Why Unicorns Are Imaginary!

Yes, the businesses and the creature

The Pyramid of Luxuries

The Bespoke - $4,000 Vacation + $1,000 VISA eGift Card

The Ultra High End - $200 Spring Cleaning Gift Card

The Superpremium - Fish Sauce Wings

The Premium Core - Solar Eclipse Glasses

The Accessible Core - Why Unicorns Are Imaginary!

The Affordable Luxury - BBQ Social

The Everyday Luxury - Thank You

The Bespoke

Click on the banner to enter The Bespoke Photo Contest. Click here for the Official Contest Rules.

• Prize: $4,000 Vacation Voucher + $1,000 in VISA eGift Cards [ARV $5,012]

• Odds: For every 660 Ducky Tran premium member by the time of judging, I will give out one (1) vacation bundle Prize

• Contest Period: February 28, 2024 at 10 AM CST to April 5, 2024 at 10 PM CST

See Issue 1 for more content about The Bespoke Prize.

The Ultra High End

Previous Contest Winner

The winner for Issue 16 is HUYEN from Arlington, Texas! Congratulations on winning the Atlas Coffee Club 6-Month Subscription. Here is her submission for “a picture of your favorite drink”:

You don’t have to worry; Atlas Coffee Club also has a tea subscription. Get ready to stay caffeinated for at least 6 months!

This Week’s Contest

Click on the banner to enter The Ultra High End Photo Contest. Click here for the Official Contest Rules.

• Prize: $200 Spring Cleaning Gift Card [ARV $206]

• Odds: For every 140 Ducky Tran premium members by the time of judging, I will give out one (1) gift card

• Contest Period: March 13, 2024 at 10 AM CST to March 19, 2024 at 10 PM CST

Spring is in the air! Fresh flowers, sunny days, and Easter bunny!

Allergies… weeds… chores… cleaning… life… maybe the warm, cozy winter socks and sweatpants weren’t so bad.

Don’t you fret! I’m going to make you love Spring again by giving out a $200 Spring Cleaning Gift Card for this week’s contest. You can use it to get supplies to do some Spring cleaning — but let’s be serious, you need to get that bod back into shape for the sunny days.

You can use it for a gym membership — but you also need to clean, you still have that grime from Thanksgiving and Christmas 2023.

You can use it for house cleaning service — but you also need to buy Easter eggs and candy for all the kids.

You can use it on eggs and jelly beans — but you also need… a lot of other stuff.

Whatever you use it on, this $200 Spring Cleaning Gift Card will at least make you feel like you attempted to clean your place… again… for the third year… yeah.

(I’m being sarcastic, kind of, if anyone didn’t notice.)

The Superpremium

This week’s Superpremium topic is Canh Ga Chien Nuoc Mam, or Fish Sauce Chicken Wings. If you haven’t had it, “fish sauce wings” sound pretty gross. However, these crispy, savory, and juicy wings are quite addicting and when I make it for my family, I make them at least 20 pounds each time.

That’s right, I’m going to be putting my recipe for Fish Sauce Wings. I don’t know if you know, but they’re kind of a big deal in the Tran family. Today you get the inside scoop, and hard labor that makes chicken wings — fishy.

Read the entire recipe before attempting it, and you can multiple it up to make larger batches.

THE CHICKEN

Ingredients:

• 2 lbs of chicken wings, split at joint, tips removed (optional)

• 3 qt of cold water

• ¼ cup salt

• 2 tbsp of white vinegar

• 1 tsp of grated ginger (I use pre-minced ginger)

• 2 tbsp of rice cooking wine (I use Michiu)

• 2 tsp of ground white pepper

• 2 tsp of garlic powder

• vegetable oil for frying

• ½ cup of cornstarch

Steps:

1. MOST IMPORTANT STEP! Put all the cut chicken wings in a large container. Mix in water, salt, and vinegar. Wash, drain, DO NOT RINSE. Pat wings dry with paper towel and set into another large, dry container. (You will use a lot of paper towels, don’t skimp)

2. In the large container with chicken, mix in ginger, wine, white pepper, and garlic powder. Make sure to mix well to coat all pieces. Marinate for at least 1 hour (I normally leave overnight).

3. SAFETY: Make sure that the pot you use to fry only puts the oil at most ½ full. Pre-heat oil to 375 degrees F.

4. Toss the marinated wings into the cornstarch and make to knock off all the excess four. (I use a strainer or colander to shake the excess off)

5. Depending on the size of your frying pot, fry in batches so your oil temp doesn’t drop too drastically. Fry for 10 minutes or until golden brown and crispy. (I time it exactly at 10 minutes every time and it works like a charm. Set in container with paper towel to drain.

THE SAUCE and TOPPINGS

• 6 tbsp of white sugar

• 4 tbsp of lime juice

• 4 tbsp of fish sauce

• 8 tsp of Thai chili peppers (I like it spicy, so adjust as needed)

• vegetable oil for frying

• 1 cup of chopped garlic (pre-minced garlic in jar with water saves time)

• 1 bunch of chopped cilantro

Steps:

1. Add sugar, lime juice, fish sauce and chili peppers in a pot and heat over medium heat. Whisk until sugar is dissolved, once it starts to boil remove from heat immediately.

2. SAFETY: If you use garlic in water, you must drain and dry with paper towels as much as possible or you will get major splatter. Pre-heat oil in frying pan on medium heat. Fry garlic until lightly brown. Remove garlic ASAP as it will still cook after removal. Place garlic on paper towels in a container to remove excess oil. (I normally fry in oil before the chicken but at 250 degrees F and use a mesh strainer to get it out, this makes it faster but can be tricky)

3. Put some fried chicken wings in a tossing bowl. Add as much sauce, fried garlic and chopped cilantro as you want. Toss, plate, and serve!

If you’re thinking it seems like hard work, because it is! Every step is key to the perfect texture and you’ll get the best results. Let me know how it goes and send me pictures if you decide to make these fishy wings!

The Premium Core

This week’s Premium Core topic is a Solar Eclipse Glasses. If you haven’t heard already, there’s a pretty big event coming up on April 8, 2024. There will be a total solar eclipse that day and people are traveling all over the country to see the event.

Many of us in Austin and DFW will be front and center as the path leads right through our cities. However, don’t be that person staring into the sun. You don’t have pain receptors in your eyes, so any damage may not be immediately obvious. So, to prepare you for this amazing event, I have a deal this week to prepare you and few friends for this momentous event.

Deal #1: I am offering up to four (4) FREE Solar eclipse viewing glasses for each member that emails me at [email protected] and let me know how many you want and the address you want me to send it to (if it is different from the Ducky Tran membership address). All the glasses will be mailed or delivered by March 22, 2024.

The Accessible Core

Why Unicorns Are Imaginary!

This week’s focus is financial wealth so I wanted to share some information on startup businesses that have valuations of over $1 billion dollars, known as unicorn companies. Unicorns are rare, they only make up of 1% of all startups and after 10 years only 0.1% of them survive. You may have heard of many of these such as SpaceX, OpenAI, Stripe, Canva, and SHEIN. Unfortunately, these are the few unicorns that are still alive, profitable and/or is still alive after 10 years.

Most unicorns aren’t as lucky. In 2023, about 3,200 private venture-backed companies around the world went out of business. With the most impressive ones being the highly-coveted unicorn companies. As a unicorn company, they normally have funds or being funded from $100M to $1B+. That’s right, at least 9 digits worth of money but more than 90% are failing in just 5 years. The crazy thing is nearly one-third of them fail because they run out of money!

An average modern startup, many times a unicorn company, spend on average $400K+ a month. Much of this is in staffing, advertising, and logistics. And based on this study of unicorn companies, most companies have a negative correlation between financial leverage and the growth of the company. Simply, as the business borrows more money, the growth of the company become less profitable. The crazy thing is nearly all funding in a unicorn company is leverage, or debt in the form of investment from private investors.

To not be completely negative about unicorns, I’ll list a few companies that generate $1B+ in revenue and is still alive and kicking:

1. Spotify

2. Uber

3. AirBnB

4. Tesla

5. Facebook

Notice something? Not all the traits can be described exactly since businesses are complex, but all successful unicorn companies like the 5 listed above have these in common:

1. Best in their industry (or extremely competitive regionally)

2. Unique business during a time when there was a need

3. Built a name that is synonymous with its service/product

4. Created a strong logistical base business model and clientele before expanding horizontally for additional revenue streams

Now, let’s get to the part some of you may be waiting for, list of a some of the most spectacular unicorn failures:

1. Theranos - funded with $500M: originally seen as the herald of new revolutionary blood testing technology, but failed due to exposure of technology claims being false and fraudulent.

2. Zume - funded with $446M: tried to revolutionize the robot pizza delivery process but failed due to technology. Also, I can get domino’s pickup in 10 minutes and delivery in 30 minutes, it’s too hard to compete with.

3. SideCar Technologies - funded with $36.3M: rival to the riding sharing companies but did not have the capital to scale like their billion-dollar counterparts Uber and Lyft.

These are just a few of the unicorn companies that have failed. There a thousands more and even more big businesses that aren’t unicorn companies that are bankrupting monthly.

So, what lesson can be learned from all this? Well, there’s a few so let me list some for you to ponder about:

1. Don’t be reliant on financial wealth alone to become stable and successful as many times just having a lot of financial wealth isn’t a great indicator on future growth, success, or value to others.

2. To succeed in business and in life, you must be adaptable, conscience of timing, establish a firm base to grow on, and never assume your novel idea will change the world or that you are the only one to have the same idea. It is about implementation and not the idea itself.

3. In business and life, when physical, mental, social and time wealth are healthy, it can generate great financial wealth; but the opposite is rarely ever true. And most of the time, it has a negative impact.

Let me know what you think about this topic and if you want to read more about these types of topics during the financial wealth focus weeks.

The Affordable Luxury

Issue 16 Community Poll Results

There was a strong return of members giving feedback this week and I’m very excited to see how the members will shape Ducky Tran moving forward. Here are the stats on last week’s poll:

1. When I asked if you would take $100K or give $200K to charity, the poll was split 50/50. I’m sure everyone has a great reason for either way, but I was just surprise it was split. I thought it was going to be skewed to one side.

2. Nearly everyone was prepared for a financial emergency or will have a way to deal with one. Good on everyone to have a plan in place.

3. I asked for new prompts for the photo contests and the members SHOWED UP! I got so many great prompts; I’ve already started to implement them. For the next few months, you’ll be seeing prompts suggested by members of the community and maybe you’ll see your own prompt.

This Week’s Community Poll

This week’s poll is dedicated on hammering down a BBQ Social! I’m sorry for those not in the area, unfortunately, most members are within DFW area so that’s where the first social will be held.

From previous polls we already know, it’ll be BBQ on a Saturday evening, so let’s get the other items:

The Everyday Luxury

(The referral program is only viewable on the email version of the newsletter.)

I just want to say thank you to everyone that has been supportive of my journey to creating a platform and community to share my thoughts and ideas with everyone. I hope this will be something I get to do for a long time. Please continue to spread the word about the community as we are still in our infancy and have a long way to go before we can truly provide all the benefits that it has to offer. I’m excited for the future and I hope to see everyone there. Thank you!

Visit shop.duckytran.com with the weekly password: spring