dan for building the brand that he's built, but I even looked at an interview that he did with Kevin o'lary and literally it was how Dan Bolzerian owned the sixty five million dollar mansion, and a week later it's revealed that, you know, Dan's actually renting the place for two hundred grand a month, which is still a lot of money. And I don't think there's anything wrong with renting, but I think it's there's this appearance of things look a lot better than they actually are, and it seems like there's the charade is kind of falling apart. So Neil, I want to get your thoughts on what you think about this, and then maybe we can give people some practical lessons. Yeah. So I'm a big believer. I'm reading an article right now like I'm Forbes. They're saying, Hell, he leases his house for two hundred thousand dollars a month. You know, he doesn't pay his own rent. Someone does. I don't see the big deal of someone paying your rent, as in like doing your accounting for it. You want to pay my rent to No, No, not me paying rent, saying someone doing the accounting for you, right, Like I don't do the books for my own company, someone else does them. The house is everything, models, flights, yachts. I think the big issue here is he's expensing some of his stuff to the company, and his brand is potentially driving sales, and it can get into a funny gray area on what should be expense and what isn't expense. I personally just like running things clean, Like you know, I have business partners, and sometimes my expenses are related to the business, but I just eat it personally so that way no one can grumble with me. But that's just how I do things, and everyone has a different way of running things. I also don't have his expenses, Like I don't even spend two hundred thousand dollars on a home per year, per get for one month, you know, So my expenses are really really low. Like I don't have a car. He probably has multiple cars. I don't go on yachts, I get seasick. I don't have a private jet. You know, I'll fly economy sometimes, I probably first class if it's international. I'm speaking because I'll pay for it, but I'm kind of cheap. Yeah. So I think there's a couple of things here, Like the last episode we talked about never polishing a turd, and I think Neil and I both can agree that Dan has done a really good job of building a brand. Again. He's a great showman, Like I know, he's even like taking I think he's taking like models and throwing them off his roof and like they would get injured and it'll be a whole scene around that. But he's always, you know, kind of seen traveling to amazing places with like groups of women, and so he lives the life that everyone wants to live, and he's built up a brand that way. And then I think it was the company he founded, the CVD company, Ignite. It seemed to make a lot of sense because it's the people that follow him that they're in that type of stuff, right, And I think what ended up happening was that the company was mismanaged, and we talked about polishing a turn. You got to be obsessed over customers, you have to be obsessed over delivering. And because the company was mismanaged, the funds were being mis mismanaged and it didn't seem like there was products were being delivered. So I'm like, look, I'm reading an article right now in Forbes, right and it says occurring to accounts flagged eight hundred and forty three thousand dollars in company expenses that appear to be personal nature. These include payments, charges racked up for one of Dan Bilzarian's credit cards, half a million dollar yacht rental, six figure two night trip to London, a sixty five thousand dollars four elements guns and star Wars set, a fifty thousand dollars bed frame. I don't know how bedframe costs. I can get that stuff from my key for like one hundred bucks. Seventy five thousand dollars. Paintball field, I don't know what a paintball field is. And an eighty eight thousand dollars vall. What the heck is in a volve that costs eighty eight thousand dollars to name a few, And I'm not judging his expenses or are not. I am saying some of those things are expensive, but like for me, they are, but you know, for a bill gates, they're not expensive. That's like a dollar. So each their own. But in general, the big thing I'm getting from this article, Eric, is yes, it sounds like there's maybe some misappropriation of funds based on what the article is saying. I'm not here to say he misused or misused the funds or not. That's up to whatever deal he had with his shareholders. The big thing is, if the company is losing fifty million a year, these expenses add up, but it's not even a million dollars. The company's being missed and it's been for years and years consistently. Yeah, but that means a company is being mismanaged. Has personal expensive Sure aren't great, but there's something that's wrong with the company. Going back to what you just said earlier, don't polish retort. If you're losing fifty million for multiple years and you can't see the light at the end of the tunnel, call it quits and move on to something else. There you go so core product value okay, is not being delay, so that is tied in with the mismanagement of the company. So I think the only I are agreeing here that this might be able to be turned around because there is an appetite for this type of stuff, But things just need to be ring like really tightened up quite a bit. We'll just put it that way, So, you know, I don't think it's the at least my opinion is. I don't think it's necessarily the end of danvils Aerian. I think he just needs to focus on what he's good at, which is marketing and sales and doing what he does, and then get really good operators around him because they've gone through so many operators in the last two years or so that you know, the company is really on its knees. Now, you know, anything else to add? Now I'm looking up the revenue. They're doing around ten million dollars a year in revenue according to Yahoo Finance, So they're creaking on revenue. Is just they need to focus more on revenue than nothing else. Do you see that there are other expenses? Don't like the marketing expenses and all that the marketing expenses have been like doubling every year. Well, if you're doubling every year, not doubling revenue, cut back on the marketing expenses because it means they ain't working. There you go. So that is it for today. We've thought let us know what you think. By the way, I think we'd like to do more, more fun analysis like this. Go to marketing school dot ioslash live that's alive to learn about our virtual and our live event, and we will see you tomorrow. We appreciate you joining us for this session of marketing School. Be sure to rate, review, and subscribe to the show and visit marketingschool dot io for more resources based on today's topic, as well as access to more episodes that will help you find true marketing success. Tax marketingschool dot io until next time. Class dismissed