#128 - Open Startups, A Mysterious Bag Lady, and Gamifying Facebook Ads

Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) and Sam Parr (@TheSamParr) host the podcast together today with no guest. In today’s episode you’ll hear: An update on Sam’s whereabouts and how he ended up buying a house in Austin (0:30), Shaan pitches an idea about “Class Pass for Billionaire’s Houses” (5:30), the best ad read in the history of MFM and how to growth hack your ads (11:00), Sam and Shaan talk about the pros and cons of a business like Baremetrics (14:25), Shaan contemplates publishing his total financial snapshot over the past year (20:35), Shaan pitches an idea on a Shopify app that connects all DTC brands (26:40), how Italic made smart deals with luxury Chinese suppliers (37:45), Sam and Shaan think someone should gamify a Facebook Ad learning program (42:37), Why Mario Level One is genius (51:27). Thank you to Lemon.io for sponsoring today's episode! They are offering a 15% discount for the first 6 weeks of work for all MFM fans. Go to Lemon.io/mfm to claim the offer! Companies mentioned: - Simon's Escapes: https://www.simonescapes.com/ - Inspirato: https://www.inspirato.com/ - Sponstayneous: https://www.sponstayneous.com/ - List of open startups: https://openstartuplist.com/ - Coop Commerce: https://www.coopcommerce.com/ - The Fascination: https://thefascination.com/ - B8ta: https://b8ta.com/ - Italic: https://italic.com/ - The genius of the first level of Mario: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zRGRJRUWafY Have you joined our private FB group yet? It's a page where people share each others million dollar ideas or what they're already working on: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ourfirstmillion. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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

• 0:21Shaan Puri?

  I'm recording. What's up, Sam?

• 0:22Sam Parr?

  What's going on?

• 0:23Shaan Puri?

  You bought a house?

• 0:25Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 0:26Shaan Puri?

  Did you really? I thought you were bluffing when you sent that to me.

• 0:29Sam Parr?

  No, I've got the inspection right after this. So I went out to like, I'm in Austin because my company's based here. Some of the guys took me out to like dinner or something and I was walking around the neighborhood and I was like, this is amazing. I want to move here. And so that was on Thursday. On Saturday, I looked at a house. On Sunday, I made the offer. Monday was accepted. So we're good. I am gonna rent it out for some of the year and live in it some of the year.

• 0:57Shaan Puri?

  Wow. Okay. I love it. Is it like kind of residential neighborhood-y family or is it like cool near Sixth Street? Like where are you doing it?

• 1:05Sam Parr?

  It's the cool. They call it like the grimy area. It's or I don't know what the stereotype is. I frankly know very little about it. It's in, it's in East Austin. It's off of Sixth Street. It's like a 22, 2300 square foot house. It's really nice. It's very nice.

• 1:22Sam Parr?

  And we got approved. I got a little bit of, a little bit more, a little bit of a mortgage. And we just got approved fast and bought the damn thing.

• 1:31Shaan Puri?

  And Sarah's cool with it?

• 1:32Sam Parr?

  Yeah, definitely. We

• 1:34Shaan Puri?

  I think you're my hero because you live like, you live, you make decisions like an independent person while being happily married.

• 1:41Sam Parr?

  It seems that way. It's, it's definitely not. I mean, I do a lot of the talking, but you know, I, it's a team. And so we both agreed, but yeah, we go, hey, you want to do this? Yeah, we go, yeah, we're it. And so we, we make decisions quickly or I make decisions quickly and

• 1:55Shaan Puri?

  I think, I think that's it. You found somebody who's compatible with you in that way. Making decisions quickly and valuing similar things so that your decisions are aligned.

• 2:04Sam Parr?

  Like when we bought a car, it was like on a Thursday. It's like, let's buy a car. What type? Well, I don't know. Let's just go look at them. And we just bought it on a Friday. So that's how we roll.

• 2:12Shaan Puri?

  That's how I did with my dog. I woke up in the morning, Christmas Eve, I said, let's go dog shopping. And she's like, what? No. And like, we had agreed, now's not the time for the dog. And then it just, that morning was like, today's the day for the dog. And we went, we saw three different dogs, and we bought the third dog and came home.

• 2:26Sam Parr?

  That's the way to go. And I also, when I was looking at the house, I wore a mask the entire time. But one of the agents who was showing it, messaged me the next day, was like, I just tested positive. And I'm, so that's why I'm home, because I can't, I'm not, I'm not going anywhere. But I went and got tested, I'm negative, but I'm still be better safe than sorry.

• 2:48Shaan Puri?

  That's good, that they called you. I had a friend in college who got the herpes, and his doctor was like, hey, you need to call all your, you know, girlfriends, and you need to tell them, like, what's up? And he's like, oh, shit, why? Like, are they gonna die? And he's like, no, but you know, it's respectful, still serious, and it's respectful. And, you know, this type of thing can can stick around, and it can be passed on to babies in the future for the, and he was like, oh, wow, okay. Came home, called nobody, told nobody. I was like, shit.

• 3:19Sam Parr?

  Yeah, there's a scene in the office where Michael gets herpes, and he calls people, he goes, I don't know how to say this, so I'm just gonna spell it out. I've tested positive for H I R P. And he spells herpes. Like, Michael, herpes is spelled with an E, not an I. Why didn't you do that? That's kind of how I felt. Like, I had to like, call my coworkers, and I'm like, just so you know, I was around someone who tested positive, but I'm not. Anyway, we're good.

• 3:48Shaan Puri?

  All right, that's great. All right, let's jump into some topics. So, congrats on the house. And let's talk about bear metrics.

• 3:56Sam Parr?

  By the way, I'll, so I intend to Airbnb this home, and I'm gonna reveal, well, I'll reveal the numbers, once we, once we do it. And I think that will be a fun little segment.

• 4:08Sam Parr?

  Let me tell you something really quick about this. There's this company that I love. It's called Super Money Market. Is that what it's called?

• 4:16Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, you've talked about that once before. Yeah.

• 4:17Sam Parr?

  Is it? Sorry, Money Supermarket. It's like Nerd Wallet, but it is in Britain. And it's been around for longer than Nerd Wallet. It's been around for, I think, since the beginning of the web. And the guy who started it, his name is Nixon, Simon, Simon Nixon, big billionaire. And when he, it went public and when he sold it, he went and bought a vacation home. And then his friends wanted to like stay there and he went and bought another one and his friends wanted to stay there. So he created this website called Simon's Escapes. And it's, I think it's like a, I don't know if it's like a profit making business, but it's like a legit business. And you could go out and rent a variety of his homes. And the whole shtick is that this is his personal collection. I don't know if that's true.

• 4:59Sam Parr?

  If it's like part of the shtick, but it's kind of interesting. And I called Ryan Beagleman and I was like, hey, this is pretty interesting. He goes, yeah, this is actually pretty common. A lot of billionaires, like even Bill Gates and Richard Branson. You can go and rent their private estates. And Ryan told me, he was like, yeah, but I'm pretty sure a lot of them are wildly unprofitable. Like, for example, the founder of Circus Soleil, I think he has a bunch of them. And you can go, he's like, they really just do it just to lower, reduce their burn. But it's kind of a neat idea, like one day to be rich enough to like, just, you know, own so many homes that you can rent. It's, it's, it's cool.

• 5:31Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I think you could do like a, a membership, like a class pass, but for staying in billionaires' houses. And so you pay the membership just to be, just to get access to the Airbnb's platform. Where you could rent only, you know, chateaus and villas and, and ski houses of rich people.

• 5:47Sam Parr?

  I've just, I learned about this last year. What's that called? It's called a, is it Aviato or Elevate?

• 5:55Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I've heard of Aviato. That's from the show, Silicon Valley.

• 6:01Sam Parr?

  It's like a month, like you pay a monthly fee and you get access to high end. What's it called? Elevato or?

• 6:08Shaan Puri?

  Okay, it's called something. What is it?

• 6:10Sam Parr?

  They, it's huge. I see commercials for it all the time. And what they do, this is like totally like, we didn't plan any of this. So what they do is they buy vacation rentals and you pay a monthly fee and you get access to all of them.

• 6:23Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 6:24Sam Parr?

  It's called, I don't know what it's called. I'll have to look it up. But anyway, it's just like this cool that I saw this guy do that. I'm like, that'd be fun to do that.

• 6:33Shaan Puri?

  Right. I think somebody could also, while we're just riffing off this, I think somebody could also do this for parties. So I think you could also create kind of like a high end party club, which is basically like a membership fee you pay every year and you get invited to parties in all these different cities and the parties are part of, the parties all are hosted at house parties of like baller houses and until you take kind of like an elite crew. And I had a friend who was doing this in Moscow. He basically was like, he went, he's, he's from Moscow and he traveled around the world. He got his MBA at that, that program called INSEAD. That was like, I don't know if you've ever heard of that. It's like halftime in Singapore, halftime in Paris or wherever it is.

• 7:13Shaan Puri?

  And so he had this like kind of cool global network of like, you know, like successful, kind of successful-ish people. And what he did was he created this party club in Moscow that only they would get text messages to, to these underground parties that were either at clubs, but often at non like club or bar venues. So somebody's house or, you know, outdoors in a field or whatever it was. And it was always like really cool events. And so he had this list of like 3,000 members that would just get this text every single time. And he was making great money doing it. And he was just doing it because he built like the most powerful, kind of like social scene. And he liked to be the kingmaker of that scene and, you know, meet girls and he liked to do all that stuff. But I could see somebody.

• 7:56Shaan Puri?

  You know, connecting some of these cool venues together in unique ways, whether it's for rentals, vacation rentals, or for partying. It's not a great business, but I think it could be a lot of fun for somebody who's just, you know, and you know, somebody's trying to have a good time.

• 8:09Sam Parr?

  So I want to riff on that for a second, but first, the company that I was referring to is called Inspirato. So inspirato.com, 500 employees, 200 million in revenue. You pay, you have two packages, one's 600, one's $2,000 a month. I think the $600 one, you get reduced rates. The $2,000 one, you get to stay, I think that's your rate. It's very expensive, two grand a month.

• 8:30Shaan Puri?

  It's luxury, luxury vacations, basically, luxury travel vacations.

• 8:34Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I think, and I don't think they've raised a lot of money compared to how big they are. It's a subscription business. Anyway, pretty big, kind of interesting, different take on the whole Sondra Airbnb thing. And then the other one in this space that I think is going to be massive, I've been talking about this for a few months now, is called Hello Landing, which is kind of like this, but more low end. So you could spend $2,000 to $4,000 a month, and you just get a furnished apartment in like 18 cities.

• 8:59Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 8:59Sam Parr?

  And so you could just live out of that. And it was started by the guy who started Shipt, which is a like Instacart competitor, but mostly in the South, that he sold for 500 million bucks. A very successful guy. I'm very eager to see how that plays out. And then regarding what the idea you just had, we had a listener tweet at us, and he basically made a Scott's Cheap Flights, but for Airbnbs and rentals. Did you see that?

• 9:26Shaan Puri?

  No.

• 9:27Sam Parr?

  I'll bring you, you have to remind me what it was called. It was called like Serendipity or something like that. But basically you say like, I don't even know if he had it set up this much, but you say which cities interest you. It could be like a variety of cities and he emails you out, cool Airbnbs that are, have been recent, or hotels that have recently been.

• 9:45Shaan Puri?

  Right. Curated. Yeah. So it's curated, unique vacation stuff. So I think there's a lot of value in this, which is basically like a combination of great deals and unique experiences, and just doing the curation work so that people don't have to do all the research and be hunting and be finding all this stuff. I think that's a pretty, pretty simple way to build a, build a list and build a business.

• 10:08Sam Parr?

  And the name of that business that he just, it's called, the name's a little silly, but the link's in there, it's called Spontaneous, like Spontaneous.

• 10:19Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, Spontaneous, yeah.

• 10:20Sam Parr?

  He's got to fix that name, but that's what it's called.

• 10:23Shaan Puri?

  Right. Yeah, probably not gonna work. I said, oh, this guy Zach. Okay, I've seen this guy. Yeah, the name is awful. That's why I he did message us. I didn't click the link because the name was so awful.

• 10:32Sam Parr?

  No, it's a cool service. I signed up for it. And what's funny is that he just launched and he did so he doesn't have any testimonials. And he has a part on his website that says testimonials and there's an asterix and it's like, no one has said this yet, but these will likely be what they say.

• 10:47Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, it says, what we hope you'll be saying soon. Future subscriber testimonials. Okay, gotta give credit where credit's due. I like the I like your spunk.

• 10:55Sam Parr?

  And then he says, like, sponsors, and he lists a bunch of brands and he goes, these people haven't sponsored us, but brands like this will probably sponsor us eventually.

• 11:03Shaan Puri?

  Dude, the best thing, the best ad sale we ever did for the podcast is one, I don't know if you remember this, I think this might have been before you came on. But we had no sponsor for like two months or something like that. And so I just did an ad read and during the podcast, I just go, this product is brought to you by? No one. Think about this. This could be you right here. I said, we don't have an advertiser right now, so email me if you want to advertise. And I got a ton of people interested. We have to book three sponsors and like from a 15 second joke, basically.

• 11:30Sam Parr?

  It works. It works. We did that when we started the hustle. I put this person, I think this is actually illegal or against the rules. I put like this was sponsored by and then I put the name of a company and they didn't actually sponsor it, but I knew that their competitors would email me asking this. All right. You want to kick it off on what you have?

• 11:45Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, yeah. Let's talk about bear metrics. Okay, so we had referenced bear metrics, which is a software that gives you kind of like a dashboard for your business. I use it for my subscription business. And it tells you, oh, here's your monthly revenue. Here's your churn rate. Here's you have this many people canceled, this many people card declined, whatever. It gives you this like very simple dashboard for your business, which is useful. And he was kind of like a bootstrapper guy. So he just posted a blog that says, I sold bear metrics. And he says, after seven years of working on this company, bear metrics has a new home. And he just dove into all the details. So he goes, purchase price, $4 million of cash. What I walk away with, $3.7 million in cash. This is a 2.65 multiple of our annual recurring revenue. And he said, here's the buyer. It's his private equity, like

• 12:29Sam Parr?

  I'm good.

• 12:29Shaan Puri?

  Private equity firm.

• 12:30Sam Parr?

  The, the company that bought it, it's Zenith or Xenon.

• 12:33Shaan Puri?

  Xenon, yeah.

• 12:34Sam Parr?

  Um, the woman who is the co-founder, Terry is one of my very good friends, Terry Wilson. They're all good people.

• 12:41Shaan Puri?

  And so it said, uh, you know, no earn out, uh, payment structure is three payments. There's, you know, at close at 12 months and at 18 months. Which is interesting because there's no earn out, but you also didn't get all the money upfront.

• 12:53Sam Parr?

  Well, that's not an earn out.

• 12:54Shaan Puri?

  That's just. He does have to work there.

• 12:55Sam Parr?

  Sell their financed.

• 12:57Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, it's sort of like dripped, basically. Um, so, so he said, okay, how we got here, you know, been working on this. It's doing well in COVID, but uh, I think it was just kind of like time to move on. So what did you think of this when you saw it?

• 13:10Sam Parr?

  So Bear Metrics is a really cool company. Um, they buffer use them at first. So I think we should, I hate this phrase. It's a cliche. Take a step back, which is this business is.

• 13:20Shaan Puri?

  I don't think you've ever said that.

• 13:22Sam Parr?

  I, I know. I try never to say it. I think it's a stupid cliche. Um, the, this business is at this, there's this whole group of people. They call them open startups. If you Google like open startups, I think there's a website that compiles all of them and they're startups or companies that reveal their revenue in real time. You could see their burn or not. I don't think you, you can't see profit. You can only see revenue. So you could see, um.

• 13:45Shaan Puri?

  Well, some do it all. There's degrees, right? So Buffer went crazy and they were like, here's everybody in the company's salary. So they published their employee salaries. Some people.

• 13:52Sam Parr?

  Their bank account information, everything.

• 13:54Shaan Puri?

  And others do kind of like the high level metrics. Like here's what our revenue is month by month. Here's what our growth was. Here's what our, here's how our email list grew, but they don't show like employee salaries or profits.

• 14:04Sam Parr?

  Yeah. And there's a lot of sites that do this. So there's Startup Story. That guy, he does that with people. There's Indie Hackers. And then there's people who do it on their own.

• 14:12Shaan Puri?

  The Gumroad guy.

• 14:13Sam Parr?

  Yeah, the Gumroad guy. Open Startup List. There you go. Openstartuplist.com has a list of them. So I think that as a business owner, I would never ever do that. But I think it's cool. I think it's really cool. I love consuming it. So I think that's interesting and bear metrics is like a really cool tool to get that done.

• 14:31Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I think that's a good move that this guy sold. He only sold, I imagine, because he had $850,000 in funding from major VCs. And it was like an easy out for him. So in the post, he says that the VCs, they're like, just forget.

• 14:48Shaan Puri?

  So they had put in 800,000 back in 2014, 2015 from two kind of like big VCs, General Catalyst and Bessemer. And, and basically it wasn't going to be like the home run, right? VCs are trying to get, you know, 10x, 100x on their money. And so they want, they want you to go, basically when a VC invests in you, they are planning for you to try to become a billion dollar company. That's what a win looks like for them. And then there's sort of like smaller wins if you end up at 250 or 500 million. But a five, a four, in this case, a $4 million outcome is, is, you know, it's a rounding error. It's a cost of doing business.

• 15:21Sam Parr?

  I don't know if he said this in the blog post or if someone said in the comments, which is like the amount of time just for the lawyers on the VC's end to do the paperwork would be, would cost $800,000 or something like that.

• 15:34Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I don't think that's quite true, but that, but I get the point. So he basically, what he said was they, he said, I wanted to give them their money back. But ultimately for a $4 million purchase price, we would need to ask them to walk on their investment. Now, this didn't fully add up because

• 15:49Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 15:49Shaan Puri?

  You could have easily given back the 800,000 and walked away with, you know, whatever, 2.8 or 2.9 million instead of whatever he walked away with and 3. something million.

• 16:00Shaan Puri?

  But I guess he asked them like, hey, will you take less? Then I'll do this deal and or will you, will you write it off so I can have an exit here? And, and they said, yes, which is kind of amazing by them. And there was a lot of people on Twitter who were like, wait, what the hell? Like this does not compute, especially people who come from other industries like real estate or whatever. They're like, you just, why would they write off their entire investment? I don't understand. And so what do you think about that reaction? And how would you explain it?

• 16:27Sam Parr?

  Well, I do think it's hard to fathom because it's almost $1 million. It's a lot of money. I think that you have to look at it like, who, who was it? General Catalyst?

• 16:35Shaan Puri?

  General Catalyst, yeah.

• 16:36Sam Parr?

  What's their AUM? Do you know?

• 16:39Shaan Puri?

  I think they have like, they have multiple funds, but I think that they have like billion dollar sized funds.

• 16:44Sam Parr?

  Yeah. So maybe like $10 billion they have. I think that the way that they probably saw it was let's just not cause a fuss, be cool with this guy because he's public and he'll talk well about us and that's worth $800,000.

• 16:57Shaan Puri?

  So they just announced 2.3 billion in new capital commitments across three funds. So I think that's probably, let's call that their AUM. I don't know if that's exactly it, but.

• 17:07Sam Parr?

  Yeah. So I think.

• 17:08Shaan Puri?

  There are billion dollar plus fund.

• 17:10Sam Parr?

  I think that the way you look at it is like, if you're in real estate, which I'm going to fluff. I mean, I'm going to kind of bumble through this. I don't know how it works, but like, let's say it's like, you paid a little money to like inspect a, inspect a property and turns out like, ah, it's not a good property. That's okay. That's part of doing business. Let's move on to the next one. That's kind of like what it is. It's just when you have, you know, 10 billion in assets, 800 K is the cost to do the inspection.

• 17:35Shaan Puri?

  Right. So here, here's what I think happened. So I think, A, I think getting 800 K back is probably not that interesting to them. And if they took any more, I think they would kill the motivation to do the deal by the founder. So, so I think that would be the most that they could get. This is probably because it's seven years old. This fund is probably already done well and has profits. And they can actually just write off the 800 K and just reduce their taxes, basically. So they can, they are going to effectively still keep that amount of money by calling this a loss, by calling this a zero. And, and then they get the, you know, the founder might let them into their next, if they started another company, it might be great signaling or kind of PR because look, we're talking

• 18:17Shaan Puri?

  about it. And so, so I think that those are probably some of the reasons why between like the cost and the hassle versus the upside, the fact that they probably have a bunch of profit that they could just write this off into. And lastly, you know, the sort of branding and founder friendly story that they get to tell for every founder after this.

• 18:35Sam Parr?

  Yeah. So that's why it's hard to fathom, but. When you like, you're like, look, this is like point 001% of their money like this just, that's the cost of doing business. And I imagine that's how they saw it. It just so happened that there's a lot of zeros behind it, but it's the same thing if it's whether it's 800 or 800,000.

• 18:51Shaan Puri?

  Right. And, and I encourage everyone, go check out openstartuplist.com and go look. So you could see ghost is on here, buffers on here, bear metrics, convert kit, Gumroad. There's a bunch of interesting companies that you can go and you could actually go and understand their business, right? Like as if the CEO took you aside and opened up their books. And I love looking at this type of stuff because it helps me, you know, clear, you know, paint a picture and understand different businesses with very little effort.

• 19:19Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 19:20Shaan Puri?

  So I would take advantage. And so I was, I was thinking about this the other day. So I was very close to just publishing my, like, I just did an annual review for myself about like everything, like I had these goals, you know, what changed for me in my life, my, you know, did I, my kind of personal development, then my financial picture. And I was like, should I just publish this whole thing? And I was like, you know, finger trembling on the button where I was about to click it. And then I was like, okay, let me think about it before I put, because once you put your financial picture out there, you can't undo it.

• 19:46Sam Parr?

  Can I give you my opinion?

• 19:47Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, tell me what you would do.

• 19:49Sam Parr?

  Don't do it. I don't think you should do it. I think that if maybe you can like give like, it increased by this much or like it's going well, or like seven figures, maybe do that. But I definitely think you should not do it. I think that, um, I think that there's a few things. One, if you're a company, so people have told me about Nathan Latka and then Cortland, the founder of Indie Hackers has told me about him. He's like, founders give him numbers and then they like regret it because people start copying them and they go to Cortland and like, hey, can you delete that? And he's like, well, no, I mean, you like knew what you were getting into and you asked me to do this interview. So no, I'm not going to delete it. Like we agreed this is fair, which he's right. But it's like,

• 20:31Sam Parr?

  So it just like brings unnecessary attention. The only up and then for personal wise, one time when I did HustleCon, I like wrote a blog post saying like the first HustleCon I made like, one year we did $300,000 in revenue and it was like all profit. And I was using that money to like grow a business and people were like, oh, nice. You have that much money. I was like, well, I mean, like it's the business. And I felt like that attention was actually really, I didn't, it didn't attract the type of person who I wanted to attract. And then also, but I would say that if you're trying to use it for marketing, it's a, it is an awesome tool for marketing like this.

• 21:04Shaan Puri?

  Well, that's, that's the upside, right? Like you give up some privacy and, and you know, I don't know whatever, I guess privacy. And you gain, it's juicy. A bunch of people want to know about your kind of like your picture. And if you, if you're going to give somebody a snapshot into your finances and how it's growing and how it's going, then that's a good way to kind of hook people into the wider world of, of your content.

• 21:27Sam Parr?

  Well, but I would do.

• 21:28Shaan Puri?

  That's the upside, but the downside I think is real.

• 21:31Sam Parr?

  Then you should do that with your fund. I don't think you should do it with your personal money. I think, say like, we have this much money in the bank. We've sent the checks to this. We're going to reserve it for this. Like that would be cool. That would be a cool shtick, but I don't think, I think that you would be unhappy if you did it for your personal life. And even Buffer, they wrote about it. They're like, yeah, this was like a cute thing that we did. And it got us popular because that was like our only marketing channel. But we actually don't want to reveal salaries anymore and things like that because it causes tension and it's just not worth the headache.

• 22:00Shaan Puri?

  Right. Yeah, I think you're right. I still might do it because it's just, you know, I'm curious to see what happens. But I do think your logic is right. So, so I agree with you.

• 22:08Sam Parr?

  What are you going to reveal? Like you're like literally your W2 income?

• 22:13Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, like I would reveal everything. I'd reveal what I earned across the board. How my assets grew. Oh, well, this is, you know, I'm not going to ask her about this. She doesn't, she doesn't use Twitter except for she went on Twitter one time and was like, yo, who told my husband to buy a bidet?

• 22:30Shaan Puri?

  He said it's somebody on Twitter told him.

• 22:33Shaan Puri?

  Leave him alone. He's buying all kinds of shit that we don't need.

• 22:37Sam Parr?

  You should look up Financial Samurai. So Financial Samurai, I know, I'm friends with him because he came to HustleCon and we became buddies, like internet buddies. So I know his identity and I don't, I think that you can find it if you wanted to. But Financial Samurai is a personal finance blogger. He's a little crazy, but he's cool. I love him. I like him a lot. He runs in our circle. And he reveals his assets and his income and office portfolio, but you only know his name is Sam and it's really, you can't, I don't think you could find a photo of what he looks like on the internet. I don't think you can find his last name, maybe, but maybe not. Yeah, right.

• 23:14Sam Parr?

  But he's, um, he does this all anonymously and I think that's pretty cool.

• 23:18Shaan Puri?

  Right. Yeah, that's cool. Um, I like that. Okay. What else we got to talk about? So I thought this was kind of interesting. Um, actually I'll get, I'll do an idea first. So, um, I call, you know, this is D to C super retailer. So what is this? Right now there are so many D to C brands. And, uh, if you look at the kind of the framework of, you know, all businesses essentially bundling and unbundling, which I don't think is really true, but it's catchy.

• 23:48Shaan Puri?

  You know, what's happened is you used to go to a retail store, Target, you know, whatever Macy's, wherever you're going. And the retail store bundled all these different brands together and cool. That's how people shopped. And then right now what's happening is this big unbundling where people create, you know, there's thousands and thousands of brands. They don't worry about getting into retailers right now. They just sell individually online. They acquire customers themselves through Facebook. And Facebook is essentially the retailer right now. Uh, that's where you find these products, um, is on the Facebook shelf.

• 24:19Shaan Puri?

  And so everybody's doing this. And now if you go talk to any D to C company, they spend like 90% of their time not on their product, not on their customer service, but on their marketing plan, like they're all their, you know, their Facebook ads, their Google ads, their Pinterest ads. Like this is where they spend their email marketing. They spend all their time on customer acquisition. And, uh, increasing the lifetime value of the customers. And so what's happening is I think there's a movement back towards, hey, let's say I'm, um, I don't know, what's a sexy D to C brand right now? Uh, maybe.

• 24:50Shaan Puri?

  Maybe it's, uh, let's take away luggage, right? So I'm away luggage. I'm trying to acquire this customer that's kind of like this professional millennial who wants like a high quality thing and doesn't want to buy their dad's brand. They don't want to buy Samsonite. Uh, okay, cool. Why don't I, you know, sort of share my marketing efforts, co, you know, co-market with other D to C brands, right? So why isn't away luggage doing this with Warby Parker and Casper mattresses and everybody else? Because we're all spending the same amount of money to acquire the same person. And, um, so there's a couple of different interesting takes on this. One is there's one Shopify app that is a post-purchase Shopify app where you install it in your store. And after, after someone buys from you, you upsell someone else's product.

• 25:33Shaan Puri?

  And if you do it, you get money from that retailer instead of from the customer, uh, as like an affiliate fee. So I thought that was kind of clever and I don't know how well adopted that is or some, some gives and takes there. But the other is to just create a destination, an Amazon-like destination that is just a curated set of all the best new brands. And you say, okay, I'm going to find the best two or three brands in luggage and handbags and the next two or three brands in shoes and the next two or three best brands of socks. And you, you only have, let's say, the three best brands of every category. And you invite those, those e-commerce players onto your platform and you go acquire customers for your kind of like retail store that has many things.

• 26:15Shaan Puri?

  You market to them all the different products and you get a 15% cut of everything you sell for these people. Because hey, they're going to pay Facebook for that customer anyways. They might as well pay, you know, a little bit less for you because average store might be spending about 30% of their revenue on customer acquisition through Facebook. So if they can get a customer for 15%, they've, you know, they've cut their acquisition costs in half. And, uh, what do you think of this idea?

• 26:39Sam Parr?

  This is a typical Sean idea that I think is potentially a big idea, but is like my default is like, oh, that sounds like a lot of work. But so to default to optimism, it's quite interesting. I think that you're, you're talking about two different things. The first one is incredibly fascinating about the upsell. So like if you buy an away bag, you're going to be upsell, upsold like. I don't know, a blanket or I don't know what.

• 27:04Shaan Puri?

  Sure, it could be like, you know, gravity blanket or it could be Warby Parker glasses or it could be Allbirds shoes or, you know, whatever, something like that.

• 27:13Sam Parr?

  Something that a traveler, I don't know, that's an easy thing to figure out. That's pretty fascinating. I think that when I've talked to people who do brand partnerships, I think that they said in general, they don't move the needle, but I would like to figure out which ones actually do, because some of them clearly do.

• 27:31Sam Parr?

  That's an interesting idea. I think that's really fascinating. I love that idea. I think that's really cool. The second one, I think as a user would be cool, but I have no idea why would a D to C brand want to put their product there? Like, wouldn't they just want to own the whole relationship? Isn't that the whole point of being direct to their own?

• 27:48Shaan Puri?

  Well, you do get the customer relationship. So they come and they buy, but the D to C retailer would share the customer insight. Unlike Amazon, it would share the customer info with that brand. That's kind of the, I think you would have to do that. Otherwise, I think it's quite tough. But if you, if you agreed to do that, right? So like, I'll find, I'll find, okay, so let me, let me give you the two names of companies I think are doing something like this. So one, I believe is called Co-op Commerce. So if you go to Co-op Commerce, so just C O O P commerce.com. I think that's the one where it's the upsell, upsell with something else. There's, there's probably another one besides that. The second one.

• 28:33Sam Parr?

  It's spelled, it looks like coop, coop commerce. I'm there. It looks pretty cool.

• 28:38Shaan Puri?

  And so, you know, you're gonna, you're gonna acquire new customers through, by putting yourself on this network. It's like an ad network, right? So like bloggers used to do this. They used to create like blog rolls where it's like, cool, I joined the blog roll network. It'll put me on other blogs like, like me, like if I'm a tech blogger, it'll put me on other tech blogs. And then I get traffic and then I give traffic as well and I get sort of a proportional share. And link share was like another one like this. I think the guy from Zappos started something like this before, before Zappos. Yeah, I think link share was the name of it. So the other one is called the fascination. dot com. And so the fascination is is trying to build this is trying to build that superstore. I don't think it works exactly by the rules I mentioned, like three, three brands or whatever. But it's basically saying, we're going to curate the best D to C brands.

• 29:23Shaan Puri?

  We're going to offer, you know, great deals on those products, you know, on our website. And as if you choose to be one of those brands, you're going to get a whole bunch of exposure because we're going to get popular and you're going to get free customers from us. But you just have to give us a kickback of about 15% on the on anybody we send.

• 29:40Sam Parr?

  Wait, so what's the website? Fascinations dot net is sex toys. Fascinations dot com is metal stuff.

• 29:48Shaan Puri?

  The fascination dot com.

• 29:51Sam Parr?

  The fascination. Lose the the.

• 29:56Shaan Puri?

  Sell sex toys instead.

• 29:58Sam Parr?

  Let me see. Okay. Yeah, it's brand new. It doesn't even rank in Google.

• 30:04Shaan Puri?

  It's not like it's not launched yet. So this is coming coming soon.

• 30:08Sam Parr?

  I think it's cool. I like this stuff. I think this is so cool. Have you seen this company called Beta?

• 30:14Shaan Puri?

  Beta, is that the pop up?

• 30:15Sam Parr?

  Yeah, so what Beta, which Beta does, and they're probably getting crushed right now, is they had these badass stores that they had in cool locations in San Francisco, LA, New York, and probably many other countries or states. And those are the ones that I saw. And you, I think the way it works is like boosted, like anyone who has a nifty gadget, it's almost like the new version of sharper image. Anyone that has a nifty gadget, it could have been like cute new brands like Allbirds, but also like some fancy TV that you didn't know was cool until you saw it. You're like, oh.

• 30:46Shaan Puri?

  Something that like demos well.

• 30:47Sam Parr?

  Yeah, that demos well. And you pay us a rental fee to be there and you go in and you could,

• 30:53Sam Parr?

  you can buy it on the spot, straight. And it's badass. That I don't know if that's a good business, but this is kind of similar to that. And it looks similar, actually. And it's quite, quite interesting.

• 31:03Shaan Puri?

  So I have friends that invested in Beta and I think they were doing well. Obviously COVID I think is, you know, one of the worst things that could happen to them, but it's B8TA. So the E is replaced with an eight. So BATA.com. And I like this idea because let's say you're a brand and a lot of brands open up these like kind of flagship or like, I forgot what they call them, like try on stores. Where it's basically, look, we're not trying to sell here. We sell online, but if you want to come and, you know, try our stroller out or like, you know, sit on our couch that we're selling. We have a showroom in your city and those are really expensive and a really big undertaking for them to be like, okay, guys, 2021, that's the year we're going to open up our showrooms in New York and LA and San Francisco. And it's going to cost us like $3 million, $4 million and it's going to take a lot of time and all this stuff.

• 31:48Shaan Puri?

  And so what Beta let them do was be like, push a button and you're in our eight locations or however many locations they have. And it's like, okay, you're, you now have a store presence. You can send your customers there to try out your products or feel it out. And you'll get new customers just walking in who like to see kind of new cool stuff. And it was sort of a modern, modern day version of like shopper image. Like you said, I really liked that idea.

• 32:09Sam Parr?

  I think the idea of curating good products, I mean, that is not even remotely new. I love that business. I think that is just the coolest business. I love those businesses. I'm in that business. I curate stuff. I love curation businesses. I think that they're low cost, start fast. We talked about a curated airline or Airbnb business. We talked about a curated cool nifty products. Gear Patrol does curation for outdoor stuff. Then there's, um, you know, um, is it called Whoop? Not Whoop the band, but like, wasn't there one called Whoop that? Yeah, Whooped. That was bought by Amazon for like a, I think like a hundred million dollars.

• 32:50Sam Parr?

  I love that. I think it's cool. And let me tell you one more that is cool. And Sarah just bought a, a gift or a jacket out of here. Have you heard of Italic?

• 32:59Shaan Puri?

  Yes, I am friends with Jeremy, the founder.

• 33:02Sam Parr?

  So the premise, and I don't, I don't think that this is particularly unique, but I had never heard of it. And it seems badass to me is they're like, basically we make, and I think a lot of retailers say this. That's why it's not particularly unique, but they've done it well. They're like, we make Moncler or Canada Goose, which are like $2,000 coats. We make those same exact coats, but without the brand and it's $200 instead of $2,000. Or we make these fancy knives, which is the same, but no logo.

• 33:28Shaan Puri?

  Luxury, luxury quality without the luxury label. That's the, the shtick. And, uh, and ironically, that's like an even more high status thing to do is be like, yeah, this is a, I'm wearing a, you know, Prada level product, but I didn't have to put Prada on it. I, I'm understated like that.

• 33:44Sam Parr?

  So we bought, I bought, or someone in my family bought another family member. A, uh, like a $20,000 purse, but it was fake. It was from China and it even came with like a fake, like a certificate of like, no, like a, like a authentic, like it was like, it came with the box that it still had plastic on it. And you open up and you had the label and like a certificate that says it's real. Like they just copied it perfectly. And then we had a real one laying around and we like, like no one could tell the difference. And, and so basically he's just made that.

• 34:14Shaan Puri?

  Dude, this is a, well, so, so these aren't, yeah, I guess these are kind of, those are,

• 34:18Sam Parr?

  minus the logo.

• 34:19Shaan Puri?

  Those are really knockoffs. So I lived in China for, for a couple of years when I, when I finished high school and my mom, was like super into like luxury bags, but was like, you know, cheap Indian woman who was not going to buy a Louis Vuitton bag, like a $6,000 bag, loved it, but wanted it, but would never buy it. And so when we moved to China, they had knockoffs everywhere, right? You could go to the market and you would see like, you know, that same Louis Vuitton bag for, for $7. But it was like clearly fake. It was like, you know, the quality was just not the same. And so, um, there was an in-between market and they called her the bag lady. And this lady was ahead of her time. So she only worked through BlackBerry Messenger. Today that would be like, you know, WhatsApp or WeChat is probably what she'd be using.

• 35:01Shaan Puri?

  But it was BBM only, you, nobody knew her name and she had no, no steady location because like they're always after her to find. So she would do these pop ups where she would just DM and she would BBM an address. She's going to be there for the next two hours. It was usually in someone's apartment, one of her customers apartment where there's like a doorman and like, they can kind of screen who's coming in and who's not. So she can't get like raided. And she had the most high quality knockoffs that were the her, her claim to fame was you could take this to Louis Vuitton. And at the time this worked, now I bet they have some chips inside that like, you, you, you know, they can, they can validate it. But at the time this was, you could take this to Louis Vuitton and you could say, is this authentic? And they would say, yes, this is authentic.

• 35:43Shaan Puri?

  And, um, and so she would sell hers for $400, $500 a bag. So you're getting the, not the 6,000 and not the $6, but you're getting the $600 bag. Um, that, that looks and feels like the packaging is identical. It was amazing. And she would text out her location and a swarm of moms would come. And this lady would probably make 10, 20 grand in a two hour period and then she would pack up and disappear. And she wore these like mask and glasses and stuff like that. So you never knew who she was. And I just thought this lady was like the ultimate baller.

• 36:12Sam Parr?

  Dude, if my mom, I don't know if she did that or not, but if she did do it, whenever I got in trouble for doing anything, I'd be like, dude, you're part of a fraud ring. Like you, like you're like, like you, you fund terrorism.

• 36:26Sam Parr?

  So I hope you would have used that, uh,

• 36:31Shaan Puri?

  I thought, I thought it was amazing what she was doing. And so I, one, the interesting thing about this italic model, by the way, uh, and I hope I could say this, I'll, I'll, I'll ask him, but the cool thing I think they innovated on was not just finding supply, the same supplier or like, you know, an identical supplier who could make, who make the same quality. But they actually went to them with a kind of no brainer offer. So every supplier in China is constantly getting hammered on their, their, you know, unit price. So it's like, oh, we make this thing for $20 and the customer's always asking for 18. And they're just, you know, they're always like pushing, pushing that down. So what they did was smart was they went and said, hey, look, we don't want to hold inventory. Cause that takes a lot of money and it's hard. So why don't we do this? Instead of 20 bucks, how about you get $40 per unit sold?

• 37:16Shaan Puri?

  And manufacturer's like, what? And he's like, yeah, you get $40, but I'm not going to buy the inventory. You make it and you take the risk with us and you get double. And they said, to start with, let's only do, you know, a little bit of the inventory this way. And you can see that this actually works. And as you get trust that we can sell the product, basically you're going to build it. I'm sure there's some manufacturing term for this, like consignment or like, you know, on spec or some shit like that. But I thought that was really smart. So they've been able to bootstrap this business or not bootstrap. They've raised money, but like they've been able to be very capital efficient because they're not putting out, you know, $5 million purchase orders to factories. Instead, they're telling the factory, hey, share some of the upside, but you make it at your risk.

• 37:57Shaan Puri?

  And if we don't sell it, you're, you're out, but, but, but you could take that risk with us for more upside. And the factories are more entrepreneurial who try to do that.

• 38:06Sam Parr?

  I think that what we need to do is like, break down the economics of that model of like, what's better to be like Walmart and just sell cheap stuff? Or to be like Costco or Sam's Club and sell a membership and sell it at cost.

• 38:18Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 38:18Sam Parr?

  I think it'd be interesting to see what that needs to become like. And I don't know what business is better. I would think the membership thing would be far better.

• 38:26Shaan Puri?

  Well, I don't know. On italic, do you have to be a member? I don't think you do.

• 38:28Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 38:29Shaan Puri?

  Maybe, maybe you can be. Oh yeah. $10 a month, that is it. So they still make money on the product itself. So they're not like Costco where it's at cost. But what I like is it's asset light. So even though the total money captured might be less, their growth is going to be faster and require less investment. And therefore they're going to own more of the, of the pie because they're an asset light model. They're not holding and buying all this inventory. And so I think that there's, you know, that's the pros and cons where they can just specialize in being an amazing marketing company and they don't have to worry about being, you know, you know, a full stack, you know, a company that that's getting stuff made, holding it in their warehouses and fulfilling it, all that.

• 39:08Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I think it's cool. I liked, I liked these businesses. I don't know how we're going to categorize them. But I think that what Italic is doing, have they raised a lot of money? Are they big? I don't know anything about them.

• 39:18Shaan Puri?

  They raised like, I think 10, 13 million dollars, something like that.

• 39:21Sam Parr?

  Is it going well?

• 39:22Shaan Puri?

  Uh, yeah, it's going well.

• 39:23Sam Parr?

  I think it's awesome. I love this thing. I think it's so cool.

• 39:26Shaan Puri?

  13, 13 million bucks.

• 39:28Sam Parr?

  But that's like the same thing, like Sarah.

• 39:29Shaan Puri?

  So like, if you go to their website right now, just sorry, one example for people who haven't been there. So they, it says, here's the November new member gift. This leather zip cart, like a wallet, basically. It's like, uh, Saint Laurent. I don't know how you say these fancy brands, but I think it's that YSL brand. 295 is their price. Kuyana, I don't know what that is. Maybe it's some like secondhand marketplace is like $75 and.

• 39:53Sam Parr?

  Dude, all like the women listening to this are like, oh my God.

• 39:56Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, it's, it's like me saying like the Dallas Cowboys.

• 40:01Shaan Puri?

  And anyway, that Italic, it's $35, right? So it's 10 times cheaper than the, the normal retail price for the same product without the, without the label.

• 40:08Sam Parr?

  So you know that fancy brand, there's a fancy brand of pots and pans are like brightly colored. Again, everyone listening to this is like, you idiot, it's called, it's like Croquet or Cro. You don't have to.

• 40:19Shaan Puri?

  We should just bleep all these out so that we save ourselves the embarrassment. But yes, I know what you're talking about.

• 40:23Sam Parr?

  Is it a little Le Creuset or something?

• 40:29Sam Parr?

  Anyway, they make a knockoff and it's $95 as opposed to $400, which is awesome. And then I, and my friend had it and I saw it. And then they also used, he bought the knives from them and I was like, Jack, this is a super sharp knife. What is this? And he's like, oh, I got it from Italic.

• 40:43Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 40:44Sam Parr?

  So I think it's great and sorry, Italic, sorry, all the brands and the people listening. We're just a bunch of basic ass dudes who can't say.

• 40:56Shaan Puri?

  All right.

• 40:57Sam Parr?

  Dude, that's like worse than the time that someone was like, it's called Thule. I'm like, it's spelled like Thule. So.

• 41:04Shaan Puri?

  I think it's Thule.

• 41:06Sam Parr?

  Yeah, like the Swedish, they got a different word for everything. I tell you.

• 41:13Sam Parr?

  They should have, don't spell it like, like it rhymes with mule. If it's going to, if you're going to pronounce it tooley.

• 41:20Shaan Puri?

  All right. A couple of other interesting things. Okay. Here's another idea for you. So I've been playing around with Facebook ads, you know, on and off for many years, but more seriously this year than any year before that. And Facebook, I would say is probably the greatest marketing engine, uh, maybe of all time, definitely of our era. You know, it's created so much opportunity. If you can take your product and be able to market it effectively on Facebook, you're able to reach, you know, the whole world at, you know, in one of the most efficient mediums possible, right? Because it's all measured, attributed. Um, and it's all, you know, you could use their, their algorithm to figure out who's your buyer, all that good stuff.

• 41:59Shaan Puri?

  So if you use Facebook ads, it's like easy enough to get started, but it's not that easy. And I think there's an opportunity for somebody to create essentially a course, but it's not a course. It's not me saying I'll teach you how to do Facebook ads. It's a game. It's called the marketing game. It's basically a simulator that, that dumbs down the Facebook ad UI and UX and just like, it gives you a chance to get reps at driving growth through marketing. And so

• 42:30Sam Parr?

  Totally agree. Great idea. Great idea.

• 42:32Shaan Puri?

  So what I would say is I would say, oh, hey, you created this shoe. You want to sell the shoe. Okay. So you don't have to like, take the time to like build the ad creative, but it's like, here are six ad creatives. Pick one you want to run. And it's like, set up your campaign. Who are you going to target? You, you know, so it's like the dumbed down UI. It saves you all the time. You don't have to actually go to Photoshop and create ads, but you have them there and you get to guess like, oh, maybe the one where there's the discount or the one with the text on top, or no, this should be the video. And then you click go, and it's like, you know, SimCity or whatever. It's like, it simulates. It's like, here's your return. What are you going to do? Take this money and do the next thing.

• 43:04Sam Parr?

  You're, you're, I think you're on and you're off. The way that I would do it, this is a brilliant idea, but I would do it differently. Here's what I would do because the, the, the, the, there's, there has to be a A category of like learning that this is under, but this type of learning always works best for me. And I'm pretty sure it's the best for most humans, which is like, you know, when you learn how to play guitar, you copy other people's work, right?

• 43:26Shaan Puri?

  Yes. Yeah. You put, you, you go look up the chords to Ed Sheeran, you know, if you want to go play guitar.

• 43:30Sam Parr?

  And you do that for years and then after a while you're like, all right, I understand what works and what doesn't work. I can make my own stuff. That's the best way to learn. I think that's the best way to learn writing.

• 43:38Shaan Puri?

  You're right. You're right.

• 43:39Sam Parr?

  And so what I would do is I would get a list of all the most successful campaigns. So like different ad campaigns that probably Trump or Biden used, different ad campaigns that native deodorant use. And I would say, all right, you see this campaign, it worked really well. Recreate it.

• 43:58Shaan Puri?

  Yes.

• 43:58Sam Parr?

  First step.

• 43:59Shaan Puri?

  Exactly. So, so, so you, you start and in the game, it's like, what do you want to be? Do you want to be the founder of native? Do you want to be the founder of Allbirds? Do you want to be the founder of the hustle? Did you build an email list? Do you want to?

• 44:09Sam Parr?

  Who are you targeting and what are you selling? Great. We got that category here. This is the best campaign that we've ever found.

• 44:14Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 44:15Sam Parr?

  Now, first thing, you need to come up with an image. The image that worked best for them was this. Now go out and find it. Yeah, I totally, we're going to call it Code Academy for Facebook. Bray, you said, that's exactly what I have Code Academy logged up here. Code Academy is a, a thing where you just log in and they're like, all right, we're going to make this game. Type in this.

• 44:31Shaan Puri?

  Exactly. So, so, so many people have done these Code Academy, you kind of like learn to code platforms. And they, they also made it easy where, so let's say you actually want to learn how to code. It's like, oh, install the Python library in your computer. Go get a text editor, um, you know, that's going to be where you're going to write your code and then learn how to compile it, learn how to get it onto a website. It's like, fuck, this is all so complicated. Just, just the infrastructure is so complicated just to start. And so what Code Academy did brilliantly that other people did too, is they made it like, hey, you go to the website and here's like, on the right side is the output and the left side is where you type. It's like, cool. First, it's like in gray, it tells you exactly what to type. You literally just have to retype what they already have. It's like variable equal, you know, var equals six. It's like, oh, you just set a variable. Great. You know, like now learn how to add two variables together.

• 45:14Shaan Puri?

  And then like teaches you step by step how to do it. And so I think that's really great. It was a great way for somebody like me to actually like, try to learn and get, get my feet wet a little bit. I think somebody needs to make Code Academy for selling or for marketing. And, um, and so the way you would do it is, is I think you, you put a great twist on it. But I got really excited about this idea the other day because I was, I, I've been finding, um, I've been doing a lot of blogging to my, uh, my audience. Like I've done probably. 50 posts in 60 days or something crazy, like some crazy volume. And one of the consistent questions is around this, around Facebook ads. And I myself have trouble with it. And I'm like, fuck, where do I even send these people to learn?

• 45:56Shaan Puri?

  And I was like, shit, I'm just gonna start building tools for my audience to like, that solves the problems that they have, that we have, right? It's like, I'm just gonna build a set of tools that that solve this problem. And so this was the one that I was most excited about. I have a list of six. This is the one I'm most excited about.

• 46:11Sam Parr?

  Look, I think that's cool. And I think a lot of people will be like, whoa, but how many people are running Facebook ads? It's like, well, 1 million people.

• 46:17Shaan Puri?

  Right, a lot, the most?

• 46:19Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I mean, how many people are running Google Ads? Like 5 million people? I mean, like, what, like enough?

• 46:26Shaan Puri?

  And this should be a part of every school.

• 46:27Sam Parr?

  1 million companies, let alone all the employees doing it. Enough, enough that you could build a big business by charging $30 a month.

• 46:36Shaan Puri?

  Exactly. And this should be a part of like every, you know, college curriculum, high school curriculum, something like that. They should make this, this, this type of experience accessible to them. If somebody built a good one, and I think you kind of got to build it a little bit like a game. The Code Academy types try to gamify their stuff a little bit. But the best ones make it where you get a sense of progress. You feel like you're making more money or you're, you're leveling up in some way. And it keeps you motivated to like, you, you don't want learning the tool to be the end game. You want to have to learn the tool in order to get your outcome you want. In business, that's why it works, right? I don't want to learn Facebook ads. I want to make more money. Facebook ads is my way to make more money. So you got to do, design this the same way where the prize is the fun of seeing your character progress.

• 47:18Shaan Puri?

  And the way to get there is to actually figure out better how to, how to actually use these marketing tools.

• 47:22Sam Parr?

  I think it's awesome. Code Academy, by the way, how much does it cost? They have, they have 100,000 paying customers, they say. How much does it cost? It costs $20 a month. So what's that mean? 200,000? Is that 200,000? 100,000? Or is it 2 million?

• 47:34Shaan Puri?

  How many customers is it? 20,000?

• 47:36Sam Parr?

  100,000. I can't do math.

• 47:39Sam Parr?

  I gotta carry my zero.

• 47:40Shaan Puri?

  Two million a month.

• 47:41Sam Parr?

  So there's a 24 million. It's a $24 million business.

• 47:45Shaan Puri?

  It's a $100 million business.

• 47:46Sam Parr?

  $100 million company, probably, yeah. I, I don't know how many people there are who code versus marketing. I have to think there's more marketers.

• 47:56Shaan Puri?

  Yes, I would agree.

• 47:58Sam Parr?

  So.

• 47:58Shaan Puri?

  It doesn't even matter. It doesn't have to be the biggest thing in the world. It's, uh, there's enough, there's more than enough to build a viable business doing something like this. It's hard. I would say this is actually really hard to build, though. That's the caveat. I think it's tricky to get it right.

• 48:12Sam Parr?

  In terms of like the psychology and how the product feels, I actually disagree with you. I, I like it, like there's all these like interactive things where you're just like looking at a screen and like the cursor needs to be moving and it's got a point like point, you know, it's like, it's like the, it's like Microsoft clip. Or what's that thing called?

• 48:27Shaan Puri?

  Clipping.

• 48:28Sam Parr?

  It's like the paper clip needs to be there just pointing.

• 48:31Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I think you can make it easy for people to go through, but just like for Code Academy, right? It says seven years and 45 million learners later. So 45 million learners have like gone through the system at least. And, uh, you know, they have a hundred thousand paying customers per month. So you're going to get a shit ton of churn because just like for Code Academy, right? I churned out a Code Academy too, because shit, it actually is pretty hard to learn how to code and keep going and keep the motivation there. And that's why I think this is hard to build because it's hard to build it where you keep somebody engaged and they get to like, you know, they get through the program essentially. I don't.

• 49:01Sam Parr?

  I hear you.

• 49:02Shaan Puri?

  I just think.

• 49:02Sam Parr?

  Thing forever. I just think it could last for like, like Code Academy has been around for 10 years. Did you say seven or?

• 49:09Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, seven years.

• 49:10Sam Parr?

  I think Code Academy could be around for another 10.

• 49:13Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 49:14Sam Parr?

  So I think it's good. I think we should do, do we, I mean, that was a pretty good one. Do we want to end there?

• 49:20Shaan Puri?

  Uh, yeah, if somebody wants to build this with me, uh, ideally somebody like, somebody good. So I get a lot, I always ask that question. I get one good person and I get 10 like complete jokers.

• 49:30Sam Parr?

  How do you know if you're good?

• 49:32Shaan Puri?

  You're good if you've like actually like built stuff before that people have used. And ideally, in this case, you understand the problem of trying to learn Facebook ads. So you've gone down and like, it's kind of like how I've tried to learn, tried to learn how to code four times. I'm actually the right person to build a learn to code product. If I pair it with a technical person, because I know I've tried this, I've had, I am the customer. I understand it. So ideally, it's somebody who's tried that. And also, best case would be somebody who understands games, like you play games, at least if, if not have built a game before, because I think you need those mechanics in order to, to give it to, the games are amazingly designed products. There's this awesome YouTube video, if you go watch, it's called, you know, Mario, like the genius of the first level of Mario or something like that. I don't remember what the video is called, but.

• 50:17Sam Parr?

  I know what you're talking about. Yeah, it's like a Vimeo video.

• 50:20Shaan Puri?

  It shows how Mario has no tutorial, right? Most popular game, no tutorial on how to play, how to jump, what's the objective, am I trying to get coins? How do you learn all this? Well, the way he designed it, so first it shows you're Mario, you're standing there. And all of a sudden, the screen starts moving, it's pushing you forward. So you already know, okay, gotta run to the right, right? Like the motion of the, of the level tells me where I'm trying to go. Go right. Then this Goomba comes and he's got this angry face. So you know, this is probably not a friend who's going to give me some potion. This is probably an enemy that I need to do something with, but I don't know what to do. And then they show that like where the Goomba meets you, you also have these boxes above you, the, the coin boxes that have question marks. It's like, well, that's intriguing. I'm going to want to hit the question mark. And so you jump,

• 51:03Shaan Puri?

  you get the coin and then you almost always will land on the Goomba's head and kill the Goomba. And then you see the satisfying Goomba's gone and you're like, oh, good, I know what to do now. And then you see two more question mark boxes and you're like, huh, how do I get to those? I guess I could jump on this to get to there. And it's like, with no tutorial, you've now learned all the mechanics of the game. You're trying to go to the right to the end of the level. You gotta kill these Goombas by jumping on their heads and you want to collect as many coins as you can in these boxes. And sometimes there's other stuff in the boxes, like a mushroom comes out of one of the first four boxes of Mario. And that's how you want to design pro, great products is where you actually don't need Clippy. You just make it where there's really only one thing you could do. And that's the next action you, you need to learn as a, as a player in the game of like, oh, click this, good thing happens. Great. Now I know when to use that technique.

• 51:48Sam Parr?

  Abra, you just shared it. It's called how Nintendo made Mario's most iconic level. And it looks like two. They're speaking in Japanese. It looks like the developers are explaining it all.

• 51:58Shaan Puri?

  Right. I don't think it's the developer, but it's some guy explaining it.

• 52:02Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it says they're using the word "we", like, you know, "we made it this way."

• 52:06Shaan Puri?

  Oh, really? That's amazing. Okay, great. What's his name? Mari Moto or something like that? Miyamoto?

• 52:13Sam Parr?

  Miyamoto, yeah.

• 52:14Shaan Puri?

  What a legend. Billy Mario. Fucking amazing.

• 52:18Sam Parr?

  Yeah, those guys are legends to me. I mean, it's just so cool. Like, when I think about these Japanese guys making Mario, I like, it's like, kind of mythical to me.

• 52:26Shaan Puri?

  Right. Okay, great. I gotta run. Good stuff. Enjoy your new house. Good episode.