#187 - How Vending Machines are Generating Millions, The Next Big Social App & Ghost Kitchens For Gifts

There are entrepreneurs quietly generating six figures working part-time in the vending machine business. Others have been able to scale to multi-million and even multi-billion-dollar figures in the industry. Shaan (@ShaanVP) and Sam (@TheSamParr) break down the vending machine industry with tons of numbers and exactly how some are pulling it off. The guys transition from a "boring" business to high-tech ones as they break down how Vimeo went from a College Humor project to competing with YouTube and earning an $8b valuation. They also talk about a trendy new pod that generated 500k downloads on its first day and they brainstorm on a fun concept: ghost kitchens for gifts. --------- * Want to be featured in a future episode? Drop your question/comment/criticism/love here: https://www.mfmpod.com/p/hotline/ * Support the pod by spreading the word, become a referrer here: https://refer.fm/million * Have you joined our private Facebook group yet? Go to https://www.facebook.com/groups/ourfirstmillion and join thousands of other entrepreneurs and founders scheming up ideas. --------- Show notes: * (5:55) How Vimeo became an $8b company * (14:26) The next big social app? * (25:45) The millions to be made in vending machines * (41:35) Ghost kitchens for gifts * (53:00) Post-podcast free talk

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Sam Parr?

  So I like these like big things, software companies that can scale. But when I heard him describing this, I'm like, God, I want to get in on this. Like this is still like, you know what I mean?

• 0:20Shaan Puri?

  What's up? Sean here. We got Sam and today's episode, we're going to talk about a blue collar side hustle, AKA the hillbilly of the week, uh, which is a vending machine business. And Sam breaks down all the numbers behind it. We talk about this idea of creating the edible arrangements of DoorDash through ghost kitchens. We talk about the new hottest app in the app store, the number one app. AKA is this the next Snapchat? Is this the next clubhouse? We don't know. It's called paparazzi and I tell a story around that. And we talk about Vimeo, a, you know, business you've probably heard of, but may not realize that Vimeo is now a $8 billion business. And then at the end, we shoot the shit with Abreu and the new Abreu, Dan, and you get to meet him a little bit. So that's the last, I don't know, five, 10 minutes of the episode. All right.

• 1:05Shaan Puri?

  Great episode. Enjoy.

• 1:07Sam Parr?

  All right. What's up?

• 1:08Shaan Puri?

  Yo, you know what's funny? I put out that thing for, um, for merch designs and somebody had a great one. That was, all right. So the funny ones I thought were somebody made a yada, yada, yada shirt with your face on it. I thought that was funny. And then somebody made one that just goes, it's both of our faces. It's both our faces, like kind of illustrated. And it just says, Abreu, we good?

• 1:33Sam Parr?

  Wait, really?

• 1:34Shaan Puri?

  Which is what you say at the end of every episode.

• 1:36Sam Parr?

  Do I really?

• 1:37Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 1:38Sam Parr?

  I, uh, and then another guy, so Sean, we're, we're doing this meetup in Miami. Um, by the way, we

• 1:44Shaan Puri?

  Called it a meetup. I feel like that undersells it, right? Live show, we're going on tour. That sounds more badass than we're doing a meetup.

• 1:51Sam Parr?

  Well, yes, you're right. But there's two things going on here. The first, I was downplaying it because I frankly, I didn't know how many people are going to show up.

• 1:58Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 1:59Sam Parr?

  So we set the limit originally at 400. And then, uh, our venue now is changing. And so we don't, I don't know how many is going to seat.

• 2:07Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 2:08Sam Parr?

  So we cap it now at 335. That's how many RSVPs we have now. So if more open up, we're going to open it up. And I was doing it to like, Make it so if I fail, that would be okay. And also, so when you're talking about show, I know that you're, I think you're pretty comfortable on stage and you actually aspire to be kind of a professional comedian. I have no idea what we're actually going to talk about.

• 2:27Shaan Puri?

  We haven't even, we haven't even said a word to each other about what are we going to do there?

• 2:31Sam Parr?

  Yeah, so we'll figure it out, but basically the way it's working and we agreed to, as per usual, we agree to stuff without thinking it through. But basically, we have a thing in Austin at 6:00 PM on Thursday. That's probably going to end at 10:00 PM. And then we have a 7:00 AM flight. And I think that flight is going to land at 12:30 in Miami.

• 2:55Shaan Puri?

  These are the, these are the logistics people came to listen for.

• 2:59Sam Parr?

  Oh, and then, sorry, but anyway, it's just, we have a lot. We're going to be running a mile, a million miles an hour.

• 3:07Shaan Puri?

  You know what I thought was, would be a fun idea? I just thought about it actually while I was putting my contacts in before this. I go, what are we going to say on stage? What would be a good live show? Cause I was like, either we just do research and we just have like a fire episode where it's like, great ideas, great Billy of the week, great business breakdown. We could have that ready. I said, or we could do it, you know, like when you go to a comedy show and they fucking, they take your phone, they zip it up. So you're like, you can't record this. It's like, well, if they showed up live, what can we get them that's special that we can't just say on air? So I thought, maybe, I think each of us probably has a few business stories, war stories, that we could share that are entertaining, that you could do kind of in an off the record format.

• 3:51Shaan Puri?

  And I feel like we could put out five stories that we could tell about stuff, you know, or three, three or four stories at least, that could be entertaining about, you know, something, something, something that happened that is, you, you wouldn't just like, you wouldn't go publish a blog post about it because it's not necessarily the details you can't get out to everybody, but. In a trusted group of some of our, you know, biggest fans. I think that's cool.

• 4:15Sam Parr?

  A 400 person trusted group, but yeah, I think.

• 4:18Shaan Puri?

  Trusted group of strangers.

• 4:20Sam Parr?

  I think, I think maybe it might default to like Q and A, but we'll see.

• 4:26Sam Parr?

  It's gonna be weird. We're gonna, I've never, I've talked, I think the most amount of people I've ever talked in front of is 5,000 and that's not a big deal. I can do that all day. But never 5,000 people who came to see me just like rip. So that's gonna be weird. But we've got a lot of ideas and you want to get straight to it?

• 4:42Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, let's do it. Where do you want to start?

• 4:43Sam Parr?

  You want to actually start, the Vimeo one's not an idea. You have this cool thing about paparazzi or I don't actually know how you say it. That's actually a lesson. I want to start with Vimeo because there's no lesson here. I just thought it was cool. So Vimeo went public two days ago. So I didn't even know this until I saw the tweet. It was an awesome tweet about the woman was with her kid and saying like wishing her mom a good day's work. When it goes public.

• 5:08Shaan Puri?

  A good day's work to you.

• 5:09Sam Parr?

  Or you know, like.

• 5:10Shaan Puri?

  And you, child.

• 5:12Sam Parr?

  Like, good, good luck. It was like a three year old saying, you know, good luck as you ring the bell. I, I, I love that type of shit. And anyway, went public, but there's a background behind Vimeo. So do you use Vimeo? I use it all the time.

• 5:26Shaan Puri?

  I've, I've used it. I think everybody runs into Vimeo once in a while. I don't use it to upload unless I'm like, oh, I need a high quality kind of private thing. And I'm just surprised this company made it. It just seemed like Vimeo was dead. I think it literally died at some point, but they pivoted and made it actually into a great business. So tell me about it.

• 5:42Sam Parr?

  It never died. So it's always been like, kind of popular, like for a very particular type of person. I love watching it on my TV because I've got like a fancy TV and they have fancy videos, like high end videos. And they particularly have like weird stuff, weird music. They've got.

• 5:56Shaan Puri?

  What sort of fancy weird videos are you watching?

• 6:00Sam Parr?

  Like, like, like.

• 6:01Shaan Puri?

  Like nature stuff?

• 6:03Sam Parr?

  There's like, yeah, tons of nature stuff.

• 6:05Shaan Puri?

  Like men and women stuff? Like what are you watching?

• 6:07Sam Parr?

  Oh, like, like, like a drone flying around or something.

• 6:11Shaan Puri?

  Gotcha.

• 6:12Sam Parr?

  Or, or, you know, stuff that's like, it's just, it's kind of like, it's oddly entertaining. Or they'll have really unique art pieces, like an art video or, so it's very niche, but it's really neat. I love it. But the way it started is actually interesting. So. These guys, it was a guy named Ricky Van, I think his name's Ricky Van Bean. He started with a guy named Josh and a guy named Zach. Three of them, they were only 18 and they started this company called College Humor. And you know College Humor?

• 6:38Shaan Puri?

  Of course.

• 6:39Sam Parr?

  We're a similar age. If you're young and listening to this, you probably don't know it. But basically it was like-

• 6:44Shaan Puri?

  It was Buck Jerry, but before Instagram.

• 6:47Sam Parr?

  Exactly. Or Barstool Sports, but not sports.

• 6:50Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 6:51Sam Parr?

  And it was like a kind of a smutty, it wasn't smut, but it was like SNL online. And it was cool. And it was one of the first blogs and they started it and it got going. And they also had little side projects. These guys lived in New York. And they were just like your typical like 20 year old, cool New Yorker guy where they like, you would see their life and they would start little side projects. It was really fun. One of their side projects was a video uploading tool that they built because they were uploading videos before YouTube was around. And that was Vimeo. And Barry Diller, who we have to do a deep dive on, he's very fascinating. He started this company called IAC. They're pretty huge. They've owned Match.com, which they spun out to be its own business. They own Tinder. They own a ton of stuff, Angie's List. And anyway, he bought that for $20 million in 2006. And he's held it now for almost 15 years.

• 7:36Sam Parr?

  Vimeo, they spun it out. So what Barry Diller and IAC does is they buy these companies. They employ people to run them and they grow them, not like crazy fast, but they grow them. And then they spin them out to go public and it works often. And they went public recently. They bought this business for $20 million. It's now worth $8 billion. Is that crazy?

• 7:54Shaan Puri?

  That's insane.

• 7:55Sam Parr?

  Publicly traded worth $8 billion.

• 7:57Shaan Puri?

  By the way, if Vimeo is worth $8 billion, YouTube's worth what? 800? Like YouTube must be, YouTube is insanely more valuable than Vimeo. So that just seems a little off, right?

• 8:07Sam Parr?

  No, dude, Vimeo does like 400 or 500 or 600. It's like many, almost close to, it's half a billion-ish in revenue.

• 8:17Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, but YouTube has like 20 billion in revenue. It's crazy, right?

• 8:20Sam Parr?

  Yeah, well, I'm agreeing with you. YouTube should be worth a lot, but I don't think Vimeo is-

• 8:23Shaan Puri?

  So explain the niche. So Vimeo basically did what? They went, they sort of pivoted from consumers uploading videos to more like- Businesses or creative people, filmmakers, you know, type of people uploading videos, is that right?

• 8:35Sam Parr?

  Yeah, so if you want to upload a video and you want to upload it quickly and you want to upload it in the highest highest quality possible, you'll use Vimeo and you'll buy a creator's account. They also let you do some editing online that makes it a little bit easier. You can add some captions, things like that. You can have a, people will use it to like store their portfolio. And so what you'll see, if you go on there and you type in like nature, you'll see some video and like, then you'll see like, oh wait, this has, this is by Yeti. And it's Yeti hosting a lot of their cool videos that they'll pay a creator to make for them as like an ad and they'll, I don't know, actually know where they even display those videos other than Vimeo. But like you'll see, um, what's the coat company, what's the outdoors company that let my people go surfing? North Face, the North Face guy, like you'll see him fishing in a stream, telling like a story about the background of the company.

• 9:17Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 9:17Sam Parr?

  So it's a lot of outdoorsy, a lot of brand stuff. Pretty interesting. The niche, I don't actually know how to describe that niche, but it's kind of interesting. It's like, it's all people who want to have higher quality stuff than YouTube.

• 9:28Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 9:28Sam Parr?

  In terms of like resolution. And they also do a couple of things that they like goes against their culture. Like they don't have view counts. They don't have a sort by popularity thing. So it makes it a little bit easier to discover, to discover stuff that you normally wouldn't have seen.

• 9:41Shaan Puri?

  Well, it's, it's good by them because all the other video upload sites, whether it's like Daily Motion or like all those other ones. They all died, right? YouTube just, uh, YouTube, YouTube took over. It ate, it ate everybody up and Vimeo squirted away and found a niche that works for them that is actually like a eight billion dollar niche, right? It ended up, it ended up working out and not like a, oh, that's a lifestyle business kind of way. So, you know, props to them because I don't think this was the, I don't think this was what most people would have bet was that would be the outcome. Once YouTube started growing like it did.

• 10:14Sam Parr?

  So the company, Vimeo has 200 million users. So 200 million people a month, I believe, go and use them. And also they have 1.6 million paying subscribers. So pretty substantial. Um, another company that I didn't put on here, but is killing it in video. Do you remember Weebly?

• 10:30Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 10:31Sam Parr?

  The website maker? Oh, sorry. Not Weebly. What's the other one? So it's the W. Wix. W- Wistia. Wistia, yeah. You know, Wistia? So Wistia is in the same thing. So Wistia is kind of an interesting company. They also started in 2006. And they were based out of Boston and they raised a shit ton of money, built this business to be like 30, 40, 50 million recurring revenue. And then they bought out their shareholders. They raised money from PP, uh, from KKR, the PE company and bought out their investors. I bet you that company could be potentially worth a billion dollars as well. Um, but they're kind of doing something similar.

• 11:01Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. You know, when, uh, last episode I had this thing or, or not the Mark Lor one, but the one before that where I said, you know, one of my, one of my learnings that one of the counterintuitive things that I learned is never underestimate these mega trends, uh, even when you feel like you're late, you're early. Um, and there's another version of that, which is even when you, even when your niche, you're big with, with a mega trend. And so, uh, Mark Zuckerberg came out, I don't know when it was. I, I didn't start using this term mega trend until I heard Zuck use it, I think five years ago, when he goes, video is a mega trend. I thought, oh, that's interesting. Facebook's not even at that time. Facebook wasn't even about video. They hadn't launched watch. The feed was mostly photos and text updates.

• 11:44Shaan Puri?

  And, but they see everything, right? Facebook knows what's going on on the internet. They know exactly where all the opportunities are, whether they can capture them or not. And for video, I thought, huh. What does he mean by mega trend? And I think what it means is like mobile, like the internet, like now video, social, these were, um, there were like trends of trends. Uh, meaning like they were going to transform basically every space. And so you saw that, we saw this with video. All of a sudden newspapers or, you know, the kind of the meme in for media companies was we're pivoting to video, right? Um, which is like, you used to write articles and now you produce videos.

• 12:23Shaan Puri?

  Um, you know, same thing happened with, with Instagram, as you know, more and more Instagram content shifted from photos to videos, either through stories or posts or now like reels or TikToks. And so video just has just eaten up more and more share of people's attention and what the internet is used for. And I think that that's pretty, pretty fascinating. And I think this is a good example of video is such a big mega trend that even being the niche, kind of like, The, the video uploading site for creative makers, hobbyists, fishermen and photographers is like boom, $8 billion. You know, 8 billion dollar company if you end up winning that space, that niche. And so, yeah, just another example of do not underestimate a mega trend.

• 13:04Shaan Puri?

  Don't think you're, don't think you're late when it's a mega trend and don't be afraid of going niche. Cause even the niches are big with mega trends. I would say today's mega trends, my personal bets are that today's mega trends are anything that's actually real in machine learning or AI. As well as crypto. I think those are the two mega trends that are happening right now.

• 13:24Sam Parr?

  Speaking of mega trend, something happened the other day. An app like went crazy viral and you kind of have an insider story of it.

• 13:32Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, a little bit. Okay. So there's this app. So I'll, I'll tell you kind of my, my, my learning here. Friend, a friend of the pod, actually he's never come on, but one of our friends or I don't know if you know him very well. This guy Nikita Beer, he, he's an entrepreneur. His company was TBH, got acquired by Facebook for a hundred million dollars in a really crazy way. They basically were grinding, trying to build like social products, like, you know, the next, the next Twitter, the next Snapchat for a while, many years. And we're just getting really, really smart about it, learning a bunch of stuff, but never hitting the home run. And I think about a few months before they ran out of, ran out of money. They just threw, you know, they were either going to wind it up, just all right, let's all go get jobs or, you know, get, get Aqua hired somewhere.

• 14:17Shaan Puri?

  They, they threw one last attempt and they made this app called TBH and it went viral amongst high schoolers. It was like a app where you're kind of like answering questions or polls about your friends, you know, who's most likely to blah, blah, blah. Or who is your favorite person about blah, blah, blah. And then it was a place to go, you know, kind of post like a social network for high schoolers. Took, takes off, Facebook buys it for, I think a hundred million bucks was the reported price.

• 14:43Sam Parr?

  How was that? How do you think that deal was structured? A hundred million dollars for an app that doesn't like, it's brand new.

• 14:49Shaan Puri?

  I have no idea. Obviously it was an overpay month, you know, months later, TBH shut down, uh, you know, no longer, it was kind of a fad, right? It didn't have legs, uh, they shut it down and they kept, you know, some, most of the talent. And so anyways, he's been there for a little while. So he tweets out.

• 15:07Shaan Puri?

  When the App Store refreshes, there's a new king. 500,000 installs on day one. All right, you got my attention. I'll bite. What is it? And people start speculating what it is. And I thought sort of I sort of do some internet digging. And and I find out, okay, there's this app called paparazzi. So have you seen what the app is? The app is called paparazzi. It's currently the number one app in the App Store. It's had over a million installs and I think less than a week. Their their waitlist, basically, they were a test flight app, which is like how you give it to like beta testers. It's not even in the App Store. Their test flight app went viral. And so they had half a million people ready and waiting to download the app.

• 15:50Shaan Puri?

  As soon as so they just they just rushed it onto the App Store and bang, they hit the number one. I think they're still number one on the free charts above Snapchat, above TikTok, above Facebook, above above everybody. And, okay, so what is paparazzi? And by the way, paparazzi has almost the same story as TBH. These guys have been working on this for a while.

• 16:11Sam Parr?

  They like three years, I think.

• 16:13Shaan Puri?

  Years. Yeah, they were just kind of grinding away in a small team. I think they're in LA and

• 16:18Sam Parr?

  Two brothers.

• 16:19Shaan Puri?

  They they almost got acquired or kind of aquahired for single digit millions of dollars like, you know, a couple of the big social networks were talking to them. They could have took that, you know, they would have made probably, you know, a million bucks, two million bucks amongst themselves if they did it. But they said, all right, fuck it. YOLO, one more try. They released this new app paparazzi and it hits. And it hits big. And so we'll see if this is gonna last, right? Know who social lapses could be like a TBH could be like a clubhouse. It could be the next Snapchat, right? That's the thing with social lapses. They all start sort of start up, start out looking the same. They look kind of silly. They sound kind of dumb. And then, you know, you fast forward a year and then, you know, some people are proven

• 17:03Shaan Puri?

  right. I told you that was dumb. It faded away. And then for some people like me, my, my, you know, I think I was right about Clubhouse, my famous Clubhouse prediction. I think it's being proven right. You know, their, their downloads went from like 1 million to 4 million to 10 million and then back to 2 million, 1 million, half a million, right?

• 17:20Sam Parr?

  Do you have intel? Are you, are you right?

• 17:22Shaan Puri?

  I mean, the download numbers would tell the story that I'm right so far now. But when I was saying it, it looked like this thing was going to take off. They just had 10 million downloads in a month, which is insane. Now it looks like I'm right. But of course, it could turn around. You know, maybe they could, uh, maybe they could prove me wrong. But

• 17:40Sam Parr?

  How did this one app get, get popular?

• 17:42Shaan Puri?

  So, uh, so I don't know exactly how, how it got popular. It was very cleverly architected, the way their sort of flow works to get you to invite friends. But I think there was just like a novel hook with this. So why is it called paparazzi? It's called paparazzi because on every other social network, you post about yourself, right? I go post on Instagram. I post a photo from my camera that I took about me and my life. And if I post a story, same thing. Paparazzi is just like the name sounds. It's other people taking pictures of you, which is kind of funny, right? So like, your profile is not pictures you upload about yourself, which tends to be you kind of in a manicured setup environment, making yourself look good. With paparazzi, it's other people taking pictures

• 18:23Shaan Puri?

  of you. And that sort of is like a photo tag onto your wall. And so your whole profile is just pictures that other people took of you and you can sort of like, accept them or deny them if you don't like the photo or whatever. And so that creates a cool dynamic where now you're getting people in more candid shots because it's other people taking photos. And which makes the content more interesting. It's more raw than what you're getting on, on Facebook. It's more raw than what you're getting on Instagram. It's even more raw than what, what Snapchat was, which this is the game Snapchat played on Facebook. Snapchat was more raw and candid because the photos disappeared. So people, they had less of a filter on what they posted. But still, they wanted to, you know, post a certain type of thing that made themselves look good. This is even more raw than Snapchat. It's

• 19:07Shaan Puri?

  even more candid. It's content that wouldn't have made it to Snapchat, makes it onto paparazzi, which is what makes it interesting. Now you're getting new shit shared that you wouldn't have otherwise got. So that's the premise of it. What do you think of this?

• 19:19Sam Parr?

  Never in a million years that I've thought this was going to work. And I can't decide if I just have bad taste or if I'm old.

• 19:27Sam Parr?

  Is that the app?

• 19:27Shaan Puri?

  I'm opening the app. There's like a hype video.

• 19:29Sam Parr?

  Do you?

• 19:30Shaan Puri?

  Which is cool. More apps should do that. They should have like a trailer, like instead of a boring onboarding. This thing is playing me like, I want to play the music.

• 19:39Shaan Puri?

  It's like, let's get it popping. And then there's pictures of all these like cute boys and girls. My phone is literally vibrating. It's like, that's the most excitement an app has ever shown me.

• 19:48Sam Parr?

  So do you, but when you were looking at this, did you think that this, so I get that it's popular now and it's easy to say, yeah, I get it, but.

• 19:57Shaan Puri?

  No, I would have never predicted this, right? Like, okay, you would have told me, I'd been like, huh, that's clever. But still, probably not going to fucking work, right? Like, it seems so unlikely for anything to just like, hit like this is so unlikely and it's not the expected things. So you sort of by default, you sort of, you don't imagine that this would hit. Same thing with Clubhouse. I was like, oh, that's cool. I've seen a bunch of things like that. I don't really see why this one will go viral, but it did. And so it's very hard to predict with social, even, I spent like maybe like five, six years of my life trying to build social stuff. I knew everybody in the space. I tried so many different things. So I would say I'm not like a novice to this stuff, but it's very, very hard to predict. And our friend Jack Smith says this best. He goes,

• 20:41Shaan Puri?

  if you look at even the guys who invested in Snapchat or WhatsApp or whatever, they go and they struggle. Okay, Sequoia, the best venture fund that's ever existed, basically. They invest in WhatsApp. They invested in every single round of WhatsApp. They led every round, which was a genius move. So when it exits for 19, 20 billion bucks, they were huge winners out of that. Cool. Guess what they also invested in? Yik Yak, a social product that died. Whisper, a social product that died, right? Like they have a graveyard of other things they tried that didn't work out. And I don't know if those are the exact ones that they invest in, but they have a bunch. And so Jack pointed out, he's like, if even the best guys who have had the home runs. Have a bunch of swings and misses with social. It just shows how hard it is to like correctly predict social before it plays out.

• 21:24Sam Parr?

  I have a friend who, who, who was in the seed stage. A friend of a friend, he was in the seed stage of Robinhood and a whole bunch of other stuff. And probably worth multi-billion, oh for sure worth multi-billion. And someone was asking him about social apps and about consumer stuff. And he goes, honestly, if the person's competent, maybe do it. But really it's just gambling and I have no idea which one's gonna work. He said, he goes with B two B stuff, I can kinda like, I can look at some stuff. I'm like, okay, I understand you can, you can, you can, the likelihood that you can make this at least a mild success is quite high. But with social and some basic consumer stuff, it's just, I'm just rolling dice and I, I have very little confidence in any of it.

• 22:06Shaan Puri?

  So the, the beautiful thing about social, like who, it's like, who would try this, right? Like, cause you're right, it's so hard to predict. If you're a great entrepreneur and you go into this space, you're intent, you're going to a casino and you're saying, all right, my odds at the craps table are, you know, 51, I'm a 49 to one, 49 to 51 underdog blackjack, I'm 49 to 51. Oh, you have, you know, whatever, Chinese backgammon over here? Okay, I'll go play Pai Gow. I'm gonna go play Pai Gow even though the odds are, you know, 80% chance of loss. It's like, why do you do that? Because it's A, it's fun. And B, when you get social right, you're the fucking king of the universe, right? Like, it's like, yeah, my app is the one that's used by like a billion people every day of their life.

• 22:51Shaan Puri?

  Their whole social scene is on here. They use it with their mom, their friends, their, their girlfriend, boyfriend, whatever. And so it just hits different when you hit social. And that's, that's why I love even talking about things that are social that hit because it's a rare type of game that you kinda have to be a madman to go play.

• 23:06Sam Parr?

  So let me bring up something that's the total opposite of this, which is you don't have to be a madman. And, and the likelihood that it's gonna succeed is incredibly high, but it may not be like a huge winner.

• 23:19Shaan Puri?

  Okay.

• 23:20Sam Parr?

  Just with that information, do you know where I'm going with this?

• 23:23Shaan Puri?

  I see vending machines on our thing and I think that a vending machine business is probably the most predictable, simple, understandable, guaranteed type of business you could do. Is that what you're going to?

• 23:32Sam Parr?

  Yes, so these two folks came to me and they pitched this idea, they're raising money for it. It's a vending machine business for, it basically is mostly female products, so tampons and stuff in bathrooms. And oddly enough, I had another guy email me a deck about a vending machine business and I'm not going to do that one, but this first one was kind of intriguing. They've got some traction, they're making money. It's kind of intriguing. And I started doing some research and I tweeted out, who knows everything about, who's the person you need to talk about vending machine? It got a ton of traction for some reason and I think it's a lot of people are interested in this. This guy named Quinn Miller reached out to me and I did a call with him this morning. Very fascinating. He worked, and I just want to bring this up because this is the exact opposite of what we were just talking about.

• 24:14Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 24:14Sam Parr?

  But it's oddly as compelling and as interesting, even though it's the two totally different parts of the world. So this guy, he's 27, he worked in software sales, he quit about a year ago to start this business. He's got a vending machine business and he gave me all of his numbers and he said I could reveal it. So he's about 10 months into the thing. He's currently doing $15,000 in monthly revenue and he's doing that across 27 machines. His startup cost for $600, $500 or $400 to buy a machine and $200 to fix it and move it to the place where it had to go.

• 24:46Shaan Puri?

  By the way, this is our weekly blue collar side hustle. This is the perfect blue collar side hustle, yeah.

• 24:52Sam Parr?

  So on the 15,000 in revenue, 65% is profit. So he's doing around $97, $9800 a month in profit so far. Total investment into the biz so far, after he already bought his first machine, has been $50,000. Time involvement per week relatively high, 20 hours a week because he's actually delivering all the stuff. I asked him all about it, I was like, how does this work? Because the reason I reached out to this guy was I was like, hey, there's this like tampon startup, it kind of looks interesting. What's your tampon vending machine startup? What's your opinion? And he goes, yeah, I mean, I obviously don't know anything about that, like too much, but basically my opinion is the world, he goes, America runs on coke and Monster Energy drink. And I was like, what do you mean? He goes, let me, let me explain. So I put these vending machines.

• 25:36Shaan Puri?

  I love that.

• 25:37Sam Parr?

  I buy.

• 25:38Shaan Puri?

  So let's slow down. So the guy basically buys vending machines like you and I are used to, just a snack vending machine, nothing, nothing innovative there?

• 25:44Sam Parr?

  Well, he does one. Quote innovative thing. He puts a, he installs a credit card machine on him for about 250 bucks. You can get a credit card.

• 25:52Shaan Puri?

  Okay, so he gets a vending machine. He says, all right, people aren't carrying quarters, so I'm going to take cards. He puts them, uh, he puts them, so he buys each machine, you said, for 500 bucks?

• 26:01Sam Parr?

  The first one was 500. He has 27 machines with 50K. So whatever that math is. So what's that?

• 26:07Shaan Puri?

  Two, 2K a machine roughly?

• 26:09Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 26:10Shaan Puri?

  Okay, so he buys a thousand to $2,000 machine. He puts it in places like what? Office building, apartment?

• 26:15Sam Parr?

  Yeah, so he cold calls, uh, lower income hotels, uh, motels, assisted living places and, and, uh, low income apartments. So sorry, low income apartments dash or comma motels, comma assisted living places.

• 26:31Shaan Puri?

  Okay, great. And so he, he goes and he basically says, hey, put this here and he, there's a revenue split or he pays rent? How does that work?

• 26:37Sam Parr?

  So, most of these businesses, the way that they work is they give 10% to 20% to the real estate folk.

• 26:44Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 26:44Sam Parr?

  Uh, this guy, he goes, I actually, because I sold software, I'm pretty good at sales and I do what's called a value sell. And he goes, basically, I say, look, your tenants are, are, if I just improve your tenant experience by just a small percent, maybe you're going to make more money because someone will want to stay or want to rent here.

• 27:01Shaan Puri?

  He gives them nothing.

• 27:02Sam Parr?

  He gives them nothing. So he keeps, and so he's got a bunch of machines in like 10 different locations. And he just cold calls them. And then it's so unsophisticated. Where does he get his stuff? Costco. So he buys a can of Coke from Costco for 33 cents and he charges a dollar for it.

• 27:17Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 27:17Sam Parr?

  Uh, and it's very simple. Uh, not complicated at all.

• 27:21Shaan Puri?

  By the way, my grandfather used to have a vending machine. So this was probably the first business I ever encountered was, I think I was probably five years old and my parents, you know, they worked. So my dad would work in an office building and he needed me to be babysat. But then like, you know, old people also kind of need babysitting. So my dad went for a two for one. He basically bought or rented out a, a, a little, like, kind of like a corner store inside, like a, like a little deli inside of the, uh, office building. And, um, and then my, my grandfather ran it and we used to go like work the register at the age of, you know, seven. Um, and he was like, baby C, baby C, he, basically he occupied his grandparents and his kids without having to like, do any, pay for any like caretakers. In fact, it made a little bit of money.

• 28:05Shaan Puri?

  And then my grandfather had this vending machine that we used to go and do this exact refill. We would go to Costco, buy the Cokes, put it in, he would collect a bag of like change. And then we would like go to the bank and like exchange the change. And I remember being like, what is this? He had one vending machine as his business.

• 28:22Sam Parr?

  It sounds awesome. And I asked the guy, by the way, this guy's name is Quinn Miller. I'll give him a shout out, Quinn Miller. I asked him, I go, how big can this get? He goes, look, I'm not trying to be offensive or anything, but the operators of these businesses typically are pretty hillbilly. And so they're pretty unsophisticated, which doesn't mean they're dumb. They're just not sophisticated in terms of like technology or anything like that. And they like, there's a low key, easy life. He goes, but I met a guy in Palm Springs who had about 1,600 machines. And he was making anywhere from five to 10 million in revenue with about half in profit.

• 28:54Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 28:54Sam Parr?

  And I was like, wow, that's pretty amazing. How else can it get big? Like, what else is big? And he said that there's a company called Canteen and I looked it up. I, I think it's public. Uh, but they do like 15 billion in sales of this and they're the largest vending machine company in America.

• 29:08Shaan Puri?

  They operate them.

• 29:10Sam Parr?

  Yeah. And they do distribution. So the thing is, is like what this guy does, Quinn, he, he finds, he finds his route. So he finds a route. So he's like, all right, if I go from destination A to B, it's a straight line. I'll do everything in between. And so I try to find locations on the way. So one truck can do all of it in a, in an easy, short amount of time. And he's like, I'm very specific about where I choose. And that's where you make a lot of money is you can be very efficient with your time. And so basically that's what he does. And he said, this company, Canteen, just does that on a huge scale. And they're ultimately at the end of the day, a logistics company and a bit of a supply chain company. But at this point, Quinn told me, he was like, I rented a small warehouse now because I'm getting so much freaking coke. He goes, the reason I like doing that, and so back to tampons, he goes, you have to like, look at what the repeat purchase rate is.

• 29:53Sam Parr?

  He goes, if I go to like a lower income area, these folks love Coke and love Monster to the point that one guy will drink five Cokes today. I'm getting five dollars from them. You have to ask yourself, can you get that for tampons or, or other products? And he goes, in fact, a lot of the vending guys, once they move from Coke and Monster Energy, they're starting to go into what's called honesty market. So basically at a WeWork, you know how they like, you swipe your credit card and you only take one sandwich for eight dollars?

• 30:16Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 30:16Sam Parr?

  He's like, that's where the money is right now.

• 30:18Shaan Puri?

  Huh, that's interesting. And yeah, that's, it's almost like there's whales for the vending machine. It's not like everybody buys one every three days. It's like, one guy drinks nine cokes a day, or you know, four Red Bulls, you know, a week. And that's where you make your money is on the like 10% of the of the residents who buy like 90% of the goods or something like that, probably.

• 30:41Sam Parr?

  Yeah, this guy was interesting, man. He's only 27. He's the, lives in San Diego, worked in tech sales. He told me that, he goes, like, basically, I'm a, he goes, I'm pretty, I was pretty good at selling software. I'm not the best, but I'm pretty good. And this industry that I went into, they're just kind of not that great at that many stuff. And I could outsell relatively easily. I could kind of outwork relatively easily. And so, anyway, fascinating story.

• 31:07Shaan Puri?

  So you know, we have the Billy of the week. I think this needs to be the hilly of the week. It's the hillbilly business. That's actually, that's actually great. So Quinn Miller, you are the hilly of the week. Congratulations. I love this business. So just to summarize, buy the thing for a thousand bucks, cold call, you know, apartment complexes, motels, hotels, you know, lower income, the better, I guess, is the way that this market works. And then you're trying to generate, he's generating off of, what'd you say, 50, 50 machines?

• 31:41Sam Parr?

  27.

• 31:42Shaan Puri?

  27, off of 27 machines, he's generating about 100 to 120 K of profit a year. And so that's, you know, that's the business. And then what's the work? It sounds like it could be easily, you know, delegated, but sounds like he wants to do it, keep his margins, which is you go, you buy the stuff wholesale, and then you stock all the the machines on some regular cadence, and you collect, you know, the payments on the other side. So that's.

• 32:05Sam Parr?

  I was so fascinated. So like, I get, when people call me a tech guy, I'm like, not really. I worked in publishing, like I'm a publisher. But I guess, compared to someone who works in vending machine, I am a tech guy. And so I like these, like, big things, software companies that can scale. But when I heard him describing this, I'm like, God, I want to get in on this. Like, this is still, like, you know what I mean?

• 32:26Shaan Puri?

  Totally.

• 32:27Sam Parr?

  It's like, we just got done talking about paparazzi and how this young guy named Nikita, who sold an app for a hundred million dollars to Facebook and is probably 26 years old. Baller. Like, you'll die a billionaire if you just breathe. Okay? That's it. But then I hear this shit about this guy who spent 50 grand and is gonna make a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year in profit. And I'm like, fuck yeah, sign me up. Let's get into this. So I think it's kind of interesting. I like hearing about it.

• 32:53Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, whatever floats your boat. You know, I, okay, let's do some quick, like, other ideas or other brainstormings. So I think, first of all, I'll say, the beauty of this is that you don't need to come up with a genius twist on it. You just do the same thing in your local market and it would work. Okay, so that's, that's cool. But if you were gonna do a twist, right? Like, I, I like to dabble in ideas. So let's, let's come up with some ideas. Here's a couple that I think might be interesting as twists. You mentioned the honesty market. What do you call it? Honesty market?

• 33:22Sam Parr?

  That's what he called it. Yeah.

• 33:23Shaan Puri?

  So I've seen this at big companies, they do this, like at the Adobe office, I remember they did this, which is like, there's a bunch of sandwiches in a thing, you take it out and you pay and nobody's watching you, so there's no labor cost. And they just hope that you're not gonna steal shit. And that works in certain types of like, high-end places. You said WeWork, things like that. Okay, I think that's cool. So maybe there's an out, maybe there's an opportunity there. What about subscription? So if you're taking my credit card and you got this vending machine, how do you get me with saying, hey, you could buy this one right now, you could buy this one can of Coke for a dollar, but for, you know, six dollars a week and get unlimited Coke, right? You can get unlimited

• 34:03Shaan Puri?

  vending machine swipes. And, and you basically set up a recurring revenue business off of the residents in the, in the place. And, you know, it's like a breakage model, so you, you know, they just can't empty you out and-

• 34:16Sam Parr?

  Dude, I think that's the move. But you're wrong. It's not unlimited.

• 34:20Shaan Puri?

  No, no, it's capped, right? But the machine caps you. It's like, oh, hey, it's user, whatever. I don't know how they would know that you're, you're you. I guess that's a little bit of a tricky one. You'd have to swipe your card every time, which feels bad.

• 34:31Sam Parr?

  You just need like a MetroCard, you know, like a, like a, like a MetroCard or like-

• 34:35Shaan Puri?

  Exactly. You need a ClipperCard or whatever, where you basically get a certain amount.

• 34:38Sam Parr?

  So the question is this. If someone's gonna, if you're gonna spend, so when I lived in college, I had a vending machine. Would I spend thirty dollars a month on that vending machine? I think yes. I think I did.

• 34:48Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 34:49Sam Parr?

  I think I did.

• 34:50Shaan Puri?

  We had snaples and I couldn't resist.

• 34:51Sam Parr?

  Right. So then the question is, you just have to ask yourself, are you willing to give up 15% of your revenue in order to give the customer a discount if they pay upfront?

• 35:00Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, but you know, I think it works both ways. So you get two benefits. One is they prepay. So you float all the money that way and you're able to like cash flow the business better. The second thing is not everybody's going to maximize the value. So there's like a breakage model where some people use the full amount.

• 35:20Shaan Puri?

  Great. And, you know, if 30% of people don't max out, that's just free money for you that you didn't have to spend it, spend a dime on. And easily, you know, most of, I think this is the ugly side of most subscription businesses is that people don't use the subscription. They just don't remember, they don't cancel. They're either too lazy or they forgot. And you sit here thinking you have all these happy customers. And in reality, go look at your usage numbers. How happy are they if they haven't used you in a, you know, year and a half and you're just charging their card? And so that's the truth about subscription businesses. Why people love them is because the people said it and forget it. And, uh, and so, yeah, I think the same thing would happen here. All right. So that's another idea. Last one else I'll bring up with this vending machine thing is I'm buddies with the guy who started LifeAid. He came on the podcast. They have

• 36:05Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I remember that.

• 36:05Shaan Puri?

  FitAid, PartyAid, you know, RecoveryAid, whatever, SleepAid, whatever, whatever they are. They have a bunch of different drinks. I'm like addicted to FitAid. It's like my whole mini fridge in my gym here is stocked with them. And he got his break by giving, he, he basically went to CrossFit gyms and he said, Hey, CrossFit, you don't have a mini fridge? Um, I will give you a free mini fridge and a case of FitAid. Here you go. You know, here's a $79 mini fridge and a case of FitAid. Try it out. Give it to your people. Let me know what they think. And if they like it, or if you like it, and you guys making a little bit of income off this, just give me a call back or, you know, I'll send you a second case next month. Um, and so this is how he grew the brand was through

• 36:46Shaan Puri?

  the CrossFit, um, the CrossFit Gym Network. And specifically with this idea that they didn't have fridges. So they didn't have a vending machine. They didn't have a fridge. They couldn't have a vending machine because you can't be CrossFit and then sell Kit Kat bars. That doesn't work. And but what you could do is you could make the The post-workout machine, you could put it in every gym. What's in the post-workout machine? It's Gatorade, Propel, it's, you know, FitAid, it's all the-

• 37:12Sam Parr?

  Who did that?

• 37:13Shaan Puri?

  All the, no, I'm just saying you could do this. This is idea. And then you have like, you know, I mean, the BCAAs, like the branched-chain amino acids you should take post-workout as a little supplement. You know, you could have hydrant for your hydration needs. So you could put a whole bunch of post-workout stuff that people take, protein powders, protein premixed drinks. You could put it all in a vending machine and put it in gyms. They could have a similar model.

• 37:35Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I think that could work. I would, I don't know actually what the margins are on health food versus a Coke. I imagine they're the same, to be honest. But I'm into it. I think that those honesty market things, I bet, works shockingly well.

• 37:48Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I remember when we were doing the sushi restaurant, we met the guys who started, like, I don't know, Panera or something like that. And Panera Bread was doing this, actually, I think in St. Louis, they opened up the first-

• 37:59Sam Parr?

  Yeah, they're from St. Louis.

• 38:00Shaan Puri?

  The first, like, pay-what-you-want restaurant. So, pay-what-you-can, I think is what they called it at the time, which is like, anybody could go and you could eat, and you just pick what you want. And at the end, it says, pay whatever you want. The average person pays $12. And what he said was that the average ticket price in that restaurant was higher than their normal ticket, than their normal restaurants where they have fixed prices. You would think, oh, people are going to scam you and cheat you. Anybody says it's a bell curve. 20% of people go over, 20% of people go under, and most of the people pay the exact same, you know. But when you look at how the exact numbers break down, it's a little bit higher because people eat more. And, because they feel like they're getting a deal. And the customers were happier because they didn't, you know, it's a kind

• 38:43Shaan Puri?

  of like a feel-good story. So I thought that was kind of interesting. Then again, I also, when he was talking, I was like, this sounds a little bit like PR. So I'm gonna like, discount what you're saying by like, 30% here.

• 38:54Sam Parr?

  I might do this for fun.

• 38:57Shaan Puri?

  Do what?

• 38:58Sam Parr?

  I might do this vending.

• 38:59Shaan Puri?

  The vending machine thing? I think it's, I think it's a great idea. I think you should do it as the, uh, just basically build it in public for the podcast. I think you should, you should basically give us updates on how the vending machine business is going.

• 39:09Sam Parr?

  I think I will. I think I'm gonna do it.

• 39:11Shaan Puri?

  I love it.

• 39:11Sam Parr?

  I think this is a fun, fun weekend thing. You want to talk about one more thing? You want to do a ghost kitchen for gifting?

• 39:16Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, so, um, so it was my trainer's birthday yesterday or two days ago. And I was like, ah shit, want to get him something? What do I get him? Right? And so I was like, okay, I'm not great at buying gifts. Buying gifts is like a huge pain in the ass. I'm a procrastinator. So like today is his birthday. So I can't like order something online. It's not going to arrive. It's going to clearly be like, I ordered this on your birthday. It's going to arrive three days later.

• 39:40Sam Parr?

  That's fucked up.

• 39:42Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, that's who I am. I'm fucked up, right? Like, that's just the reality of the situation. And so I was like, okay, well, what do I do that? What can I do now that will like arrive today? And how do I be a good friend? Who's also a lazy bastard? And so my go to recently has just been, I just surprise order people Postmates or Uber Eats stuff. Like, I'll just like, I'll just order, you know, like two, two Jamba juices to somebody's house. And they're like, uh, and I'm just texting, be like, hey, uh, they think, you know, there's something for you outside. And they're like, what? And they go and they pick it up or they, you know, the person rings the doorbell and says, hey, this is for you. And people love this shit. Uh, it happened to me, somebody on my birthday, instead of giving me a birthday gift, they just ordered me food from one of the restaurants that I like.

• 40:27Shaan Puri?

  And I was like, this is fantastic. And like, sometimes the logistics don't work because you're like not there or whatever. Like, it's not perfect. But, um, these, the food ordering apps, I think they recognize this because now like recently in all their apps, they kind of have like a gift, a meal, like option. But, um, what it made me think of was, oh, what's the actual business? What's the, if this is, um, But you know what that phrase is where have you ever seen this diagram where there's like a street or like a walkway where you're walking? And it's like a L, right? Like I walk straight, then I turn left. And then there's like, if you cut across, you get there faster and you could see in the grass, people, so many people have cut across. It's like worn out. It's called like a happy path or something like that, like a desire path. It's basically you show what people actually want to do.

• 41:11Shaan Puri?

  It's called the desire path. And so similarly, I think the desire path here is not to randomly order food, have to ask your friend for their exact address, hope that they're there to receive it. So you can't really surprise them. But instead, why don't people make, why doesn't somebody make the version of like edible arrangements? Or like one of these like gift basket products on top of Uber Eats and Postmates and all these companies that we all already use. So if you're on top of DoorDash, it already has my credit card. I'm already opening the app every day. Why doesn't somebody make the best way to just send a gift product to somebody else as a ghost kitchen on top of this? I think this is a no brainer, successful idea.

• 41:51Sam Parr?

  What does edible arrangements do?

• 41:54Shaan Puri?

  Oh, you never had that? Basically it sends like a, kind of like a platter or gift basket to somebody?

• 41:58Sam Parr?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. I know that.

• 42:00Shaan Puri?

  In a like, um, cool format. And this business does like hundreds of millions of dollars. Like it's a very, very successful business, old school business.

• 42:07Sam Parr?

  No, I, I get that. But how do they, how do they, like, how's this any different than you just ordering food for someone?

• 42:16Shaan Puri?

  So what edible arrange, it looks like a gift, like it's a, it's like a gift basket. It's got like a.

• 42:21Sam Parr?

  And you want to do that for a restaurant?

• 42:23Shaan Puri?

  No, I think somebody should make a ghost kitchen on top of Uber Eats and DoorDash that is specifically a way to send food gifts to other people. It looks like a gift. It's like a giant chocolate thing, right?

• 42:34Sam Parr?

  Interesting.

• 42:35Shaan Puri?

  It's like a giant fruit, fruit arrangement. It's a, it's just, you know, hearts and strawberries and chocolate covered strawberries or whatever, right? Like it's stuff like that. And it basically, and like, instead of, you know, when in DoorDash, it says customize your order, you're like, you know, I'm allergic to gluten. And instead of this, it's like, what's your gift message? We have, we, we print it out, we put it in there, right? Like the thing you want to be a thoughtful person is like. A cool looking thing that looks like a gift and it comes with a little message. But I want it as a last minute option and the way to do that is as a ghost kitchen, I think.

• 43:03Sam Parr?

  So I was talking to Andrew this last podcast and then I talked to him afterwards. I called him. I go, hey, what we were talking about was pretty interesting. Tell me more. So he started this bakery bakery. Basically Andrew is being Andrew. He's always tinkering and he was like, I want low carb, like something to satisfy me like bread.

• 43:22Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 43:22Sam Parr?

  And so he uses this thing called sucrose, I think, some monk fruit, some alternative sweetener.

• 43:28Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 43:28Sam Parr?

  And he got the guy to, he hired a chef and he paid him a small amount of money, single digit, low hundreds of dollars to come to his house for a few hours and make these recipes.

• 43:37Shaan Puri?

  Single digits, low hundreds of dollars. What does that mean?

• 43:41Sam Parr?

  Like, I don't like two, three, four. No, like a single day, as in not like eight hundred or I guess that, yeah.

• 43:48Shaan Puri?

  Okay.

• 43:48Sam Parr?

  You're right.

• 43:48Shaan Puri?

  He paid him a few hundred bucks. Gotcha.

• 43:49Sam Parr?

  Yeah, a few hundred dollars to come and make a bunch of muffins, I think, is what he made.

• 43:54Shaan Puri?

  Okay.

• 43:54Sam Parr?

  And he had him use this monk fruit thing. He goes, this is sick. And he designed a website called, I forget what it was called, something like, I forget. He made a little website on Shopify for the brand and then he put it on a DoorDash or Uber Eats and he sent it to a bunch of friends. And he only did local delivery in Victoria and he had the meal delivery come to it. Dude, he sold like three grand in month one worth of stuff and he was like invested eight thousand dollars into it. It didn't make a profit, but it kind of sick. He was able to test this idea very easily. It is, I'm like, man, of all the stuff that you do, this like agency which makes way more money. This bakery thing is so much more fascinating than like just make, you know, doing a design, design work for someone. This is way neater to me.

• 44:37Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 44:38Sam Parr?

  And anyway, so I think you could test this so easily.

• 44:41Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, totally. Cause you could just rent out a commissary kitchen for the hour, right? You don't even have to commit to very long, right? So you could rent these things by the hour. So you can rent it for a couple of weeks. Few hundred bucks, maybe, maybe a thousand dollars max. You list your, your restaurant on, uh, you, you five year old logo, you list your, your ghost kitchen on, on DoorDash or Uber Eats. You pick one city and you start. And if this works, you basically just, you become the easiest way for people in that city to send a thoughtful little gift to others. The key is you don't have to spend the money acquiring customers, right? So like, you could have always done this business, but you would be competing against, you know, 1-800 flowers and edible arrangements. And, uh, I forgot what the other one's like David, something where you send like chocolate. Now, like I did this for my neighbor.

• 45:25Shaan Puri?

  My neighbor lets us use their playground with my kid. And so I sent them like a big like chocolate gift basket or something like that. Cause like, I don't know, I need to do something nice and I don't want to make anything. So like, you know, how do I spend a hundred dollars and give a thoughtful, nice gift to somebody, make them happy for, for five minutes? And, uh, so I did the same, so that's what I want to do. But I don't want to have to go Google search and figure out the brand and then like go through their website, input my credit card. No, I already, I already opened DoorDash six times a week. It should just be there. My credit card's saved, I push the button and it goes to the person and it's, it's done.

• 45:57Sam Parr?

  What's your grocery bill every month?

• 45:59Shaan Puri?

  Is, dude, groceries are insane. I don't know if I'm insane or if inflation has happened, but I went to the grocery store, no joke. Last two times I went to the grocery store, it's a 450 to $500 for me, my wife, and I have a like, you know, I have a baby who drinks breast milk. Cause I don't even, that doesn't even count. And then we have like a, you know, a 20 month old, so.

• 46:18Sam Parr?

  You go to Whole Foods?

• 46:19Shaan Puri?

  It's Whole Foods, but like Whole Foods, you didn't, it wasn't a $500 trip for me before. It was like a $200 trip. So I think we got like a little crazy being like, yeah, let's buy these like $9 juices or something like that. I don't know what's happening, but it's crazy. What's yours?

• 46:33Sam Parr?

  Uh, I would have to look, but I imagine it would be between 1,000 to $1,500 a month.

• 46:39Shaan Puri?

  1,000, okay. So that's like $400 a week, so about the same.

• 46:43Sam Parr?

  Yeah, but my thing is even before I had anything, I would always spend a lot on it because my logic was what's the point of living? If you don't feel good, and so I'm going to buy the highest quality stuff. And I don't care about price.

• 46:57Shaan Puri?

  My logic was I want this. I really want to eat this right now.

• 47:00Sam Parr?

  No, look, like when it comes to books, I don't care what the price is.

• 47:04Shaan Puri?

  Same.

• 47:04Sam Parr?

  And I don't even care if I read it. If I just get one sentence on it.

• 47:06Shaan Puri?

  Zero guilt.

• 47:08Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it could change my life forever. So I don't care. Like there was one time I saw this book and it was eighty dollars. I'm like, oh my God. I'm like, no, I don't care. I'm buying it. Mostly it's the same thing with groceries. So like the healthiest, freshest stuff that like, like, for example, I used to buy like Kroger, that's like the grocery store in Nashville. Like Kroger generic cheese. And like, if I thought about that now, I'm like, oh, I can't even think about eating that right now.

• 47:32Shaan Puri?

  Well, do you do the thing where you're like, you look at your parents and you're like, yo, what were you thinking? Like,

• 47:38Sam Parr?

  Yes.

• 47:38Shaan Puri?

  cheese in a can and like,

• 47:40Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 47:42Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, every Thursday we used to eat like, you know, like, um, like Totino's, uh, you know, pizza rolls and like,

• 47:49Sam Parr?

  Yes.

• 47:49Shaan Puri?

  Takotis or whatever those things are like,

• 47:51Sam Parr?

  Or like yogurt.

• 47:54Sam Parr?

  Yes, same exact thing.

• 47:56Shaan Puri?

  That was the regular food we ate. That wasn't like the one off thing.

• 48:00Sam Parr?

  If you ask my mom what a carb is, I don't think she could still tell you. So like, I just,

• 48:04Shaan Puri?

  My mom would straight up be like, this is good. It has carbs. I'm like, no, mom, see, that's the problem. You know this has carbs. And you're like, yeah, pasta. That's a good hearty meal. I'm like, no, no, no, mom, that's like, because she's still like, you know, but I can't even blame her. Dude, the food pyramid. The food pyramid, how big of a lie was that? That was like a middle finger to America. The bottom of the food pyramid is like, get your grains and your carbs and cereals and pastas and breads. And then like vegetables has this small little half slice on the third layer, like fruits and vegetables just got like, you know, shoved in last minute, right, right next to dessert. It's crazy.

• 48:39Sam Parr?

  Yeah, like if you, how many grams of sugar are in a can of Coke? Ballpark, you know?

• 48:43Shaan Puri?

  I think it's like thirty, forty grams. Yeah, it's a great.

• 48:45Sam Parr?

  So you, that's the ballpark. Yeah. So I think it's like a little bit more than forty. If you ask my family, like growing up, how many grams are, I have no, a million. I don't know. Like, what is the, what is the gram? Yeah, like I don't know. And also like, if I told them forty five, they'd be like, I don't, is that,

• 49:01Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 49:01Sam Parr?

  forty five percent? Like, is that good? Like, we're not, we're not a hundred percent. Sounds good to me. They wouldn't know. Um, so I think that there's something here, uh, but, uh, like,

• 49:11Shaan Puri?

  I, I had middle school. I used to eat the school lunch in Texas. I grew up in Houston, Texas in middle school. And this is my first time where like, yeah, mom, stop packing my lunch. And I started to buy the school lunch, six, six, seventh grade. And straight up every single day I ate a Frito pie, which is, by the way, that's not even like a meal. Like you can't go to a restaurant and order a Frito pie. Cause all it is, is it's a bag of Fritos emptied into a basket. And then chili and cheese put on it like nachos. I ate that every day. It tastes fucking amazing, by the way. But I ate that every single day as a kid and my parents. Where was the intervention? That's what I want to know. Where was the intervention? That, that should not have happened.

• 49:51Sam Parr?

  I definitely think it's changing now. I don't think it's changed entirely at all, but I think it has.

• 49:55Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. Jamie Oliver died for this, man. He tried to change the schools or whatever.

• 49:59Sam Parr?

  Yeah. The Naked Chef. Um, I saw, yeah. So when it comes to like budgeting, I, for food, I just, whatever. Cause like, I'm putting this in my body. Okay. I need it to be like the best stuff. So, um, but I did just drink like a Diet Dr. Pepper.

• 50:14Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. I was gonna say, pretty sure I've seen you just like, just house like a whole Halloween. That's a small child's like Halloween hall.

• 50:22Sam Parr?

  I do.

• 50:22Shaan Puri?

  Podcast one time.

• 50:24Sam Parr?

  It's a, it is, it is a huge weakness of mine, but uh, whatever. I, I mostly do good. We, well, I'll have to do an update. So I've been, I'll, I'll say it now. I've been taking TRT now for about a year. And both Sean and I invested in this TRT company called.

• 50:40Shaan Puri?

  Peak. Switching its name now, but.

• 50:42Sam Parr?

  It's switching its name. Um, and I'll, we'll like do an update on it. But basically like I took it not to change my body. I took it because uh, like I was feeling down. And I got tested and they're like, oh, your T's real low. It has made me jacked. Like totally jacked. Like I, I feel like.

• 51:02Shaan Puri?

  Still feeling down, but dude, I'm.

• 51:05Sam Parr?

  So we're gonna have to do an update on this and I, like I told these guys, I was like, you know, like, I don't know if I want to post a shirtless pic, but I might be open to it. If you want to do like a, like a, cause they're appealing to like nerds.

• 51:17Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 51:18Sam Parr?

  And I'm like, I'm that. If you, but I look like a kind of a shredded nerd right now. Maybe I could be like your, you want me to post a pic like a before and after, I will. But uh, oh my God, this TRT stuff, I feel amazing.

• 51:30Shaan Puri?

  That is crazy. So you were taking this before, but you switched peak? Is that what you did?

• 51:35Sam Parr?

  I took it for a little while and then I got off of it when I got, uh, when I got lime, I couldn't get like a refill, something like that. And then I got like, and then I'm back on it again now. Um, and I, and I started using peak, pretty cool service. I'm not telling anyone to take this, by the way, don't, I mean, just like, this is like some doctor shit, but it's pretty awesome.

• 51:55Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. Don't come to our podcast for either financial or medical advice, to be honest. But it's sick dude. What we do and what works for us. That doesn't mean it's gonna work for anybody else. No, no promises for anybody.

• 52:06Sam Parr?

  I'm eating Whole Foods and I'm shooting up with TRT and like,

• 52:09Shaan Puri?

  Your body's transforming.

• 52:11Sam Parr?

  My body is completely transformed in the last six months. Um, I'm just like crazy strong. I have pretty low body fat, like 15%, which isn't that low, but pretty low. And I just feel like a professional athlete. So it's pretty awesome.

• 52:23Shaan Puri?

  That's amazing. Congratulations. I think now we know what to do with the live show. You just need to take off your shirt. I think that's gonna be your contribution. And then I'll prepare some content.

• 52:33Sam Parr?

  Well, I sent you a pic and someone was like, you look like a white ape. You look like a white gorilla.

• 52:38Shaan Puri?

  Like a gorilla. You look like, uh, you were like, you looked like stunning. Like when you wear your shirt, like right now, if somebody's watching on our YouTube channel, which you should, youtube.com slash HustleCon, I think is it?

• 52:49Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 52:51Shaan Puri?

  If they see you right now, they're gonna be like, like, I'm not meaning this as an insult, but you just look like an average person right now.

• 52:58Sam Parr?

  Yes.

• 52:58Shaan Puri?

  You sent me that picture and you looked like my bodyguard. Like you looked,

• 53:03Shaan Puri?

  you looked like somebody I would hire to protect me, which is insane.

• 53:07Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it was crazy. So anyway, we'll do an update about that. My birthday is coming up in June and I thought about, uh, maybe I'll post a shirtless pic just to like,

• 53:14Shaan Puri?

  Why aren't you, um, why don't you wear shirts that make you look more jacked? Do you wear stuff that like makes you look non-jacked? Are you trying to do some Clark Kent Superman shit?

• 53:25Sam Parr?

  I don't know.

• 53:26Shaan Puri?

  It's not intentional.

• 53:27Sam Parr?

  I, it's not intentional. I don't think about it.

• 53:30Sam Parr?

  So we meandered a bit. We'll see if this turns out to be any good.

• 53:35Shaan Puri?

  No, dude, that was great. The vending machine stuff alone was the price of entry. I think people will, you know, go check out paparazzi, Vimeo. That was okay. And then the ghost kitchens for gifting, I think is like a cool idea, but nobody's gonna go do that. But I think the vending machine thing was the star of the show today.

• 53:50Sam Parr?

  What do you think, Abreu?

• 53:52Shaan Puri?

  Or should we ask Dan? Because Abreu, you know, handing off the baton to Dan. So, let's start with Dan and then let's go to Abreu. Let's go for the apprentice and then the master.

• 54:04Speaker 03

  All right. I liked the paparazzi. I like the Vimeo.

• 54:11Speaker 03

  The vending machines, I don't know. I looked at that when I was in high school, actually.

• 54:16Shaan Puri?

  Oh, damn, the contrarian. I love it.

• 54:18Speaker 03

  Yeah. And then the ghost kitchens, I don't know. You guys use DoorDash and stuff. Maybe I'm just too old. I don't use that stuff.

• 54:25Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I feel like that's one thing that I'm always like, yeah, everybody uses DoorDash six times a week. I'm like, oh, wait, probably not. Probably most people don't, but.

• 54:33Sam Parr?

  Wait, Dan, you don't use DoorDash?

• 54:35Speaker 03

  I like to cook.

• 54:38Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, but what do you do when you don't want to cook?

• 54:41Speaker 03

  I usually go out to eat or I'll pick something up.

• 54:45Shaan Puri?

  You like to cook all the time?

• 54:46Sam Parr?

  Yeah, he's like, I like to cook. It's like, dude, but you eat 20, what do you do for the other 18 times?

• 54:52Speaker 03

  I've been intermittent fasting.

• 54:54Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I also like to cook.

• 54:56Shaan Puri?

  We have that in common, Dan.

• 54:57Sam Parr?

  Yeah. Yeah, I did. I cooked too last month.

• 55:03Speaker 04

  I don't think it's even, I don't think it's even an older person thing. Like, it's just expensive. You're just paying so much for the delivery.

• 55:09Sam Parr?

  Yeah, but like, what do you do when it's like?

• 55:11Shaan Puri?

  What do you do when you're hungry?

• 55:13Speaker 03

  When I have an eight-figure exit.

• 55:18Sam Parr?

  I, I guess.

• 55:19Shaan Puri?

  So, Abreu, you cook every meal?

• 55:21Speaker 04

  Yeah, just about. But I also eat like chicken nuggets for lunch, so.

• 55:26Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, yeah, okay. So give me, give me, give me yesterday's menu. What did you eat?

• 55:29Speaker 04

  Breakfast, lunch, dinner.

• 55:31Shaan Puri?

  And snack.

• 55:32Speaker 04

  Yesterday, I'll start with dinner. It was mashed potato, kielbasa, frozen veggies, toasted Hawaiian, Hawaiian bread, whatever it's called. Lunch is always the same thing. It's carrots and chicken nuggets every single day.

• 55:50Shaan Puri?

  So I feed my dog.

• 55:52Speaker 04

  And then morning is just like coffee.

• 55:54Shaan Puri?

  Okay, what's kielbasa?

• 55:55Speaker 04

  It's like a, it's like a Polish sausage, yeah.

• 56:00Shaan Puri?

  You had a bowl of sauces with Hawaiian bread and what?

• 56:03Speaker 04

  Um, mashed potatoes, frozen veggies.

• 56:06Sam Parr?

  Dude, so you're not on the Whole Foods tip.

• 56:08Speaker 04

  Dude, that's.

• 56:08Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, you're eating like my mom, my mom taught, you're eating like my mom taught me to eat.

• 56:13Sam Parr?

  You're starting a company up, right? You, it's like, at least go in the Whole Foods scholarship and eat and you gotta like, when you're on the Whole Foods scholarship, you gotta, you fill the plate with the hot food and then you take a cart and you walk around while you're eating it. And then you just, and then you just bounce.

• 56:26Speaker 04

  I'll try that.

• 56:28Sam Parr?

  You could pay them back when you're done.

• 56:29Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 56:30Sam Parr?

  But like, that's, that's crazy to me.

• 56:31Shaan Puri?

  Dan, what do you eat? I feel like now, now I feel like an asshole. Is this what I'm supposed to be doing? I'm supposed to be eating kielbasa for dinner? What, what?

• 56:39Speaker 03

  I have a little Instant Pot spice pack business. So make an Instant Pot meal a few times a week. So I got them.

• 56:47Shaan Puri?

  Dan, coming in hot with the plug. What is it? What's the business?

• 56:49Speaker 03

  Anis spices.com, A N I spices.com.

• 56:53Shaan Puri?

  So you put spices into a spice and then what? You put just like chicken in there or what?

• 56:57Speaker 03

  Yeah. So the biggest thing I thought was the challenge with the Instant Pot was measuring out all the spices. If you wanted to make something. So I had a butter chicken recipe. It took two minutes to do everything but the spices. So we sell a pack that's compostable, has the recipe, has all the spices. You just open it up, dump it in. Makes using an Instant Pot much easier.

• 57:14Shaan Puri?

  That's not a bad idea. Okay. What's the, how's the business doing?

• 57:17Speaker 03

  I kinda went on hold when COVID hit, so I'm spinning it back up.

• 57:21Shaan Puri?

  Why would it go on hold for COVID? Like you had to go on hold?

• 57:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, I ended up losing all my clients. I was doing consulting for events and that kinda disappeared overnight.

• 57:30Shaan Puri?

  I see, I see. Okay, gotcha. And so you, you paused the business. Okay. But are we talking, are we in the tens of dollars, hundreds of dollars, thousands of dollars, tens of, tens of thousands?

• 57:38Speaker 03

  We're in like the hundreds of dollars a month. So.

• 57:42Shaan Puri?

  Okay. All right. So everybody go to Ani Spices, order something. Let's get them into the thousands of dollars. I'll get one. What's your best one? Is butter chicken recipe?

• 57:49Speaker 03

  Butter chicken. I have a little Indian three pack. We have a Rogan Josh, an Indian curried lentils and a butter chicken.

• 57:56Shaan Puri?

  If I take off my shirt, I also have a little Indian.

• 58:00Speaker 03

  That's my nickname for Sean.

• 58:05Sam Parr?

  What's it, I mean, that was easy. You just.

• 58:08Shaan Puri?

  Thank you for the assist.

• 58:11Sam Parr?

  Dan, what's the URL?

• 58:12Sam Parr?

  A N I spices.com.

• 58:14Sam Parr?

  A N I spices.com?

• 58:18Sam Parr?

  Yep.

• 58:19Shaan Puri?

  All right. And Dan, so Abreu grades us at the end of every episode. Abreu, what'd you give this one?

• 58:24Speaker 04

  I thought the vending machine thing was worth it. That made it an A minus. Everything else was a eh. So in the A's, thanks to the vending machine.

• 58:33Shaan Puri?

  And then Dan, are you, are you more Simon Cowell? Are you harsh? Or are you Paula Abdul? You just give everybody A's? What's your, what's your grading style?

• 58:40Sam Parr?

  Uh, let's do this one as a B plus. I feel like there's.

• 58:44Sam Parr?

  Abreu is literally has never given us a B. It's only an A.

• 58:48Shaan Puri?

  It's an A or like?

• 58:49Sam Parr?

  His grading skills, A minus or A?

• 58:51Speaker 04

  Dude, it only used to be Bs. You guys started actually doing some work and you got some As.

• 58:55Shaan Puri?

  All right, fair enough. All right, good stuff. Let's, uh, let's, all right, let's leave all this in. This is fine. People can, people can enjoy this. So, all right, we're out of here. See you in Austin. See you in Miami. I bought my tickets this morning.