#157 - Instagram Food Drops Making $200k a Week, Chrome Extensions That are Crushing It & Open Salaries

MFM #157 Rewarding hustle: MFM is hiring two kids to do video production because they took the job without permission. They heard Sam complain about needing a recording studio and offered to do the work https://twitter.com/DylanJardon/status/1366274333858017282?s=20. This is how you get the job you want. Don’t send a resume. Do the work instead. Don’t ask for permission. Food topics The food companies of Instagram: Companies mycookiedealer.com, 1-900-Ice-Cream, and Allie’s Banana Bread are crushing it on IG with food drops that sell out in seconds. Why it’s big: These work because it’s at the intersection of many trends: cloud kitchens (no need for expensive restaurant infrastructure), DTC (no need to get costly distribution deals and shelf space) and have virality baked into them. My Cookie Dealer is estimated to be doing $200k per weekly drop. This is a potential $10m business today. Formula: Sam breaks down how these companies are going viral, and how you can copy. Make a side ingredient the main thing (cheese, cookie dough) Make it in an unusual color (rainbow bagel, rainbow kettle cork, green ketchup, cloud bread) Make it huge (huge sundae, massive pizza cookie, sushi-rito, massive KitKat) Frankenfood: combine two different foods (cronut, pancake cereal, donut cereal, cream cheese, bell pepper, desert burger, ramen burger, spaghetti donuts, fairy bread) Food allergy or remove stuff from it (vega ice cream, Banza) Make junk food or simple food ultra-fancy (tater tots, mozzarella sticks) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2IFYt20QON8 Tiller money Spreadsheet plugins: The guys have talked Chrome plugins and browser extensions in the past, but an overlooked niche is spreadsheet plugins. Plugins are great businesses because they are sticky and capitalize on an existing platform and user base. They can be light, simple tools that can gain huge adoption quickly. Tiller Money (https://www.tillerhq.com/): Personal finance nerd Sam loves the simplicity of this plugin. Most people already manage their money on a spreadsheet, Tiller Money just makes it easier to do so. Supermetrics (https://supermetrics.com/): Marketing data plugin Sam uses. He predicts the business does 8-figures in revenue. Open salaries Open salaries: Should companies publish employee salaries? Open salary data is becoming a legal requirement, starting with 🍃 Colorado: "From 2021 employers must disclose pay rates or ranges in job postings for jobs that could be worked in Colorado (including remote)" Source Open salaries is part of the culture of some companies. Buffer used it as a growth hack. The company continues to publish a lot of it’s financials and all employee salaries. Companies doing it now: Glassdoor shows average and anonymous salaries but can be inaccurate They were acquired for $1.2B in 2018. At the time did $170m in revenue with 700 employees Founded by Rich Barton (we’ve spoken about him a few times before). Famous for saying “Information wants to be free”. Started Zillow, Expedia, and Glassdoor off this principle. Levels.fyi: A helpful guide to understanding what employees at top tech firms should be making. They even help you negotiate a salary. Take: Open salaries tend to benefit employees (more transparency means higher, more equal pay) and is more detrimental to employers. Apple stopped doing it. Buffer has also said it’s not helpful anymore and was only good for initial growth. Pat Flynn published his income for several years, but eventually stopped as he started getting hate. --------- 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. Editing thanks to Jonathan Gallegos (@jjonthan)

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

• 0:00Shaan Puri?

  It's insane. This whole guy, this guy's life is insane is what I can see from this. I mean, this guy's, his steroids are, you know, as good as his cookies, I would say.

• 0:08Sam Parr?

  That's what, yeah, I want the HGH drop.

• 0:17Shaan Puri?

  You look fantastic. You upgraded.

• 0:20Sam Parr?

  Uh, I'm currently recording. I wish I could turn the camera around, but I don't want to screw it up. But I'm sitting at my friend Jack's house in Hawaii where I'm having a week vacation.

• 0:30Shaan Puri?

  Congratulations. Well deserved.

• 0:32Sam Parr?

  Uh, yeah, yeah, it's, it's cool. Uh, just got here, but, uh, gonna be here for maybe five days, but it's all right. How's, uh, things going with you?

• 0:43Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, things are good. Did you see, um, this thing that the, these guys who tweeted at us that were like, dude, we will pimp out your, your stream. Did you watch these videos that they made?

• 0:53Sam Parr?

  No, I've been flying, but they said that they booked a ticket to Austin. Are they actually going to our, to my house?

• 1:02Shaan Puri?

  I don't know if they, I don't think, no, no, they're, they're waiting for us to be like yes or no. But, uh, these guys applied very intelligently. I gotta give them credit. So basically they saw that we were trying to upgrade our stuff. And they're like, we'll do this for you. We'll make it no hassle. I'll come to you. I will hook it up. And a few people tweeted, tweeted something like that at us and you were like, kind of, you know, humoring it, I guess. And then these three guys are, are kind of like, I think they're like college seniors or something like that. I don't really know. Didn't look too far into it, but they sent us a video. They go, watch, here's what we're gonna do. And they recorded a video and it's, looks like a Casey Neistat video, like the quality is like that. And the editing style and storytelling is like that. It was a funny video.

• 1:46Shaan Puri?

  It was basically telling us how to pimp, how they would pimp out our stream. And, uh, they kept calling it like, you know, my first million to the moon. And they're like, we're gonna take this baby to the moon. Here's how we're gonna do it. And so they did two things. He, he showed how his camera setup, how they do it for their podcast and it looks awesome. Looks way better than ours. And then, um, also he's, then the next day he sent us an edited clip of a, of the, of you telling the story of bumping into the Silk Road founder at a party and he like stole your girl or whatever. And, um, they edited like a little clip and they're like, dude, we'll pump out clips like these all the time. My first million to the moon, baby. And, uh,

• 2:20Sam Parr?

  Are they good?

• 2:21Shaan Puri?

  They're good. They're really good. Both videos are really good.

• 2:23Sam Parr?

  Where, first of all, why, let's hire them. And second, where did they send this to on Twitter? I've been flying since Saturday.

• 2:31Shaan Puri?

  It's on Twitter. I sent you a link because I was like, dude, fuck, yes, this is like, this is, you know, like, it's like the opposite of a job application. Normally you get a job app, you, you, you put a job up that you want to hire somebody to do X. And then some people apply and then you're like, you're kind of squinting. You're like, do I think this person's really going to be able to do it? And then you make a guess and then it takes some fucking six weeks to ramp up. And then, or, or this guy just applies showing, look, I can do it. I've done it for myself. I'll do it for you. And let me make this easy for you. Let me show you how bad I want this. And I just thought like, this is so much better than, than what we've been talking about of trying to find people to do this stuff.

• 3:09Sam Parr?

  I'm looking at his, okay, cool. His name's Dylan Jarden. Weird last name. I keep, I, because I want to say Jordan. Uh, yeah. Dylan, if you're listening to this, let's do it. I'm in.

• 3:20Shaan Puri?

  Um, and you know, I don't know, there's probably people at the hustle who have similar jobs, but I think we should reward the hustle of these guys and be like, the gig is yours to like pimp out our, the video side of our podcast. I think we should give, we should give them the, the chat.

• 3:34Sam Parr?

  All right. I'm in.

• 3:36Shaan Puri?

  Cool. Um, all right. We have a bunch of topics we wanted to talk about. Where do you want to start? You want to start with this open salary thing?

• 3:41Sam Parr?

  No, let's start with food because I've, was this yours?

• 3:44Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 3:45Sam Parr?

  I've thought about this for years, so I have a lot of, I've got, I've got something boiling up.

• 3:50Shaan Puri?

  All right. So let me, let me intro this. All right. So I'm talking to Ben, my right hand man, Ben, and Ben's kind of like, you know, I'm easily excitable. You could tell by the way I talk. Ben is the opposite. He's chill mode. He's always relaxed. And, um, but when Ben mentions things, I've learned like when he says something is just like, like, oh, this is cool. You should check this out. It's actually fucking amazing. And he just doesn't say, hey, dude, he doesn't like shake you and say, look at this. This is amazing. And so he showed me this thing that is amazing. So he goes, check out this website, uh, or this Instagram handle, my cookie dealer. I was like, my cookie dealer. So I go to it. You should click these.

• 4:27Sam Parr?

  Oh, my God, I'm looking at it now. I want to eat this.

• 4:30Shaan Puri?

  Dude, so all right. So he sent me three Instagram accounts. He sent me by Cookie Dealer. Click the second one, one nine hundred ice cream. So like one eight hundred, but one nine hundred ice cream. One nine hundred ice cream looks so good. Just like describe what you're seeing. It's incredible.

• 4:45Sam Parr?

  Is it a pie? I don't know what this is exactly, like what you would call it, but it's a it's a cone. What it? I don't know what shape.

• 4:53Shaan Puri?

  It looks like it looks like there's a stick. So like at the top of the stick where you would have like a popsicle instead, it's like a full ice cream concoction, which is like the ice cream and all the toppings and the fudge on top or whatever. It looks amazing. You should, if you have Instagram, go to go to one nine hundred ice cream.

• 5:08Sam Parr?

  There's one called the Cupcake Wonderland, which is vanilla ice cream, rainbow sprinkles, strawberry, marshmallow icing.

• 5:17Shaan Puri?

  So they call themselves, they call themselves the ice cream thirst trap slash thick check trademark. And they they have a bunch of followers. They've they've grown really quickly, 26,000 followers. So Ben was sending me these and I was like, okay, cool food account on Instagram. That's not too new. What do I care about this food porn? He's like, no, no, no, dude, I've been trying to send you one of these. And I've been trying to like get these myself. They do weekly drops of their stuff and these are selling out instantaneously. So I go, what do you mean? So he showed me my cookie dealer. So my cookie dealer does a drop, a cookie drop. Every week they do a random cookie drop. So a different flavor or whatever. And it sells out within literally seconds and they're doing $200,000 a week. They're doing $10 million

• 6:00Shaan Puri?

  a year, dropping cookies on Instagram and just instantly selling out. And then they ship them, you know, a few days later, they know how many orders they get. And then they ship them out a few days later. Kind of like, you know, nationwide or whatever. And there's another one, Allie's Banana Bread. Go look at this banana bread, dude. Just look at this banana bread. I want to print this banana bread out and just lick the paper. It's looks so good. And same thing sells out.

• 6:25Sam Parr?

  Wait, wait, wait, wait, wait, dude, check, check this out. So if you go to my cookie dealer.com. That's the website. Okay, click, click Instagram page. Are you on their Instagram? And tell me when you're on their Instagram page.

• 6:37Shaan Puri?

  I'm on it.

• 6:39Sam Parr?

  Okay, you see, go scroll up to their profile and you see who where it says like the owner is this guy named Juan Diesel Moore, Morrell. Click it.

• 6:47Shaan Puri?

  Oh, dude, he's like a bodybuilder.

• 6:50Sam Parr?

  This guy is huge. This guy is so big.

• 6:55Shaan Puri?

  He looks like if you've ever seen ESPN or whatever bodybuilding competition where the guys are like this crazy color of skin that nobody is and he's just humongous.

• 7:04Sam Parr?

  Well, I know I can't tell if it's like the tan. I think it's a black guy. Is he like, he's so dark.

• 7:09Shaan Puri?

  I think it's a white guy. You know, they like the white guy has to do the black tan for bodybuilding.

• 7:14Sam Parr?

  Well, and then look at his wife.

• 7:16Shaan Puri?

  It's insane. This whole guy, this guy's life is insane is what I could see from this. I mean, this guy's, his steroids are, you know, as good as his cookies, I would say.

• 7:24Sam Parr?

  That's what, yeah, I want the HGH drop. This is awesome, man. This is cool. Okay. So Allie's banana bread.

• 7:31Shaan Puri?

  So Allie's banana bread. So there's a bunch of these. So Ben is like knee deep in this world of like Instagram food brands that are basically, they're kind of like drop shipping baked goods all around the country. So they have them for cakes, ice creams, banana breads, and they're just specialists. And so there's a couple of cool things that I wanted to bring up about this, and I know you have some stuff on food too. But the part that I thought was cool is, so the internet is, the internet is really good at doing this, which is normal before the internet, you would just go to whatever's like your local, whatever. So you'd find the best within your local radius of five to 10 miles or whatever it is, that's what you would go buy. But with the internet, whether it's news or comedy or whatever, um, the best thing can just get distributed everywhere.

• 8:16Shaan Puri?

  And so the best brand wins on the internet. And so this is why you see things get so big, you know, like Facebook and other, other platforms, because the best, the best thing will get all the users. And it's, what's interesting is that these guys are doing this with food. So if these guys really do make the best goddamn banana bread or best cookies or best ice cream, they don't need a physical shop. They could just through Instagram alone, spending $0 on marketing, have customers worldwide, like Allie's banana bread literally ships worldwide. And, um, so if you're the best at making something now, you have a pathway to become like a multimillionaire, um, where that really wasn't possible if you were just a local baker and whatever in Cincinnati. You know, you were always restricted by however many customers you could get in your local radius.

• 9:01Shaan Puri?

  So I thought that's pretty cool. The second thing is, if you think about this. You know, this is like a mix of a bunch of things that we've been talking about for a while. So we've been talking about cloud kitchens. So these are essentially like cloud ice cream shops or cloud bakeries. They don't have like a physical storefront necessarily. They're all in the cloud and you just order online. The second thing is direct to consumer. So they're going direct to their fans. They're getting their fans phone numbers. And so that when they do a drop, they just text everybody like one picture of the new thing and then instantaneously people buy. And I think that's kind of like amazing, a way to go to direct to consumer. You don't have to worry about getting on the shelf at, you know, Whole Foods or wherever else to, to build your, your brand as a cookie company or whatever. And go ahead.

• 9:43Sam Parr?

  No, keep going.

• 9:44Shaan Puri?

  Last, last one is if you think about it, like, you know, who's going to be the next Mrs. Fields or Ben and Jerry's or like Auntie Annie's pretzels? It's gonna be one of these brands. It's gonna be one of these cloud bakeries. Doing it on Instagram, building a cult following like these guys are doing and, and you're gonna see, I predict you're gonna see just like, I forgot, what was the name of that meme company that sold for like a hundred million dollars? They hit like, they were the ones behind, Daquan and whatever, like the couple of the meme Instagram accounts.

• 10:15Sam Parr?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That was about eight months ago, maybe.

• 10:19Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, we talked about it on the pod. It's like,

• 10:21Sam Parr?

  I'm ready. We'll pull it up. This like, what, you see it's right there. You see it?

• 10:25Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I M G M media. So, so basically, you know, some brand that just owned a bunch of like meme accounts on Instagram sold for like a hundred million dollars, I think, if I remember correctly. You're gonna see the same thing in the food space. You're gonna see a bunch of private equity companies coming in and they're gonna buy up, you know, Ally's, Allie's banana bread. They're gonna buy up 1900 ice cream because they're gonna be like, dude, this is the next Ben and Jerry's. And we're gonna take this, this thing, we're gonna put it on steroids. We're gonna advertise the fuck out of it. And then we're gonna get it into retail stores on top of what it's already doing. And so you're, I think you're gonna see a bunch of these. If I could go invest in those four brands that we talked about right now, I would go give them each, you know, a 25K check because I think these are gonna get scooped up.

• 11:04Sam Parr?

  Okay, so let's break this down further. I've thought about this a ton. The reason I've thought about this a ton is I, I'm a media guy, right? By the way, is my mic good? Yeah, you're good. Alright, I'm a media guy. I love content and I've studied what goes viral and why for years. And one thing that I've always been fascinated with is I've known people who have worked at Thrillist. And Thrillist started as a food, well, they started as like things to do in New York, but one of their biggest things is food. And I remember when I started dating my wife, she was from New York City and I hadn't been there since I was, or the first time I'd been there was when we started dating, 26, 27 years old. And I went there and I would see these long, like I would go to like the areas that you see in movies where like the cute people hang out, where they all dress like, you know, like they dress like, they go to NY.

• 11:49Sam Parr?

  Yeah, like they just dress, like for me, that was like, wow, I feel like everyone looks like a movie star. Everyone was cool and hip, but you know, I don't, I don't know, Madison Square Park or Washington Square, whatever those parks, I don't know, I don't spend a lot of time there, but you know what I mean? They would have the longest lines and I'm like, what, what are all these people waiting for? And it was like the latest Thrillist craze that went viral. And so I would walk through Brooklyn and everything and I would see these lines and I'm like, what is going on? And I would do research and I kinda broke it down into, I like, I've like studied this for a while and, or not studied is the right word, but thought about it a lot. And I basically broke it down into the, into a handful of categories.

• 12:32Sam Parr?

  And what it appears, what, what seems like, what, what happens is people have a small store, a relative, like pretty like a corner store in hit parts of Brooklyn or New York where there's people who share. So like college kids mostly, and they create one or two things that, that Thrillist or BuzzFeed or someone, because all those companies are located in the cool parts that I'm describing and Soho, things like that. And one of these BuzzFeed or Thrillist folks sees it, a whole bunch of college kids see it, and then it creates a line and it creates hype and it, it becomes like a good business that lasts for three to six months. And then it kinda like goes away and maybe like it still is a remainder, but like still is a business, but it mostly like is a hype cycle, whatever.

• 13:16Sam Parr?

  And I was like, what is going on? And so I broke this down into a few categories. And I want to go through these categories because I agree with you. I think this is so cool and I've tried to break this down. So first, And these are like, uh, different ways to

• 13:28Shaan Puri?

  Formulas for virality.

• 13:30Sam Parr?

  Yeah, like formulas for food virality. Okay. The first one is make a side ingredient. So something that's normally a side ingredient. Make it the main thing. So the best example of this is cookie dough. There's a lot, there's like, this is a thing I saw in New York. There was a line out, a door, the door for, someone sold cookie dough as if it's ice cream. So it's like sprinkled cookie dough, then like ice cream flavored cookie dough. It was like, cookie dough is the main thing. Another one is cheese, like people do, uh, like fondues. They have like fondue bars, something that's, uh, what, what else is a side ingredient? That could be it.

• 14:00Shaan Puri?

  I don't know if it's a side ingredient exactly, but, uh, cereal does this too. There's, there was these like viral things, it was like cereal bars. All you do is it's just milk and cereal and that's it. And you can come, normally that's not a restaurant. It's a side, like, it's like literally a side dish of a side dish. And, uh, they made it the focus of the restaurant. And that made the restaurant notable and remarkable for people to, to talk about and go to.

• 14:20Sam Parr?

  Or an I, or a whipped cream bar, like a whipped cream store, just like anything that is typically an afterthought. That is a topping or a side to the main thing. Make that your thing. Okay. The second one is do it the, have normal foods, but different colors. A few examples, rainbow bagels. Okay. Crazy popular, they're, they're hype. I mean, they're still popular, but they went through a, a cycle. The second one is rainbow, rainbow kettle corn. That's quite popular. When I was a kid, I remember a couple of times buying green ketchup. Do you remember green ketchup?

• 14:52Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, dude.

• 14:54Sam Parr?

  I love green ketchup.

• 14:55Shaan Puri?

  Which was just red ketchup, but green, right? It was literally just the color was different.

• 14:58Sam Parr?

  It's just the name, it's just a normal thing, but a different color. And then the latest trend on, uh, uh, or this year on Tik Tok was cloud bread, which is basically, you know, everyone is baking at home now. It's just bread that's kind of blue and white and looks like a cloud.

• 15:11Shaan Puri?

  Right. And by the way, your side thing, main thing, I got another example of that. But, you know, Captain Crunch, the crunch berries were always just the extra. And then they came out with Captain, just, just the berries, just the crunch berries. And it was like way more popular.

• 15:25Sam Parr?

  Yeah. Or like Lucky Charms with only the marshmallows.

• 15:27Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 15:28Sam Parr?

  So you, you take the thing that's supposed to be the

• 15:30Shaan Puri?

  The topping.

• 15:30Sam Parr?

  Yeah, the topping, the second, the third string thing, make it the first string thing. Okay. The, the third one, the same thing, but a different side, uh, different size. This is pretty common. So you like huge pizzas that you can't fit through the door. Huge sundaes, they call it like the kitchen sink, everything but the kitchen sink in a kitchen sink. Or, or sushi rito is another example. Have you seen sushi rito? That's a chain, right?

• 15:53Shaan Puri?

  Yep.

• 15:54Sam Parr?

  So it's just sushi that isn't cut. So it's just a long piece of sushi. Uh, another one, uh, I had a friend named Saul. You probably know him, uh, and he created a Kit Kat bar that was the size of like a cake.

• 16:07Sam Parr?

  He, he would make these things. And so I've actually never seen this sold, but you get the idea. Uh, a Kit Kat bar. That's, that's like a, the size of a loaf of bread.

• 16:14Shaan Puri?

  In San Francisco, they have this place Bob's, Bob's Donuts or Bob's whatever.

• 16:18Sam Parr?

  Yes.

• 16:19Shaan Puri?

  And they have this humongous donut. It's like this donut the size of, you know, two of my head and, uh, and you could buy it and then you could try to eat it. And then you could take pictures of it because you're eating this enormous donut. Boom. That's the whole hook.

• 16:31Sam Parr?

  It's not special, but it, I mean, it becomes special. It's just a normal thing, but a different size. Okay. Uh, or like in St. Louis, the whole thing is, this is so silly how this works. In St. Louis, our pizza is cut into squares.

• 16:44Shaan Puri?

  Right, right, right.

• 16:44Sam Parr?

  So it's around.

• 16:45Shaan Puri?

  You kind of said one earlier about like, uh, sushi. Sushi sometimes it comes in these like boats. Or if you go to a beer place and they serve it in a boot or whatever, it's like, it can also be, you know, a punch bowl that's in a fish, you know, a fish bowl or whatever.

• 16:57Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 16:57Shaan Puri?

  Like it could be bigger and in a, you know, in a non, non-traditional, like the kitchen sink in a non-traditional container.

• 17:03Sam Parr?

  Yes. The same thing, but different size. Okay. Or, or it could be miniature, you know, just something that, you know, whatever, uh, like White Castle mini cheeseburgers. Uh, okay. So the, the, the fourth one, combine two things that are quite different. Okay. So I've got a, this is a really easy one. There's a ton of examples. The first one is the cronut. Pretty easy.

• 17:23Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 17:23Sam Parr?

  The latest trend right now on Tik Tok pancake cereal. It's, I don't even know what it is. Uh, I, there's like recipe. I don't even know what it is, but it's, I don't know.

• 17:33Shaan Puri?

  Okay.

• 17:34Sam Parr?

  Uh, look it up actually while we're talking to Bray. It's probably, it's probably just, I, I don't know.

• 17:40Shaan Puri?

  Probably pancake and cereal. Okay.

• 17:42Sam Parr?

  It, no, they, uh, they bake it. They call it pancake cereal. It really is just probably normal cereal made out of like the same ingredients. They just bake it at home and it looks like the shape of a pancake. Same with donut cereal. Um, but there's, um, uh, do you know, um, do you remember ramen burger?

• 17:58Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 17:59Sam Parr?

  Okay, so there's ramen burger. There's fairy bread. You know what fairy bread is?

• 18:03Shaan Puri?

  No, what is that?

• 18:03Sam Parr?

  It's basically just bread with sprinkles. Okay, so you're just taking two things that don't normally go together.

• 18:09Shaan Puri?

  Mashups.

• 18:10Sam Parr?

  And you mash them, just like a dessert burger.

• 18:13Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 18:13Sam Parr?

  Very simple, or you can get a cream cheese bell pepper sandwich.

• 18:17Shaan Puri?

  Right, and the more, um, more unusual, it's, you know, it's Doritos Locos Tacos, right? It's, uh, when KFC came out with the fried chicken bun or whatever, and it was like, the bun is fried chicken. Like, you know, there's, the more shocking, I would say, the better in this case.

• 18:34Sam Parr?

  Yes, you just take two things, you smash them together. Pretty easy, relatively simple, okay? The fourth thing, or the fifth thing, is you make something that's normally a crappy food, but you make it fancy. So tater tots, mozzarella sticks, you add a fancy shtick to them. Or you could probably go the opposite way of making something pretty fancy and make it not fancy, although that would, might be gross. But you get the idea. And then the final one is you, uh, take, um, some type of food allergy. But this one isn't actually that sexy. But you take some type of food, you just make something for food allergy. So there's Banza, which is a chickpea pasta. There's, uh, there's, uh, Lou Allen's Ice Cream, I think it's called, in Brooklyn. It's vegan ice cream, only vegan ice cream.

• 19:18Shaan Puri?

  Right, or like Oatly is like this, right? It's milk not made from cows, boom. This is now so popular that this almost can't get viral anymore. But, um, maybe if you chose some category that's not, not typical, but it feels like a lot of these are now mainstream, um, at this point.

• 19:35Sam Parr?

  But so, here's what I would do is I would open up, you, uh, this was what I was thinking about doing. I mean, I would never, I don't think I would do it, but maybe one day I would want to actually, it seems pretty fun. Is I would have a kitchen in New York, and I would get it in a really high trafficked, high trafficked area. And I would just, every three months, try to do a launch, where I launch like a rainbow cheesecake. Or, you know, I don't even, I'll just make it, you're just making stuff up. And then I would even, what I would do is I would mix, I would do a ton of stuff, and then just post a picture and drive a little bit of traffic to it. And see what had the, the cheapest cost per click.

• 20:11Shaan Puri?

  Right. Yeah. So, so, so what you're saying is just reuse the hype cycle, no embrace that the hype cycle exists and just make a kitchen that's going to rotate every month into a new crazy concoction and people will line up every month to go try the new thing and you'll build your brand as like Willy Wonka when he would create, you know, now everlasting gobstoppers or whatever, you know, like it creates a new, a new crazy concoction that you gotta go.

• 20:35Sam Parr?

  It goes a step further. So do you remember Cronut?

• 20:39Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 20:40Sam Parr?

  So Cronut's got popular in 2013. It was invented by a guy named Dominique. What was his last name? I don't know what his last name is, but a French pastry chef. He's like a big name chef, but he made Cronut because he likes, he was like, I just want to have fun and create something new and interesting all the time. And this one just kind of hit. He actually trademarked the name Cronut and he is like a purist. He's like an artist. So he didn't actually want to license it to people, but he easily could have made tens of millions or more by licensing that name to someone. And so there's a step further. So you create the food and you got to come up with a really cute name and you could actually get a trademark and, and there's licensing deals there. So I think this is super fascinating. I think if someone invested one year of their life to do this and a hundred grand or less, they could probably get one or two hits.

• 21:25Shaan Puri?

  Right. Which may not be the right thing to do with your life, but if that's you, if you're like, I'm doing it. Great, great. Good.

• 21:32Sam Parr?

  It's definitely fun. It seems fun, but yeah.

• 21:35Shaan Puri?

  It'll teach you a lot. I think it'll teach you a lot about business and marketing to be able to approach, you know, food this way. Okay. So a couple of other opportunities I see here. So I mentioned, I think, you know, investing or private equity, I think we'll start to scoop up these brands. I think that's one opportunity. Second one is I think somebody could, could build a kind of Guy Fieri of Instagram food, uh, character who basically just goes and tries to find the next, you know, who really does make the absolute best like oatmeal or whatever, right? Like come up with like, you know, go to every category and then just hunt for the best one ever. And then you do the drop on Instagram for, you know, for that brand, for that, for that shop. And maybe you, you found, you know, the absolute best Philly cheese steak in Philly and then you, uh, you know, you drop that. So I think somebody could create that if

• 22:21Shaan Puri?

  If they're a foodie and that was their thing. The other thing is a little more boring, which is like we've talked about cold chain three PL. So basically, how the heck do you ship all this stuff and keep it where it actually tastes good when it arrives? You know, three to five days later across the country. How do you, how do you make it work? And so I think that there's just a bigger, a bigger and bigger need for cold chain logistics. And I think we've, we've heard this a few times now, and I feel like if somebody's working on that or somebody has one of those, I would love to talk to you just to learn. Cause I think this business is booming and I think more and more people are going to go into it.

• 22:58Sam Parr?

  Okay. Do you want to hear one more food thing that we could, we to discuss? Do you remember as a kid seeing these books, I'm pulling them up now called eat this, not that?

• 23:07Shaan Puri?

  No, what is that?

• 23:09Sam Parr?

  Okay. So it was awesome. I loved it. I bought it once just because it was at Barnes and Noble and it ended up like being like pretty amazing. So Google eat this, not that. It started as one book, uh, like almost a coffee table-esque book.

• 23:21Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 23:22Sam Parr?

  And on the left side, it says eat this and on the right side is not that. And so for example, um, it started as just like a general, a general one, but then they eventually went to like desserts, fast food, all types of that, all types of stuff like that. And an example, let's find an example, one that I can say, so it would say eat this. Arby's beef cheddar classic, 450 calories, 20 grams of fat, not this. Arby's roasted turkey ranch sandwich, which has 800 calories. And so it shows two things that are quite similar and it says eat this one instead of this one. And if I want to.

• 23:58Shaan Puri?

  Saying eat a salad, don't go to Arby's. It's saying like, if you're at Arby's, get this one, not that one.

• 24:03Sam Parr?

  Yeah. Or let's see if like, they have like different Denny's, different Denny's breakfasts or, uh, like IHOP versus Denny's or whatever. Eat this or, uh, yeah, you get the idea, right?

• 24:14Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. Okay.

• 24:16Sam Parr?

  It's, are you looking at it? Do you Google it?

• 24:17Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 24:17Sam Parr?

  It's pretty sick. I, it's been around since probably 2000. Uh, probably 2002. I mean, I, I think I bought this when I was pretty young.

• 24:28Sam Parr?

  Let's see, there's a whole-

• 24:30Shaan Puri?

  They have half a million followers on Instagram, which is like, I think all these old like kind of publications, like either magazines or, or little brands like this, today they're all just Instagram accounts. I think that's the way to like reinvent these.

• 24:43Sam Parr?

  Wow. Okay. So the eat this, not cat, eat, eat this, not that, as of 2012 had sold eight million copies of the book. And then they spun it up into a magazine and wow, it's freaking amazing. I'm just pulling this up.

• 24:58Sam Parr?

  Here's what I would do right now, today, if I wanted to get popular on Instagram is, I would do, I would do the same thing just for Instagram. It's a whole eat this, not that, uh, on Instagram.

• 25:08Shaan Puri?

  Totally. And, and the format is so good. It's just a split screen. So it has half the food item on the left and half the food item on the right. And then it has the nutrition facts about why, why one versus the other. I think a lot of this stuff is super shareable on Instagram and you would grow very quickly. Like I can see their Instagram right now. It looks kind of shitty, like they're not doing a great job. I think you could basically steal this concept, pick a different name and, uh, grow a big Instagram account off this.

• 25:32Sam Parr?

  Oh, yeah.

• 25:32Shaan Puri?

  If I was bored, I would do something like this.

• 25:34Sam Parr?

  Yeah. And it's kind of a fun topic. Uh, I'm, I'm reading all about it now. This is pretty amazing. I hadn't thought about this in forever, but anyway, there you go. I think, if you did that for six or, six or 12 months, you'd get hundreds of thousands of followers on, uh, Instagram.

• 25:52Shaan Puri?

  Um, all right. We'll switch off food. Let's go to something else. What, what do you want to talk about?

• 25:55Sam Parr?

  You want to talk about money real quick? Tiller money?

• 25:58Shaan Puri?

  Okay. Yeah. What's this?

• 25:59Sam Parr?

  Have, okay. Very fascinating. Do you, you, what do you use to track your money?

• 26:05Shaan Puri?

  I don't use anything to track my money. I use Excel.

• 26:07Sam Parr?

  Okay. Everyone says that, who I've talked to, uh, not everyone, but a lot of people. Here is usually the answer I hear. I use Mint or I use Personal Capital or I use-

• 26:17Shaan Puri?

  Right. I have Mint. Yeah, as well.

• 26:18Sam Parr?

  And can I ask you, why don't you use Mint?

• 26:22Shaan Puri?

  I used Mint back in the day. I mean, I used Mint like 10 years ago. So it's just kind of like one of those things that I don't have a habit of going and looking at. And I don't like looking at that stuff because it makes me focus on like, you know, expenses and saving money here and there. And I just don't think that's fun. I don't enjoy that.

• 26:40Sam Parr?

  So I went and looked at a bunch of subreddits about money because I usually use personal capital and I don't like it for a bunch of reasons right now. But when I asked like 10 different people how they track their money, most who I asked, maybe five or six, use Excel, which is kind of crazy to me because how many, how many accounts do you have that you need to track? Over 10?

• 27:02Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 27:04Sam Parr?

  Yeah. So it doesn't matter if you're wealthy or not wealthy. Most people like between, if they have a wife or a husband, you have like your checking account, bank account, your 401K, your stock stuff, uh, maybe your home loan.

• 27:16Shaan Puri?

  Credit card.

• 27:16Sam Parr?

  Credit card. You probably have two or three credit cards. So typically I imagine the average Joe has 10 plus. So it's actually a lot to track regardless of if you have money. And everyone I've noticed, or not everyone, a lot of people I've noticed use Excel. So I did some research. There's this thing and it's not like I've discovered this. I think it's pretty popular already called Tiller Money. And all it is, the landing page is beautiful, but I'm just fascinated by this business. All it is, is a, if you go to Google Sheets and you click Tools and then Add-on, okay, you'll see the ability to add plugins to Google Sheets. Okay. Tiller Money, all it is, is a plugin for Google Sheets that costs 100, I think it's a hundred dollars a year.

• 27:59Sam Parr?

  And all it does is it automatically imports your bank accounts and any other account into Google Sheets and templates that they have, or you can just make your own template. But I've never seen someone build such a sick and awesome business off of a Google Sheet add-on. It's incredibly fascinating.

• 28:17Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, this is good. I like this. Um, I think this is this of all the like kind of money manager things. This appeals to me more because it feels like I'm managing my own money. And in reality, you know, the thing I'm always worried about is data like I don't want my data on all these different services. Like I'm not going to try your new finance app because like I just don't want to link my bank account to all this new stuff. But if they could do this where this was like self hosted in some way, like it's just a template. That'd be great. It doesn't look like that's the case, but it is sweet. I like it.

• 28:45Sam Parr?

  So if you go to Google Sheets right now and you click add-ons on the top right, once you're in a sheet, you can see add-ons. And I actually just realized I use a few add-ons. The other add-on I use is called Supermetrics. Which is, uh, it pulls in data from SQL and stuff like that. I'm, I bet you they do close to eight figures a year in, in revenue. But, uh, we've talked about plugins for WordPress. We've talked about plugins for Chrome. Google Sheets plugins is another thing that is super, super fascinating to me and I completely overlooked it. It's so neat. And so I don't know what else to say other than it's cool.

• 29:25Shaan Puri?

  So you, you had a thing that I thought was kind of interesting that was about open salaries. What, what is this? And do you want to talk about this or where do you want to go?

• 29:33Sam Parr?

  I'll let you lead a little bit, but I'll, I, it's so funny. I'll, I'll put stuff in here throughout like two weeks and

• 29:41Sam Parr?

  I, three days goes past and I'm like, wait, did I write that or did you write that?

• 29:44Shaan Puri?

  So all right, so we'll do it quick. We'll do it quick. So, so you put this thing on here. I got kind of intrigued. So you, you open salaries. What is it? It's the idea that like today, it's kind of crazy that we don't know what other people make and not in a gossip kind of way. But it's really, you know, the company knows what everybody makes, but the employees don't know. And that actually puts the employees at a pretty big disadvantage. You don't know when you're underpaid. You don't know if there's any like systemic bias and let's say women or minorities are not getting paid as much as, you know, tall, white males or whatever. And so, uh, it's kind of weird that this is this like taboo thing. Nobody talks about it. You're not allowed to talk about it. It's seen as kind of a faux pas, but would actually be to the benefit of any employee to know, to have transparency at, as to what people are getting paid.

• 30:29Shaan Puri?

  And it can be anonymized, but being able to see what, what other people at your role at your company are, are getting paid. And so you had put this thing on here that Colorado was gonna say that, hey, from 2021, employers have to disclose pay rates and ranges for job posts of any job that could be working Colorado, including remote jobs, which I thought was kind of interesting. And then we have companies like Buffer and Whole Foods have been doing this for a while. Buffer kind of tried to like make a name for themselves by being like the open transparent company. We'll share everybody's salary and like literally you can like, here's a link. You can go and see everybody at Buffer's salary.

• 31:04Sam Parr?

  Whole Foods lets you, Whole Foods, you can see people's salary?

• 31:08Shaan Puri?

  Uh, you put that in there or I braided, I don't know. I haven't seen that one, but I wanted to share a couple of interesting things that I, I found when I was digging into this. So first, uh, check out this, this spreadsheet of Buffer's salaries. I just put it in the chat. Um, so you can click this, anybody can Google this and find it. You can go and you can see that Joel, the CEO is making $280,000 this year. And you can go see what this, what his EA is making, she's making $89,000. And you can just go down the whole company roster, everybody's salary is public, um, which I think is like pretty insane. But interesting, then you have things like the Google kind of secret spreadsheets. I don't know if you've seen these, but at big companies, people are starting to like, just make an anonymous spreadsheet and say, hey, put in your salary and your level and your, your location here. Um, so we can all like have more transparency.

• 31:53Shaan Puri?

  You don't have to put your name next to it and, um, they circulate it with inside company. So Microsoft had one, Google had one, Facebook had one and the Google one, the, the, the, I forgot who it was. So some woman created this and within two days, 10,000 people had put in their information. And now there's over 20,000 people in the open Google database and you can go.

• 32:12Sam Parr?

  Can you link, can you link to that?

• 32:14Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, it's right here. Um, I have it at the bottom.

• 32:18Shaan Puri?

  So, so, so these are kind of cool and, um, and it's interesting how viral these go. So then I was looking at levels that FYI, which I know you know about.

• 32:28Sam Parr?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 32:29Shaan Puri?

  It's a place to go see, like, you can go and say, all right, I'm interviewing at Amazon and Facebook. And they, they labeled me an L5 software engineer located in Bay Area. Like, what am I going to get paid? How much is, or I got an offer. I don't know if that was a fair offer or a low offer, did they lowball me? And so you can go on levels at FYI and it's the same thing. Crowdsourced information about what you make at these different companies. And, uh, levels, if you look at their traffic, they're getting about a million and a half visits a month. And like this thing is really elevated from a side project to something like pretty legit. So they have like job boards now. If you click at the top, they actually have the thing we were talking about last episode, a negotiator as a service. So if you click the top, it's a sick little website where they have a little calculator that says, you know, what company, where are you located, how many years of experience, here's what you're getting,

• 33:14Shaan Puri?

  here's what we think you should get paid based on the levels database, which is now in the, I don't know, tens of thousands of entries or something like that. And then they basically say, hey, if you pay us 500 bucks, we'll negotiate your offer for you. We have former recruiters from these companies that freelance with us. And basically you book a time, you talk about your offer and how you're feeling about it and what you really want out of this. And then we'll negotiate for you and they show all these like success stories of like this person at Facebook got 20,000 more than their offer. This person got 40,000 more, this person got 10,000 more. And so they're taking and they just take a flat fee of like whatever 500, 600 bucks, I think. And so I think there's some interesting stuff going on in this like transparency around what people are making.

• 33:57Shaan Puri?

  And it really goes in like fits in my values where I think it's crazy that people don't talk about money more. I think it would help everybody if we talked about money more and it would be less like kind of taboo and less, less like a big, deep, dark secret if people were more open about it. And I think that's where we'll just go.

• 34:13Sam Parr?

  Can I give you a counterpoint for that?

• 34:15Shaan Puri?

  Go for it.

• 34:16Sam Parr?

  I thought that that was interesting and I'm not saying how I feel because I'm still thinking about it. But Leo, I forget his name, Leo, but he did it from Buffer, the co-founder of Buffer who no longer works there. So Buffer started with this whole transparency thing. That was like the whole shtick and it worked.

• 34:37Shaan Puri?

  About everything, users, revenue, salaries, everything.

• 34:40Sam Parr?

  It was, it was a shtick that got popular amongst bloggers. In particular, there's this guy named Pat and he has this blog called smartpassiveincome.com. I used to read it when I was 15 or 16 or 18, something like that in high school. And he would make money by creating books and doing a bunch of other side businesses. And he would reveal his income every single month. And other bloggers copied him and it was a really cool thing. John Lee Dumas did it, all these like really cool people did it. Buffer did it and that was their shtick to get popular and it worked because the Buffer's product isn't really special. There's so many different versions and they did it. Leo said in an interview, someone was like, this whole transparency thing, it's pretty

• 35:25Sam Parr?

  cool. Like you guys got traffic and everything. Do you think that it would work? And I believe, I don't want to quote him because I saw this a year and a half ago, two years ago, but something like, this works now and it's great for us, but I have a feeling when we get to 75, 80, 90, 100 people, it's not going to work anymore and it's actually going to hurt us big time. And I forget exactly why, but I believe Steve, man, I'm getting all my names screwed up. Someone else at Apple, like a head honcho at Apple, said something similar. He's like, no, the transparency thing, it actually can hurt, it hurts the company after a while and we tried it. And so I actually think that maybe this is good for startups, but it kind of sucks after a long time because look, let's say you own a small business that

• 36:07Sam Parr?

  does 20 million in sales and you're the business owner and you wanted to pay yourself $3 million a year. That's pretty shitty then if you're a $50,000 receptionist or something, but that's like your right to do that. Why would you want to share that with everyone?

• 36:22Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, as the employer, it's not great, right? Buffer used it to get a bunch of traffic because it was an effective growth tactic for them. Hey, if we're open about this, we'll get a bunch of people asking what the heck is Buffer and some of them will use it. But as the employer, it's not great. As the employee, it's great. And so that's, it depends kind of which side of the coin are you on. Also, it depends how far you go. The Buffer thing where they write everybody's name and how much they make, bit much. But the Google thing where it's like, hey, look, there's thousands of employees here. I need to know that within my level, within my kind of area, am I underpaid, overpaid, or you know, somewhere in between? It gives people peace of mind and it gives them, you know, an opportunity to get more sort of fairness or equity in terms of being able to negotiate with information, information

• 37:07Shaan Puri?

  that the other side has that you don't have. So I like it from the employee perspective and I think it's, but I wouldn't go the Buffer way of writing everybody's names down. Now, at a small company, cool, that kind of happens, but. I thought that was, I think it's kind of cool. I think there's definitely interest around this. So, you know, a couple of little ideas of things that people could do. So, levels F I dot F I I is cool, is working. I'm surprised that somebody like, you know, our buddy Andrew Wilkinson doesn't go buy a company like this. It's, it's kind of an N of one company. It has like a unique data advantage. It's in, it does job boards, which he loves as a business model on top of all this traffic that they're getting.

• 37:45Shaan Puri?

  And it's kind of like a side project that's probably like, you know, reached the max of that, of which, you know, the two guys behind it really can take it. The other ways that you could do this, I think you could do this in any vertical. So I don't know, is there levels of F I I in the like hedge fund world or consulting or banking? Like if you're in those worlds and there isn't a tool like this, you should just make the levels that F I I database for your industry, nursing. I don't, I don't know. Whatever the industry is, this product can work across those. And so I think that's cool. Even within levels, somebody could go further and be like, all right, I'm going to take product managers or data science and really own that. If they were somebody who has a big audience for that, like if, if that guy Lenny, Lenny, who's got a big blog and kind of audience around product managers.

• 38:30Shaan Puri?

  He could do this for product management and do it better than levels can generally. So I think the levels concept could be exported and done in different areas.

• 38:38Sam Parr?

  When we first launched, like maybe the first couple of months of launching, so we didn't have an audience. So, and I'm saying this so anyone could do it. We didn't have an audience. I wrote a post called, how much money do founders make? Because I was trying to figure out like, do I pay myself? Do I not pay myself?

• 38:52Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 38:53Sam Parr?

  Whatever. And if you Google, how much money do founders have in their bank account, the hustle, you might see it. And all I did was I took a Google form and I posted it on Hacker News and it went to number one. They eventually took it down because I think that goes against their terms of service, like have a survey. But I got like three or 400 replies and I asked people how much money they have in their checking account, how much they have in their bank account, how much they pay themselves, how much they have in illiquid assets. I got 100 and then what their job title is and where they live. And I got hundreds of replies and I published all the data. And I took out any information where you could like learn about someone and people loved sharing anonymous information and they loved reading anonymous information like

• 39:36Sam Parr?

  they loved like it was amazing. And so I agree. I think it's pretty sick and it was way oh there it is. Aubrey, you posted it. It was way easier to get people's I'm not like literally getting their information because it's all anonymous, but people were so forthcoming with us. It was pretty cool and pretty interesting.

• 39:53Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I want somebody to do this with VCs. I think most people don't know how much VCs make and all the different people in the food chain like the GPs versus like a partner versus like an associate or whatever. And I feel like somebody should like kind of crack that egg open and be like, look, here's the here's the numbers. Here's what it is and anonymize it. But give people some transparency into what what's really going on.

• 40:16Sam Parr?

  Let's talk about this for a second. So there's two companies that come to mind that are interesting to me that when we're talking about this. The first is PitchBook. You know what PitchBook is?

• 40:24Shaan Puri?

  Yes. So do you pay for it?

• 40:27Sam Parr?

  It's so expensive. No, my sister in law works there though. And so every once in a while she'll she'll be kind enough and let me ask her a question of like to look up.

• 40:35Sam Parr?

  No, I don't pay for it because it's really expensive. It's like $25,000, I think.

• 40:38Shaan Puri?

  Yep.

• 40:39Sam Parr?

  So PitchBook, it's kind of like Crunchbase but souped up. And so you pay 25 grand and you get access to like, a lot of information about privately held companies. The second, well, let's just talk about PitchBook. The reason it's interesting is they have a team of outsourced folks. I don't know what country they're in, but I think the Philippines and they literally have like 200 people and and by the way, PitchBook is a publicly traded company. You can go and read about them. They're owned by Morningstar. So you can actually go and see their operations and how they how they work. They're growing like crazy. They're north of 100 million in revenue. You can they have a team of folks and what they do is call VCs and they literally just ask them information or they call companies and they just ask them information. And for some reason, I don't know how or why, people

• 41:22Sam Parr?

  give them information. And that's one of the ways, one of many of ways that they get data. The second thing is this business called, is it called the org? Is that what it's called?

• 41:32Shaan Puri?

  Yes.

• 41:33Sam Parr?

  Okay, the org. Very interesting because in a nutshell, their tagline is the org. Transparency starts here. Build a better organization with a public org chart. Celebrate your colleagues. Basically, that's just kind of crap.

• 41:47Shaan Puri?

  Let's not, let's not read their marketing.

• 41:49Sam Parr?

  Yeah, really, what it is. I mean, I'm sure they do all that nonsense, but.

• 41:53Shaan Puri?

  It's a, it's an org chart. It's a public org chart.

• 41:55Sam Parr?

  Yeah, you pay money and you get access to people's org chart and this helps you know who to email to sell shit to.

• 42:01Shaan Puri?

  Right, exactly.

• 42:02Sam Parr?

  Uh, and that's cool. Like, there's no, I don't know why they don't just say that, but they've raised a lot of money, like, I think, tens of millions of dollars. It's probably gonna be a monster business. And so I would do two things with the salary thing. One, I would actually hire people in the Philippines or whatever and just hit it hard and just go out and hit it hard. And I would trust that a lot of people would be actually pretty, pretty transparent. Uh, and the second thing is I would pay wallet, kind of like the org, and I would sell this to every HR, uh, department in the country.

• 42:36Shaan Puri?

  So I have a friend that is doing this with Shopify sales. I showed him a way to roughly estimate how much a, not roughly, it's pretty good. Estimate how much, how many, how much sales a Shopify store is doing. And, um.

• 42:51Sam Parr?

  What is that? Can I get? You don't have to say if it's true. Is it because you order from them and you see what the order number is?

• 42:57Shaan Puri?

  That's one of the ways, yeah. And, um, that was one of the best ways. And so I showed him, I said, look, this is, this is useful. People want to know what their competitors are doing and.

• 43:06Sam Parr?

  And the second way is you look at the traffic.

• 43:09Shaan Puri?

  Uh, yeah, you, you still need a couple of other pieces of information. For example, you need to know how, how much the average order is and things like that, but, um, but roughly that, that will tell you, uh, you know, how they're doing. And so now he emails me a report every month that shows me, you know, these four companies that I decided, uh, hey, I want to track these four companies. And he emails me a report. This is their sales. This is their social media following. This is how many ads that they're running on Facebook. And, um, one other thing, which is, uh, just like the month over month changes, uh, between those. And I think it's a great idea. So I, he was kind of looking for something to do. I told him, look, I think this is a good pivot. Uh, I don't know exactly how well he's doing. I should really shout out the name, but I kind of don't remember. Let me look it up while we're doing this.

• 43:49Sam Parr?

  How'd you find this person?

• 43:51Shaan Puri?

  He was in my mastermind. Um, uh, let me see what his thing is called. It's called.

• 44:02Shaan Puri?

  Okay, dramatic pause, let me figure it out.

• 44:05Sam Parr?

  And you came up with the uh

• 44:08Sam Parr?

  with the

• 44:09Shaan Puri?

  I told him, I was like, look, uh, he, cause he was like, dude, I'm good with data. I'm interested in this kind of stuff.

• 44:17Shaan Puri?

  But I also like, you know, I also have a team in the Philippines and um, you know, so, so I really like this. Okay. So here it is. So the, the website is shop sales data.com. And uh, I hope he gets a bunch more customers from this. I hope he's still doing it. Um, he still emails me my report. I hope he's taking more customers right now. But it's monthly report of Shopify competitor data in your inbox every month for a hundred dollars, something like that.

• 44:42Sam Parr?

  Yeah, this is great. I mean, you could do the same with um, Facebook ad accounts, just like, because Facebook shows everyone their ads. You can say, you know, email me my competitors ads every time they launch a new one.

• 44:53Shaan Puri?

  Exactly. And so I think that there's like, there's some good stuff in this kind of like data, data based businesses where you're just collecting data from public sources. You're cleaning it up. You're structuring it. And then you're offering it as a service to a bunch of other uh, companies.

• 45:07Sam Parr?

  Okay. You want to do a mini one? Do we have a mini one?

• 45:11Shaan Puri?

  Uh, yeah, let's do a quick one. What else we got?

• 45:17Shaan Puri?

  Do you have anything good of like your first week working at a real job?

• 45:21Sam Parr?

  It is was my first week and now it's in my second week and I'm sitting on the beach in Hawaii. Uh, so

• 45:29Sam Parr?

  having a job rocks.

• 45:34Sam Parr?

  I should have done this years ago. I love having a job.

• 45:40Sam Parr?

  Um, it's cool, man. HubSpot announced that they had a billion dollars in revenue, like uh, run rate. It's pretty amazing. And so there's like two things. This is like my first like real job, uh, or like a corporate job. Um, I mean, that's not exactly true. Like I would have friends, like my friend Neville, who is like a works from self. He would be like, hey, do you want to go hang out on a Wednesday like at noon? I'm like, no, dude, I have a job. Like, so I treat like running my company. It was 100%

• 46:08Shaan Puri?

  More than a job. It's two jobs. Yeah.

• 46:10Sam Parr?

  It's more than it's, I would call it a nine to five. I'm like, yeah, like I'm, it was in fact way more than nine to five, but I was like, I'm like pretty straight. Like I get to work at nine. I do my thing. Like anyway, I try. So I, I teased about this, but yeah, first like corporate job. Um. It's it's gonna slow down, but like the amount of meetings is pretty crazy. And I told them I'm not doing meetings like this anymore. Because I'm gonna make stuff, but I don't know how it's still crazy to me how people find time to get the actual work done.

• 46:44Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I I realized how that works, which is just that managers don't get work done. Managers just go to meetings. And then ICs or individual contributors, as they're known, are the ones who actually like sit down and do work because they don't have, you know, back to back meetings throughout the day.

• 47:04Sam Parr?

  But I think even

• 47:05Shaan Puri?

  Like your work is basically just communicating between people.

• 47:08Sam Parr?

  But my seven days of working has shown me that even ICs have a lot of meeting.

• 47:14Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, they should. They shouldn't. They should not have that many. They should have like whatever one or two or three a day, but they should have like, you know, somewhere between three and five hours of uninterrupted time.

• 47:24Sam Parr?

  Yeah, like, so is that a like, I just don't understand how people so like I'm telling everyone at Husbands, I'm like, you don't know, talk to me for these hours. I like, like, and I'm like, this is I and I and I say, I say nicely, of course, but I say, I'm doing this for the better of everyone. Like, I'm gonna make good stuff. So like, let me go on my hole and you just just don't bother me.

• 47:44Shaan Puri?

  All right. What's been the worst part so far?

• 47:46Sam Parr?

  The meetings.

• 47:47Shaan Puri?

  Let's be honest. Okay. What what what the meetings boring or just the amount of them?

• 47:52Sam Parr?

  The amount. And also, like, I didn't know what workday is and all this stuff. There's just so much paperwork that I've always had people do for me that I'm having to do. What's the worst part? You know, like, everyone's like, is having a boss weird because I've never had a boss before? No, I think it's gonna suck after a while, of course, like having a boss might suck. I'm so pumped. I don't have to like, I get to just shovel shit onto Kieran's plate that I don't like. I'm like, hey, you know, should we hire this person? Like, I don't have to make that decision. I love that. I love that. I think it's awesome.

• 48:24Sam Parr?

  So having a boss has not sucked so far. I don't know. What do you think would be the worst parts? And I'll tell you if they are. What was your worst part?

• 48:31Shaan Puri?

  There are certain meeting types that you have to do that I just found like completely soul sucking. One of them was called a calibration meeting. It's basically like. Even just describing it, you know, gives me some pain here. Basically, it's like you're trying to promote people. But how do you know, like, if every manager has their own criteria for promotions? How do you make sure you're promoting people equally and fairly throughout the company? So you have to do these things called calibration meetings where you sit down and you basically say this person's up for promotion or they get they're getting promoted because of this, this and this. And then other person says, well, you know, I I felt like they weren't a they weren't great at this. So they didn't do a great job with that project and you have to kind of defend them.

• 49:12Shaan Puri?

  For me, it was boring on two levels. One, first and foremost, I didn't know anyone else in the company. So I just sat there for three hours, not being able to say anything because I didn't interact with any of these people. I just got here. I just got bought. I don't know these people. I can't give any input, nor do I have any opinion on if the if the feedback is valid or not. And the second thing I was just like, wow. Even after all this talk, like, I still just feel like the person who's the most vocal and best salesperson is getting their way and the person who's not that great at talking is not getting their way. So like, we could have just skipped all of this. Like, it would have almost been better had we not gotten into this room and said, you sell your person and you sell your person. And you debate this person. It's like the better debater wins in big companies. And I think that that's like really crazy.

• 49:58Sam Parr?

  Well, I think we do at our company all the time, which is like, if it will say, I'll like if a meeting sounds for 30 minutes and and like in the meeting, I'm like, okay, I said what I had to say. I don't need to be here anymore. I'm leaving. Or like it's very, it wasn't considered rude to be like, hey, you need to leave now. You're done. It was like kind of a helpful thing. And I'm still trying to figure out how to politely do that here. I'm like, do you guys need me here? Can I can I leave?

• 50:21Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 50:21Sam Parr?

  Or or or I'll just say, I'm out. You I I've said what I need to said. I've heard what I need to heard. You guys can talk.

• 50:27Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. Especially on Zoom or whatever. You just sort of like, you hold up, you wave and you click exit.

• 50:36Sam Parr?

  The second thing is HubSpot is doing really well. And just the software business in this sounds like, just like, like obvious stuff from anyone who's in software. But I've never been at a company like this. Man, if you figure out how to get a if you figure out how to reduce your churn to to very little or or even positive. So for every dollar someone spends, it's above $1 the next year. And you pick a big enough market, it's just magical. Like, just now I understand why people are saying like, oh, you know, why is this company valued so high highly? It's like, well, because sticky revenue, software revenues, so something like. I don't know if HubSpot would be considered this, but something for sure where you're building an entire business off of, and you know that the switching costs are quite high. It's pretty amazing, like

• 51:21Sam Parr?

  software, like just start a software company. It's so much better than everything else. Like, it's really hard and it's a slog early on, but if it really, truly, if you can get your churn to be right and you pick a big enough market, it's just, and you have a, and you can figure out how to have a good marketing machine, which all this is like, oh yeah, if only you could do that. Like, I know, but like, you, you can kind of figure it out. Actually, I think given enough, if you, if you give yourself like five years to figure it out, I think you can.

• 51:48Shaan Puri?

  Well, I think all the things you're saying are true and they really just point to this one lesson I've learned the hard way over and over again, which is it's much more important to pick what game you play than to try to be the best player at a game.

• 52:01Shaan Puri?

  Because if you pick the wrong game, even becoming the best player still ends up in a small outcome or a really painful path. But if you pick the right game to play and whether you become the best or not even the best, but you know, just kind of the top 25%, it's just so much better to win that way. And in this case, like we've, if we've, we talk about and we've done different types of businesses, right? We've done, like I did social network. I tried to make a new social network. It's the wrong fucking game to play, dude. It's so hard, so hard. So it's a low chance of probability of success. You did a media business, also hard, hard, you know, higher odds of success, but like lower size of the prize if you get it right.

• 52:39Sam Parr?

  Yeah, way lower size.

• 52:41Shaan Puri?

  Ecom, you know, just a fucking pain in the ass, just tons of headaches all the time with your supply chain and logistics. Cause you've got real world products and you have to like ship them all around the world and you're going to have customers who have returns and like things that just like are not as easy as software. And so like we've, and you know, we talk about all these different, you know, doing a paid newsletter or whatever, like there's all these different models. And for my money, by far, the best one is to build a software business because a software business can scale, a software business can like. Be improved over time and you know, unlike e-commerce, when you, when you make a crappy ecommerce product, uh, you know, you go make a better version, the next, you know, it takes you six months to make it and then you make it and all those old customers who got the bad products

• 53:25Shaan Puri?

  still think you suck. Whereas with software, you push the update and all of a sudden, every single customer has the new best thing. You know, there's all these just tiny advantages and um, software is the way to go.

• 53:36Sam Parr?

  But we, I want to say something that David Siegel, so we had David Siegel on last time, he had a uh, billion dollar or close to billion dollar tea business. And I go, David, why are you doing brick and mortar stores when you could be doing software? And he said the right thing. What did he say?

• 53:51Shaan Puri?

  He was like, oh, it's fun. I love selling product.

• 53:54Sam Parr?

  And I was like, that's the best answer. That is a wonderful answer. And I think that like, will I ever be able to start an enterprise software company? I think that if I was going to, it would either have to be very soon or even a few years ago. Like you, you, I would, you have to do it. I think when you're like really like where money is the one number one thing. It's like, I gotta get paid. I gotta get my hit. And um, in that case, yeah, I would do anything to make money. But where I am now and where I think where a lot of people are is you really, it's, it's, I agree with everything you said, but you have to add the, and also, not like passionate about, but what, what, what excites you enough to, that you're willing to get good at it over a decade?

• 54:34Shaan Puri?

  Right. Well, let's let you know. All right. So let's take you, okay. Uh, you're happy at HubSpot. Everything's great. You're gonna be there for, for 20 years. We know that. Alternate reality, you know, we all know you're happy at HubSpot. You'll be there for two decades. It's great. Uh, it's, you know, sunshine and rainbows. Let's say alternate reality, they fire you tomorrow. You're gonna go build something else. Um, where do you think you would go build? Would you do what you're, would you go media? Would you go something totally different? Would you go software? What do you think you would do?

• 55:03Sam Parr?

  Everyone's gonna laugh at me because I say trucking, but I would do some, maybe something, something in the agriculture space. Yeah. I think ag tech is, is ag tech is interesting. Uh, I think that's the most interesting. I had a great call with this guy who I'm gonna, uh, we gotta have this guy on the podcast. His name's, uh,

• 55:23Sam Parr?

  Uh, just his son's name is Jordan. I can't remember. Uh, Rob, uh, Van Trump. It's called the Van Trump Report. So Van Trump Report, it's this guy who has a newsletter that does $20 million a year in subscription revenue. He's the only writer and he was telling me all about ag tech. Do you know what ag tech stands for?

• 55:43Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, agricultural tech.

• 55:44Sam Parr?

  And he was just saying all types of like what's going on. And I think working with like middle America people who, whether they're rich or not, they're more humble and they create things that actually impact the world, like get food to you. I would do something in that space or I would start another media company.

• 56:03Shaan Puri?

  But okay, let's say you go into ag tech or and you're, you're probably going to be open and whatever, you know, you'll think of it then. But knowing what you know now, would you do media in agriculture? Would you do, uh, you know, something with actual farms and logistics? Would you do technology, hardware, you know, trucking, the actual self-driving trucks? Would you do a job thing? Would you, what, what would you, what model would you be wanting to do in that space?

• 56:26Sam Parr?

  Well, okay. So I don't like this question because it could, it'll change every single day you ask me. But as of right now, I would start a blog with, in the ad tech space. And then eventually I would turn it into a database. Kind of, I like this, this company, the org. Uh, I think I could create something like a, a database that's better. Um, and I, yeah, that's what I would do.

• 56:48Shaan Puri?

  Okay, nice.

• 56:49Sam Parr?

  I think that's what I would do as of right now. That, that fascinates me. Or I would create, um, do you know what Tiger 21 is?

• 56:56Shaan Puri?

  Isn't that like a, like a kind of a club, conference or club or mastermind thing or something like that?

• 57:00Sam Parr?

  Like a club for people who have investable assets north of $10 million and it costs 30 grand a year. It's, and they have like a thousand people who are subscribed and, uh, my friend joined and I looked at the backend and it was horrible. And I was like, oh, I'm just going to clone that.

• 57:15Shaan Puri?

  And what do they do with the, with the members? Is it events or is it, uh?

• 57:19Sam Parr?

  It's like both, but like they create like, um, like little like safe communities where like you meet in groups of 10 and you're going to show off your portfolio and people criticize you and like try to make you defend your position. So you get better. But it's, it got bought by private equity. So it makes a lot of money.

• 57:40Shaan Puri?

  All right. That's cool.

• 57:46Speaker 02

  I feel like I could rule the world, I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel, never looking back.