Welcome to The WC — your weekly shot of awesome.
Today we’ve got:
- The $340 billion care industry
- Podcast biz ideas
- Two huge sports investment funds
- The ComicCon of sports
- The stupidest idea you’ve ever seen
Table of Contents
Does it pay to care?
My wife and I are part of what’s called the Sandwich Generation. That’s when you’re caring for
- Your kids – we’ve got three little boys
- Your parents – my mom lives downstairs from us, and Grace’s mum lived next door until she passed last month
It’s HARD, and 23% of Americans are doing it in some form or another. More than 60% of those people are stressed out by it.
A lot of people call in reinforcements in the form of carers — professionals who look after kids or aged parents.
But that’s fraught as well. According to the International Labor Organization, “care work across the world remains characterised by a void of benefits and protections, low wages or non-compensation, and exposure to physical, mental and, in some cases, sexual harm.”
Sounds awful.
So it’s not surprising an economy has sprung up around this.
According to Care, it’s a $340 billion industry. Lots of room here.
Marketplaces like Care match up caregivers and carers in a way that provides some transparency and a decent user experience. Prices are higher, just like if you used a similar service to find a housekeeper or dog walker, but it shows there’s money to be made here.
Google searches for “carer” are up 14% year on year, and related terms get nearly 500k searches per month — including 90k people looking for jobs as caregivers.
10,000 Americans turn 65 every day, and that number is only set to increase over the next decade.
This is a HUGE business.
By the way, I signed up for Care in Spain–one of 14 countries they cover–and they’ve suggested Teresa, who looks lovely.
What’s the deal with podcasts?
We’ve been kicking around the idea of bringing back the Alts podcast, because we’ve got a bunch of ideas we think our community would like:
- Stefan and I plus a guest or two talking about the Sunday edition topic (e.g. buying private islands, alternative sports, buying towns).
- A podcast version of the this newsletter with (probably) more swearing.
- A weekly wrap up of alts news in real estate, startups, crypto, the macro view, and more.
[If this is a thing you want, let me know so we can ping you when they go live.]
I’ve noticed two weird things while researching the idea.
Weird thing one – there aren’t any podcast affiliate programmes.
Growing a podcast that’s big enough to pay for itself is really hard. That’s the single biggest roadblock to us launching something.
First, the economics of a podcast.
Ignoring the value of my time (which is infinite, obvs) and fixed setup costs like a decent microphone and maybe a studio, it costs around $50 to edit each podcast.
Each podcast has three advertising slots: pre-roll (at the beginning), mid-roll (in the middle) and post-roll (guess where). Advertising rates, assuming you can find sponsors, differ by ad type:
- Pre-roll: $15 per 1,000 listeners
- Mid-roll: $30 per 1,000
- Post-roll: $10 per 1,000
Assuming you sell all the slots, you get $55 per 1,000 listeners. Just about breaking even, but I’m not sure it’s a good use of your time.
You need to get bigger, fast.
In the newsletter biz, there are affiliate programmes everywhere, and they’re easy. A few examples:
If we recommend you sign up to another newsletter, and you do it, we’ll get a couple bucks. If we want more subscribers, we can pay someone else a couple bucks. It’s easy.
But nothing like this exists for podcasts. I get that attribution is harder, but there must be a solution for this.
If you know of someone who’s doing this, or if you want to build it, let me know.
Weird thing two – podcasts don’t really do newsletters
My current pod backlog is around 600 episodes across eleven different shows. All stuff I’m super interested in but will never have the time to listen to.
But if all these did a regular newsletter that:
- Told me what the topic was and who the guest was
- Summarised the episode for me (not a transcript I don’t want to read a transcript)
- Included links to anything / everything they talked about
I’d probably read it! And possibly go listen to the episode. And maybe click links to their sponsors.
Does anyone do this well now? Do you have a podcast and want to run a newsletter as well? Let me know — maybe we can help.
[Remember, if you want an Alts podcast, let me know so we can ping you if / when it launches.]
Investing in sports
Sports is everywhere, and the venn diagram of people who like sports and people who like money is nearly a circle.
On Sunday, Stefan wrote about the world of alternative sports. Last week, I ripped the shit out of the pickleball (alleged) pyramid scheme.
We’ve got the Women’s World Cup kicking off tomorrow (at an insane time), and Wimbledon crowned its second youngest male singles champion three days ago.
Two monster sports investment funds were announced against that backdrop.
First, Saudi Arabia launched a multi-billion dollar sports investment fund
And more recently, 777 partners announced a $200 million fund to invest in global football (soccer) teams.
None of this includes sports cards, memorabilia, individual share agreements to buy a share of players’ future revenue, and so on.
I believe the global sports market is over $1 trillion. Not bad.
Are you an accredited investor? If so, I’ll add you to our private distribution list for off-market investment ideas.
ComicCon for sports
Speaking of sports investments and unreal amounts of money, $31 billion-valued Fanatics is looking to launch a “live events business … to create a sports version of Comic-Con”
From Fanatics CEO Lance Fensterman, “The launch of our new Fanatics Events business provides an opportunity to celebrate all aspects of fandom — including sports, collectibles, memorabilia, fashion, music and entertainment — under one physical roof in a way that has never been done before.”
Fanatics is partnering with IMG Events, which will give it a deep roster of available athletes.
What I don’t fully understand, and what’s not really been explained, is “how is this different to The National?” The National is the world’s biggest sports card and memorabilia show every year.
It features lots of the same sort of thing I would associate with a sporting Comic-Con. Events, personalities, music, etc etc.
Is the idea that Fanatics will do this except more? I think there is an argument to be made The National could use an upgrade, but details are light so far.
The worst idea yet
Earlier this year, Oura, which is like a Fitbit except it’s a ring, partnered with Slack to let everyone you work with know if you were having a terrible day.
You know, so they could avoid / haze / humiliate / pity you.
They thought it would work something like this.
Instead, I think it went something like this.
Oura / Slack / Common sense pulled the integration.
Undeterred, I hear Slack’s got a Flo integration in the works.
Seriously, though, if you do want to look after your employees and check on their workplace stress levels, try something legit like Ambr instead. It’s only like $7 a month per employee and you get 25% off code SWAP25.
There are lots of other resources out there like Remote Source as well.
That’s all for this week; I hope you enjoyed it.
Cheers,
Wyatt
Disclosures
- This issue was sponsored by One Call Capital. The links to Ambr, Remote Source, and Care were affiliates.
- Our ALTS 1 Fund doesn’t have a stake in anything here.
