#198 - How to Build a Unicorn Around the NCAA Reg Changes

Sam (@TheSamParr) and Shaan (@ShaanVP) break down opportunities created by the NCAA regulation changes. One of those ideas Sam said was the best he's heard in months. They also talk about Sam's road trip adventure to New York. The guys finish the episode brainstorming ideas ranging from an internal search engine for company documents to Zapier for sounds to referral programs. --------- * Want to be featured in a future episode? Drop your question/comment/criticism/love here: https://www.mfmpod.com/p/hotline/ * Support the pod by spreading the word, become a referrer here: https://refer.fm/million * Have you joined our private Facebook group yet? Go to https://www.facebook.com/groups/ourfirstmillion and join thousands of other entrepreneurs and founders scheming up ideas. --------- Show notes: * (:54) Intro * (1:47) Sam's Nightmare Trip to NYC * (7:19) Opportunities for healthy eating on the go * (11:17) The Roaring 2020's * (13:04) NCAA Athlete Opportunities * (20:29) Inflections * (25:27) Stanwith.me * (32:59) A company document search engine * (39:41) Zapier for sounds * (53:58) Loyalty and referral programs * (1:01:37) The benefits of not using custom software

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

• 0:00Shaan Puri?

  Really heard this a bunch of times, which is a lot of times as an entrepreneur, you just need to be in the market. You need to be in the game. And even if your current thing's not working, if you are aware of these like inflection points, you're the perfect person to just shift over.

• 0:25Sam Parr?

  All right. We had a good episode. Well, I think we talked about a lot of stuff. What did we talk about? We talked about the Zapier for sound. We talked about.

• 0:32Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, we talked about the opportunity now that college athletes can make money. What are the business opportunities around that that just opened up?

• 0:38Sam Parr?

  And I think if you're interested in software, I think Sean, you actually gave like one of the, one of the better ideas in the last three months that we discussed. So that's kind of interesting. We talked about a new company that's creating a search engine for company documents. It sounds boring, but it's actually could be quite a big business. What else did we talk about?

• 0:53Shaan Puri?

  Last thing is we talked about this business model idea of basically, go take the R and D that the big companies do and that they make custom software for themselves, like the Starbucks mobile app or the Domino's pizza ordering app, and then make that available to all the mom and pops. So we did a bunch of examples of that and where the opportunities might be.

• 1:11Sam Parr?

  All right, listen up. Let us know how and how you liked it. My Twitter is the Sam Parr, then Sean's is Sean VP. All right, what's going on?

• 1:20Shaan Puri?

  Yo.

• 1:22Sam Parr?

  I'm in New York. I had a hell of a week, but I'm here.

• 1:27Shaan Puri?

  Tell the story.

• 1:29Sam Parr?

  So I leave. So I'm driving. So I got this like nice car and I love driving it. I'm living in New York for a few months. I wanted to do that long drive because it's fun for me in my car. I'm all ready. I got my dog, everything. I get 15 hours into the drive. I get out of my hotel room and I have two spare keys on the same ring because you can't leave one of these fancy keys in the car, otherwise the car won't shut.

• 1:54Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 1:55Sam Parr?

  So when I go to the hotel, I put them on the, on one ring. And then when I get in the car, I separate them. I'm on the phone with my mom first thing in the morning, just saying what's up. Put my keys, both of them on the roof for a second. Get in the car, start the car, drive off. 60 minutes later, I stopped for gas and I go, shoot, the car's telling me that I can't start it because the keys aren't here. What the heck?

• 2:19Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 2:19Sam Parr?

  Where are the keys? Turns out I left them on the roof 60 miles back, drove off and I go back to find them over many hours of searching for them. Someone ran over both the key fobs.

• 2:31Shaan Puri?

  So you actually found the destroyed key?

• 2:33Sam Parr?

  I found the destroyed parts and I had a locked bike. My like nice bike was locked to the roof along with my thulie like rack was locked in there. I find those keys thankfully. Otherwise I was gonna have to call the welder to like weld my bike off and like pop this lock open. And I find those keys, but my fobs, my $800, I think they're 800 or 1,000, they're expensive, completely smashed to bits. I call Mercedes, they tow my car. This is on a Thursday. They go, we are not going to get a new key in until Thursday. So I was like,

• 3:04Shaan Puri?

  Fuck, you got, you're supposed to be in New York. You're stuck in Tennessee.

• 3:08Sam Parr?

  I'm stuck in Tennessee.

• 3:09Shaan Puri?

  You drove from Texas to New York, you get stuck in Tennessee, your car keys get smashed, your car's just sitting at a gas station and you can't get a new car key for a week.

• 3:17Sam Parr?

  And I'm with my dog too, who's like an 80 pound pit bull. And I'm like, dude, what do I do? And he's like, well, we could just store it here. So I'm like, all right, well, I'm not going to stay in Tennessee for like eight days. I tried to get a private flight. I tried to fly because you can't fly with a dog. Eventually I like waited in line for hours to get a

• 3:35Shaan Puri?

  So from my point of view, I get a text message in our group chat that's like, how much does a private jet cost?

• 3:42Sam Parr?

  What?

• 3:43Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. And, and I need to get to New York. I'm stuck here. I can't get on a normal flight because my, I have an 80 pound pit bull with me. I don't want to leave my car, but I guess I have to. And how am I going to come back and get my car? Very confusing situation.

• 3:58Sam Parr?

  It was a very confusing situation. Now let me tell you a few things that I learned. And this is related to this podcast. So I've flown private once or twice. I've never paid for it. It was just like a rich guy who I went along.

• 4:10Shaan Puri?

  Sugar baby.

• 4:11Sam Parr?

  Yes. What I, what I learned was, so we have a friend in this group. We don't have to say his name. I don't know. We could or could not. But anyway, he went to Europe and he sent, he goes, I got a hotel that was $3,000 a night for $350. And I was like, what? How? And he, he sent me, he sent us a screenshot of the email and he emailed the general manager of a hotel. And he goes, hey, I'm, I work at this company. I'm going to be there. I don't, I mean, he said he worked at this company because it's a huge company. It's just for clout, but it doesn't really mean anything. I'm going to be there with my fiance. My budget's $400 a night. Do you have anything available? I would love it to stay in this room or this room.

• 4:47Shaan Puri?

  Right. And he searches for all the five star hotels in that area and he just sends the same thing to all the general managers.

• 4:53Sam Parr?

  Yes. And then every once in a while they give them a hotel. So he's staying in a $3,000 night hotel for $350. And that got me thinking. So I Googled Nashville private airport. And I was like, look, I want a private flight either like right now or first thing in the morning. My budget is, I'm willing to spend $7,000. Do you have any airlines or do you have any pilots that want some like quick work? And they were like, well, like it usually costs $15,000. I was like, well, look, you tell me what, if you have someone who has work, you tell me what's the like, cause like you think like private airlines, like there's no room to haggle, but it's like, they're, they're just like small businesses.

• 5:35Sam Parr?

  And so they get me a quote and that ended up falling through, but I realized that you could, they're like, ah, you know, like they actually got another bid, whatever. So it didn't work out, but I realized you could totally haggle with these people. It was so fascinating.

• 5:47Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. The hotel thing is great because I feel like anybody can do that. And, and you know, if you have a little social media following or whatever, I know Instagram influencers do this. I've never even thought about doing it. I probably still won't do it because it sounds like it's kind of time consuming, but I thought that was pretty great. That little tactic that he uses. I thought, you know, the situation, when you got in a pickle, you had to get creative and. You probably like learned a bunch of stuff that you didn't know, you know, 24 hours before that and never really would have paid attention to, had you not done that, like

• 6:17Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 6:17Shaan Puri?

  Key fobs, you know, what to do when you're stranded, private jets, can you commission a private jet, can you hop on to somebody else's thing, like, what are the other options? You know, somebody's like, somebody from this podcast or the listener was like, I'll drive your, like, hey, when you get your key fob, I'll drive it to you in New York if you, like, hang out with me for 30 minutes or something like that.

• 6:36Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I saw, I don't know what I'm gonna do, my, it's not gonna be, the situation isn't even resolved till tomorrow, so I gotta figure out what I gotta do. Coincidentally, I have to be in Nashville for work, August 1st-ish, there's like a podcast conference that HubSpot wants me to go to.

• 6:48Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 6:48Sam Parr?

  So I might fly down there and drive, but anyway, crazy week, but can I tell you a few things I noticed when I, so I've driven, and then we'll get some, we'll get to ideas, but I, I've drive cross-country a lot, I've done it a bunch of times, I love doing long road trips in America, and it's always fun to get out of our little Silicon Valley or New York or whatever, like fancy tech guy bubble. And a few things that, like, I noticed, the first, dude, the average American eats so poorly.

• 7:17Shaan Puri?

  What makes you say that?

• 7:19Sam Parr?

  Well, granted, I am like on the road, but like, I, I try to like actually go to these small towns, but man, like, just seeing what, I'll just like go to a gas station or I'll go to McDonald's, or I'll go to like, a restaurant and I, and I'll, because I eat in the parking lot with my dog, and I'll just like sit at what, and just look at what people order, and like, the lines are packed for rallies or Sonic, man, people, this whole healthy eating thing that I think is popular amongst like affluent people, I don't think it's popular amongst all types of people, and that is crazy to me, because they're just killing themselves.

• 7:54Shaan Puri?

  You didn't see a lot of keto and intermittent fasting on this road trip, is what I'm hearing?

• 7:58Sam Parr?

  No, man, just processed foods, and I'm not like the healthiest, I mean, I splurge, I like Diet Coke and I'll eat McDonald's, but oh my gosh.

• 8:06Shaan Puri?

  When you're driving, you're gonna see, it's like pit stops, it's like, here, you stop here for gasoline, you stop here for sugar, you stop here for caffeine, and then you just repeat that loop, gasoline, sugar, caffeine, gasoline, sugar, caffeine.

• 8:17Sam Parr?

  I'm just shocked at the, I'm shocked at just how there are very few healthy options. It's amazing, I just like, when I, I would go to like a fast food place, I'm like, look, dude, just give me a grilled chicken breast and like vegetables, that's all I need.

• 8:30Shaan Puri?

  By the way, we had talked about vending machines before, and then you're talking about this healthy eating thing? I got pitched this company. I don't think I'm going to invest, but it's called Daily Blends. And what it is, is that basically it's a vending machine. It's a, you know, healthy eating vending machine, but instead of snacks, it's basically just a meal in a jar. And you push a button and it basically gives you a jar and the jar has like a ready-made meal inside. All you gotta do is kind of like, put the dressing on top, mix it up, and then you're ready to go. And the thing I think is smart is they are, they're basically doing big corporate partnerships. So they're getting into like every hospital. So like every hospital needs to be, you know, should they, should a hospital really have a vending machine? That's just like Twix, you know, candy bars and like, you know, Red Bulls?

• 9:13Shaan Puri?

  Or should it actually have like healthy options? And so whether it's like big companies, big hospitals, this sort of thing. I can kind of squint my eyes and see like, obviously it depends on the food and how that works. But, you know, they're able to charge way more than a typical vending machine because people are getting like a healthy meal out of it. And they basically have like a central kitchen. They make all the jars and they go stock all their vending machines in that city. And I think this is kind of a cool idea. I'm not going to invest, but it reminds me a little bit about that, that water company. You know, the like office water company that's done really, really well.

• 9:46Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it's like a, like a billion dollar company. I forget. Starts with a B.

• 9:50Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, it, yeah, it's something.

• 9:52Sam Parr?

  Bevy.

• 9:53Shaan Puri?

  Bevy is the name of it. Yeah. So Bevy is like one of these genius things. It's like, hey, does your office want like fancier water fountain? Good. Use a Bevy and they just get planted in every company and then it's just like a recurring charge.

• 10:05Sam Parr?

  And the guy who, Quinn, the guy who came on to talk about vending machines. He said that the thing is, is that these healthy options, like the, the, the honey pot is at, at WeWork, where you have like an eight dollar sandwich. But he's like, basically like most of America just wants a Monster.

• 10:23Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, but I think, I think that's fair. But I think the one smart thing they're doing is they're going to, there's like, if you just take hospitals. And airports and things like that, like they kind of they're sort of incented to have like another option and a kind of a better option, even just from optics point of view. And so I think you could do pretty well just by getting prime placements through through that. But anyways, yeah, random tangent off of what you said about healthy eating on a road trip.

• 10:49Sam Parr?

  And then the last thing that I'll mention is I am so bullish on America over the next two years, dude. Every rent a car place that I've gone to sold out like it's so hard to rent a car. Right. I had a friend, maybe it was your friend, someone, I don't know if you're part of this, said that they had a hitchhike in Hawaii because they couldn't get a rental car. They had to just like hope someone would pick them up. So rental cars are crazy. I like to stay at motel. Sometimes I'll stay at like a, I'll range from a $30 night place to a $200 night place, just like whatever I'm in the mood for. All, everything's sold out. The roads are packed. Every convenience store is packed. I'm so bullish on America. And I went and talked to some of my staff and some of my friends who are just like

• 11:31Sam Parr?

  average Americans, they have saved a significant amount of money over the last two years and they're all like, I want to, I want to go buy something. I need to, I need to, I need to spend.

• 11:41Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. What was it after like the world war, whatever the roaring twenties, it seems like we might have the roaring 2020s here where people are ready to travel. They're ready to just go like, kind of like max out all their experiences after being sheltered in place for, you know, a year plus sometimes and potentially save money.

• 12:01Sam Parr?

  Have you, so I like went out and talked to people like, like who I know earned between 50 to like $150,000 a year. And I was like, how much money have you saved? And they're like, more than I've ever saved in years. And I was like, what are you going to do? And they're like, I'm ready to, I want to buy a Rolex or I want to buy, they want to spend. So like my traveling lately, when we went to Miami and everything, and we saw like it just consistently, like I try to buy a. Accessories for my trip, like a, like a new rack for my car. Everything is out and I'm so bullish on America over the next two years. So that's just an interesting insight from traveling. You want to talk about ideas?

• 12:37Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, let's do it. All right, so I think the big one is this NCAA thing. We had touched on this briefly, but basically the law changed that allowed college students to make money off their name and likeness. So previously, you're a college athlete. Sorry, I should have said athletes. Previously, you're an NCAA athlete. If you, if you make money, you lose your amateur status. You can't play your sport anymore and you can have your scholarship sort of like revoked even potentially if you, you, you, you, you've run afoul of those laws. So that changed and all of a sudden overnight, a bunch of opportunities opened up. Right? So this, this thing that was just bottled up because of regulations and rules, all

• 13:20Shaan Puri?

  of a sudden, the court got taken out of the bottle and you get to see what was going to happen. And so I don't know if you've paid attention to this, but I think we should do like a mini brainstorm on just what we see that's interesting or what you saw people doing.

• 13:32Sam Parr?

  Yeah, so can you explain the rule? Because I think that there's some stuff around it. Like you can't actually, can you not make the money yet? Is it like put, like you can't access the funds? Is there anything weird like that?

• 13:41Shaan Puri?

  Uh, I don't know about that. I think they, they, they definitely started getting like signing contracts and getting paid. I don't know what the, I don't know what the nuances of the, the fine print of the law is. I didn't look into that.

• 13:54Sam Parr?

  So I had this suite mate in college. So if you Google pure sweat, have you heard of pure sweat basketball?

• 13:59Shaan Puri?

  Pure sweat?

• 14:00Sam Parr?

  So this guy named Drew Hanlon, he's from my hometown.

• 14:03Shaan Puri?

  Drew Hanlon, yeah, he's the trainer like on Instagram that you always see with every NBA player.

• 14:07Sam Parr?

  Yeah, so that, I've known him since I was a kid and he was my suite mate in college. So I've knew him in high school and then we went to college together and I was an, I was a track and field athlete. He was a basketball player in college and he was my suite mate. So we, I got to know him quite well and he'd be working on this thing called pure sweat. It started out just as like a binder of. Like paper binder full of workouts that he would sell for like $50 to kids in the neighborhood. And then eventually he like made a website and an app and I don't know how successful it is, but he was always working at night on this thing. He didn't drink or he didn't party and he was always working on Pure Sweat. And he eventually after college started training, uh, what's that guy? Like the Greek Freak or whatever.

• 14:45Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 14:46Sam Parr?

  Brandon Beal, Bradley Beal, cause he's from St. Louis.

• 14:49Shaan Puri?

  Jason Tatum, Zach Levine.

• 14:51Sam Parr?

  Yeah, so he like trains all these guys and I haven't, I've always, I, I wasn't close enough to ask him, but I was like, I wonder how much that pays. But anyway, he has this app that's like a hundred dollars a year. And in college, I like we, I was a college, division one college athlete. I wasn't like even remotely a big deal, but they make you sit to these seminars on how you are, are allowed and are not allowed to use your image or your name. And he was in that office all the time because he was, he was, wanted to make sure he was following the rules because he had this business, Pure Sweat. So he couldn't sit like he, I think he was allowed to say like, this is Drew Hanlon from Belmont University or whatever. But anyway, this guy crushes it. I bet, I bet you he makes five to 10 million dollars a year off his little business.

• 15:32Sam Parr?

  And I have a feeling, and by the way, do you know that like these like summer camps for basketball programs? That's the moneymaker.

• 15:40Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, my, I have friends that run these.

• 15:42Sam Parr?

  That's the moneymaker and these guys, my friends, they were, they're paid by the hour, I think, but I think they were getting paid like 50 to a hundred dollars an hour, like something crazy. And the program makes so much money from these camps. So what I think would, what I, what I think is an easy opportunity is you're going to see loads of little Pure Sweats, which is like a really simple app that just has basketball workouts that you pay a hundred or $200 a month or a year for. I, I have to imagine you're going to see loads of that. That's just such an easy, low hanging fruit.

• 16:11Shaan Puri?

  My best friend, Trevor, he was a kid from Wyoming, sort of like a five foot nine on a good day, white kid who, when I got to Duke, I had found out, oh, the roommate I got randomly matched with, he's trying to walk onto the basketball team. So I'm expecting this like six, eight black dude to show up. And instead of this five, nine white guy shows up from Wyoming. And I'm like, no, no, my roommate is trying out for the basketball team. I don't know who you are, but he's like, no, that's me. And you know, this guy was kind of like a Drew Hanlon type of guy, super hard worker, amazing shooter, you know, like whatever you would expect. So he was like the best high school basketball player in Wyoming. Comes to Duke and tries to walk on, ended up, long story short, didn't end up making the team. He was like the last guy, cut. And then, you know, stayed on as sort of like

• 16:56Shaan Puri?

  water boy, hoping for his like Rudy moment. And then like, that never came. Like, some, a spot opened up. And then they took some other guy because his dad is like, super rich and he's a booster of the school. And they put him on the team instead. And he was like, oh, fuck this. But anyways, in the summers, what he would do is he would go back to Wyoming. And people knew him there. They were like, oh, you, you went to Duke, you're a, you're, you were like a legend in high school basketball here. And he would run these camps. And every single day, he would have basically like, three camps running simultaneously. Each kid just pays a hundred dollars. He was underpricing it like crazy. And you would make his whole year's worth of money, in like, a two and a half month period. And then he spent the other nine months out of the year, just traveling around, learning stuff, and then come back and do it again the next summer. Because he had

• 17:40Shaan Puri?

  that brand affinity, the way that you're talking about, that local brand affinity. So I wanted to go over a couple of things I saw happening. So the first thing is, Cameo was a winner. So winners and losers. So Cameo is a winner. All of a sudden, every athlete just put themselves up on Cameo. And if you go to Cameo's like NCAA page, you'll see.

• 17:59Sam Parr?

  So they already, Cameo already has an NCAA page?

• 18:02Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, they already have an NCAA page. They were ready to go. And this is like, you know, one of the easy ways celebrities make money. There's like, you know, 17 pages of, of people available on the NCAA page now.

• 18:11Sam Parr?

  Oh my God, that's so funny. And they're all so cheap. It's like $25.

• 18:15Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, right. Because they're like, oh, sweet. That's, you know, three meals for me on campus here. Okay. So the second is, did you see what Barstool did?

• 18:22Sam Parr?

  Yeah. So Barstool sponsored an athlete for gambling, right?

• 18:27Shaan Puri?

  So, so Dave Portnoy, I don't know the exact story, but I saw, I was just sort of following this on social media. He goes, he's like, emergency press conference. He goes on, online, and he just says, I'm announcing Barstool athlete. What is that? I have no idea. And like, that was like, basically his emergency thing. And so then, somebody, some athlete messaged him, was like, I'll be the first Barstool athlete. And he's like, okay, great. We got this, you know, like, whatever, some volleyball player, girl from this college, she's our first Barstool athlete. So he tweets it out. You know, the more people start rolling in, he's like, I didn't even say what this is yet. And so then he goes, he goes on, on for a second video and he goes, listen, a lot of you asking, how to become a Barstool athlete. If you play division one sports and you blink at me, I will

• 19:12Shaan Puri?

  sign you. I will send you a T-shirt. You want pizza? You want Campari? I don't know what's gonna happen here. We may just become the most powerful agency in the world here. And so I actually think that like, that legitimately could happen because now the athletes can have lawyers, they can have agents that are helping them with their brand deals. And Barstool is just there, they're ready to take advantage of this. They have that brand that's super loved amongst college athletes. And so I think they're gonna do really well out of this. So I would say they're another winner. That's that, that we talked about the four levels of luck. That's level four luck where your reputation is such that luck finds you. And so that's what's gonna happen. The best athletes are gonna want to work with Barstool just because of their reputation.

• 19:52Sam Parr?

  It's almost boring to discuss the ideas for this because it's obvious. You just look at what, I mean, it's just, they're now professional athletes almost that anyone has. But what I think is interesting is this idea of inflections. So like, there's these cultural things that happen. Well, it's not, sometimes it's cultural, sometimes it's political, sometimes it's technology driven. But Mike Maples, who we had on the podcast, he actually has a blog post where he talks about inflections. Because I look for inflections. So it could be, everyone has an iPhone, so now GPS is possible. Or we are able to build this technology to making GPS possible. So that's a cultural inflection. Or like, you know, being gay is cool now, or not cool, but it's accepted. So now like, having like, a gay dating app or whatever, you know, like, that's like a cultural

• 20:35Sam Parr?

  shift, or weed is no longer frowned upon, that's a cultural inflection. Now, there's also regulation and political inflections. One of them being about two years ago, when telemedicine, the law changed, although it's changing back, that provided a huge gap. This is a perfect example of a regulation slash political inflection, that big businesses are built in times like this. I'm not gonna be the one, because I don't care about this, but this is the type of inflection that we're gonna look back, same with sports gambling, you know. Those guys have been at it for years and years and years. And it was pretty horrible businesses, I believe, for a long time. Something changed, boom, they took off. Same with UFC. They weren't allowed in New York, they weren't allowed here. Something changed, boom, they're allowed. This is one of those moments

• 21:18Sam Parr?

  that we'll look back on in 20 years and be like, think of all the businesses that came from that one ruling.

• 21:24Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, there's a couple of examples of this. So with GDPR, this is the like kind of like privacy. It's the thing where you go to a website and it says, "We want to use cookies to enhance your experience." You're like, "Okay, accept cookies." And so this is a law change that happened. And then you saw companies come out of this that were like, I think, pretty, pretty big companies. So one of them is OneTrust. So I think OneTrust is like over 200 million in annual recurring revenue. It's probably the fastest growing enterprise SaaS company in the last 10 years. And it's basically, it's GDPR compliance as a service. "Hey, big company, you are not, the way you set things up is not compliant with the new

• 22:06Shaan Puri?

  laws. You can get smashed for not being compliant here. It's going to spend, it's going to take your team of lawyers and engineers in your company like weeks, if not months, to just understand the laws, then make the changes so that you're compliant. Like, we can do this for you." And so OneTrust, you know, already at a $5 billion valuation in less than, I don't even know when GDPR came out. That's like, I don't know, five years ago or something.

• 22:28Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 22:29Shaan Puri?

  So that's kind of like a great example. Osano is another one. It's a company I wanted to invest in, in that same space because that regulation change made that happen. Another one, UnitedHealth. So when Obamacare kicked in, companies like I think Oscar and UnitedHealth, I don't know too much about this space, but what I do know is if you go look at the stock chart for UnitedHealth, it's like, flat, flat, flat, flat, flat. Oh, something happened in like 2009, 10 range. What happened? Oh, you know, like as Obamacare kicked in, the stock price went from like $24 a share to $400 a share now. And so, you know, that was a better investment than Amazon, Google, Netflix, whatever during the same period of time because they were well positioned to take advantage of the

• 23:14Shaan Puri?

  new law changes. So one of the law changes that I think you could take advantage of here is there's the obvious ideas, which is, "Great, you're an agency for NCAA athletes." Like what we're talking about Barstool. Or your Cameo, right? Your platform where they can go on and monetize their, their name and face. Another one is these athletes have to report the deals that they're doing to their school. So you can't just do like anything, you have to report it. I can tell you what, most of these athletes are not going to do a good job of keeping track of all their deals, how much they got paid, what the date was, what the terms were, and all the collateral they're going to need to report this. And the schools are going to need it to report it to the NCAA. And so, somebody who builds that back office sort of reporting tool, that underlying infrastructure layer, that's going to become incredibly valuable. A way to think

• 23:59Shaan Puri?

  about that is like Carta, or Angel List, like these underlying platforms that sit underneath the entrepreneur. And so, that's one, that's one opportunity that I could see taking off.

• 24:10Sam Parr?

  I actually think that's the best idea that you've had in a long time.

• 24:14Shaan Puri?

  All right, I'll stop there. I won't give you more.

• 24:17Sam Parr?

  I don't know what like the total addressable market is for that, but like, I mean, it's enough.

• 24:21Shaan Puri?

  Well, just, I mean, what's happening right now, by the way?

• 24:24Sam Parr?

  I mean, universities just spend tens of thousands a year for your software. Like, that's, there's enough.

• 24:28Shaan Puri?

  And you'll be sticky, right? And you'll become the system of record for all these things. They're not going to want to switch two years in because this other system of record has a new feature. So whoever gets plugged in as the system of record, has the opportunity to like, own that data. You're entrenched in all these universities who are not looking to take a bunch of risk. And then you could build on all the add-on services. So you could build on other things that allow, you know, whether it's banking, or it's contracts, or it's marketplace for deals, whatever. You could build all that on top of the data record, record book.

• 24:59Sam Parr?

  You know what I just realized? Now, this company that you and I invested in, there's actually a lot of competitors, but we invested in this company called Stan.

• 25:07Shaan Puri?

  Yes.

• 25:08Sam Parr?

  I don't even know the URL. It's like Stan.

• 25:09Shaan Puri?

  Stanwith.me.

• 25:11Sam Parr?

  Stanwith.me. And basically what it is, is you, you put a link in your Twitter bio, or your LinkedIn bio, you click that link, and it's like Linktree, where you see like five different pages you can click off to, but it says like, book a call with me, sell you this thing. It's basically for commerce, you know, like giving you money for an exchange for some type of, whether it's time or document. Perhaps we'll see those types, although I don't necessarily believe that that will be the case, but this thing might like, impact that business. Business. But so I think there's a bunch of cool inflections here. And this whole like idea of inflections, I think there's a lot to learn from. I was just reading about Thomas Edison. And basically, he was like, look, I just invented this light bulb.

• 25:51Sam Parr?

  It's gonna work. It's amazing. But there was no power at the time. And he's like, well, we can power it by putting up these, these wires that go from house to house to house. And the government was like, no, we're not doing this. And so one day he hosted dinner. And he goes, I want all you guys to come to this dinner. And they come up to the dinner and there's no lamp lamps. So it's pitch black. And they're sitting there. They're like, what the hell are we doing? And then he just flips a switch and boom, his lights come on automatically. And there's waiters there ready to greet them. And they're like, and he's like, this is how people are going to live from now on. And they go, oh, great. Okay, fine. Well, we will allow you to put electricity throughout Manhattan in the smaller area to test it out. And so this idea of it.

• 26:31Shaan Puri?

  And that is how. By the way, I got chills while you were telling that story. I love that.

• 26:34Sam Parr?

  And that is how GE came to be eventually was in a bunch of these companies that Thomas Edison had on. You know, he was involved in a little bit of everything.

• 26:44Shaan Puri?

  I saw you tweet something that Thomas Edison invented the word hello.

• 26:48Sam Parr?

  Yeah. So basically before Edison, people would say greetings or good afternoon, like hello wasn't even a word. In fact, the word hello, it was pronounced a little bit differently. It was like hello, or like something silly like that. And when he invented the phone, he was actually partially deaf and also the phones weren't very good. So he would call like an operator in order to set this up and they would have this think of a word to say to be like the greeting on the phone. And he was like, well, the word hello, I can actually scream that pretty easily. And so I'm going to start saying hello, like it was hello. It was like originally, it was meant to like as a, as a word to like, say, oh, you surprised me. Hello, you surprised me, you know? And so that's how he started saying it. And then once people started using the phone, they started saying it and the phone got better.

• 27:33Sam Parr?

  And then it just became a hello.

• 27:35Shaan Puri?

  Wow.

• 27:35Sam Parr?

  And that's, that's how the word hello came to be. And then anyway, this idea of inflections are actually really interesting. So there's all types of moments where these things are capable. And I think that this NCAA thing, it's interesting. The idea you said is interesting, but the concept here of inflections is actually more important because we're actually seeing it happen right now.

• 27:53Shaan Puri?

  And by the way, I hear this so often. Two examples come to mind. One, I was talking to this guy Jesse Pujee, who we should have on the podcast.

• 28:03Sam Parr?

  I know him. He lives in St. Louis.

• 28:05Shaan Puri?

  That's right. And he was telling me his story, you know, oh, how'd you build your company? He built this company, Ampush. It was like this digital marketing agency that was working with Dollar Shave Club and Blue Apron and all the big brands. And so, and they eventually sold it. And so, one of the things he had said, he's like, yeah, you know, we were just doing this other thing and it was kind of wasn't working. And then, that's when, you know, like, that's when, whatever, the Facebook platform launched. Or Facebook announced, you know, on News Feed, or Google launched AdWords, or whatever. There's all these like, moments where new thing comes into existence. He's like, well, like, this thing we're doing is not working, so like, let me go jump on that. And, and the same story is true for, for our friend Suli, who, he was like, yeah, I quit my job at Microsoft. I wanted to go be an entrepreneur. I didn't know what I was gonna do.

• 28:51Shaan Puri?

  So I, I moved back into my parents' house. And like, that day that I moved in, I was, you know, just browsing the internet, and I saw that Facebook launched this new platform, app platform. So I was like, okay, cool. Like, let me try to build an app today. And he's like, I didn't know if it was gonna be a thing, but like, he was one of the first app developers on there, built a simple dumb app. And like, immediately started to like, go to fly on Facebook, because Facebook was that good of a, like, platform. And it was so new, that people wanted to play with the new thing on the platform. And so that was like, their start. And I've really heard this a bunch of times, which is, a lot of times as an entrepreneur, you just need to be in the market. You need to be in the game. And even if your current thing's not working, if you are aware of these like, inflection points, these shifts, these platform shifts,

• 29:36Shaan Puri?

  or, or big changes, either in law, or technology, or open platforms, things like that, you're, you're the perfect person to just shift over, because you're kind of like, already jogging. You're not at like, a cold start. You're not like, at a job where you got to decide if I should quit or not. And, and you weren't so successful at your current thing, that you're, that you're married to it, so you hop on over. And I've just heard this many, many times over, this same. Same model of like, yeah, I was just doing this thing. It wasn't really working that great. And then boom, I saw that Facebook ad platform launched. So I made an ad for T-shirts and I started selling like crazy. And then I started, you know, then, you know, those were the glory days and it's all downhill from there. But

• 30:15Sam Parr?

  And we are seeing these, we're seeing these actually constantly. So like, there's a thousand examples that we could just give. That just happened in the last five or 10 years. I mean, you said Facebook, you said Google, you said, you could say the same for Snapchat. Clubhouse likely won't pan out, but that was definitely an opportunity to have one.

• 30:31Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 30:31Sam Parr?

  This NCAA thing, the medical thing where now doctors could practice remotely because COVID.

• 30:37Shaan Puri?

  I mean, Right.

• 30:37Sam Parr?

  Working remotely. I mean, there's this, it happened constantly. What I like to do is I like to read Politico. Politico is a cool site that tells you on regulation updates. That's a great way to learn about these. But there's like loads of different inflections and they happen consistently and you, you could be an insider to have to see some of them. So like, you know, if you're not working in tech, you're not going to see like the, the power of Facebook early on. But like a lot of them are actually like the, the information is oftentimes blatantly obvious. It's not obvious that this is going to be the one, but it's blatantly obvious. Like, all right, this could be an inflection.

• 31:09Shaan Puri?

  Right. Yeah. And it goes back to that same two by two matrix. This athlete thing is, is basically it's new problem. Like all of a sudden, a whole bunch of people have a new problem. These athletes have to keep track of their records. They want to make money. They can now do this. And there's going to be old, you know, you can take some old solution and repurpose it for, for this new opportunity, this new problem that, that exists in the world. And so, all right, let's move on. Let's do another one. Do you have one or you want me to do?

• 31:34Sam Parr?

  Yeah. So I just found this company and I actually heard of it for a while. I'll tell you two interesting companies that I, I discovered. The first was, it was, it's called nera.com. Before this, it was called FYI, I think.

• 31:47Shaan Puri?

  Yes.

• 31:48Sam Parr?

  So the reason why I came, I found this, do you know who Heat and Shaw is?

• 31:53Shaan Puri?

  I know Heat and Shaw. Yeah. I invested in Nera, by the way.

• 31:56Sam Parr?

  Oh, you did?

• 31:56Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 31:57Sam Parr?

  Oh, sick. All right. Well, we could talk about it. So Heat and Shaw. So there's this guy named Neil Patel, who's like the face. And if you are Probably a little bit younger than me, then you probably don't know who he is. But if you're about my age or older, you probably know who Neil Patel is. He had this amazing blog called Quicksprout. And this was like, if you wanted to learn anything about search or Google, his blog for somehow, I don't know how he managed this, covered pretty much everything. And he built a huge blog for SEO and it became a huge business. And he launched loads of different software products on top of it. Well, Heaton Shaw was his right-hand man and probably the operator behind, the brains behind this. He just launched this new business a while ago and I had, I looked at my old messages. I DM'd him two years ago when he first launched it, but I didn't have any money at the time. And I was like, dude, this is amazing.

• 32:42Sam Parr?

  And so he changed the name to Nira and it's really simple. What it is, is basically if you are a company like HubSpot, so you have 30 or 3,000 employees, or The Hustle, when we had just 10 employees, even when you have 10 employees, my current Gmail has 100 gigs full. So let's say you do times 10, that's 1,000 gigs. That's like a terabyte, I believe of data. That's like hundreds of thousands of documents and images and whatever. It's really hard to find all of those images, but also it's hard to know who has access to all these things. So for example, you have this document called salaries and you must've like accidentally said like, share to everyone who has access to this, to this folder. You don't fucking see that. Or if someone quits, they still have access to this document called passwords, like stupid

• 33:27Sam Parr?

  stuff.

• 33:28Shaan Puri?

  Yep.

• 33:28Sam Parr?

  Well, Heaton built this software that I didn't even realize this was a problem. I mean, I have had this problem, but I'm like, oh, this is actually a great thing that you could sell.

• 33:36Shaan Puri?

  It was like a blind spot. You're just like, oh, this is just the way the world is, you know? It's just like a problem you live with until somebody says, by the way, you know, you can, you could stop that, right?

• 33:45Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 33:45Shaan Puri?

  Oh shit.

• 33:47Sam Parr?

  And so he's been working on it, but here's, so anyway, it's, the, the product is, is interesting, but that's not even what I care about. It's basically just a search engine for an entire company's documents.

• 33:58Shaan Puri?

  Well, that, okay, so that's what it originally was. That's the FYI was, which was like a quick way. You just type in, you don't need to know that the doc is in, like normally you want to find a doc. You think, oh, that's in Google Drive or that's in Dropbox or maybe it's in Asana or so I need to go find this thing. So what he made was just like one search bar to go find the document across all your cloud apps. And I think, you know, after a bunch of trial and error and customer development, he found out that that's not the problem worth solving. The problem we're solving is that second part you talked about, which is

• 34:27Sam Parr?

  The security.

• 34:28Shaan Puri?

  If you go to neuro.com, it just says protect your company documents from unauthorized access, which is exactly what it says, like says, and that's the problem you were talking about, right? Like, I just brought somebody on board and they were showing me, um, you know, like a spreadsheet from a previous company that they worked at. And I was like, you still have access to this? And he's like, yeah, I don't know. Like, I'm not, obviously I'm not doing anything bad with it, but like,

• 34:50Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it's so fucked up.

• 34:51Shaan Puri?

  You shouldn't have that, you know, that's like their KPIs. And I'm guilty of this too. Like you said, like you share one thing with a group or a list and now they have a bunch of stuff. Or somebody leaves and they shouldn't have it, or you're sharing it with some vendor and like they vendor should allow his access. And it is impossible to go through all your documents that are in the cloud and make sure that who has the right thing. And so Nera is solving that problem by creating like one interface work. So I think that's kind of a, like a pretty genius, uh, problem, like a problem that they identified that's worth solving. I think every, this is a, every company problem, uh, as far as I'm concerned and only growing.

• 35:28Sam Parr?

  But I want to explain why, first of all, how'd you hear about this? Cause your friends are heating, he hollered at you?

• 35:33Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, loosely.

• 35:34Sam Parr?

  He, uh,

• 35:35Shaan Puri?

  buds, but he's like, we're cool with each other. And then I saw this, I was like, oh, that's dope.

• 35:39Sam Parr?

  How did you, how are you know of this? See, I'm friends with them and he like, I, we talked.

• 35:43Shaan Puri?

  I'm in a group chat with him. And so I saw he was talking about it there.

• 35:46Sam Parr?

  Oh my God, that's so funny. You're, you're in on everything. Um, he, uh, but there's a few things that's interesting. First of all, like I'm pretty positive this has, I mean, he could screw it up. And, and I mean, like there, there's execution risk, risk here, but I think like it's going to be pretty big. Like if, as long as I just have C plus execution. But what is interesting to me is, and this is out of my world, you know, you and I do stuff that we come up with an idea and we can make money off of it in five days, but it can also like go away pretty easily. He's been working on this for two years before is getting any customers with like 10 employees. Because in order to sell these enterprise contracts, especially to the IT department, where everyone's like uptight as they should be, you have to, everything's got to be buttoned up.

• 36:29Sam Parr?

  And it's really cool that I get intel or insight into that because I normally don't ever see that. You have to have so much patience to build these SaaS tools. And so I don't think I'm cut out for it, but I thought it was really interesting.

• 36:41Shaan Puri?

  Specifically the, the enterprise ones, right? There's two types of SaaS. There's like bottoms up where it's just like, kind of like consumer, like, oh, you just have this cool product. A developer hears about you, a PM hears about you, they just sign up themselves and you're hoping it kind of spreads virally throughout the, the company because the product is so good. It's product driven growth. And then there's enterprise sales. Enterprise sales is basically saying, I need to go be able to knock on, knock on the doors of people, the right people at, at the top of a company. I need to be able to sell a product for over a hundred thousand dollars a year eventually. And that's my, that's my game. And I'm going to, the sales cycle might be six to 18 months. And I'm going to do what I can to accelerate that. But in reality, that's just the way these companies move. And I'm with you that, that is not the DNA I have. That's not where

• 37:26Shaan Puri?

  I would be. That's not where I would be strong. But other people, you know, they, to do it, obviously enterprise sales is like extremely valuable when you can, when you can do it.

• 37:36Sam Parr?

  Yeah. So I just wanted to bring this up because it was interesting to like, talk to him and be like, yeah, we've worked for two years doing this. Our roadmap is this. And that is just not really what we talk about a lot of like this, like epic planning and like really like, all right, in three years, hopefully we'll be here. Next, in two quarters, we'll be at this. And I actually think that that's good. I, I wish I were like that a little bit. I'm not. But I thought it was crazy fascinating to see how. You have to sweat the details so much before you even get a customer and you just spend so much money, you know, 10, 20 engineers to do this. So I just wanted to bring that up. You want to do another one?

• 38:15Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, let's do one. I think I've said this once before on the pod, but I want to do, I'll do it quickly. You tell me if we've already talked about it, but it's this idea of Zapier for sounds. Have I talked, do you know which idea I have here?

• 38:26Sam Parr?

  You didn't bring it up last time, but I've heard this phrase before from you. I don't think you brought it up though.

• 38:32Shaan Puri?

  You're the one who kind of really highlighted Zapier to me, right? I was using it and Zapier, for all I knew, might've just been like two dudes, you know, who built this as a side project and they're kind of in, they're on indiehackers.com bootstrapping and they're at, you know, 8,000 a month of MRR. No, Zapier is like a billion dollar company.

• 38:50Sam Parr?

  Multi-billion dollar.

• 38:52Shaan Puri?

  Multi-billion dollar company that was largely bootstrapped, I think. I think they got really far.

• 38:56Sam Parr?

  There is a million dollars in funding and use that million dollars in funding to get to a billion dollar status.

• 39:00Shaan Puri?

  Right. So, so pretty freaking impressive. When you go to the product, it's like a very simple thing. Zapier just lets you say, hey, it's like a pipe. So it just connects two different services. So you might say, hey, whenever somebody signs up for my, on my website for my mailing list, put them into this spreadsheet or like, send me an email. And so you're just connecting like Gmail and your, your, your website or you're connecting like whatever, Shopify and Slack. So you just connect, you just create these little formulas. If this happens, then do this. And so that's what Zapier is. And Zapier has become very, very successful, obviously, because people want that. They, they want to say, okay, they want to, basically, nobody wants to build anything. It's like, there's a million, there's a tool

• 39:42Shaan Puri?

  for everything, but they don't speak to each other. So the Zapier is like a connector between tools. So anyways, Zapier for sounds, what is it? So my friend Samir had this idea and Samir Bala, and he was gonna do it. And then he like, found a better opportunity, like, there's a fast growing startup and he joined as like an exec there instead. And I was like, oh dude, I love this idea. And I agreed for like, I put like a one and a half year embargo on talking about this idea because I thought he might do it. At this point, I'm pretty confident he's not going to do it. But the, what, the Disney outline was pretty damn good. He goes, every team, every company has something in their, some event that happens in their company that they celebrate. For the hustle, it might be getting an email subscriber, maybe it's getting a new advertiser to come on board or selling a trend subscription.

• 40:29Shaan Puri?

  Wouldn't it be great if there was just a sound, right? The old kind of like, and in most offices, there's like a gong. I bet you guys had a gong or your sales.

• 40:36Sam Parr?

  Yeah, you have a gong.

• 40:37Shaan Puri?

  You have a gong. You literally, you go, you make a sale, you stand up, you walk to the gong, you grab the thing and you hit it. And everybody knows, boom, the good thing has happened. And in our office, we used to manually wire this up. We built a charity product and every time somebody donated, it would go cha-ching on the like speakers in the office. And you would do that until it gets too annoying. And then you kind of turn it off if it gets like too frequent. And so I really like this idea of basically taking any service you have. Maybe it's Stripe, maybe it's your email list, maybe it's your, your, your bank account, whatever. And, and anytime the good, you just basically create these formulas. You say, if this good thing happens, play this sound, play it on my phone as like essentially like a ringtone.

• 41:19Shaan Puri?

  And, you know, or play it on my Sono speakers or whatever in my office. And so the cool thing that you could do with this is I think that's a pretty simple problem. And I think people would like that they'll be able to hook it up. But it actually gets pretty sophisticated because you can't, what you can't do is you can't say like, hey, you know what, at the beginning, notify me about everything. And then as it gets more mature, what you really want is to say, hey, when we get, if we hit a hundred subscribers today, play that sound, I want to know when we hit a hundred for the day, right? Cause everyone now it's too annoying, it's too frequent. So let me set this better rule. So there's nothing that lets you set those rules. So I think there's a very simple company to build here. That's Zapier for sounds. That could be a SaaS company that, you know, I think it could do a few million dollars a year, but maybe it's more like Zapier.

• 42:01Shaan Puri?

  Maybe this is a bigger problem than I would have otherwise expected and could get into the tens of millions or even a hundred million dollars of revenue, just celebrations as a service. What do you think?

• 42:10Sam Parr?

  All right, what my reply is going to sound like a tangent, but it's not. So again, I'm on this Edison kick, I'm reading all about him. And in the biography, when he created the phonograph, so basically a record player, people are like, why are you wasting your time on this stupid toy? Like this is not interesting. This is not going to help anyone. This is so dumb, this looks janky. And obviously it wasn't right, it changed the world. And it was the first time that anyone had ever heard someone's voice before, besides, you know, just talking. And a lot of really cool ideas that great people have or ideas that turn out to be amazing, whether it's Airbnb or Uber, they sound like these stupid dumb things.

• 42:50Sam Parr?

  You're actually particularly good at finding things that are toys or silly on the surface and making the case for why this could actually be huge and big. And you're because you kind of default to optimism. What is your default to optimism on how this could be big? Because my default is this is such a silly. I'm, I'm, I recognize that I default to that, but although I'm trying not to. My default is this is just a what like, what? That's such a small silly thing. Tell me everything.

• 43:17Shaan Puri?

  Uh, yeah, I think it probably is a small silly thing, but I like things that for sure can win at the small scale. And there's a, hey, who knows, uh, path that you can go down because I think most things that end up quite big, um, they typically will start with what looks like a kind of humble, humble level of ambition, right? Facebook, it's a college network for Harvard. And then, oh, maybe it's a, it's a social network for all colleges. And then it becomes now, you know, they literally just are building this like internet pipe in Africa to basically bring, bring internet to more people in Africa. So more people can use Facebook, right? Like their ambition was progressively growing. There's interviews of Zuck early on when they're like, oh, are you going to expand to high schools? He's like, no, I don't know. I mean, like, does it have to?

• 44:02Shaan Puri?

  It could just be a cool college thing, right? That was Zuck then and Zuck now is like, you know, let me take over the, the universe. And so I think I like ideas like this that, that will start small. The thing that gives me hope that this might be big, bigger than you think is every single company I know wants to celebrate their wins and morale goes up when you celebrate your wins. And so if you can come up with simpler ways to, uh, to celebrate progress, I think it'll make happier companies. And I think that managers will want that, um, want that option or want to be able to configure that option so that, um, yeah, everybody feels a sense of progress. Everybody feels a sense of, uh, of a boost as, you know, like you used to say, every emails, we're a pirate ship and every email subscriber is a little bit of wind in our,

• 44:47Shaan Puri?

  in our sails, right? So how do you make it actually feel like that versus just sitting in every day in the office and only focusing on all the problems and all the things that are broken?

• 44:55Sam Parr?

  I actually think that, uh, there's a, a great lesson here. I didn't used to think about this way when I was a little bit younger and now I'm, I'm changing, but.

• 45:05Sam Parr?

  I remember when I first started creating stuff and I see a lot of people who are early in their career of creating stuff, they think like, ah, the market's like too saturated, like no one buys courses or, you know, there's already like-

• 45:18Shaan Puri?

  No one clicks ads.

• 45:19Sam Parr?

  No one clicks ads. But what you actually just did was interesting is you looked at the macro, like the, the high level, like, human beings do want this. So you, so the way that you just described it, you goes, you go, everyone I know, all companies want to celebrate a win. Like, we all know celebrating a win is first, or is great. We also know that a lot of them celebrate a win with a sound. Therefore, it actually is plausible that this could be interesting. And I think that that's far more productive and helpful than starting the other way around. So for example, I would justify a course, like, we all know that people want to learn how to do this. And we also know that a lot of people buy stuff. So like, it's pretty justifiable that if I execute well, people will buy this.

• 46:03Sam Parr?

  And that's like an easy way to like back yourself into like, of course, this can succeed. But can it succeed a lot? I don't know. But, and I think that that's actually a really interesting way that you tend to look at things. And that's cool.

• 46:15Shaan Puri?

  That's cool. All right. Let's do one more, one more idea right now. Do you have one or you want me to do one?

• 46:20Sam Parr?

  I could tell you one. And I don't want to make this all about stuff that I'm investing in. But so I will disclose, I am an investor in this, but I actually am not entirely sold on the idea. I'll say that. So click that website, steak dot rent.

• 46:33Shaan Puri?

  Okay, I'm on it. So let me just tell you what I see. First reaction, it says, cash back for rentals is here. Pay your rent and get cash back at a home or office that offers steak. Okay. So what does that mean?

• 46:44Sam Parr?

  Okay. So there's this guy, I don't even know his name. I barely talked to him, but he created the rewards program for Amex and a couple other airlines. And so these reward programs, they give you stuff in order to make you happier. So you want to stay with Amex. So discounts to stuff, in order to, you know, when you sign up for Amex, you get a discount for movie tickets or on your insurance. And so he was thinking, and this guy knows nothing about real estate. I don't, I don't think so. And he was like, we should do, actually do this for rent. And when you think about it, a lot of actually renters or landlords actually do this. So they say, I'm going to give you a month's free or two months free. Have you seen signs for that?

• 47:24Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, especially to start your lease. Yeah.

• 47:26Sam Parr?

  Yeah. So it's very common. So they're already doing that. And he was like, you know, if you give someone one month free, that's 8.3% of annual rents that you're giving someone a year.

• 47:35Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 47:35Sam Parr?

  If instead you made it, so you get three or four or 5% cash back every month that you pay your rent on time. That's actually kind of an interesting way to build loyalty amongst the renter. And it's like a smaller, you know, it's like a gold star, like sometimes Sean might be happier if I give him a gold star versus like giving him a hundred dollars.

• 47:55Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 47:55Sam Parr?

  You know what I mean?

• 47:55Shaan Puri?

  Okay, that's interesting. And so the math, I mean, 3% every month would add up to more than eight for the year. So how does the math work? Is it like more like 1% cash back basically or what?

• 48:06Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it's a smaller fee. I don't know what the, what the exact fee, but you, it's usually less than, it's like less than 6% a year.

• 48:13Shaan Puri?

  Gotcha.

• 48:14Sam Parr?

  And so it's something like $20 a month, but it, and they get the money if they pay their rent on time.

• 48:19Shaan Puri?

  And they're basically, they're proving to the landlord, hey, look, if I give, if I help your renter, if I, if your renter feels like I'm getting a bonus for paying my rent on time every month, I will lower the, I will lower your, your sort of defaults and your late payments on rent by X percent.

• 48:37Sam Parr?

  By just a little bit.

• 48:37Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. If they can show that one behavior, then they can go to every landlord and say the same thing. That's the idea.

• 48:44Sam Parr?

  Exactly. And I thought that was kind of interesting. And the reason why I thought was interesting is there's actually a few things. I don't, I don't care about the stake dot rent, whatever, who cares? What, there's a few things interesting here. One, what I like is a guy with no experience in real estate, but experience with human behavior, being around loyalty and looking at different places to apply that. That intrigues me.

• 49:06Sam Parr?

  I lost my train of thought, but but that's really interesting to me. Oh, and the second thing is, when I heard this idea, I'm like, well, this is like, this doesn't seem like a groundbreaking idea. Like, this seems shockingly obvious and easy to pull off. Why isn't anyone doing this? Part of me was like, well, if no one's doing it, there's a reason why no one has done it, right?

• 49:24Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 49:24Sam Parr?

  Like, that's one side of things. The other side of things is like, maybe there isn't the right outsider. So I thought this was like, an interesting idea. Do you think that this this can work?

• 49:32Shaan Puri?

  Uh, yeah, I think this could work. I don't I think it's hard, because if you it depends on your worldview. Like, the first time I heard about, um, what's it called? Layaway? You know, you know about layaway?

• 49:44Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I mean, it doesn't really exist much anymore.

• 49:46Shaan Puri?

  I'm gonna sound like privileged. I think it exists. I think it exists in a big way still. So I think at like, um, you know,

• 49:52Sam Parr?

  I think it was more popular years and years and years ago. Like, when I my dad used to tell me all the time, when he was a kid, he would do layaway.

• 49:59Shaan Puri?

  Right. So so basically, layaway, I didn't know about this, but basically, let's say you go to a Walmart, and um, and you go to Walmart, you want to buy something, you don't want you don't have the money to pay the whole thing. You basically say, I want to put this on layaway. And you but it's what I thought was gonna happen is it's more like those, uh, you know, buy now, pay later type of things where it's like,

• 50:20Sam Parr?

  You have to keep it.

• 50:21Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, like it's like a firm or something like that where you you buy the thing and instead of paying the whole hundred dollars upfront, you make four payments of 25 bucks. And you you pay it over time, but you get your thing from day one. With layaway, from what I understand, it's the exact opposite. Layaway, you just put the thing on hold there, and then you come back every month and start making your payments until you own the thing. So it's like, kind of like, it's like doing a chore in a way, right? It's like it's like telling your parent, hey, if like, I will, I will work hard for four straight months in order to get this thing. And so this is apparently like, a very big, I should have looked this up. I didn't know we were gonna talk about it, but Layaway is actually like a pretty huge part of like the economy, especially in like kind of like lower end retail, like Walmarts and stuff.

• 51:05Shaan Puri?

  And so, so I thought that was kind of interesting and it got me thinking about like all these little like incentive structures around paying for things. So what you're talking about is incentive structure for rent. There's other incentives around rent, but I don't know if you've seen, have you seen Rhino? It's like a rent service. Basically, you pay your rent and you build your credit by paying.

• 51:27Sam Parr?

  Yes, man, I love those. I, I, I wanted to do one of it. So it's say Rhino.com. I wanted to use one of them because for years my credit was only okay because I didn't have credit. But I'm like, it's bullshit that your rent doesn't count as credit.

• 51:40Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, so, so I don't even know if that's what Rhino does, but some people do that. Then what Rhino is doing is they're basically like, they looked at when most people, when you go rent a place, you put the first or the first and second months rent down as a deposit. And they're like, dude, that means there's like X hundreds of millions or billions of dollars that are just deposits that are just locked away. And so, and so, and so basically what they created, I think, was like an insurance product that said, hey, you don't have to pay, you don't have to pay your, you don't have to put a thousand dollars down as your deposit. Instead, you pay five dollars a month as an insurance policy and we will, we will cover the landlord if the deposit ever kicks in and you get to keep your money instead of putting down thousands of dollars as a deposit and having that dead money just locked away for a while.

• 52:25Shaan Puri?

  And I thought that was, I think that's what Rhino does now. But there's all these like interesting things around either real estate incentives. Another one I want to tell you about is smile.io. Have you ever seen this? Probably not. It's more of an e-commerce thing, but I'm, right now I'm in the process of designing like a loyalty program. And so when you, when you said this thing about the guy who did it for Amex, that's interesting because I was just researching Amex's loyalty, like the psychology of these programs.

• 52:51Sam Parr?

  All right, well, let me, let me read it. So smile.io, turn your hard earned sales into repeat customers. Maximize your customer acquisition efforts and turn transactional sales into passionate brand advocates. I don't really know what that means, so I'll just explain.

• 53:04Shaan Puri?

  So do this instead. Go to this website and just look at the bottom left where it says. Where it says, give 10, get 10. Give 10%, get $10.

• 53:13Sam Parr?

  Well, I see three for 40.

• 53:16Shaan Puri?

  At the bottom left. See, see, there's a little pop up that says, get 10, get 10. So in this is two things. So this is powered by smile.io. So basically what smile.io is they're going to ecommerce stores and they say, hey, you should have a loyalty program. You should have a referral program, just like Starbucks and Amex and these companies that spend millions of dollars and thousands of hours fine tuning and designing this thing. We'll just make it like a Shopify app for you. And so what does the Shopify app do? So basically you go on and it's like, you want a referral program? Cool. Here's the thing that will be on your site. So any customer who comes in, they know that if I share this with a friend, I get a discount and they get a discount. So created a two-way reward system. The second thing is if you scroll down, there's like a little like points program. In this case, it's called bubbles.

• 53:59Shaan Puri?

  But but the points program basically says, here's how you earn points. You follow us on Instagram. You like our stuff. You buy, for every dollar you spend in the store, you get five points. Tell us your birthday. Well, if you if you create a birthday, we'll give you 500 points. Write a review. You get 200 points. So they incentivize all these behaviors that you know leads to a stickier customer. And in doing so, they get points that they can redeem for free shit in the store, like store credit, basically. And so all of that like reward system magic, they just make available and easy for any ecommerce store, right? So then it sounds a bit like an infomercial, but the really, I don't, I have no skin in the game here. I just think it's a sick product. But I love the idea of basically

• 54:40Shaan Puri?

  taking like what the big brands do and what the big brands have spent millions of dollars developing for themselves. And then just turning that into an app that any little mom and pop can just plug into their store and have that same user experience. And so I've seen this as a trend, as a business, like kind of like model blueprint. I told you about that company I invested in, Joe Coffee. They did the same thing. They took the Starbucks mobile app, which was like super slick, made it easy to order on your phone. You earn stars for everything that you buy. And they basically give any mom and pop coffee shop. A white labeled version of that same app called Joe Coffee. And so now you can have order ahead, you can have loyalty points, you can have push notification

• 55:21Shaan Puri?

  marketing, you have all the things that Starbucks put like probably tens of millions of dollars into building, they just made for, and they said, good, we're going to arm the rebels. We're going to give this to all of the indie indie coffee shops instead of just what, just Starbucks having it because they can afford the R and D.

• 55:36Sam Parr?

  This is sick. I, uh, yeah, this is sick. I'm looking at it now. Uh, does this work? Have you implemented this? Like when I see these rewards programs or things like that, like when I go to a lot of e-comm sites, uh, there's like a wheel that you spin and if you enter in your email, you get something like, there's all these like tricks and-

• 55:59Shaan Puri?

  We, we put, we went from normal, pretty looking thing that says, hey, you know, give us your email for a discount code to the wheel, it tripled conversion rate, tripled.

• 56:08Sam Parr?

  So have you implemented this club tub?

• 56:11Shaan Puri?

  Uh, yeah, I just, I just, uh, started working on this last night to, to implement it, but I'm like, I'm figuring out what are the perks? Cause you have to find the balance, right? If you give too much value away, it eats all your margins. And if you make it too shitty, then nobody's motivated to do anything. You wasted your time. You gotta find the sweet spot where it's like compelling enough to them and it doesn't eat away your margins. And that's the sort of like, that's the art of this, um, of, of doing it. But I love that I can do this without knowing how to code. I think that's kind of like, you know, a, a great business model, an idea. And so I would do that. If I wanted to think of other ideas like this, I would just go look at what do the top retailers like, I would go to Starbucks, I'd go to Lululemon, I would go to, you know, whoever, Macy's,

• 56:54Shaan Puri?

  uh, Nordstrom, and I would walk around, I would use their online shop and I would walk around their store and I would say, what have they built that's custom and awesome for them? And then how can I make the white labeled version of that and offer it to every other retailer that's competing with them?

• 57:08Sam Parr?

  There's this, um, great thing I want to bring up. Basically, I don't know where I heard about it, but at Facebook Chamath or someone early on discovered that there's like the magic number of seven. Um, uh, basically if you create a Facebook account, we need you to add seven friends right away. And if you add seven friends, you're likely to become a Facebook user forever or for a long period. You know what I'm talking about?

• 57:31Shaan Puri?

  Yes. Basically they, they, they said the aha moment, meaning aha moment where we talked about in product building is just like- A user comes to your site, they don't know what the fuck's going on, they're kind of confused, they're trying to sign up. And finally, there's an aha moment where they get actual value from the product. They're like, oh, you know, like if I go to mint.com, the aha moment is seeing all my financials, you know, like laid out in front of me in my budget and my pie chart. Oh, wow, automatically. That's the aha moment for Mint. You've got to do a whole bunch of shit, connect a whole bunch of bank accounts and credit cards to get to that. But when you're there, you're sticky. For Facebook, what they found was seven friends in 10 days was the aha moment. So, once you saw seven different friends on your feed, and if you could do that within 10 days, you were like, super, super sticky.

• 58:14Sam Parr?

  So at the Hustle, we found, I don't remember the numbers off the top of my head, but we found like, if you open five out of seven days, right off in the first seven, five times the first seven, you're going to be with us, and we're going to call you a gold person.

• 58:24Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 58:24Sam Parr?

  And so, whatever. And we have this new thing called snippets, where we're trying to automate a lot of the email content, and you sign up for the Hustle, and you tell us what type of news you care about, and we automatically like, give you a customized email. And what we're seeing is that the people who fill that information in, and it's like a relatively long flow, they are like, three or four times more engaged than other people.

• 58:45Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 58:46Sam Parr?

  And a debate that I have, and I'm bringing this back to what we're talking about, is that I actually think, the question is like, were those people more likely to become power users anyway? And they are filling that out? Or are they becoming power users because they fill that out? And I would argue, it was the second one. So, like, if someone's going to give, what's this tub, huh? Whatever this, e-comm, whatever we're talking about.

• 59:08Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 59:08Sam Parr?

  If, are they going to become, are they power users already? And so they're more likely to give you your email and like you on Instagram? I would actually say no. Because you are there going through this little, small indoctrination process, they are now becoming power users. It's like, what are you, are you confident therefore you're going to flex your muscles? Or do you flex your muscles and then feel like you are confident?

• 59:28Shaan Puri?

  Right, right, right.

• 59:29Sam Parr?

  And so, I actually think that making users do this stuff, you are turning them into power users.

• 59:36Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I, I think that's true too. I think there's an element of both. I think that the people who are already power users are going to be like, oh my God, my favorite thing has more value I can go get, like, let me go do it. And then there's a whole bunch of other people that are potential power users, if the circumstances were right. If they followed you, so then they would see your updates. If they gave you their email, so that you could show them the new stuff, blah, blah, blah, then, then you're going to get more, you're going to, higher likelihood of turning that casual person into a hardcore person. And so I think, I think both do happen.

• 1:00:05Sam Parr?

  Do you want to save this? Do you want to wrap up now and save some of the stuff for next week?

• 1:00:10Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, actually, I just want to say two more examples of the same trend. So the same trend, if you go and look at the Hustles emails, you guys have at the bottom like a survey thing. It's like, were you happy, medium, or sad from this email? You have an ambassador program. And a lot of those were like, things you either you got off the shelf and modified, or you just built homegrown. And so if you're a newsletter, if you're, if you want to build something for the newsletter industry, go look at what the Hustle, go look at what Axios or what these guys are all using and be like, cool. How do I give every newsletter the ability to just have this feature without, without having to build it themselves? Because clearly it's working and they're competing with groups like the Hustle that are like years ahead,

• 1:00:52Shaan Puri?

  have employees, have money to be able to spend on this type of stuff.

• 1:00:56Sam Parr?

  Yeah, and we did have to build a lot of that, by the way, and it was horrible. And it breaks all the time. And like, I would wave, like, a lot of people, a lot of people who, there's this whole, there's a large contingency of people who say, oh, let's build our own stuff. A lot of people who have been there, done that, will say the exact opposite, which is never build anything if you don't have to, always use off the shelf, right? I fall into that category. And I wish, I wish a lot of this stuff had existed. I'd rather pay a software fee than an engineer.

• 1:01:26Shaan Puri?

  And you talked about this once, you were talking about paywall software. You're like, yeah, I'm in the media business and like, the best sites have really good, smart paywalls that convert. And then the rest of us are using this kind of like crappier version of that. Like, why don't we all, let's just pretend and say, the New York Times has the best paywall flow that's causing highest conversion rates. Somebody should take that and just say, do you want the New York Times paywall on your site? Great. Here's New York Times paywall as a service. An example, another example in this trend is Slice. So basically Domino's had the best pizza ordering experience. It's like you would order the pizza on your phone. Then it would show you the progress bar. It's like, oh, you know, like, You know, John has put it in the oven. 20 minutes. Oh, it's out of the oven.

• 1:02:11Shaan Puri?

  We're just putting the toppings on top. Oh, it's in the car. It's almost near you. Hey, it's at your door. And so like, you know, they spent a lot of money doing that because they're Domino's. They can afford that. And what Slice did was Slice went to every indie poppy indie pizza shop. And basically gave them an app that was the Domino's mobile ordering experience. And say, hey, now you can compete against that. So let's just compete on the basis of who's pizza is the best. Rather than, well, they made it so easy and fun to order. And mine still is like, call me and I'll write it down on a piece of paper. And they became a billion dollar company doing that in that space. So it's the same model that when you see three or four versions of these, that's the pattern recognition to say, okay, that's a, that's a blueprint I can follow to get a new business idea.

• 1:02:52Sam Parr?

  I agree. And we want to wrap up there?

• 1:02:54Shaan Puri?

  Let's wrap up this one and then, uh, yeah.

• 1:02:57Sam Parr?

  All right. We, uh, that's the episode. Holler.