Just the facts: UberFacts goes analog

“On Amazon a couple of days ago, I know the number doesn't seem high, but it was number 9,000 on Amazon overall, which, I think Amazon has a total of 1.8 million titles. It was a pretty good spot to hit,” said Sanchez.

In 2009, as a bored college student and aspiring dancer in New Paltz, New York, Sanchez was killing time searching the internet for interesting, if useless facts, as students often do, when he got an idea to find and collect amazing facts and have them all in one, easy-to-find place. His Twitter feed posted sporadically until Sanchez decided to make his fact hobby his living, launching UberFacts officially in 2011. Since then, it has grown exponentially and garnered over 13.5 million followers on Twitter, with an app, Facebook, Instagram and Tumblr feeds, and Sanchez and his crew are now making a good living off “the most unimportant things you’ll never need to know.”

The book, however, is something Sanchez hopes will grow his business and his brand. So far, it has allowed him to do some radio and television interviews, which helps with brand recognition, and there may be a book tour in the works. The book was always a plan for UberFacts.

“There had been talks of doing a facts book for years. Ever since I hit 3 million followers I'd been talking about it. It wasn't until last summer that we actually got a book deal with a publisher and started to make it happen,” he said.

Success through Paris Hilton’s big feet

UberFacts has an amazing number of facts it has found, like:

• Studies show that swimming in cold water will make you hungrier than swimming in warm water
• Research shows that just thinking about a Plan B can make it less likely that you’ll actually achieve a Plan A.
• Generally, red chile peppers aren’t as hot as green ones because red peppers have more sugar in them, which helps to counter the heat.

It was a celebrity fact, though, that piqued Sanchez’s interest enough to pursue his unique line of fact-finding.

“I can remember one of the first ones that really caught my attention, which was that Paris Hilton wore size 11 shoes. She has really big feet,” he said. “I thought that was so weird. I wonder if there's more of this stuff on the Internet. Sure enough, there was.”

Since then, Sanchez and company have flooded their feeds with sometimes useless, yet interesting, facts, ranging from science to celebrity and everything in-between. With so many facts, his crew works overtime to confirm their validity, and he admits that occasionally they get it wrong.

“We've gotten much, much better. I'd say, probably starting three years ago when I hired staff and there were five people at one point who were all working on this. Finding content, making sure it was true. But it's sort of like every major news outlet today — we still get stuff wrong, but the percentage is way less,” he said.

The team gets it right enough to make plenty of money and keep interest high, with celebrities like the aforementioned Hilton, the Kardashian sisters, Aaron Paul, Roseanne Barr and Whoopi Goldberg as followers.

Furthering the brand

Sanchez and company make money for his LA-based company by building galleries and tweeting links.

“I work with publishers (Mental Floss, Distractify, etc.) that create content that's tailored to my audience and that content is hosted on other people's websites and I get paid based on how much traffic I send to those websites,” he said.

But Sanchez is looking to grow his empire of facts through television and perhaps a podcast.

“We're already working on producing a television show that's based around the content and the brand, so there's that. I've had an offer to do a podcast a couple of years ago. That's still a potential option. There are just so many ways to share this stuff. We're thinking more of a game show, unscripted-type deal. That's where we're at right now. That's our favorite idea, more of a game show,” said Sanchez, though he admits he wouldn’t want to serve as host, since he’s not “quick enough.”

After the book, he would like to keep growing the analog side of the business, even as his digital realm explodes.

“I would love to do more stuff offline. More books, the television show. It's done well online, but there's a different kind of magic I feel that can happen when it exists in the real world.”

While those things in the works continue to manifest themselves, Sanchez recalls one of his favorite weird facts.

“After a male bee has sex his testicles explode then he dies.”

We’ll just leave that there for you to ponder.