#172 - Indie Businesses Making Millions, Advice to Young Entrepreneurs & How to Grow a Podcast

We start this one off with a little "Inside MFM" from Shaan (@ShaanVP) and Sam (@TheSamParr) as they discuss growing the pod and how they are going to do it. Then they break down the big news of the week: the Coinbase IPO. They talk about Coinbase's humble origins on HackerNews and how most big businesses have these same origins. It's often hard to see the big picture in the early days. They also talk about their own early days and give advice to young entrepreneurs. The second half of the pod turns into a brainstorm. They brainstorm around indie businesses like Microacquire and Photopea and how to build similar businesses. Finally, we end it by discussing the opportunities around "Affirm for X". --------- * Want to be featured in a future episode? Drop your question/comment/criticism/love here: https://www.mfmpod.com/p/hotline/ * Support the pod by spreading the word, become a referrer here: refer.fm/million * Have you joined our private Facebook group yet? Go to https://www.facebook.com/groups/ourfirstmillion and join thousands of other entrepreneurs and founders scheming up ideas. --------- Show notes: * (0:24) Growing the podcast: how we're going to do it * (9:02) The guys break down the Coinbase IPO * (20:25) Big businesses are often not apparent at the beginning * (25:26) Advice for young entrepreneurs * (33:55) Microacquire dissected * (40:55) An indie project making million * (52:17) Brainstorm "Affirm for X"

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

• 0:00Shaan Puri?

  I used to chase money a lot like, how do I make money? Maybe this will make us money. Maybe this will make some money. And that was good because I like learned skills about how to make money. But the things that actually paid off, none of those really paid off with a big dollar amount.

• 0:23Sam Parr?

  All right, before we actually get to the content, um, a few things. We've been making a ton of changes to this podcast. So the numbers are working. I think the last month was our highest ever, right, Abreu? I believe so, yeah.

• 0:36Shaan Puri?

  So I think we should start saying the numbers. I think we should start saying the numbers. I think we should say what it is, say what we're going to do and say what happens, whether it works or it doesn't.

• 0:45Sam Parr?

  Yeah, so the trailing 30 days was, I think, 350,000 listens.

• 0:51Sam Parr?

  Which if it's not the highest ever, it's one of like top one or two. But the trajectory is, is really what matters and that is great. So we're getting around an average episode, I think, is 20,000 downloads an episode, which is, I think, a 60% increase from the year before. Is that right, Abreu? Am I, am I getting all these 22,000, 23,000?

• 1:12Shaan Puri?

  Right. So let's say we're at 22,000.

• 1:17Shaan Puri?

  It used to be 15, of course, it used to be zero. So, you know, whatever, it's growing and our goal is 100,000 per episode. One Rose Bowl Stadium per episode is what I want to be doing, something like that. And so we're not far. Forex is, you know, it's not far. I think naturally that would happen in a couple of years. And what we're going to do is just accelerate it so it happens in one.

• 1:39Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I feel quite confident that if we do the same thing, but more, it would happen with time. But I don't want to do that. I'm impatient. I want it to happen immediately. So, uh, the changes we've made is we prepared more for every podcast, which I think is very clearly working.

• 1:54Shaan Puri?

  Yes.

• 1:55Sam Parr?

  We now have these videos going, um, which I also think is clearly working in that it makes me feel good. Is it driving downloads? I don't actually, I'm not convinced, but it's worth it.

• 2:07Shaan Puri?

  Well, you know what it does do is there's a whole group of people that like. Like either A, just don't listen to podcasts or don't listen much. So they're like, kind of like, otherwise they would only hop in once in a while. They didn't build a habit with us and they follow just through the clip. So there's actually just like another audience that's like, oh, good. I watch those clips every time because they're good and I always get messages about them.

• 2:26Sam Parr?

  I am. Yeah. And I'm in that category as well. I've never, I don't think I've ever listened to a Joe Rogan podcast, but I watched a lot of clips.

• 2:32Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 2:34Sam Parr?

  And we're putting our clips on YouTube, which is not working. That is not working well at all for us.

• 2:40Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 2:41Sam Parr?

  It maybe the, we're putting the full episodes on and a handful have 20 to 30,000 views, maybe even more. A couple of them have a few more. That's working, but the clips are not working. And then we're doing email blast and the hustle. I think that started two weeks ago. That is working.

• 2:55Shaan Puri?

  We should, we should rewind. We should basically say, we had a meeting, which was like, uh, I don't know, a week ago, maybe something like that. And it was like, oh, okay. We got all these ideas. Basically I had thrown a few ideas. You had a few ideas. Bray you had a few ideas. My buddy Ben had a few ideas. We're like, oh yeah, great. All these sound good. So like, who's going to do them? And then we kind of had this like come to Jesus moment where it was like, look.

• 3:17Shaan Puri?

  In Sam, we trust. Like if, and we can't, we can't outsource this to somebody else who doesn't really. I don't want to say doesn't care, but like, it's a different thing when it's your baby. It's your show. You are getting the like. The more people who listen to this, the cooler opportunities we get, the, the better DMs we get every morning. And so like, clearly it matters more to us than it would be for, even if it was somebody's full-time job. And the second thing is like your skill level is super high, right? Like we saw you grow the hustle. I saw you grow the hustle. A lot of people who were subscribers saw you grow the hustle, saw you grow trends from scratch and saw you sell the thing. And it's like. So I got excited because I was like, I'm going to get to see Sam in action even closer than I did with the hustle where like you would send a monthly update.

• 4:00Shaan Puri?

  Now I'm seeing how you actually operate and it's pretty dope. And I actually think the listeners will like to see. How you operate, how you approach growing a thing. And that, I think that'll be exciting.

• 4:10Sam Parr?

  That's a lot of pressure. Thank you for the compliments. That's a lot of pressure. I, I will say, I think growing the podcast has been, I mean, that's actually. One of the harder things I've done.

• 4:19Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 4:19Sam Parr?

  But. HubSpot owns us now. It's not my money. Like it's their money. And so we're in a totally, I mean, we're, our owner, you know, the company, this company now does a billion a year in revenue. There's like a billion plus in cash in the bank account. Like, so we could actually, so we're gonna have a lot more resources. I actually am not convinced that that's actually gonna help us grow.

• 4:40Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I don't think resources helps you grow, but I think, I would say like, that wasn't the problem before. It can be helpful, but that wasn't necessarily the problem.

• 4:49Sam Parr?

  And then, so what we're doing now is, we don't have ads in the email anymore. So in the Hustle, we do zero advertisements and the podcast is going in every day now. Or not every day, but a lot. And then also, what we are launching at HubSpot and the Hustle is we're creating this thing, well, I actually don't know if I could say too much about it, but there's gonna be a lot more podcasts. And amongst those podcasts, we can promote one another. And that's what you're gonna hear. So whoever is in our podcast crew, we're gonna promote them, them us, yada, yada, yada. And I actually think that's gonna help a ton. I think that, I actually don't think I could talk any, I don't actually.

• 5:27Shaan Puri?

  It's pretty dope who's in that, but we'll, we'll say it later when you can. So, okay, can I give the audience the five ideas that we had brainstormed that were like, oh, okay. Once, thing one was like, let's put Sam in charge of it, because Sam knows how to grow shit. That was step one. Step two, okay, so what are the like, how would you grow a podcast if you're gonna grow a podcast? So we said, I'm gonna just rattle off the ideas. Number one, big name guests that actually have an overlapping audience. So people like Chamath, people like Tim Ferriss, not just like a famous person who, like, for example, we had Jake Paul on, super famous, but his audience and our audience not gonna have a huge amount of overlap where it's not necessarily that his fans would, would connect with us and become, you know, ongoing subscribers.

• 6:12Shaan Puri?

  Okay, the other one was paid. Can you advertise to grow a podcast, right? Like, running some experiments on, take a few thousand bucks, run it on a paid campaign and see, can you grow through, through paid? I think we'll find out if that's interesting.

• 6:23Sam Parr?

  We're doing, so we bought ads in Player FM, Abreu, is that what we did?

• 6:30Shaan Puri?

  Yep.

• 6:31Sam Parr?

  And then, we're buying ads and a few more, I have a few more that we're buying ads. Did that work, Abreu Player FM?

• 6:39Speaker 02

  It's hard to tell because they claim a lot of their views come from desktop listeners, which doesn't necessarily get measured according to them.

• 6:48Shaan Puri?

  Okay.

• 6:50Sam Parr?

  Oh, that's like saying like, oh, yeah, yeah. It's like saying like, no, look, the it's like, this is like selling like CBD treats for dogs. Like, does it work?

• 6:58Shaan Puri?

  Right. Can't ask your dog.

• 7:00Sam Parr?

  Yeah. It's like the greatest business ever. It's like selling vitamin B for your puppy.

• 7:07Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, exactly. So I would say if it's hard to tell, it didn't work. It's a very obvious way to think about it. Okay. Another one, go on other people's podcasts. So do a do a tour going on other people's pods. They already have an audience. Those people listen, they say, oh, man, what a great guy. I'd love to listen to more of this person. They were interesting. Boom, get some people from there. Clips, people have seen we tripled down on clips. We found awesome clip makers. We're making fucked up clips and we're going to post the shit out of them. So I think that's a good, good strategy. There's the, and then the last one that I thought was kind of an interesting one was like, get sharper on the branding. So if you want to grow a product, the sharper the hook of what is the product, you have the better chance you have to grow because it'll be more clear. It'll resonate with more people.

• 7:52Shaan Puri?

  And so being able to describe it well, as well as just being like on brand all the time about like what this is and what you get out of it if you listen to it. I think that's what an area that honestly was kind of shitty at, which is ironic because I think we're pretty good at it with our startups, but we're pretty bad at it with the podcast. Like the name doesn't really make much sense. The description, I don't know. We don't have like, we don't do an intro when you join to like, be like, oh, this is the podcast where XYZ happens. We don't have like a, a highlight reel of like, you know, start here. If you're, if you're new to the pod, like go here. This is the onboarding episode, you know?

• 8:25Sam Parr?

  Basically, in a sense, it kind of succeeds a little bit in spite of itself.

• 8:29Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 8:30Sam Parr?

  And, and a lot of people say the name doesn't really matter. Or sorry, the name doesn't reflect it. And I'm, in my opinion towards just names is it doesn't, your name really like it rarely will it hurt you. In some occasions, it actually could help you. I think Coinbase is like the perfect name ever.

• 8:44Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 8:44Sam Parr?

  But even if Coinbase was called like, uh, uh, blue sky sunglasses. I'm just looking, I'm just making shit up that I'm looking at. It would work. Blue sky, like it will work. It would have worked.

• 8:59Shaan Puri?

  Okay, so should we move on to Coinbase, actually?

• 9:02Sam Parr?

  Let's move on to Coinbase. So Coinbase went public today and it's, everything about it is astounding.

• 9:09Shaan Puri?

  Right. Where do you want to start? I can read off some of the, kind of the numbers of like, just how big is that business? And then we could talk about the returns of this, of the, of the investment. So how big is the business? So Coinbase came out, they're public now. So now they released their numbers. Their Q1 numbers came out. Fifty-six million users, six million monthly active users, which is, I think more than E-Trade had, you know, like total. I think E-Trade had like three million, like trader accounts or whatever. And so this is kind of amazing to me that there was more people on Coinbase. Coinbase makes up 11% of the crypto asset market in terms of how many assets are stored on Coinbase. Three hundred thirty-five billion in trading volume. Okay, here's the interesting bits.

• 9:53Shaan Puri?

  One point eight billion in revenue for the quarter.

• 9:57Sam Parr?

  For the quarter?

• 9:57Shaan Puri?

  For the quarter.

• 9:59Sam Parr?

  So round up to two, so about eight billion-ish in revenue.

• 10:02Shaan Puri?

  That's right.

• 10:02Sam Parr?

  Annualized.

• 10:04Shaan Puri?

  Eight hundred in net income off that, off that one point eight billion in revenue.

• 10:08Sam Parr?

  So like $2.4 billion annualized in profit.

• 10:12Shaan Puri?

  Right. And, and then, yeah, so basically Coinbase goes, it lists publicly today. It wasn't, it wasn't an IPO, it was a direct listing where you basically, you know, IPO is, you create some shares, you issue new shares to buyers. A direct listing is, you don't issue new shares. It's just people who have shares can get, you know, like basically sell some of their, their shares. So they listed, they had about 114 million shares for sale. And it's up about 40% on day one. So the implied market cap as of right now is about $110 billion. So what I wanted to know was,

• 10:45Shaan Puri?

  there's this kind of phrase in the startup investing world, which is like, anytime there's a gold rush, like some new frontier, new space. It can be hard to like pick the winner. It can be hard to like, you know, just grab your shovel, dig and find the gold. And there's a thousand people looking for gold and you don't know where to dig. It might be this one, might be that lot, that land, you know, you don't know exactly where the gold is. So the foolproof strategy in any gold rush is what they call the picks and shovel strategy, meaning you sell the shovels to people who are going to go mine to gold. And so Coinbase is kind of a classic picks and shovels thing in the crypto market. So you, you could buy Bitcoin, you could buy Ethereum, you could buy one, you could buy Litecoin or Dogecoin or one of the thousand altcoins that exist. And you're betting, okay, maybe one of these will become like the digital currency.

• 11:30Shaan Puri?

  Or you could buy Coinbase, an exchange that's going to trade a bulk, you know, a bulk number of these coins. And so I wanted to know, once Coinbase got up to where it was like $100 billion valuation, I had the question of what would have been a better investment? Coinbase at its seed round or Bitcoin that same day? If you could, should you have bought the currency or should you have invested in the company? And the reason I thought this was interesting is I remember 2013, I was, I had just kind of heard about crypto from a guy in my office, like our Pete, our IT guy was like, dude, Bitcoin is the shit. It's at $7 now. It's at $11. I was like, I don't know what that means. And he was like, yeah, fuck fiat currency. And I was like fiat, I think that was a car. I didn't even know that's a currency at the time.

• 12:14Shaan Puri?

  I didn't know what that meant. And he was like mining Bitcoin using our servers at the office. And he's like, we mined two Bitcoin today. And I was like, okay, good for you, Pete. Like, what does that do? You know, I was kind of like, you know, mocking it, but I was curious also. So I started going and listening to some talks. And so one of the things I was looking at was like, are our smart VCs, are people smarter than me, investing in this space? And what I remember happening was I listened to this talk and it was Andreessen Horowitz. It was Mark Andreessen, who now blocks me on Twitter. He was talking at a thing, he was talking about how crypto is going to be great, how it's, how Bitcoin is going to, you know, is such an interesting technology, how blockchains might change everything. And then the interviewer was like, so how many investments, how much money have you put into this?

• 12:57Shaan Puri?

  You're, you're kind of hyping it up. Like, how much money have you invested? And they're like, we haven't invested in any crypto companies yet. This was like, I think 2012, 20, I think it was 2012. And he goes, right now, we're just owning the currency. We're just buying Bitcoin. And I was like, what? That's so weird. These guys like they're they're a VC fund. They bet on companies. There's a few companies out there like I found it to be super strange. He goes, right now, the bet, we don't know which of these companies is going to emerge as the winner. So we're just buying the underlying tech, the underlying currency. We actually think that's the right move right now. And and later, you know, Andreessen Horowitz has actually did invest in Coinbase later and since invested in many projects.

• 13:33Shaan Puri?

  And actually, Andreessen Horowitz changed their whole fund structure from a private, you know, VC fund to like some other kind of like financial investment vehicle. They went and got registered with like the SEC or whatever. Because they wanted to own crypto assets and you couldn't do that out of a traditional fund. They couldn't, you couldn't buy currencies out of a traditional fund, but the paperwork, the docs don't let you. And so, so anyways, I went back and looked at the numbers. So Coinbase announced a seed round September 2012.

• 14:02Shaan Puri?

  I don't know. They probably raised it a little bit before that and then they announced it. They raised $600,000 from investors, including a crowdfunding campaign, which I, which I found interesting because I

• 14:11Sam Parr?

  You don't like them.

• 14:12Shaan Puri?

  I shit on crowdfunding all the time as like

• 14:14Sam Parr?

  Me too.

• 14:14Shaan Puri?

  It's always the bottom of the barrel, but this was through Funders Club. Funders Club had put in like $285,000 through its crowdfunding into that, that round. And so anyways,

• 14:23Sam Parr?

  What is, is, and Funders Club is just a startup, like?

• 14:25Shaan Puri?

  Funders Club itself was a, is a YC startup and then Coinbase was a YC startup. And so Funders Club took, took a share, uh, like did a, did a crowdfunding campaign for, for that. If I read this correctly, I, I could be wrong in this part. But anyways, I went and asked one of the, the seed investors. So somebody who, a, a friend who invested in the seed round of Coinbase, I said, what was the valuation back then? He said it was 15 cents a share. So 15 cents a share there. And he said the A round was only 20 cents a share. So it wasn't even that much more. So something like that. So, so 15 cents a share and

• 15:00Shaan Puri?

  Now it's trading right now, like right before this podcast at $330 a share or whatever. And so you've got this, you know, 2000x markup, I think 2200x markup. And so you invested $100,000 in the seed round of Coinbase. That's worth $220 million on this day today because it goes, it goes public. Now, if you had invested in Bitcoin same time, Bitcoin in that same month was trading at $12 a coin. Now it's at $62,000 a coin. So your same 100K instead, you know, would have been worth $500 million. So still Bitcoin was the better investment, even though this was like, you know, you invest in a startup that's became a $110 billion company, still Bitcoin outperformed, but it's closer than I would have thought

• 15:44Shaan Puri?

  because Coinbase has really gone up in value in the last two years.

• 15:48Sam Parr?

  So let's give some more numbers. I think right before we started, the valuation was 80 billion, but a few hours ago it was 100 billion.

• 15:57Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 15:58Sam Parr?

  We're going to use 100 billion because that math is a little easier. Brian Armstrong is the CEO. He's 38 years old. He owns, I think, 20% of the company, which means at 100 billion, his net worth is $20 billion, which puts him, I think, like in the top 50 richest people in the world at 38. And the company Coinbase, I, let's see, it started when 12, so it's nine years old. So basically became the, from zero to richest, top 50 richest people in the world in only 10-ish years, nine years. And also, he owns 20% of Coinbase. Who knows?

• 16:40Shaan Puri?

  How much?

• 16:40Sam Parr?

  I don't, I certainly don't know, but you have to ask, how much Bitcoin does this, does this person own? If you told me that it was another 20 billion, I don't think I would be surprised at all. Do you, would you be surprised?

• 16:55Shaan Puri?

  20 billion is a lot. That is, that is, that is a very, very large amount. So I don't think it would be quite so high, but I wouldn't be surprised if, if it was over a billion dollars. I think 20 billion would be, 20 billion would be like, he'd be one of the, the top three, I think Bitcoin whales, I think at 20 billion or something like that.

• 17:13Sam Parr?

  Okay, okay.

• 17:14Shaan Puri?

  So I think that'd be way too much.

• 17:17Sam Parr?

  Would you think, I don't, I didn't do the math ahead of time, but would you think he would be a top 50 Bitcoin holder? That seems reasonable, right?

• 17:26Shaan Puri?

  It's plausible. Yeah. So I don't know. You know, I don't think he's ever said or disclosed, you know, if he, if he was buying the underlying coins. So the biggest thing is, did you hold, right? Because Bitcoin on this run up, right? So from when, you know, if, if he's doing Coinbase, Bitcoin's at $10 a coin, right? That becomes your kind of like frame of reference. Bitcoin today is trading at $63,000. $63,000 from 12 is such a like mind boggling like change. And so when I was talking to the, my friend who was an investor in Coinbase, I said, I was like, wow, did that, did that mean, does that mean that Coinbase outperformed Bitcoin? He goes, no, I think Bitcoin still wins. He goes, but name one person who held all their Bitcoin from 2012 to 2021.

• 18:07Shaan Puri?

  He's like, Sam's right. Well, I guess like of people who owned a lot of it at that time.

• 18:13Sam Parr?

  No, I didn't. I didn't own a lot. I owned, I bought hundreds of dollars worth, but no, not a lot.

• 18:18Shaan Puri?

  So let's say you owned a lot, you know, as that nest egg becomes 10 million, 20 million, a hundred million dollars, you're gonna like, a lot of people would, would liquidate some of it. And so he was saying, you know, all of us at Coinbase, we really couldn't sell this whole way. And he goes, the illiquidity was a feature, not a bug. Like the fact that we couldn't sell this whole time for Coinbase was the best money-making strategy for us to like not be able to be liquid until now.

• 18:42Sam Parr?

  I didn't sell, but my numbers were like tens of thousands or maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars. It certainly was not a million or tens of millions, but I didn't sell because I actually forgot my password. And I was like, oh, I just don't want to log in. It's too hard. And so I didn't log in.

• 19:00Shaan Puri?

  Have you still, you have it now or no?

• 19:02Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I have it now. Like I had, I had a, I just never did like a forgot your password thing in my email because I was like, ah, too much work. Maybe it's a sign. I'm just not going to sell.

• 19:10Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 19:11Sam Parr?

  And so I didn't sell, but can, what do you have in front of you? Are you looking at something?

• 19:14Shaan Puri?

  I'm looking at this tweet you put in of Daniel Gross.

• 19:17Sam Parr?

  So I want to bring, I want to bring this up.

• 19:18Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 19:19Sam Parr?

  So the numbers here is fascinating, but I actually don't think that's the really fascinating part. What's the fascinating part is the psychology behind this because today it's Coinbase and 20 years it's going to be something else. 50 years ago, it was real estate or something. A hundred years ago, it was oil. There's always something.

• 19:37Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 19:38Sam Parr?

  And The psychology behind the human being, I think, is far more interesting.

• 19:42Shaan Puri?

  And by the way, he was an engineer at Airbnb before he left to go start Coinbase. His Airbnb shares from, you know, would have done amazingly as well, right?

• 19:50Sam Parr?

  Like, Well, he only worked at Airbnb, I think, for a year. And before that, he worked at Deloitte. So I'm almost positive, granted, he was probably a genius, probably like, you know, crazy high IQ, but like, normal guy, uh, normal, like a normal nine to five. And also, uh, so let's talk about the, let's talk about the personality part here that I love. I like knowing what drives people, what makes them tick. We talk about billionaire of the week, and it's not actually about necessarily the money, but what, what, what, what do people think who achieve greatness?

• 20:17Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 20:17Sam Parr?

  In this case, it's money, but reality greatness can be a variety of things. So Daniel Gross is a guy we had in this podcast. He went, uh, so Hacker News, if you guys don't know what Hacker News is, you should read it every single day. It's basically Reddit, but only for nerds. I love it. I read it every day. It's, uh, tech folks. Um, and anyway, um, Brian Armstrong has a handle on tech news or on Hacker News, and you could read his old posts. And he has this old, and Daniel Gross tweeted out some of this guy's old posts. His handle, uh, is, uh, I actually don't know what his handle is, but well, it's sorry, it's B Armstrong. And so B Armstrong actually had a blog, listen to his blog. And this is actually kind of funny. It's called startbreakingfree.com, which is, which is kind of on, on brand consistently.

• 21:01Sam Parr?

  And actually, if you go to startbreakingfree.com, it's controlled by a virus. So like they, it automatically wants you to install a plugin. Are you know what I mean? Like, are you like, it's like,

• 21:15Shaan Puri?

  Like if I go to it right now, it's gonna try to install like, you know, security software that actually is gonna steal all my money.

• 21:20Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 21:20Shaan Puri?

  Just steal all my Bitcoin.

• 21:21Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it's gonna, well, it's gonna say like, you won, you know, you're the lucky winner. Uh, like somehow he let the domain expire or something like that, and, uh, someone got a hold of it. So now it's just a scam, which is kind of funny, uh, that the guy who's supposed to be like Mr. Security, his web, his domain expired and, uh, yeah, whatever. But anyway, you can see his post history, and he was launching a lot of stuff. He launched this one thing and it says, hey Hacker News, I just built a new forum software. Hey Hacker News, I just built a new photo sharing website. So the guy was really prolific and it's really interesting to see his posts.

• 21:57Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, he was definitely like trying, like what Daniel tweeted out was, I, you know, I look back at Brian's Hacker News submissions before he started Coinbase. You could see, what you see is a story of a hacker working on different projects, slowly zeroing in on his launch coordinates, right? Because he's consistently shipping stuff. They're not all like, you know, some of them have like one upvote, seven upvotes, 32 comments, right? Like, they're not like taking off. So you see a guy taking a bunch of swings. And as it swings, you can see it was, you know, like something about maps, something about, could, you know, how would you start your own country? Something about like, could you build an entire web app in one language? And then it's like Bitcoin Android release. You know, like how Airbnb does X.

• 22:40Shaan Puri?

  And then it's about, you know, like how to build your own forum, Bitcoin iPhone app. And, you know, just like sort of finding, finding like the thing that is his thing. And this is, this is the truth for everybody, right? Like, you know, people joke about Sam's, you know, Sam's footlong wieners or whatever, your hot dog stand.

• 22:57Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 22:57Shaan Puri?

  You know, my sushi restaurant. It's like, if you dig back into people's first projects, you're always going to find interesting things. Like Mark Zuckerberg, first project that I've heard him talk about. Have you heard this, the dentist office thing?

• 23:10Sam Parr?

  No.

• 23:10Shaan Puri?

  He set up an internal, like just internet network for his dad's dental office. So it was like a messaging, like the secretary in the front desk could message him in his office, you know, at the back. So he just like, kind of set up the internet inside their office and let them message each other. Then he built Wirehog, you know?

• 23:27Sam Parr?

  Oh, and Wirehog, I think, was really successful, by the way. For like a 17-year-old kid.

• 23:31Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, exactly. For a 17-year-old kid, it was more successful. And there's chat transcripts of when he, after he like leaves to go work on Facebook, he moves, you know, in the social network, they're like, they moved to Palo Alto. It's like, this is it. Facebook's going to be the thing. There's chat transcripts of him talking at that time, like. Yeah, like I think Wirehog's the thing. Like, so even them, it's not obvious at that time. And whereas people try to project that these guys are visionaries. They are, you know, visionary geniuses who never had a doubt in their mind. And then they saw the future and then they built it. And it's like, well.

• 24:05Sam Parr?

  Well, I actually think that a couple of those things are true. They could be visionary geniuses, or rather, they could be geniuses. But that's actually not a prerequisite, but it does help. But they definitely had doubt regardless of how confident someone is. It doesn't matter if you're Conor McGregor and you're going in a fight. You always have doubt, no matter what. And second, they probably didn't have a vision until it started getting a little bit of traction.

• 24:29Shaan Puri?

  Right. And I go back through, there's these, there's this interview on YouTube of Mark doing, there's like some college news station that's interviewing him. Some guy, some guy has like a college podcast and he invites Mark Zuckerberg on because he's got the college social network. That's kind of like taking off on a handful of colleges. I think they're on like, I don't know, five or 10 campuses at the time. And he's like, you know, so what, what is this going to be? You're going to go out to more colleges and then what, like high schools? And then, you know, non-college students? And Mark Zuckerberg is sitting there in his like basketball shorts with a red solo cup in his hand. And he's like, I don't know, like, I don't know if it has to do that. Like, why can't this just be like the cool thing for colleges? Like, once you take it out of the college thing, then you let everybody in. It's like less cool, like, maybe this is just cool.

• 25:14Shaan Puri?

  And like now he's literally putting fucking satellites into the sky to give people in India the internet so that they can use Facebook. Like, you know, aspirations changed.

• 25:23Sam Parr?

  The takeaway here, and I actually just went back to my high school the other day to like, give like a talk. And I was like.

• 25:29Shaan Puri?

  Dude, doesn't everything look small when you walk into a high school?

• 25:32Sam Parr?

  Yeah. And you'd be a 16 year old and you're like, oh my gosh, like I felt I was mature. I felt I knew what I was doing. You're a child.

• 25:39Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I could beat you up.

• 25:41Sam Parr?

  Yeah. I'm like, I was like, dude, I'm 30 and I thought that we were more similar, but we're not.

• 25:47Shaan Puri?

  We're not at all. Yeah.

• 25:48Sam Parr?

  Yeah, we're not like.

• 25:50Shaan Puri?

  Why are these chicks so low to the ground?

• 25:52Sam Parr?

  Yeah, everything is so small and like water fountains are disgusting. I can't believe I used to drink for them. Anyway, um, I was like, you guys just do shit, take swings, tinker on stuff. First of all, a lot of stuff that starts out cool, it actually looked really dumb early on. But even if it stays dumb, just get into the habit of taking swings and making stuff. Because, uh, like, I'm not like uber successful, but my first shit was like a poison ivy business. It was a-

• 26:22Shaan Puri?

  Poison ivy business, what is that?

• 26:24Sam Parr?

  My first stuff was like stupid and like it led to this thing and this thing. And like, hopefully the thing that I'm doing now is actually going to lead to something even bigger. And I also did a ton of research and I found out that there is this poison ivy treatment called Zanfel. Z A N F E L, I think, Zanfel. And basically I did more, a ton of research and I found out the guy who started it used to work at a cleaning supplies company. And I was like, oh, that's interesting. What is going on here? Like, that's kind of weird. I just saw that connection and I did research. And I found out that basically what he did was he took this thing called, I think it was called Mean Green. And it was really good at washing, um, oil off mechanics' hands. And it costs like $5 for a gallon. It was dirt cheap.

• 27:08Sam Parr?

  But he found out that, uh, the way poison ivy works is if, if the leaf gets on you, or if a leaf gets on you, it gets this oil on you. And you have to use this oil stuff, uh, this oil remover to-

• 27:18Shaan Puri?

  I've done it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Same thing with poison oak or whatever.

• 27:20Sam Parr?

  Yeah, yeah, same thing. And I was like, oh, so I'm just gonna bulk buy this Mean Green crap and repackage it and sell it for $40. As opposed to, I sold it for like $40 for like some, like a, like a car max size or like a, you know, like a, like a chapstick sized thing. When it costs like $40 for like literally an industrial sized barrel. And I just repackage it and I was making thousands of dollars a month. And then I quit doing it because I was like, I don't want to do this. Anyway, it was kind of a cool thing, but I shut it down because I was like, all right, this is making money. But like, I don't want to do this. I'm not proud of this. This isn't like anything I, I like to talk to, tell people I'm doing. It's kind of lame, even though it was making like five grand a month, shut it down and, um-

• 28:02Sam Parr?

  The point is, the thing that we're doing now, I have a feeling it's going to lead to something even bigger. And in Coinbase's regard, everything was much bigger in a much shorter timeframe. But it doesn't matter. It's the exercise, I think, is still true.

• 28:17Shaan Puri?

  That's great. You know, those guys who came and set up my studio here, they just released a vlog on his channel. This guy, Henry, I forgot his last name, Henry Bladcaster or something like that. I don't know what it is. But basically, I don't know how you'll find him, Henry on YouTube. He did this thing. He put out a video yesterday being like, oh, the advice that I got from Sean Puri. And I was like, okay, well, I'm one of his, like, I don't know, 100 subscribers. Like, I'll click this. This is about me. So I will go ahead and watch this video. And his videos are actually super well made. He's like, very Casey Neistat-ish.

• 28:47Sam Parr?

  Mini Casey Neistat, yeah.

• 28:49Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, which just shows how hard it is to win on YouTube. Like, his quality is really high, but like, no one gives a shit because it's just YouTube. There's a billion things on there.

• 28:56Sam Parr?

  Hey, as we said, just give it some time and just keep trying to hit.

• 28:59Shaan Puri?

  So the advice, and I was like, I'm curious what the advice was because they came over and they were like doing all the work. And I'm just sort of standing in the garage with like a cup of coffee, just like, you know, just sort of like trying to be nice. I'm not helpful, but I was like trying to talk to them and I was like, and they're like, you know, hammering things. And I'm just like asking him questions and giving him some kind of like, well, here's how I would do it if I was you guys. Because I really resonate with anybody who's like, if you're like 22, 23, and then you, you're smart, but you chose not to go the traditional path, and like, that feels right. But then you also just get these like hunger pangs of like doubt when it's like, shit, my friends actually have a salary. Wait, like, I'm sleeping in a like, you know, four of us are sleeping in this one bedroom apartment.

• 29:41Shaan Puri?

  And so I started, like, I really like empathize with that because that's where I was. And like, I just want to tell them what I, what I would tell myself, which is like, dude, you're doing the right thing. Here's how you need to think about this, though. Don't like, don't worry. Here's how, here's how this is going to play out. What I told them was like, look, Honestly, the best times of my life were three of us living in a, you know, one bedroom apartment. My, my co-founder and my roommate lived in my closet because he couldn't even afford our dirt cheap rent. So Trevor lived in my closet and like turned my living closet into like a room for himself with a lava lamp and shit. And then like his girlfriend moved in with him in the closet too. Oh my God. And so then, uh, I was like, you know, he had a grocery cart because there's no, he didn't have a closet because he was living in a closet.

• 30:26Shaan Puri?

  So he stole a shopping cart, rolled it into his closet and used that as like his hamper, his closet for himself. And I just remember like, like at the time, everything seemed so shitty. It was like, oh, this is the shitty version of life. And now I'm like, no, that was the, that was the most fun time. Cause all we were doing every day was just trying to figure shit out, trying new different schemes and projects. We had no responsibilities, no burn, and then we were just like party for fun, like on the side. And so I, I just remember thinking like, now that I look back, I'm like, that was the shit. And that's what I was trying to tell him. I was like, first of all, guys, this is the best. So like, uh, like embrace this part. You're never going to get to have this again with your friends like you have right now. It's, it's so fun. Embrace these five years. I said, the second thing is like, I used to chase money a lot. Like, how do I make money? Maybe this will make us money. Maybe this will make some money.

• 31:11Shaan Puri?

  And that was good because I like learned skills about how to make money. But the things that actually paid off, none of those really paid off with a big dollar amount. The things that paid off were like the people I was meeting and like doing projects with or learning from. Like those relationships pay off big in the end. You know, the, the learning of like building skills around like, I did my first econ project like you. I was selling these wristbands called fatbands.com. And it was just a fat wristband, fat wristband that I like noticed a bunch of kids were wearing on, on campus. I thought, oh wait, maybe that's a trend. Let me try to sell those online. You can customize them. And so, um, those skills translated, but the, the business did not. And so what I told them, the, the advice that he put in the video, um, that I didn't even realize I said was like,

• 31:55Shaan Puri?

  you're 23 years old now, like here's the trick to this whole thing. You're doing the right thing. Every day you're just making stuff, you're trying stuff, you're making content, you're having a blast with your buddies. We're going to measure the scoreboard when you're 30, not when you're 24. And it's like, that was the game changer, like, kind of like advice I wish I had and that I gave them.

• 32:14Sam Parr?

  And maybe 35 or 40.

• 32:16Shaan Puri?

  Right. But basically, it's like, don't, like, you're planting seeds. Don't go dig up that seed the next day and be like, shit, this didn't grow into a plant. Like, no, plant that seed, water it, enjoy it. And just say, look, I'm not trying to win the whole game in one year. I know a year and a half. And like, if my, if my friends who went and took this banking job or consulting job are, are doing better than me in 18 months, like, I don't need to feel like I made a bad choice. Like, I'm making the right choice for me. And it's gonna, like, let's look at this as a 10-year game. And we can only measure the score that, like, the fourth quarter is 10 years from now. So that's the only time you can look at the scoreboard, really.

• 32:51Sam Parr?

  And the seeds that you're planting, at least in my experience, and I think in a lot of my friends' experience, and also seems like you for sure, is it's shit, it's shit, it's shit, it's shit. And then suddenly it's like, oh, my God, it worked.

• 33:04Shaan Puri?

  Right, it hits, yeah.

• 33:05Sam Parr?

  Like, so, like, it's shit for the most of the time. And then finally, it's like, oh, okay, now it's all happening.

• 33:11Shaan Puri?

  Your learning goes in this, like, gradual curve. Like, your learning does go up every year where you're like, oh, man, last year I was such a dummy. I didn't know shit about shit. And now I know better how I would do this. And then the same thing happens the next year and the next year and the next year. But your results can kind of stay flatlined for, like, a decade almost, for like, seven years, before it actually, you know, stops being a flatline and just like curves up rapidly.

• 33:35Sam Parr?

  So I wanted to continue talking about this, but I'm actually going to save my stuff that I have these notes here. I'm going to save that for the next time because I don't want this episode to be entirely this stuff. Although frankly, I love this stuff. Abreu, do you like this or not?

• 33:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, man, I'm just soaking it all in.

• 33:51Sam Parr?

  Okay, I like this stuff, but Sean, you want to move on or you want to do the other thing? You want to do micro acquire or do you want to keep talking about this?

• 33:58Shaan Puri?

  I don't want to keep talking about this. I want to do either some micro acquire or some ideas.

• 34:02Sam Parr?

  I want to do micro acquire, and this is an idea, actually. But we, at The Hustle, we've worked with this guy, and I never talked to him because I wasn't the one working on the project. But anyway, I just started hanging out with him recently. This guy named Andrew, people call him Gaz, but his last name is like Gaz Nady or something. Do you know Andrew?

• 34:20Shaan Puri?

  Gaz Deki or something, yeah.

• 34:21Sam Parr?

  Gaz Deki. I think they can just call him Gaz. Do you know Andrew or do you know who he is?

• 34:25Shaan Puri?

  I did the, like, the mini SPAC with him. So that's the only way I know him, just through DMs. I never talked to him. I never met him.

• 34:31Sam Parr?

  Andrew is 32, I think. He previously had a company that I think was an agency and he told me that he sold it for like tens of millions of dollars. So it was very, very successful. But his new thing is incredibly interesting. It's called MicroAcquire. I think it's just microacquire.com.

• 34:47Shaan Puri?

  That's right.

• 34:47Sam Parr?

  And the premise is very simple. He finds people that wants to sell their company and he just talks about it in a newsletter. It's basically like AppSumo or like The Hustle, but a newsletter that just sends out cool companies, except what he does is he makes you pay money to get access to it. You only have to pay $200, $300 though, and you get a year's access. And his numbers are pretty interesting. And keep in mind, Andrew's actually the only employee. So no one works there. And so as of today, he's got 1,500 subscribers paying $299 a year, and that brings his revenue to about $400,000 a year. And I posted a chart of this. Do you see the chart I posted?

• 35:27Shaan Puri?

  Uh, no, I'm on his Twitter because I was looking for that because I know he posts, oh, here it is. Yeah.

• 35:31Sam Parr?

  No, I have the chart. So I posted it. And he just sent this to me. So I guess, I mean, I said, can I share it?

• 35:36Shaan Puri?

  He builds it in public. So he announces the revenue publicly as part of his like way of getting more traffic. So he's at 425 ARR.

• 35:43Sam Parr?

  And look at the chart. Yeah, that's a pretty amazing chart.

• 35:47Shaan Puri?

  Really all of the growth happened like in November, December, January, February, like it's just last like four or five months.

• 35:54Sam Parr?

  Yeah. And it's pretty interesting. And I actually shared with you, just scroll down a little bit more. I shared with you his, his vision, but what this guy is building, I mean, this is his vision. We'll see if he can pull it off, is a different type of angel list. So basically, he wants to disrupt investment banking and he wants to make it easier to buy and sell companies. And it's incredibly fascinating. So he wants, or sorry, not disrupt angel list, but kind of be like angel list.

• 36:18Shaan Puri?

  I feel like we didn't describe what it is. So what it is, MicroAcquire, you go on there if you want to buy a small SaaS business. So a small business that makes recurring revenue through subscription. And, and so that's the, that's the, that's the thing.

• 36:32Sam Parr?

  And the size are?

• 36:34Shaan Puri?

  It ranges. So you could buy one for $5,000. That's making $100 a month of revenue or something like that, or zero. Revenue, but it has users. So you could buy it for as low as like a thousand or $5,000, you could buy a business. And as high as there's a couple for like, single digit millions of dollars on there. Maybe there's a few that are outliers, but that's like, I would say the sweet spot, the range for these things are kind of like hundreds of thousands of dollars is like where the, you know, decent businesses are on this platform. And this is the thing where I talked about this once on the pod, but he had DM'd us and he was like, hey, like, love my first million. You guys are great. Would, you know, would you guys want to do something with me where I like, give away a

• 37:14Shaan Puri?

  $5,000 micro SaaS business? And I was like, dude, that's a great idea. I'll like, go in with you and like, I'll pump this to the audience. And so basically I tweeted out, like, I didn't even talk to him. I didn't actually respond to his DM. I just tweeted out, hey, me and Andrew are giving away a SaaS business for $5,000. Like, who wants it? Oh, you know, all the business is there, we'll buy it and give it to you. It's like, these are businesses that are already working to some extent. You know, it's like, we just need to add some hustle. Who's a hustler who wants this business? And what ended up happening was, a bunch of other people started chiming in, being like, I'm in for 5K. I'll put 5K in. And so we ended up raising $100,000 as a micro spec, meaning a blank check company. So we raised $100,000 into an entity to go and use that entity to go buy a business off

• 37:57Shaan Puri?

  of micro, micro acquire. And then as of last week, it closed. So we found an entrepreneur, found a business, and we closed that deal to buy a Shopify app.

• 38:08Sam Parr?

  That's amazing. And that's pretty wild. I'll be eager to see what happens. And I'm sure you'll reveal in like, six or 12 months. My opinion around micro acquire is, at worst, it's going to be okay.

• 38:21Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 38:21Sam Parr?

  At best, it could be amazing. I don't know what it's gonna, what's gonna happen to it. What do you think? It's a really fascinating business. And I, the thing is, now, I'm actually shocked he's letting me talk about it, because I feel like I can clone this so quickly.

• 38:36Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, it's a lot of work. Like I saw this guy doing the one deal we did and it was just like fuck ton of work. So there's like, you know, separate everything to make it happen, do the paperwork, get it.

• 38:45Sam Parr?

  Yes, but that's not the work for micro acquire.

• 38:49Shaan Puri?

  Well, they have to help you do the transaction. So, so that's their, that's their function. It's what's good is that they don't make money on the like transaction closing. They make money on you paying a premium subscription. Like I pay a monthly fee to be able to browse businesses, which is a much better model because you're not just reliant on taking a brokerage fee of closed M and A because there's just not a lot of closed M and A that happens. But there are a lot of people who are curious and will pay the, you know, a hundred bucks or whatever it is, 200 bucks to be able to like browse the premium listings and get the, get the details, get the info.

• 39:21Sam Parr?

  And so what I would do if I was Andrew is I would decrease the price to $99 a year because that not, or even $39 a year. Because that would make it an impulse buy and I would get loads of people. Then I would do this company selling. Then I would have a course that costs $2,000 or $5,000 and it would include, include a community and was all focused on buying and selling companies.

• 39:43Shaan Puri?

  Growing businesses.

• 39:44Sam Parr?

  And I'm pretty, I'm pretty confident that you would get that to around 30, 40, 50 million dollars a year in business. I don't know if that would be a valuable company to sell, but I'm pretty sure that you could make 10 to 20 million dollars a year in profit for at least a handful of years.

• 40:00Shaan Puri?

  I think it's, I think it's needed. So I think it's smart that he specializes in SaaS. I think that it's smart that he's like curated marketplace versus like Flippa or these different places where you're just like so much fucking junk. You don't know what, there's no trust. So I think he's doing it right, that he's bringing trust to these kind of like lower trust like marketplaces. So I'm with you. I really liked the project and I'm with you that the minimum is a good outcome. The maximum is like, oh wow, this was a big idea hidden in plain sight. And I'll, I think it's interesting. I think it's more likely going to just be the good outcome, but I like that it has the, you know, the option to do both. And it seems like a fun, a fun kind of business to build if you're this guy.

• 40:42Sam Parr?

  I think he wants it to be the okay outcome, which is he owns it and he lives a really good lifestyle.

• 40:47Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 40:47Sam Parr?

  And, uh, which by the way, I think like I would probably do the same as well. Yeah. So anyway, that's a cool company I wanted to bring up. What do you got?

• 40:56Shaan Puri?

  I got a couple. Okay. So I'll go for.

• 41:00Shaan Puri?

  We talked about this before, but I'm curious what you think. So Photo P. We talked about this many, many months ago, but you know, we were much smaller than people. Those people are probably not even listening anymore. So we'll just pretend it's the first time. So there's this thing called Photo P. And all it is, is it's Photoshop, but it's free. And it's in the browser. You don't have to download anything. And the guy who makes it, I don't know much about it. He posts on Reddit or, you know, he has posted on Reddit. It's a pretty big thread. I think you know a little more about him than I do, kind of like the backstory. But it's a free version of Photoshop that has cloned every feature of Photoshop, pretty much. It's like, it's the exact UI of Photoshop, which is crazy because Photoshop is such a complicated

• 41:43Shaan Puri?

  piece of software to build. And this guy just chipped away, just chipped away, just chipping away. And basically built Photo P and P as in like the vegetable, like P E A. And so Photo P.com, you go there and it's just like one banner ad. That's like how he makes his money, I think. I think it does a million dollars a year now. Because so many people use this goddamn thing, like students and like people who don't want to spend. Photoshop's really expensive. People who don't want to buy Photoshop can use Photo P and get like 80 to 90% of the same power without any of the cost and without any of the headache of downloading a big ass one gigabyte application.

• 42:20Sam Parr?

  What a, oh my God, I'm on it. So we, I know this person. Is that what you're saying?

• 42:25Shaan Puri?

  I remember the first time we brought it up, you had already heard about it because I was like, dude, this, I have a really obscure thing. And then you're like, Mr. Obscure. So you're like, oh yeah, I've seen this on Reddit at the time. So I remember being like shocked that you knew about this thing because I thought I had just discovered like uncovered gem, you know?

• 42:41Sam Parr?

  Yes, I see. It's from November 2018. A guy, yes, because it got 50,000 upvotes. And he started it by saying, I made a free alternative to Photoshop. Ask me anything. And that's how he got promotion for it. Yeah, I like this. So you think he's making a million dollars a year doing this?

• 42:58Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. So I don't, I don't know why Ben told me this. Ben gave me this topic and he was like Photo P. You know, he's like, you know, Photo P? I was like, yeah. He's like, you know, it's been a million dollars a year. So if I'm wrong, Ben's wrong. I didn't look it up myself. But um.

• 43:10Sam Parr?

  By the way, I got access to SimilarWeb. I've got a premium account now.

• 43:14Shaan Puri?

  Oh, bro, you got the goods.

• 43:16Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I uh, someone who works at HubSpot, uh, I don't know if I can blow up there. Anyway, I got SimilarWeb.

• 43:24Shaan Puri?

  Dude, I'm the same way where at Twitch, I was like, oh dude, you got a premium app and a account? That's like a couple thousand bucks a year to see app download stuff like share the login? And they're like, you know, we're like a company. You just buy a seat and it's just the company pays for the seat. They're like, if you, if you think you would use this, just buy it. I'm like, oh, but they're like, I felt like such a pirate, like I had to like hide. I was like, oh yeah, yeah, of course, of course. I wouldn't bootleg that like, well, yeah, that's not what I meant.

• 43:51Sam Parr?

  That, and I'm still trying to like be a little bit less hood rat Sam and more like, oh yeah, it's like, this is ROI positive. Just buy it.

• 43:58Shaan Puri?

  Right, right. Uh, it's actually like very much looked down upon to be that way. Like I was negotiating with somebody and they're like, wait, well, why are you trying to like? Why are you trying to like save us all this money negotiating with this vendor? Like just pay the thing and do it upfront.

• 44:13Sam Parr?

  And you're like, but this goes against like everything in my genes. I can't not do it.

• 44:17Shaan Puri?

  I was like, yeah, I booked him a hotel, but it's in the motel six. Like I saved us $200.

• 44:24Sam Parr?

  I always used to tell people, yeah, like we'll take care of your accommodation. And it was, they would actually be sleeping in my.

• 44:30Shaan Puri?

  Staying at my aunt's house.

• 44:32Sam Parr?

  And I would actually go, I would stay at my girlfriend's house and they would get my bedroom. I did that all the time. I'd be like, yeah, we'll take care of your accommodation. Cause we get hustled, they just looked at my house.

• 44:44Sam Parr?

  So according to SimilarWeb, PhotoPe gets 8.5 million monthly uniques. They spend a ton of time on the website and most all the traffic is direct. So I, if you told me that this made a million dollars, I would think, are you sure it's not a million dollars a month?

• 45:00Shaan Puri?

  I don't know. I gotta, I gotta check. I don't think it's a month. I think that would be pretty, pretty crazy. I think, I think a year, cause you know, he's only, he's not monetizing well, right? He's just got display ads. So he's, you know, he's got the bottom of the barrel monetization, I think on the, on the site.

• 45:13Sam Parr?

  Yeah, you could probably crush this though. Um, speaking of just, oh, go ahead.

• 45:17Shaan Puri?

  Well, I was just gonna say like, you know, okay to.

• 45:21Shaan Puri?

  So what? So I think the so what here is A, photo P is cool and interesting and like just a cool thing to know about. But B, like, couldn't you do this for more things? Like, first of all, take the whole Adobe suite and do the photo P for After Effects. Do the photo P for Illustrator, photo P for, for the whole suite, right? Like, anything that has over X million users, you could do this for. What else? Like, maybe it's like AutoCAD. Like, I don't know if that's free or if you pay for it or whatever, you know? Like, I forgot, like, what's that thing called? Math Lab, MATLAB or something like that? It's a thing that all the engineers have to use. Like, is MATLAB paid? Is, you know, great, can you, can you do this? And I think a version of this is called OBS. So have you ever used OBS?

• 46:05Sam Parr?

  No, what's that?

• 46:06Shaan Puri?

  OBS is an open source piece of software. That's basically the most popular thing for every Twitch streamer or YouTuber. So it's the easiest way to like, stream from a PC, high quality video and audio to Twitch to whatever. So for years, Twitch, actually just up till recently, Twitch didn't have any way. If you went to Twitch, you're like, great, I want to be a streamer. They're like, cool, go, go use OBS. Like, what the hell is OBS? Twitch doesn't have a button just saying, go live? And same thing with YouTube. You go live on YouTube? Nope, can't just go live on YouTube with, without like, using more sophisticated software. And so OBS is actually an open source project, maintained by a small community developer. But really, it's this one guy, Jim. And I met this guy and Jim's like, you know, I don't know,

• 46:49Shaan Puri?

  five foot seven and like, long hair down to his kind of waist. And he looked like an open source, you know, like, app developer. And he's extremely high ethics and morals, where he's just like, the app is 100% free. He's been working on it for a decade. And it's supported by donations of people who are like, dude, I run my whole business off OBS, like, sure, here's $10, you know? And Twitch, Twitch actually was paying him every month, just to keep maintaining OBS, because it was like, cheaper to just pay Jim, I don't know, X thousands of dollars a month than to like, have 20 engineers try to recreate this thing.

• 47:24Sam Parr?

  I think that that is cool. I think that like, when I hear that, I'm like, that's badass. I love that, that, I love that that exists. But what was my, what was my thing earlier? I'm like, cornrows and sleeve tattoos, I respect it and I think that's badass. I just don't want it. It ain't for me. I'm not wearing it. And that's, that's my case with this, which is, I'm so happy that that exists. I ain't doing it because there's a bunch of examples of this. So another example is Spice Works, spiceworks.com. They were doing like 50, 60, 70 million dollars a year in revenue and they ended up selling because they raised too much money, it didn't work out, but they had traction. And basically what Spice Works did was they created software.

• 48:05Sam Parr?

  So if you're like, if you have like a thousand employees and you wanted to figure out which computers you needed to buy, they created software to help you figure that out, which normally costs money and they actually made money through advertising on the website. In my opinion, that's like neat, but just charge people money for your thing. Because I'd like, would you rather be PhotoP or Adobe?

• 48:31Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, of course, of course.

• 48:33Sam Parr?

  I know which one I'd rather be. So I think it's cool to actually do that free stuff just to get a ton of users. But after a while, like if I was PhotoP, I'd be like, well, if I just, I should just hire more engineers and we should just make some premium features and upcharge. And that is what I would do. I would not do this.

• 48:49Shaan Puri?

  Well, there's another way of looking at it, which is sometimes like free doesn't mean no ambition. So for example, Skype was like, hey, free international, you know, like calling. And WhatsApp, same thing. Why did WhatsApp take off? Because SMS was actually really expensive. You had to pay for every text, especially international texting. It was super expensive. So WhatsApp free was the growth hack. And for these guys, I would say free is also the growth hack. But you know, if you're, if you want to just be one person maintaining this thing and like whatever, like you're, where you do it matters. So Photoshop is still at least big, but nowhere near as big as texting and calling was, right? That was like such a huge market. And then the second thing is like, if you're going to do free, find some other way to capture a ton of value.

• 49:33Shaan Puri?

  So Skype and WhatsApp were able to capture a bunch of value using a totally different method, whereas PhotoP is just like, cool, here's a, here's one banner ad, you know, and that's enough for me. Or OBS is like, hey, donate to me and that's it. Whereas OBS could have like created, you know, either premium features or sold to Twitch or, you know, could have done many things to try to capture more value out of the free thing that they made.

• 49:56Sam Parr?

  Do you know the website Unsplash? So Unsplash is an alternative to Getty's Images. So Getty's Images, everyone has probably heard that word. Not a lot of people probably use it. We used it. We paid them 50 grand a year and we were a small client. Getty Images, they pay photographers, they buy rights.

• 50:12Shaan Puri?

  Why were you paying so much?

• 50:14Sam Parr?

  Because

• 50:15Shaan Puri?

  When there's cheaper or freer options for photo libraries.

• 50:18Sam Parr?

  Getty's is the best. So a lot of free or cheap ones, they don't actually have images of the people. So for example, if you want to write about Elon Musk, a lot of the free ones don't have good pictures of Elon Musk. Second, once you get to the size that we were, like we like, which is not that big, once you get past like 500,000 monthly uniques, you probably want to stop doing things illegally when it comes to photos because there's all these people that, yeah, and which is like, A, it's the right thing to do, right? You, you are using other people's stuff, so you shouldn't do it. It's, it's okay to kind of bootleg it early on. But after a while, you should pay for it. And we were a small person. We're, and we paid, I think 50, I forget, tens of thousands of dollars.

• 50:58Sam Parr?

  And anyway, there was this competitor called Unsplash. I think Unsplash is dope. I think they're badass. They were just acquired, acquired recently. I got a little information where I like, I found, I heard a little bit about what they were doing. They were only doing around four-ish million, five million dollars a year in revenue, even though like hundreds of millions of their images were being downloaded.

• 51:22Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 51:22Sam Parr?

  And I was actually shocked at how small they were. If I had that much traction, A, I would have been far more aggressive about selling ads on the site. And B, far more aggressive about getting subscriptions and charging a lot of money for them. Because this website, Unsplash, which from the outside appeared to be doing wildly well. And I imagine they actually were acquired for a lot of money because if a proper person could get their hands on that, they could crush it, I would think. But if, if you have that much usage, like Unsplash did, Unsplash wasn't ubiquitous, but it was quite popular. You can make way more money by charging money upfront for all that stuff. When Unsplash giving away their stuff for free, I think they're only doing like 400, 500,000 dollars a month in revenue.

• 52:03Shaan Puri?

  Right, right, right. Okay. Yeah, that's a good, that's a good example of one. I had one other topic I wanted to do.

• 52:11Shaan Puri?

  Okay, which one's more interesting to you? Is it the affirm for X or is it game film for salespeople? I'll let you pick from those two categories.

• 52:19Sam Parr?

  Affirm and I have a, I have a take on there that you're not going to like.

• 52:23Shaan Puri?

  Okay, good, good. All right, so if you don't know what affirm is, affirm was a company started by Max Levchin, I think. Am I mixing this up?

• 52:32Sam Parr?

  No.

• 52:32Shaan Puri?

  Right, all right, so Max Levchin, the co-founder of PayPal. Affirm went public, I think this year or last year. It's about 17, 18 billion dollar company right now. And what affirm does is when you're on an ecommerce site, you're going and you're buying a mattress online. You go to Casper's website and it'll be like, oh wow, this mattress is $1,200. And it'll say, or, or for, you know, 96 easy payments of $8, you can own this mattress, right? So it's basically a pay as you go software that lets ecommerce stores sell more stuff because if people don't have the full amount or don't, or you know, they're hesitant to spend a large amount of money right now. You can offer them pay as you go plans with zero effort and then they take a cut.

• 53:17Shaan Puri?

  So, you know, you know, on our ecommerce store, we offer, we use one called Sezzle. And Sezzle will basically say, great, you could buy this thing for, you know, four payments or eight payments of $10 instead of paying the full amount right now. And, and then they take 7% and then they send us the rest of the money. And so it is kind of a no brainer as a retailer because it just, it really does improve conversion. And for us, customers were asking for it because they were used to buying it.

• 53:45Sam Parr?

  And it's up, it's, it's publicly traded company now, does really well.

• 53:49Shaan Puri?

  And so, and there's several of these. So there's Afterpay in Australia, which is even bigger. Afterpay is a $34 billion company, which is kind of interesting because normally Australian companies are much, much smaller. Klarna is like big in Europe, I think for this.

• 54:01Sam Parr?

  I think Klarna is even bigger than all of them.

• 54:03Shaan Puri?

  Exactly, so Klarna is what probably the biggest one. And so there's a kind of this war going on. They're all trying to like, I think affirm partnered with Shopify, so it's like built into Shopify now. That's a big move, but basically, okay, pay as you go, interesting space. Kind of was one of the big ideas that just came out in the last like 10 years and is a good example of. Once it started working in the US, it was not hard for people to just say, be like, "Cool, we're gonna do, we're gonna do a firm for Australia, we're gonna do a firm for UK, we're gonna do a firm for India, whatever, right?" So I think generically, that was a good business idea. What I thought was interesting is, what else could you use it for? So I heard of one company in this, this year's YC batch, that was doing pay-as-you-go.

• 54:44Sam Parr?

  How did you get access to that?

• 54:46Shaan Puri?

  Bro, big time investors like us, that's what we get access to. Actually, YC still has not accepted me into the investor pool, even though I've invested in probably like 10 YC companies at this point. But, but I have a friend who gave access, so that's no problem. So anyways, one of the companies, what they do is they're a firm for general contractors. So another high-ticket item, you're getting, you know, your garage redone, or whatever, bathroom remodeled, or you're building out, you know, a multifamily apartment complex, or whatever. They're giving the general, what they did is they went to the general contractor, just like, that's their version of the ecommerce store. And they say, "Hey, instead of charging your client 12 grand for this, you can just offer them pay-as-you-go,

• 55:27Shaan Puri?

  and it helps your clients pay you money. And you get a higher collection rate, you have less, less kind of late payments and defaults, and higher conversion rate, because people can afford you this way, it makes you more affordable." And they were doing alright, they had decent revenue, and, you know, it was early still. But I thought, "Oh, this is interesting. Are people gonna do pay-as-you-go in more, more industries, more, more sectors? And what else might there be?"

• 55:52Sam Parr?

  Okay, but here's my, here's my take. Klarna, Afterpay, Affirm, I like the people who start them. I think they're horrible companies for the world. I think that they, they should burn down completely and not exist. I think that-

• 56:08Shaan Puri?

  Why? Because it's getting people in debt?

• 56:10Sam Parr?

  It's getting people in debt. It's making you buy stupid shit that you can't afford. So where, like, where's a firm? Like, if you go to, like, Fashion Nova, like, people who can't afford, who, people who want to do a firm for a $29 pair of pants, I'm like, "Don't buy those fucking pants. Don't use Affirm. Don't buy any of this. You don't need this bullshit. Don't buy it. Do not buy it. Run. And also, if you're gonna have to buy it, don't go in debt to buy it." I think this is horrible. And I'm actually shocked at a guy like Max Levchin, who I think is a cool dude. He started PayPal, he started all this stuff, it's badass, the guy seemed like a nerd, I love nerds. What are you doing? This is useless. You're just doing dumb shit.

• 56:48Shaan Puri?

  You know how it just started? How he got the idea? Tell me. He was, um, so this is the version of the story. I know I'm gonna be, you know, somebody who was there probably knows a lot more details. But what I'd heard was there was an engineer who had, uh, so he had this lab, like I had Monkey Inferno. He had a lab called H V F, Hard Valuable Fun. And basically it was an incubator where he said, I'm gonna do any project that satisfies those three criteria. It's gotta be hard, it's gotta be valuable, it's gotta be fun. And so, uh, and then they kind of like didn't have, um, like, I think they've, they've had, you know, a few nice companies. Glow came out of it, it's fertility tracker. And then Affirm was the big one. And Max like went all in and he became the CEO of Affirm and all that stuff to, to take it forward.

• 57:26Shaan Puri?

  But the origin story from what I heard was, is an engineer who had come up with like a new, uh, like database technology or database technique. He's like, oh, look at this. He's like, basically just like nerding out. He's like, look at this. We could do like so much computation in so little time and like with this new technique. And I was like, okay, but what are you gonna use that for? It's just kind of like blockchain. It's like, great, you have blockchain, but like, why do we need a blockchain? What are we gonna use it for? Does it really make this better? And like, there's, you needed to find an application. So the way that blockchain found money, currency as, as the core killer app. Uh, what he, what Max realized was, he came into the, this guy was an E I R for him. So for months, he was just like working on this like databasing technology and how he was gonna use it. Couldn't, couldn't really figure out an application.

• 58:08Shaan Puri?

  And then one day Max walks in, he goes, dude, like credit scoring and credit reporting is so like ancient. We should be able to like, if you're a person today, I should be able to take signals from the internet. Social, social networking data, uh, publicly available data on the internet to do instant credit, uh, worthiness. Versus like the way that this works today with this kind of like, you go get a credit score and it's based off of like, you know, stuff in the, in the past. So here, his insight was, there has to be a better way to determine the credit, credit worthiness of a person. And he's like, your databasing technology is actually perfect for doing that on the fly and doing that at scale. And so they came together and he's like, great, I'm gonna like basically create this application to do this.

• 58:51Shaan Puri?

  And I think at first they didn't want to do, I don't think the initial, very initial idea was what they ended up doing, which was like pay as you go on ecommerce websites. But pretty quickly they realized that's the use case, that's the market that needs this the most is basically instead of, um, like, I guess my question to you would be, do you also feel, do you also use a Visa and Mastercard? Like, because it's just credit cards. That's all this is. It's just credit. Um, so do you also hate credit cards the same way you hate pay as you go?

• 59:19Sam Parr?

  You want to know what's funny is my credit, my personal credit card limit is $4,000. So I've got a, I've, I've never had any debt other, I just got a mortgage.

• 59:29Shaan Puri?

  Are you one of those people that uses debit cards instead of credit?

• 59:32Sam Parr?

  I do it because lately someone has advised me to do it, but for a long time, no. But I'm not against credit. And I realized that what I'm saying is not entirely logical. It's definitely emotionally driven. And you're saying, and I'm not like going this hardcore libertarian route, which is like, well, I'm like against the government, therefore all government is bad. I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, like I'm going to draw. So what I'm doing right now is basically I'm drawing the line, which I get. It's does, that's not always the best, but I think that credit cards in some cases are good and a firm in most cases are bad. That's what I think.

• 1:00:08Shaan Puri?

  Okay. I think that's, you know, that's whatever.

• 1:00:09Sam Parr?

  Because the people like, do you know, do you have any, uh, do you know, like in Europe, like our friend Ramon and a lot of my other friends from Europe, they were like, you know, credit cards, we don't use credit cards like in, in, in Germany. Yeah. Like in, in a lot of places in Europe, if you want to use a credit.

• 1:00:26Shaan Puri?

  We use bidets, proper cleaning.

• 1:00:28Sam Parr?

  Yeah. Which by the way, whenever people were flipping out over COVID and toilet paper, I'm like, dude, take a shower. Like, why the fuck you flipping out over this? Why are you fighting over this? Anyway.

• 1:00:41Shaan Puri?

  You're going to shower every time you shit?

• 1:00:43Sam Parr?

  Just go twice a day. But like it's, it's the inconvenience is not bad enough that I'm going to fight over that.

• 1:00:51Shaan Puri?

  That's fine. That's fair.

• 1:00:52Sam Parr?

  That's what I'm saying.

• 1:00:53Shaan Puri?

  Not going to like stab someone in like.

• 1:00:54Sam Parr?

  No, I'm not going to go to jail over this. Like I'll just take a shower. Or I'll just be uncomfortable. Anyway, um, I just think like credit cards aren't that common in Europe. There, it's definitely an American thing, but long story short, I am not in favor of a firm. I think that that is a stupid thing to spend his life working on. That's my opinion. I would love for him, if I, we could goad him or bait him into coming on here and convincing me of otherwise, because I'm open minded. But I think it's dumb. I think it's stupid. For general contractors, that's a little bit different, but for buying like a $29 pair of pants, like don't fucking buy the pants.

• 1:01:29Shaan Puri?

  Well. I, uh, my family member trains his daughter in jujitsu. And so maybe, maybe we could use the, the daughter jujitsu connection to get Max on the pod, uh, very soon.

• 1:01:42Sam Parr?

  Am I wrong though? Do you agree or disagree?

• 1:01:44Shaan Puri?

  I disagree. I disagree completely. I think credit is a great thing. It helps the economy move. I, I'm always a kind of don't hate the player, hate the game type of situation where I put the burden on the individual. In the same way that I wasn't like, oh my God, jewel or like, you know, like, is, you know, is, is Grey Goose evil? Cause it's alcohol and alcohol causes problems? No, like, I don't think so. I think I, I basically for myself, I live my life where I never blame a company for tricking me into like doing something. I blame myself if I don't have the self-control and the like thought process to do it. And so that's how I look at others too. I will never blame a credit card company for, um, for somebody getting in debt.

• 1:02:26Shaan Puri?

  Now, what I do say is if you're not transparent about what the fees are, what the charges are, what the rates are, then that's shady, right? You're withholding information. You're not disclosing, you're hiding the fees. But, um, but in this case, they don't charge people more, uh, for, you know, uh, for buying a lot of the times it's 0% interest actually. Because they, they can offer the customers 0% interest because they take 7% from the merchant for helping them close the sale. And so it's actually an interesting model compared to.

• 1:02:55Sam Parr?

  That's interesting. I didn't know, I didn't know the full.

• 1:02:57Shaan Puri?

  It depends on the credit worthiness. If the, like when I, I bought an eight sleep mattress using a firm. And I was like, cause I was like, God, do I want to spend like two grand right now? Oh, I'll try this affirm thing. And I was like, oh, this is cool. I can just pay in payments and it's 0% interest. Cause I had.

• 1:03:11Sam Parr?

  Well, I tried doing it. I also have an eight sleep. I tried doing it with there and I actually was going to have to pay like a pretty hefty fee. I was like, oh, no.

• 1:03:19Shaan Puri?

  Because you don't use credit cards. You don't have high credit.

• 1:03:22Sam Parr?

  Something like for some reason, I don't have a good credit. My credit score is is not bad anymore, but it was bad because I didn't have history. Anyway.

• 1:03:29Shaan Puri?

  Well, I have one last idea on this, which is I think this is the same thing as like, you probably know what layaway is. I don't even really fully understand what layaway is. Layaway sounded like a total scam to me.

• 1:03:40Sam Parr?

  It's silly. It's silly. Basically, like what it is, is if you want to buy a $500 thing, you would go each week and you would give them a little bit of money and it would start paying down your balance. And then eventually you'd get the item.

• 1:03:51Shaan Puri?

  Right. But it's crazy because you like with a firm, you get the item first and then you pay later. Buy now, pay later. Right. That's the that's.

• 1:03:58Sam Parr?

  Well, you have to remember, there's a one big thing, which is like, is that if if it's going to take you three months to purchase and you can't, if you don't have the internet to buy stuff, like you want to guarantee that they're gonna like, that's yours.

• 1:04:10Shaan Puri?

  Right. And I guess for me, it's like, are items really out of stock? But apparently there's a huge thing like Walmart, like in most parts of the country, layaway is like a huge part of their business. And it's a it's a it seems like a pretty predatory thing in a way, but I don't know too much about it. So I shouldn't really speak on it. But anyways, I guess my my point is, why aren't people doing a firm for retail stores? So why isn't this the same option every time I check out? You know, my wife goes and shops at, I don't know, wherever, you know, Nordstrom, like when she checks out, they're like, Oh, you know, do you want to open a Nordstrom card or whatever? Why isn't it, hey, you want to pay the full amount today? Or would you like to pay in installments? And you could pay in installments. Now, maybe this is already the case. I don't know. But like, it seems like something that should be built into the point of sale at retail

• 1:04:54Shaan Puri?

  stores. I don't do a ton of retail shopping. So this might be me being dominant. Actually, it's totally a thing.

• 1:04:59Sam Parr?

  Does a firm plug into Shopify?

• 1:05:02Shaan Puri?

  Yes.

• 1:05:03Sam Parr?

  And do a lot of people use Shopify to but like, Nordstrom doesn't use it, but like a coffee shop might.

• 1:05:09Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, not really. They're trying to do more. That Square is definitely trying to do a lot of like, retail plus online, blah, blah, like, you know, brick and mortar and online. So maybe Square does it. But but I think a lot of retailers just have their old school POS still.

• 1:05:25Sam Parr?

  This is like one of those rare topics that you're bringing up. And I'm like, Oh, I don't know. Like, how do people buy stuff at stores? I've done it.

• 1:05:31Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, we should just smoothly exit this topic before we.

• 1:05:36Sam Parr?

  We gotta find the emergency exit on this one.

• 1:05:40Shaan Puri?

  Okay, I think we should wrap it up. That's a good, good episode.

• 1:05:49Speaker 03

  I feel like I can 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.