Someone Paying Our Producer $100K for Advice? - Here's the Story

Sam Parr (@theSamParr) and Shaan Puri (@shaanVP) talk with producer Ben Wilson (@BenWilsonTweets) about his unique opportunity with a high net worth individual and how to monetize his podcasting business. Sam and Shaan then discuss how to make money with short term rentals, turnkey ways to make money in college, and much more. _____ * Do you love MFM and want to see Sam and Shaan's smiling faces? Subscribe to our Youtube channel. * Want more insights like MFM? Check out Shaan's newsletter. _____ Show Notes: (00:20) - Producer Ben's big opportunity (10:40) - Making big money through consulting calls (22:12) - The State of Shaan's angel investments (32:00) - The advantage of being long-term oriented (37:00) - Short term rentals (45:15) - Tailgate Guys and selling to universities ----- Past guests on My First Million include Rob Dyrdek, Hasan Minhaj, Balaji Srinivasan, Jake Paul, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Gary Vee, Lance Armstrong, Sophia Amoruso, Ariel Helwani, Ramit Sethi, Stanley Druckenmiller, Peter Diamandis, Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan, Marc Lore, Jason Calacanis, Andrew Wilkinson, Julian Shapiro, Kat Cole, Codie Sanchez, Nader Al-Naji, Steph Smith, Trung Phan, Nick Huber, Anthony Pompliano, Ben Askren, Ramon Van Meer, Brianne Kimmel, Andrew Gazdecki, Scott Belsky, Moiz Ali, Dan Held, Elaine Zelby, Michael Saylor, Ryan Begelman, Jack Butcher, Reed Duchscher, Tai Lopez, Harley Finkelstein, Alexa von Tobel, Noah Kagan, Nick Bare, Greg Isenberg, James Altucher, Randy Hetrick and more. ----- Additional episodes you might enjoy: • #224 Rob Dyrdek - How Tracking Every Second of His Life Took Rob Drydek from 0 to $405M in Exits • #209 Gary Vaynerchuk - Why NFTS Are the Future • #178 Balaji Srinivasan - Balaji on How to Fix the Media, Cloud Cities & Crypto #169 - How One Man Started 5, Billion Dollar Companies, Dan Gilbert's Empire, & Talking With Warren Buffett • ​​​​#218 - Why You Should Take a Think Week Like Bill Gates • Dave Portnoy vs The World, Extreme Body Monitoring, The Future of Apparel Retail, "How Much is Anthony Pompliano Worth?", and More • How Mr Beast Got 100M Views in Less Than 4 Days, The $25M Chrome Extension, and More

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

• 0:00Sam Parr?

  I think you should go hard on this. So you have a hundred thousand listeners a month. You're making single digit thousands of dollars. You would make like six figures a year for sure. Doing this.

• 0:22Sam Parr?

  All right. Good. So Sean, what's good? What's going on?

• 0:25Shaan Puri?

  What's up? What's up? You got Ben still on the line. What do you got? What do you got for Ben? Normally you're like, so he turn off your video. We need to focus.

• 0:33Sam Parr?

  I'm going to tell you why. So Ben made a comment to me, maybe to you too. I think you were here like a while ago, a month or two months ago, and I've been thinking a lot about it and he kind of made it not a big deal, but it's kind of a big deal to me. So Ben, I'm not, I'm not gonna, I'm gonna only, I haven't told you I'm going to bring about this, bring this up. I'm only going to like, kind of mention the thing and then you could, you could kind of explain how you want to. But basically Ben Wilson has this podcast called How to Take Over the World. And you said that a very wealthy person, like a hundreds of millions of dollars person, has you on retainer and basically tells you the strategy that this person's going to do in business.

• 1:13Sam Parr?

  And you tell him stories from history to let him know what you predict will happen. Is that right?

• 1:19Shaan Puri?

  What?

• 1:20Sam Parr?

  Yes, yes. He made, is that crazy?

• 1:25Sam Parr?

  He didn't explain it that way, but that's exactly what happened.

• 1:29Shaan Puri?

  It's like a sugar daddy, but it's like a history daddy.

• 1:36Shaan Puri?

  Like a history baby, I guess. Sugar baby.

• 1:38Sam Parr?

  Okay.

• 1:38Ben?

  That's true. Did I get that? Did I explain that?

• 1:41Sam Parr?

  Yeah. So here's the full story. I get a lot of people who reach out to me. At this point, basically any fan who's like, hey, can I talk to you for a little bit? I'm just like, yeah, I'm not that big yet. If you're big enough that you want to, if you think I'm important enough that you want to talk to me, yeah, I'll talk to you. That's starting to change a little bit. A lot of people want my time now, but this was a while ago.

• 2:02Sam Parr?

  And so I said, yes, I'll talk to you. He's like, I'm thinking of starting something. I want to talk to you about it. I was like, okay, this guy's probably a joker, but whatever. He reached out to me. I'll talk to him. So.

• 2:12Ben?

  We hop on a Zoom and first thing like he's got a glass wall behind him and you can tell he's in like a very, very, very high, high rise in New York City. You can see the whole skyline behind him. So immediately I was like, this is not what I thought it was going to be. And so he was like, yeah, I'm a managing director at XYZ Bank, one of the biggest banks in the world.

• 2:37Ben?

  And I lead their X division, very, very big financial division at this big bank. And he's like, I just randomly found your podcast and you don't know this, but I've been listening to you. You're my guru now. So I want to talk to you about like what I'm thinking of starting and I just want to bounce it off you and see what you think about it. And so he gets to call me whenever he wants to.

• 3:02Shaan Puri?

  That sounds more normal. Sam was saying, he specifically wants you to tell him, based on history, here's what's gonna happen. Is that?

• 3:09Sam Parr?

  That's what, that's what you meant. You go, you said, you said that, yeah, like I said, I explain it differently, but that's what's going on here. Like he likes you and he wants you to like, tell him like, how would Julius Caesar handle this? Or how did Julius Caesar handle this? Tell me like what, what to do.

• 3:25Ben?

  That's, that's basically the angle he's going for. Yeah. Cause he knows me from how to take over the world. So yeah.

• 3:29Shaan Puri?

  Oh my God, that is amazing.

• 3:32Sam Parr?

  Isn't that awesome?

• 3:33Shaan Puri?

  Well, first of all, hopefully me laughing about it doesn't blow this for you. But, but wow.

• 3:39Sam Parr?

  Okay. But listen, I want to ask you more questions about this, Ben, but I had the same reaction, Sean. I was like, what? That sounds like a scam. But I've been thinking a lot about this and I actually think that's a great idea. I think that that is a wonderful idea. What do they say? History may not repeat itself, but it definitely rhymes. If you're gonna tell people what behaviors to avoid or like how other people have had the same move and what happened? I think that's great. How much is he paying you?

• 4:04Ben?

  Zero.

• 4:05Sam Parr?

  What? I thought he was paying you. I thought you were like on retainer.

• 4:08Ben?

  No, no, no, no, no. He's paying me. So he, so he offered to pay me and I said-

• 4:13Sam Parr?

  How much did he offer? How much did he offer?

• 4:17Ben?

  Well, he didn't offer explicitly, but he, he said, he said,

• 4:21Sam Parr?

  He said, I'll pay you.

• 4:23Ben?

  He said, people who do what you do, who, who consult people like me often make upwards of $5,000 an hour. I don't think he would pay me. I've never done it before. I'm not like a high level coach, but I was like, well, that's a pay range I was not considering. I must admit. But he said, I will pay you, but then I ended up telling him, no, don't worry about it. And I just think it's better to have the connection and have him think that he owes me at this point.

• 4:54Sam Parr?

  Okay, that's fine. I, but I actually think that there's like, is something interesting here, like, because like Alex Friedman or like these like thinker type folks, like they definitely could get paid five or 10 grand an hour.

• 5:05Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, but this to me is more like when you, the way you described it, it's more like, you know, in billions or whatever. It's like the guy's got a kink and he goes to like get dominated by some chick in a mask with a whip. To me, it's more like that where it's like some rich guys just like, hey, I need you to, when I call you, I need you to tell me that I'm a huge fuck up and I suck and that that's going to motivate me to go into this meeting and prove myself daily. And I will pay you $2,000 an hour if you're a hot woman who tells me, you know, I suck and you spit on the webcam. To me, that's, that's more where the opportunity is than like telling me about lessons from history.

• 5:42Sam Parr?

  No, this is good because it's like, let's say that, um, this, he's like, I'm working on this thing. My opinion of it is this, this, and this. And he, and Ben goes, well, you know, Rothschild, he actually, the reason why they did really well, because they just got information just a little bit faster and they did this, this, this, and this.

• 5:57Shaan Puri?

  The business is so context dependent. It's not like you actually need the strategies of the Rothschilds or Julius Caesar. I don't think, I think it's motivational to hear these stories, right? Like I, I use one story a lot.

• 6:09Sam Parr?

  Why does it matter if it's motivational or if it's like strategically actually accurate?

• 6:13Shaan Puri?

  Well, because you gotta know, what am I delivering? Right? What am I? Actually selling this person, am I selling them strategies from the 1830s? Or am I selling them that, hey, you know, for example, Ben, I use this anecdote you have from, from how to take over the world where you talked about, you know, Edison used to go, Edison used to be like, he was amazing. He was like, had done so much by the age of 25. And he's like, um, you know, but Nikola Tesla had already done XYZ by this age. I'm so behind. And even though he was the greatest inventor of our age, he personally felt behind because he was comparing himself to someone. And then he read that Julius Caesar used to go look at a statue of Alexander the Great and be like, what the fuck am I doing with my life? Alexander the Great already ruled, you know, the world by now.

• 6:57Shaan Puri?

  And to me, that lesson was like, you know, that was actually a pretty important lesson. A lot of people feel like they're behind or feel like they, they compare themselves to others who are doing better. It's like, dude, there's no end to that. Julius Caesar used to do that and feel that way. So you know, that's a trap. You know that there is no amount where you'll stop feeling that way. So might as well just let it all go.

• 7:17Sam Parr?

  But that's kind of the same thing. You're just talking about life strategy. I'm, I mean, it's kind of, yeah, I agree with you.

• 7:22Ben?

  I'll tell you how it actually went because, because what you said, Sean, actually plays into it. That he said, I'm thinking about starting this thing. It's a higher possible outcome. But if I stay where I am right now, it's just a more steady, like I can go from whatever, I can go from 220 to 500, hopefully in the next 10 years. But I'm not going to become a billionaire essentially. But if I go start my own thing, I could lose a lot of money.

• 7:49Sam Parr?

  What does 220 mean?

• 7:51Ben?

  220 million.

• 7:53Sam Parr?

  Oh, that's what he's worth?

• 7:56Ben?

  No, I'm, I am saying number. I'm not going to tell you what he's worth, but he is, but it is in the hundreds of millions.

• 8:01Shaan Puri?

  Sounded pretty specific to me. All right.

• 8:05Shaan Puri?

  Sounded like not a made up number. All right.

• 8:08Ben?

  And so, and so he was essentially like, should I do this thing? So I tell him, I talk about the, I talked about the concept of exactly what you're saying, Sean, of like.

• 8:18Shaan Puri?

  So much pressure on you to say something that's not fucking stupid.

• 8:23Ben?

  So much pressure. Hundred percent. I was literally, as he was saying this, I was like, why the hell are you talking to me? Like, it was so funny to me. But he loved the podcast. He thought I'd have something interesting to say. So I was like, literally just grasping in my head. I'm panicking a little bit. I'm like, what am I gonna say to this guy? And so I start talking before I even know what I'm gonna say. I said, uh, okay. Well, have you heard of loss aversion? And I brought up the idea of loss aversion, which I'm sure you guys-

• 8:52Sam Parr?

  Have you heard of that?

• 8:53Ben?

  He hadn't heard of loss aversion. So I explained to him a little bit what loss aversion was.

• 8:57Sam Parr?

  Explain it for somebody who's listening who doesn't want to go look at it.

• 8:59Ben?

  So a loss aversion is the idea that, um, that you value not losing your money more than you value gaining money. So, um, you, you put more emphasis on it. So I essentially said, you need to make loss aversion work for you. Essentially, if you believe that you're going to be successful, then, um, you need to visualize that success and say to yourself and realize every day that you delay starting your, your new thing is gonna make you billions, you're losing millions of dollars because you're, you're failing

• 9:40Ben?

  to act. And, uh, he was like, that was amazing. That's changed my whole perspective. He was, he was blown away. Okay.

• 9:47Sam Parr?

  That's why they pay you the big bucks, Ben.

• 9:49Ben?

  Yeah.

• 9:50Sam Parr?

  Ben, I, I think that you're doing something that's like so common, which is, and I do it too. You, uh, Sean does not do this. You, uh, you, you are putting too low value-

• 10:00Ben?

  You're underplaying.

• 10:01Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 10:02Ben?

  Let me tell you how it ends though. Let me tell you how it ends. So, um, it was like a month later, I was in New York City. So I said, let's meet up, let's get lunch. We went to a really nice restaurant and he bought me lunch, which is very nice. And I was like, so when are you starting the thing? And he's like, well, I'm not actually doing it. And he like gave his reasons why he's not, he's not starting it yet. And I was like, okay, well, it sounded good when it came out of my mouth. Apparently my advice was not that valuable.

• 10:24Sam Parr?

  You spit in his water. Drink it.

• 10:27Shaan Puri?

  Exactly. That's when you need to go dominatrix, dude. It's a yin and yang, good cop, bad cop sort of thing.

• 10:33Sam Parr?

  I think, I think that-

• 10:35Shaan Puri?

  The loss aversion thing, I think the numbers are two to one, meaning- You'd have to make $2 to feel the same as losing one. You'd have to make 2,000 to feel the same level of emotional hit as losing 1,000 would be. I don't know if that's bullshit, but I've read that. That's the ratio of like how much we value loss more than gain.

• 10:56Sam Parr?

  Sean, do you get asked to consult and like do this type of stuff?

• 10:59Shaan Puri?

  I get asked. I'd never consult anymore, but I basically run a simple filter, which is, would I do this for free? That doesn't mean I'm gonna do it for free. It's would I do this for free? So for Ben, in Ben's case, Ben's like, oh, this sounds like a super interesting guy.

• 11:12Sam Parr?

  And he did do it for free.

• 11:12Shaan Puri?

  I'm gonna learn as much from this guy as he's gonna learn from me, if not more. So, you know, I'm happy to do this with my time. So that's one thing. And then the second part is dude, you get paid crazy money for doing this type of shit. Like Sam, you do these GLG calls? Have you done any of these?

• 11:27Sam Parr?

  I used to. I think I was getting paid $1,000 an hour.

• 11:30Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, exactly. I set my rate at the max that they let you do, which is now 2,000.

• 11:35Sam Parr?

  1,000? 2,000. That's what it was.

• 11:37Shaan Puri?

  And dude, I'll get paid 2,000 bucks to just do like a 40 minute call with some like, first of all, it's kind of funny because they're like, it is this like weird underground dominatrix shit where it's like, I'm a hedge fund manager. I can't tell you the fund. I can't tell you what I'm looking at. I can't tell you my name. But like it's a one, it's a one way transaction. It's like, I'm the masseuse and they're laying face down. I can't see who they are. And, and then they're like, okay, say the word metaverse. And I'm like, metaverse. Tell me, tell me who's gonna, who's, which stocks you know, because of the metaverse. I'm like, dude, I don't fucking know. And they're like, what? And I'm like, yeah, but I could tell you, you know, here's some things I think about.

• 12:12Sam Parr?

  Well, whenever I do those things, I talk really slow.

• 12:15Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. Cause you just need the hour to pass.

• 12:18Sam Parr?

  Yeah. I always talk really slow and I'd be like, wait, hang on, let me get my headphones.

• 12:24Shaan Puri?

  Better way, I can't talk slow. It's like, I'm too nervous. Like, like I said with Ben, you feel a tremendous amount of pressure. It doesn't really matter how much money you have. When somebody's paying you something, I would never pay someone two grand for a phone call, even though I'm sure there's an economic case where it makes sense. It's just a big number to me to just pay for somebody to talk to me. I'm so, I'm so, I'm so not used to it that when I'm on the other side, I'm getting paid, I'm like, I need to deliver this guy like some insane insight that they've, and I put this weird pressure that just is unachievable. But I'll be like, I'll say my point and I really only have one point. And I'll be like, another way of thinking about it is. I'll repackage the same idea with like some metaphor or some analogy just to fill airspace.

• 13:07Shaan Puri?

  Because like, like in reality, it's one idea that that's worth it for them or not. And I don't have like 10 amazing ideas. I have one around one topic, you know? I don't have.

• 13:17Sam Parr?

  But there's a, there's, that's why Ben's shtick is amazing because Sean, well, you can only consult on your life experience and you like, you can't live that interesting of a life all the time. And whereas Ben can just steal, he can just read a book a week and he's going to have like, you know, 52 new ideas a year.

• 13:34Ben?

  The thing that this guy was trying to sell me on was that I should come up and speak to his bank.

• 13:43Ben?

  And he's like, you could get paid like easy, like 50 grand a pop to come up and give these speeches.

• 13:49Shaan Puri?

  And I do 10 grand for Zoom at home to give a speech to somebody now. And now I'm like, why am I not doubling my price? Like, if they're not saying no to this, I need to, basically the pricing strategy is unless half the people are saying no, you're priced way too low. And so right now everybody's saying yes, why not price double that?

• 14:09Sam Parr?

  I did one recently, it was 25,000, but it was in person.

• 14:12Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 14:13Sam Parr?

  Yeah. How many of those Zooms a month? How many Zooms a month do you do?

• 14:16Shaan Puri?

  Not even one a month, one every two months probably is the current.

• 14:20Sam Parr?

  That's pretty sick to me, though.

• 14:22Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, it's great. It's, I mean, it's a, it's great money because there's this other thing, Ben, I don't know what this, what the history or psychology will tell us about this. But there's extra joy in making money when you can assign what that money gets to go to. Versus just generally making money and it's going to go into a general pot of a bank account. Versus like, oh, 10 grand. All right, if I'm like, I do these two speeches this week, this month, I'll go buy that car. Or I'll go get my wife this gift. And she's like, wow, that's great. That, hey, this, this work you did was awesome. And I don't know what the name for that metaphor is, but I abuse the shit out of that.

• 15:00Sam Parr?

  Consumerism.

• 15:02Sam Parr?

  Just consumerism.

• 15:04Ben?

  So you guys can tell me if there's ever a moment like the reason I'm not doing any of this stuff is I just feel fraudulent like going up there and

• 15:11Sam Parr?

  That's normal.

• 15:12Ben?

  Yeah, maybe I just need to get over it. I don't know.

• 15:14Shaan Puri?

  Hundred percent. You need to get over it. Like the way you should think about things is most of your life, you're basically underpaid. You're you're underpaid and underappreciated. And you know, the universe has this way of evening itself out where like, you know, Sam will make more money off of like some random investment he thought about for five minutes than he would have, you know, grinding some business that he his apartment roommate finder business he did for two years or three years. And so like, you know, the inputs don't always match the outputs in life. And once you sort of acknowledge that you accept that, that's like the first thing you have to acknowledge, which is like, the level of difficulty for me is not what dictates the value for somebody else. So that's number one.

• 15:53Sam Parr?

  Yeah, the the the effort is not in proportion to the

• 15:56Shaan Puri?

  It's irrelevant. All that matters is the output. The fact that you know, input is a liability for you. It is a weird psychological liability. You would be better off not knowing how hard it was to say that one thing to that guy at that moment. The second thing is that the you know, Mr. Market will decide what it's worth. And like, you might be, you might get lucky once, you might get lucky twice. But if people consistently pay you for something, it's because that's what it's worth to them if not, if not being worth more, right? They're they need, they need a positive ROI on that on that interaction. And so just let the market decide and the market over time will balance itself out. Maybe, maybe one one off. Yeah, that was just a fluke. But if it happens consistently enough, and you should just expect it to happen consistently, then it works.

• 16:41Sam Parr?

  I I think you should lean into this hardcore because how much money are you making on ads for your podcast? Let's say the numbers. Can you say the number? Do you want to do it? No?

• 16:49Ben?

  Yeah, I guess I have one sponsor right now. It's

• 16:53Shaan Puri?

  Shout out.

• 16:54Ben?

  Cold plunge. Go to the

• 16:57Shaan Puri?

  Carrying that sponsorship.

• 16:59Ben?

  Use code Ben Wilson.

• 17:02Ben?

  For I don't remember how much off $150 off, something like that.

• 17:06Ben?

  So I will say I'm making a four, four digits per month, low four digits.

• 17:11Sam Parr?

  Okay, so one to 5,000 a month.

• 17:15Shaan Puri?

  By the way, also the hack, when somebody says how many digits, just take the bottom three numbers of that range. So if I say I make seven figures, I'm saying one to three million. If we sold for eight figures, it's 10 to 30 million. If somebody's right, like nobody, if you're over half, you're, you usually say it differently. Once you're, once you cross the, if you cross over 50 million, you would say over 50 million, not eight figures.

• 17:42Sam Parr?

  Or like the figures can include the dot zero zero.

• 17:47Ben?

  Yeah, there you go.

• 17:50Sam Parr?

  That's a figure. Nine figure exit, bro.

• 17:56Sam Parr?

  So I think you should go and do this, Ben. I think that you should include, I think you should go hard on this. So you have a hundred thousand listeners a month. You're making single digit thousands of dollars. You, you would make like six figures a year for sure.

• 18:10Shaan Puri?

  You should do your own ad read, which basically says, look, yes, you listen to this and I, you know, people who listen to this tell me they got a bunch of inspiration. They got, you know, some strategies, they got, they, you know, they filled in the gaps of something they didn't know about history. And they can see, you know, their place in the world today through that, whatever, blah, blah, blah, some bullshit. And you basically say, uh, you know, I used to run ads for, you know, cold plunges. By the way, use code BEN WILSON at checkout if you, if you want. But you know, actually what ended up happening, and you just basically say, this is what, this is what ended up happening. Company started hiring me to come in and talk to them about lessons from the greatest, you know, the greatest blah, blah, blah in history. And it's motivational for the executive team. It's a great addition to any offsite, blah, blah, blah.

• 18:56Shaan Puri?

  And so that actually ends up making me more money than the ads. So if that, if you're interested in that, you should contact me, blah, blah. I bet if you do that, you'll get one of these a month and it will quadruple your current ad, um, you know, ad revenue for the month.

• 19:10Sam Parr?

  Dude, you gotta do this, Ben. You've gotta do this. Okay, next, next month, uh, we'll do another segment in, uh, Ben's First Million and, uh, and, and, look, you, you can make it as simple. So my best friend Neville Madora, he has these things that he calls consults. And if you go to his blog, like copywritingcourse.com slash like consult, there's just like a checkout page and it's a thousand dollars and you booked one hour with him and you just, you pay and then you just like select on Calendly and then every like Tuesday and Thursday from like 9am to like 1, he just knows that he does call those, that's his call time. And, uh, he makes a lot of money from it a year. You could do it as simple as that.

• 19:48Shaan Puri?

  The other thing, by the way, you need to do like a profile of how to take over the world of like, uh, I think, you know, you've done jobs, but I think if you do like Pixar, uh, right, and you say, you know, here's Pixar's kind of creativity, uh, process, how Pixar consistently has creative hits and, um, you know, storytelling or something like that, that opens the door for you to basically teach the Pixar way to a bunch of companies that want to be better creative, you know, more creative or storytellers or whatever, and replace Pixar with any company that's excellence in X category. And you just tell your story as you always do. And then that becomes part of your slightly more corporate repertoire that, you know, maybe they don't want to hear the Putin, Putin story, but they, they want to hear the Pixar one.

• 20:31Sam Parr?

  Yeah. So you select the people by who will listen to this and then pay me money to consult or talk to the company.

• 20:37Shaan Puri?

  Work backwards from that.

• 20:39Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I'm gonna go to Apple and give them the, the Putin speech and then all of a sudden, Google employees start mysteriously dying.

• 20:48Sam Parr?

  I think, um, I think this is good. I think that, so right now you're, uh, you're, you're slumming it because you've got a small business that you're just starting and it's going to take time to get going. We, this will just supercharge it a little bit, I think.

• 21:01Shaan Puri?

  And by the way, I always, whenever I give advice, the way I explain to people is I'm going to say some things that make you feel uncomfortable either because you personally would feel nervous saying the thing I just said to a customer or quoting that price to a customer. The second reason is your moral code says, well, that's not what I want to do with my content. I don't want to feature Pixar because I want to give talks about creativity and storytelling. Okay, cool. I'm just telling you, if you crank the commercialization, like sellout knob to 12, here's what you could do. And then you could decide to dial that back to nine or eight, whatever you feel comfortable with.

• 21:37Sam Parr?

  And I always say it differently. I say, do you want your future kids to have braces or not? Get to fucking work. It's like, you ever been to an orthodontist, my friend? It's expensive. Get to work.

• 21:52Shaan Puri?

  That's amazing. That's too good. All right, let's do some other topics. Thank you, Ben. I appreciate the.

• 21:57Sam Parr?

  Ben, good luck.

• 21:59Ben?

  I do appreciate the advice. I really do. Thanks, guys.

• 22:02Sam Parr?

  That's amazing, right? I was thinking about that for like about a week.

• 22:05Shaan Puri?

  That's hilarious. I had no idea that was going on. All right.

• 22:08Sam Parr?

  He mentioned it to us, but he didn't make a big deal out of it.

• 22:10Shaan Puri?

  What do you want to talk about?

• 22:11Sam Parr?

  What do you want to talk? Okay, I know what I want to talk about. Well, I don't know if this is interesting to you, but I've noticed that your angel investing is on a tear. Our friend Suli just said, whatever Sean, what did he say? Whatever Sean.

• 22:26Shaan Puri?

  A joke. He was like, I got this new brilliant investment strategy. Sean invested something and then he tells me about it two weeks to two months later. And then I paid 10x price for the same item, for the same company.

• 22:37Sam Parr?

  It was great.

• 22:37Shaan Puri?

  Which is like anecdote, like he was joking, obviously. Obviously, that's not great. He's like making fun of himself because that's literally what's happened in like, I think, six or eight deals now where I'll even tell him about it, but he just delays responding for a couple of weeks or I forget to tell him and I tell him, or he tells me about the company a few months later. I'm like, oh yeah, I invested in that. He's like, awesome. Can you make an intro? And I make the intro and but the price has gone up like dramatically because the company has more traction or more whatever. So that's what he was joking about.

• 23:06Sam Parr?

  So I put you on like an email list for my friends where I'm sending you everything. Are you getting those?

• 23:11Shaan Puri?

  No, I didn't see anything.

• 23:12Sam Parr?

  I sent you two of them so far.

• 23:15Shaan Puri?

  Okay, maybe I need to.

• 23:16Sam Parr?

  I'll forward it to them. One of them, I'll send it to you after this. But anyway, so I'm starting, I'm starting it off where I'm sending them to you. So you gotta, hopefully if you find something that interests me, you'll send back. But how are you getting such good shit?

• 23:28Shaan Puri?

  Um, I don't know, like dude, it's amazing. So I feel like there's, I think the easy answer is, oh, cool. I do this podcast and because of this podcast, people come inbound, right? The bigger this podcast gets, the more people uh want you to invest. And there's this great um thing my buddy Vishal taught me, which he goes, startups are the only asset class, like real estate doesn't work this way, stock market, like in real estate, if you want to buy it, you go buy it. If you want a stock, if you want to buy it, you go buy it. Startups are the only thing where even if you want in, you don't just get in. The security selects you, the asset selects you just as much as you're selecting the asset. And that one insight is pretty important. It basically means you need to build your brand and your like reputation so that people want you in deals.

• 24:13Shaan Puri?

  Um, because the best deals are all like, kind of like super competitive to get into. Um, and you want people to, when they're first thinking of an idea, to reach out to you. Cause they know, oh, you know, like for example, I did a great deal recently and it's so funny. You're gonna hate this, it's gonna piss you off so much. You've been talking about short-term rentals. Somebody came to me with a short-term rental startup idea, because they thought I was you or something, or somebody was like, hey.

• 24:39Sam Parr?

  Bro, why didn't you say that to me?

• 24:41Shaan Puri?

  Well, by the way, the subject line that she reached out with was last one in. It was like, hey, I have, I have the smallest bit of allocation left in this.

• 24:49Sam Parr?

  Mother.

• 24:50Shaan Puri?

  It's this company called Hostfully, you'll love it because it's, it's literally exactly what you're doing. You should get it. I'll, I'll interview you. You will get in. Uh, but, but basically what they're doing is if you own a bunch of Airbnbs, which is kind of like a new market, uh, it's basically like you're a property manager. So you're more than just renting out your home or one home. So you have multiple properties, but you're not a traditional property manager who owns a multifamily, you know, like a building of like 32 units. And so this is for people who run multiple Airbnbs and it's just like, it makes your life way easier as the, as the owner of that. And they have like a few million dollars in recurring revenue. The valuation was great, founder was really impressive. So I was like, oh yeah, great SaaS software for people who manage multiple vacation rentals.

• 25:33Shaan Puri?

  And then you're over here building short Sam's short-term rental club, building this community, doing this thing, and I got the benefit because people thought I was you. That's, that's one answer, the piss you off answer.

• 25:43Sam Parr?

  That's ridiculous. That is a piss me off answer, whatever. It is what it is. Send me, what's the company called? Can we talk about it?

• 25:50Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, Hostfully.

• 25:51Sam Parr?

  Hostfully. Well, then I can just email her. It's, is it, uh, do they have a bunch of, uh, VCs behind it or all angels?

• 25:59Shaan Puri?

  Um, I think this rounds a lot of individuals. I'm not sure. It was like, I was kind of late to the party. So I was just pretty quick to just be like, okay, this makes a lot of sense. Uh, you know, the red ones, once you have revenue and a few million dollars, uh, that's recurring and they really haven't even like figured out what their marketing strategy is going to be yet. It's like, okay, that's a pretty good signal that this is going to work. And, uh, it's a pretty indispensable tool for a property owner. So, so I like that one. But I would say, okay, here's, here's some of the things that have happened. One is when I share deals with you, you share deals with me, my buddy Julian Shapiro's shares, like some of the best deals. Um, he's just very, he's very like consistent with it. Meaning like every week he's sending me some good shit.

• 26:38Shaan Puri?

  That's, I would say 40 to 50% of the portfolio is relationships with friends who themselves are experts and specifically people who are experts in one niche. So it's like, we've been doing a bunch of like salesperson software and it's because we like have a relationship with craft ventures who it started by David Sacks. He's kind of like the enterprise SaaS guy. He built Yammer, sold it for a billion dollars. His fund specifically just focuses on SaaS companies.

• 27:04Sam Parr?

  And what you're, you talked to, so David sends you stuff?

• 27:07Shaan Puri?

  David, not, not me particularly. So my partner, Ramin, uh, who runs my fund, he basically has a good relationship with somebody at craft. So for example, when they're seeing something good, they're just trading notes all the time. And so we're getting to get in on a lot of their deals. So if even if you don't have the reputation as being-

• 27:21Sam Parr?

  But do they, are they giving you the deal because they like Sean or they like Ramin?

• 27:26Shaan Puri?

  In this case is Ramin because, uh, he has that relationship. He's catching up with that guy every two weeks, goes to get coffee or whatever it is. And but then I do the same with my guys, right? So I do the same with the people in India or the people in Southeast Asia. Cause I'm like, I think that's where a lot of opportunity is and that's where I have the right relationships. So we're sharing stuff, uh, just amongst that. So, and then the other thing is like themes. So for example, once I decide that a theme is correct, uh, like worth, worth betting on, what I learned from Sully actually is the level of aggression you need to have. Once you decide X is a good idea, you need to go invest in that company. And then like the five other companies that are like adjacent to it. So for example, um, there's this trend of, of banking, of like neo banks,

• 28:11Shaan Puri?

  right? So this started several years ago, uh, where people basically were like, look, Banks are something everybody uses but has super low customer satisfaction scores like their apps sucked, their marketing sucked. So basically people were like, look, we can create like a digital first bank. And this started like New Bank is probably the best example of this. It's in Brazil. They're like, oh, look. Yeah, and they're about to go public. People are underbanked there. So they started a new bank. A friend of mine was like led their investment. And now it's a $10 billion company and it has like millions of customers in Brazil. And then the same thing happened in the UK with Revolut and Monzo, whatever. So this idea of neo

• 28:50Shaan Puri?

  banking, basically of can you make super slick like slick app for customers, digitally market to go get customers? And basically, you're building, you're actually not building the banking part. You usually go partner with like some bank like BBVA or something like that. Under the hood, it's BBVA. But the customer relationship is with, with a company that's really good at, at taking care of customers and building good user experiences. Anyway, so that's the, the short answer is like, okay, decide that that's a good idea. And that takes many forms. So like, we talked about this before, like Ramp or Brex. These are like Brex, I think was the fastest growing YC company in the last few years. And you look at it, you say, is this a good idea? You say, well, what are they actually doing? They're basically giving

• 29:33Shaan Puri?

  credit cards to some group of people that were dissatisfied with current credit card providers. Brex did it for startups. And they get a portion of every time that card swipes? Oh, interesting. So if a million people are spending a thousand dollars a year on it, and they're keeping 1.3% of the interchange fee of the debit card or whatever, you can come up with some number. You say, wow, this company is going to get big pretty fast. So we did that math of neo banks, how much is a neo bank customer worth? And how much is a credit card customer worth? And then we went and did it in every niche we could think of. So we, we invested in Keep, which is doing this for Canada. And then we invested in Pluto, which is doing this in the Middle East. But, but did you holler at them? Yeah, then we go search and destroy. Basically, it's like, how do you go hunt for

• 30:16Shaan Puri?

  the best companies that are doing this in, in either this geography or with this customer base? So for example. And you just DM them on Twitter, probably. Yeah, exactly. We just reach out, cold DM and say, hey, I'm a believer in this for this, this and this reason. What you're doing looks super interesting. Would love to invest. And sometimes it comes inbound. Sometimes it's, oh, you got 100 things inbound, but you know what you're looking for. So you quickly pounce on the four that fit your, your. Aren't you out of money at this point from the fund, though? I raised more money. Because I was like, I was like, before I thought. Dude, you know, will I get a million dollars worth of deals every quarter that are good deals? I'm not just trying to invest in crap. So I need to invest in good deals. So I was like, I don't know how many high quality deals I'll have. And now I realized

• 30:58Shaan Puri?

  that like, whatever I, whatever I had before was too low. So now we're doing almost 2 million a quarter. We raised more money because we just had better deals.

• 31:07Sam Parr?

  Man, I, because I'm starting, so I started angel investing almost one year ago. Well, I did it five or eight companies.

• 31:14Shaan Puri?

  Person.

• 31:14Sam Parr?

  In the last, before that, I forget. And a couple of them have turned out to be like, meaningful, like turning 20 grand into like 300, 400, $500,000. And I'm like, holy shit, this is how it works. And, and like, but like, it sucks for a while, right? Because you just invest it. You're like, well, that's money's gone and you don't ever hear about them. And then you're like, oh, nice. It works. And so I'm like, in some of those cases, those are huge markups. In other cases, I'm just now experiencing like two and three and four X markups. And I'm like, that's awesome. What would happen if that was, had I invested in this company at a $10 million valuation instead of a $50 million valuation? That would have been wild. And like, how do I do that?

• 31:54Shaan Puri?

  One of the reasons, so I hated startup investing for, for a while because I was like, you know, is this the best use of time and money?

• 32:00Sam Parr?

  Dude, it feels like an expensive hobby. I'm just spending money and not getting anything in return.

• 32:04Shaan Puri?

  And then, and then I realized two things, which is, Bezos has this quote, which I believe, he goes, "One of the biggest competitive advantages you can have is being long-term oriented." Basically, if you prioritize, like, if you have a 10-year view, where you're like, okay, I'm going to maximize what I can do in 10 years. And the other guys trying to make the most they can make, you know, for their quarterly earnings call, right? This is what, this is how Amazon worked, right? Amazon was basically like, we're willing to lose money to invest so that we provide two-day shipping instead of seven-day shipping, or free two-day shipping, or a larger selection, but it's going to cost us more because we're going to have more inventory or whatever. So we're going to go into all these other verticals, books, CDs, whatever. They basically said, like, his strategy was, long-term, this

• 32:49Shaan Puri?

  is going to be the most valuable strategy. Short-term, we're going to get punished by the market because our quarterly earnings are not going to look great. But that turned out to be the like magic, you know, the sort of like the biggest competitive advantage Amazon had was their ability to be long-term oriented. I think this is true just in general, which is if you're competing against somebody who they need a result in one year and you're willing to be patient and get the result in five years, seven years or 10 years, you can make bets that they can't make. So that means you get to have lower-priced bets that will pay off bigger just over a longer time horizon. So I think if you have the luxury of a long-term horizon, that's a competitive advantage. That's how startup investing works is if you need money or you need to see positive growth in one year, startup investing sucks.

• 33:33Shaan Puri?

  If you're willing to play a 10-year game, this can be an awesome game to play.

• 33:35Sam Parr?

  And so do you think that, but do you think you told me, you're like, man, I think I could three and a half X my fund because that's average. Now it seems like it's going to be significantly more.

• 33:45Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, like, you know, you think about kind of like, what's the floor? You know, I think a three and a half X would be, you know, a solid outcome, but you know, nothing to write home about. But like with a small fund like ours, you could see things where you can get a 15X, you can get a 20X. There are literally crypto small funds like ours that have had 100X, they 100Xed the fund in the period of time, right? So, you know, you shouldn't really, the ceiling is high, but the floor is pretty reasonable. So the first thing was, okay, long-term oriented is a competitive advantage. I like startup investing for that reason. The second one is you want to do things that compound. So for example, if I wanted to beat the market in the stock market, right? I want to beat the S and P 500.

• 34:29Shaan Puri?

  I need to have proprietary like intelligence. I need to be smarter than anybody else about something. And I think just being smarter at a game where money's on the line is just really hard to do. Whereas if you do, if you basically say, hey,

• 34:46Shaan Puri?

  My advantage comes from my reputation or my network of people that I know. That's just going to compound every year. The more deals I share with you, the more deals you're going to share with me. The more companies I have that are winners, that's going to make it easier for me to get into the next winner or for founders to come reach out to me. Cause they'll say, oh, I saw you did these five Indian unicorns. I'm an idiot. I want to be the next one of them. So you should invest. Can you invest in me? So compounding also comes into play here in a way that doesn't happen in the stock market. And doesn't even really happen in real estate. Real estate has it to an extent, but, but not in the same way as how fast your reputation can compound and start investing. So anyways, those are my two reasons why I now actually view startup, startup investing as a, as a game worth playing because it, it uses two of the superpowers that, uh,

• 35:29Shaan Puri?

  that I believe in, that I think most people undervalue.

• 35:32Sam Parr?

  Is it gonna, what do you think will earn more, the e-comm thing or this angel investing thing?

• 35:37Shaan Puri?

  Uh, probably for me personally, the e-comm thing because I just own the majority of that company. So, you know, if it sells for $50 million or a hundred million, you know, I'll own the majority of it. But whereas with startup investing, you know, it's like my fund invest $100,000. We own 0.8% of this startup. I personally have 20% of the carry, but then I share with Rameen and Ben and Zach. And so I personally own 14 point something percent of the carry or whatever.

• 36:07Sam Parr?

  Sure, sure, sure.

• 36:07Shaan Puri?

  So it's not like, you know, you're owning a slice of a slice of something big versus just owning the, you know how it is. Owning the majority of something that sells for a decent chunk is, is just better financially.

• 36:18Sam Parr?

  It's so much better. And yeah, I think that whenever people raise money, I'm like, are you sure, man? You might be able to sell this for $50 million and you'll make more money than if you raised money and sell it for 500.

• 36:28Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, exactly. Now, you know, but I have to operate that other business whereas startup investing is like, you know, a joy. All right. You just read about cool ideas. You meet, meet awesome founders and you say, yes, you write the check and then they go do the hard work. So it's, you know, it's just a different thing.

• 36:42Sam Parr?

  Can I, you brought up SDRs, short-term, that's what I, they're called short-term rental SDRs. Have you researched that at all?

• 36:49Shaan Puri?

  So I joined your club, but uh.

• 36:52Sam Parr?

  Fucking crazy, right?

• 36:53Shaan Puri?

  Tell me two things.

• 36:54Sam Parr?

  Did you just review it?

• 36:54Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I was, I'm, I'm been looking at some of these posts.

• 36:56Sam Parr?

  Dude, did you see like, it's, it's like techie guys. It's like people who have like hundred million dollar companies.

• 37:02Shaan Puri?

  By the way, I don't know how you have Facebook, but like every time I open Facebook, whatever you're working on is always the top fucking post on my feed. I didn't know Facebook just knows that I love you, but like if it was trends, trends was always at the top. If it's Sam talking about his cold plunge, it's Sam's video of his cold plunge naked at the top. Like you know the, what hits in the Facebook algorithm in a way that like, I don't understand.

• 37:23Sam Parr?

  I've always been like that. It's always been that way. For some reason I mastered Facebook and that sucks because it's the least valuable.

• 37:29Shaan Puri?

  Dude, it's the most valuable, I don't know what you're talking about.

• 37:32Sam Parr?

  Wow.

• 37:32Shaan Puri?

  What do you want to master Snapchat? Well, you've only, if you're trying to be cool.

• 37:35Sam Parr?

  I could only have, cause I can only have 5,000 friends on Facebook.

• 37:38Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, but your groups are big. Okay, so, but tell me.

• 37:41Sam Parr?

  But that group is sick, right? How many people are in it? A thousand?

• 37:43Shaan Puri?

  A thousand people in this group. And people are basically posting, hey guys, here's the properties I own. And they show a bunch of cool photos. My strat, like for example, my family owned five big short-term rentals in Kissimmee, Florida, which is five miles from Disney World. So my strategy is basically Airbnb is near Disney World. I have a full-time job, I'm a PhD student, blah, blah, blah. And, um, and, uh, and then they're showing like these Disney themed rentals that they have. And then people go ask questions in the comments. And then everybody's got this like, you know, you're doing your, your magic thing where everybody feels comfortable just telling you how much money they're making. And, uh, everyone's sharing a bunch of good info. So, so I think that's really cool. What I wanted to hear from you is give me the top two most interesting stories that you've learned out of this.

• 38:27Sam Parr?

  I'm gonna tell you. I, uh, I've gotta be a little subliminal about this. So in that group, there's 11 or 100 or a thousand people. I met one person that's got $35 million in homes. He owns about 20 of them. And he's currently making about a million, close to a million dollars a month in profit.

• 38:49Shaan Puri?

  And was this person wealthy before this? How do you get to the $35 million worth of real estate?

• 38:54Sam Parr?

  They were mildly wealthy. They were worth probably $15 million. They had a business that they sold. Yes, they were not poor. And they invested a lot of it into, into, into short-term rentals. And now they have a staff of a couple of people who are full-time. And his take is like 800 grand a month. And I met another guy who worked at a hedge fund and he, his name's Richard. If you Google Richard, he has a story in there. And he eventually quit his hedge fund. Now he owns $50 million worth of short-term rentals. And the themes that I'm seeing are this. One, institutional capital has not come into short-term rentals, a significant amount.

• 39:33Sam Parr?

  Two, the numbers might be inflated because the economy is crushing, but I'm not entirely sure if that is totally the case, but definitely could be the case. Three, a couple of years ago, it was, people were just buying places without doing much math and the math like worked out when you, they're making 25% returns. And it's crazy. Now it's a little bit more challenging, but it's still a lot of opportunity. And it's sick, man. Like I've been learning all about it. It's wild.

• 40:01Shaan Puri?

  So of the things you've read in here, what, what seemed like the smartest, what I'll call small ball strategy? So throw out the guy who's had 15 million bucks and now has built this big thing. Who's done a small ball, start small, grow, grow it. And maybe in some niche, that's a cool, cool story out of this. Or you don't say who, but what is the, what do they do?

• 40:21Sam Parr?

  Is a million dollars considered small? So if you buy property for a million dollars, you're going to put down 150 grand for some of these guys. There's a guy in there. Yeah. If you go, are you in the group right now? Search the word coconut. There's a guy who bought a plot of land on a, it was a coconut farm in Mexico. And he put four, I think tiny homes and he rents them for a hundred and $50 a day in Mexico. And he did really nice landscaping, but not complicated stuff. It looks beautiful. Do you see it?

• 40:51Shaan Puri?

  Is it?

• 40:53Sam Parr?

  Something farms.

• 40:54Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. Can I say the name or no? Safa Farms?

• 40:56Sam Parr?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 40:56Shaan Puri?

  Safa Farms.

• 40:58Sam Parr?

  So click it.

• 40:58Shaan Puri?

  So six cabins.

• 40:59Sam Parr?

  Created this like.

• 41:00Shaan Puri?

  So, so it says a tiny eco hotel slash farm, six cabins, one house, in-ground fire pit and a pool in Mexico. And it looks cool. It's basically like a bunch of wooden cabins that look like really small. You know, one person, two person kind of stays. And then like really cool outdoor area with hammocks and pools and, you know, common areas and places to go to yoga with like chickens running around you.

• 41:24Sam Parr?

  Is that wild? And he talked about it in the post. I don't think he spent a significant amount of money to set that up, but he just, it's minimalist ish. It's kind of nice, but it's definitely minimalist, but it's, it's lovely. And so that's a really cool thing. I've seen a guy like that, like that is really interesting. And what they do is they go and stay there a couple of weeks out of the year.

• 41:45Shaan Puri?

  Dude, how cool is Airbnb that it created this opportunity for anybody to say, hey, look, if you can create an awesome experience for people, like a great, a great place to stay, a unique place to stay, we will give you money. You will be able to make money just by creating this cool little farm and huts set up in, in Villa Corona, Mexico. And how sick is that? And then on the other side, it's like, hey, you want to travel? Here's the, here's the, the buffet of like dope experiences. That's not just cookie cutter hotel that you can go stay at. Like, how sick is Airbnb? That's just like a respect.

• 42:22Sam Parr?

  It's amazing. It's, it's amazing. And what I'm learning is so basically the order of importance is when you're looking for, it's just like content. It's just like scrolling through YouTube. And so if you look at it through that lens, you can make a lot of money. For example, when you're buying a property, you go on Zillow and you look at their thumbnail pictures. You're like, what catches my eye? And then if you don't see anything there, you're like, all right, that, nothing here, but. Like, oh, they took a bad picture here, but if they changed the angle here and they made the light at sunset, this will look beautiful. And so you're basically shopping for thumbnails. And then the second thing that you're wanting to do is you're not shopping in any place in which you have to create demand. And so you use air DNA and it showed you who has the highest booking rate.

• 43:03Sam Parr?

  And then the third thing you do is you pick a very specific niche and you have one unique thing about the property. For example, you call it a zen, a zen thing, because you've got like a little pond in the front. Or what I'm gonna do is you call it like has a fancy gym or has a putt putt course or has like one unique thing.

• 43:22Shaan Puri?

  Right, right, right.

• 43:23Sam Parr?

  Like deck with view of sunset. And so you want that one unique thing and that's the same thing. That's the same way how content works.

• 43:30Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, because it lets you reimagine, okay, if this home was not for a family of four to live every day and go to the grocery store and come home. Well, then maybe this little space instead of a, you know, a living room that's about, you know, just two couches and a TV. It's like, maybe this is actually where companies are going to come for their retreats. And it's actually going to be different groups of 25 at a time and they need a big sauna in one area. And then they need a pool area, a barbecue pit. That's like, I will over invest on these things and I will, I don't need to have these daily utility functional things that a normal house would need.

• 44:04Sam Parr?

  Right. And it's just been so fascinating because I didn't realize how many like tech nerds are into this stuff. That group is so cool. It's so interesting. And anyway, we don't, we can move on, but I thought, I thought that was, I thought it's just an interesting world that I'm falling into. So like, you know, Rohin from Price Economics? He basically, he didn't tell me this, but it appears as though Price Economics is on the back, the back burner. And all of his time is on short-term rentals and he owns like seven of them. It's badass, man. It's a super interesting market.

• 44:35Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I just want to give money to this group and just be like, hey. You know, anybody who wants to like trick out their, their place and you know, whatever, or buy their next property. Hey, I'll just finance it with you and share cash flow. If you wanna, you know, you can have some preferred return. That's fine.

• 44:51Sam Parr?

  So that is the thing that's interesting to me. There's no such thing or there aren't many funds. So like you and I have invested, I think you did as well in like a BlackRock, like investment fund that like buys like 500 Walgreens and they just make 5%. There should be one of those for short-term rentals, just because if you believe in that category, you can have a REIT or skin in the game somehow. That's passive.

• 45:14Shaan Puri?

  Right. Yeah, that's wild. Okay, let's do, let's do one other thing.

• 45:20Shaan Puri?

  Let's see, I got a couple. Let me give you, let's do, let's do two quick ones. Okay.

• 45:28Shaan Puri?

  Tailgate guys, have you ever heard of this business?

• 45:31Sam Parr?

  No.

• 45:32Shaan Puri?

  So this, this came up at FarmCon. So I go to this dinner with this guy. He listens to the pod and he was telling me, I was like, you know, I was trying to make small talk at this dinner where I was like, okay, I hate normal small talk. Like I'm not just gonna, oh yeah, how's the conference going? Good. Yeah. Good. How about you? Good. Good. And I also don't know anything about farming. So like, it's not relevant to me. So, you know, okay, I can ask them a bunch of questions.

• 45:55Sam Parr?

  You like corn too?

• 45:56Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, exactly. You know, I don't have much to add there. So.

• 45:59Sam Parr?

  What's your favorite type of corn?

• 46:00Shaan Puri?

  So as a bit of an icebreaker, I was like, I was like, first job, like, what's your first, first job? First, first, first, I asked, did you have a side hustle in college? And I went around the table. I was like, did you have a side, because everybody was doing something different now and they're all established now. But did you, when you were in college, have a side hustle? And everybody had an interesting one. So this, I put that in my question bank of like, ah, interesting. You know, fun little convo when you're in a, in a kind of entrepreneurial group. So one guy tells a story. He goes, yeah, dude, I, I think he went to like Ole Miss or like what are the Alabama or like one of these like southern football colleges.

• 46:35Shaan Puri?

  And he's like, I created a like tailgate in a box. So what? He's basically like, yeah, like tailgating is huge before the football game. People go to the parking lot and they wanna grill and drink and play beer pong and do all this stuff. And he's like, you know, he's like, my family used to like to do it. So he's like, first, my family, it was so competitive. So you had to go wait like kind of overnight to get your spot. He's like, so they would send me, I'd have to go down to the, I forgot what it's called, the Grove or something like that. And I'd have to wait in the parking lot and hold my family's spot. And then I started to be like, okay, cool. You got the spot. Well, like, well, you gotta set up the tailgate for us. Like, come on, we need tables for beer pong and we need this and that. So he's like, okay, I'll get the stuff every week and I'll go do it. And he would create a good setup. And then that

• 47:17Shaan Puri?

  space next to him was like, hey, dude, can we next week, can we just, will you set ours up? And he's like, all right, uh, give me like 200 bucks. I'll get you guys some stuff. They're like, yeah, sure. And then the price goes up and he's like, oh, wait, I can basically charge each little tailgating square, like each little group of friends. $500 to just set up a cool tailgate spot for them, turnkey tailgating. And so he did this at his college and he's like, dude, I was making thousands and thousands of dollars every semester running this. And I was like,

• 47:48Sam Parr?

  Is it, I Googled tailgate guys, did it get acquired?

• 47:50Shaan Puri?

  So that was their competitor. So there was that nationwide version of this. He was doing this at small scale. That was his college side hustle, just to make a little bit of money. He's like, yeah, tailgate guys tried to come in, but they couldn't break into our market. Like we owned our market. And I was like, who's tailgate guys? He's like, oh, these guys basically took this idea and they started doing it nationwide. And I was like, that's really smart. He goes, yeah.

• 48:11Sam Parr?

  But how's it work? Do you have like, you just hire college kids and you say, we'll give you $50, $50 an hour for three hours on Saturday. We get 50, you get 50. And then do they, do the kids go to like Walmart and buy the stuff?

• 48:22Shaan Puri?

  I think either you give them the supplies in bulk or, or they have to go grab it and you tell them, hey, you need to get this table and these balls and this beer, this whatever.

• 48:31Sam Parr?

  And you use like a company credit card or something that has.

• 48:33Shaan Puri?

  Exactly. And, and so tailgate guy and what they do, the, the key is they would partner with the school. They would say, hey, we'd like to be the exclusive, uh, tailgate provider for the school. And the school would give them the license and so they had a monopoly and I was like, what? And it's like, yeah, actually this is pretty common that schools will basically pick one vendor provider, they'll sell the license rights. Basically, they'll let you become the official, you know, North Carolina, you know, you know, the Tar Heels. And they link to you and stuff. And you call it Tar Heel Tailgate and it's like their thing and you pay them a fee or a revenue share of what's going on. But in exchange, you get a monopoly. You get to be the only provider of this shit. And it's like super viral, right? Because you're just like,

• 49:15Shaan Puri?

  everybody sees, wow, that setup looks not bootleg. What is that? Oh, they use tailgate guys or whatever? Okay, cool. We should use them next time. And so tailgate guys apparently, like, I think they got bought out by private equity or something, but they, they were doing like, I don't know, 30 to 50 million dollars a year doing this. What? And, and I thought, what a great example of a college hustle that you then scale up. You say, all right, if this works at my college, it's going to work at every college. And every college that has a football program that has tailgating. And then we have this repeatable sales model of going to the university. And we tell them, hey, these other eight universities partner with us. We'd like to partner with you. You get extra income and we will provide a safe, you know, convenient way for your, your fans to do this. I thought, That's pretty wild.

• 49:59Shaan Puri?

  This is really cool little niche business. And then I started thinking, well, what are the other ones? What are the other businesses that use the same sales tactic of basically partnering with the school and becoming the exclusive provider? So we had a little mini because the guy listens to the podcast. So we had like a mini brainstorm session at dinner where he's like, dude, this is happening also with scooters. When like Bird and Lime came out in cities, companies decided, oh, shoot, we should become the exclusive scooter provider on campus. Like we'll go drop these scooters all everywhere. It'll be branded by this with the school. The school will get a rev share for every scooter ride that happens and we get a captive market that nobody can compete with us in. And so this started happening with scooters. And I was like, oh damn, what else could be done? Because scooters is cool because

• 50:44Shaan Puri?

  it's a new category, right? Tailgating worked because it was a new category. So you just have to think about like, what's something today that they don't even really have a Like an option for like they're not really, there isn't really like a market for it. You're creating the market.

• 50:57Sam Parr?

  What did he say?

• 50:58Shaan Puri?

  Well, we were kind of brainstorming, you know, he's, he's like, you know, one of the hard things is now schools have gotten slightly wise to it. They won't give the license up super easily. Meaning like they want to make sure they get a fair shake. So, once you come to them with the idea, they're like, great. Hold on 90 day proposal, request for proposal period where we're going to go like, see who wants to offer this to us. So we're going to go talk to five companies before we just say yes to you. But in the good old days, he used to be like, oh, they used to be like, sure. You know, you came to us, so you get the deal.

• 51:27Sam Parr?

  I am, I, I, I've learned a little bit about selling to schools. I, I, you frozen? Oh, there you are. I sent you this company. It's called Kira Cubby. It's kind of a bad name, Kira Cubby. But basically it's, I, I just sent it to you. Actually, I told Joe to send it to you. And you see it?

• 51:45Shaan Puri?

  No.

• 51:48Sam Parr?

  And what they do is it's like the most boring thing ever. So basically this guy, Stephen, he had an autistic kid. His kid was diagnosed with autism and he goes, I don't feel like sending him to a normal school. I don't think they're going to do anything. So he started a school and he, like 20 kids in the neighborhood went to the school. And he was like, man, managing the school. So first of all, that's amazing. Second of all, he was like, managing the school is a pain in the ass. And so he, so he found another parent in, he, he lives in Oakland. So the parent, other parents are like tech guys. And he found this guy who sent his kid to his school and they decided to build this software together. That basically makes it really easy to collect tuition payment and also pay your bills. So basically like a bill.com or, and then plus a QuickBooks and then plus Eventbrite.

• 52:31Sam Parr?

  So you can like check into after school programs and stuff like that. And they are crushing it. And it's just four guys and they got it up to like 2.4 million in revenue, recurring revenue. And, but he's telling me all about selling into schools and it sounds like a nightmare selling into a school.

• 52:46Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I think it is. You know, the company who I think has done the best of this is Mystery Science. Have you seen them?

• 52:52Sam Parr?

  Is that like a TV show? What is that?

• 52:55Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, kind of. Okay, so basically, um, oh, wow, they got acquired. I didn't realize this. They got acquired last year. No way. Hundred forty million dollars. Good for them. They, um, okay, so this, what Mystery Science was doing was they were like, all right, um, how do we make like entertaining videos, sort of like, uh, you know, I don't know, pick your favorite analogy, like Blues Clues or, um, whatever, you know, Reading Rainbow or whatever the hell that's called. Magic School Boss, whatever. And basically it's on every topic. So if you're like, you know, how do, why are plants green? So they're like, we start with a question that any kid would have. Why are plants green? Or like, um, you know, how hot is the sun? And they're like, we're gonna make the definitive, most entertaining, simple answer to that question.

• 53:39Shaan Puri?

  And it turns into, in some ways, like a, um, it's like a game where it's like, the teacher can just pick one of those questions and be like, hey, class, today, here's the question. Who, who wants to know the answer to this? Everyone's like, yeah, me, I want to know the answer. Like, great. We're gonna like have this little worksheet and this video, and the video's gonna like, tease us part of it, and then we have to go figure out the next bit, then we watch the next bit of the video. So it makes it easy for the teacher to like, teach a question that people are really interested in. And they reached like four and a half million teachers countrywide. Like, I think at one point, thirty or forty percent of all elementaries were using them. So they had like-

• 54:15Sam Parr?

  Dude, how did they only sell for a hundred and fifty million dollars?

• 54:17Shaan Puri?

  Incredible, um, penetration. It was, it was absolutely insane.

• 54:22Shaan Puri?

  They, I don't know why they sold for a hundred forty million, but I know that they had basically raised very little money. And they were super profitable. And so I think, you know, for the guys, they probably made, you know, over a hundred million dollars off this deal. And, um, you know, they raised, I think, they raised only four million dollars, like, lifetime.

• 54:39Sam Parr?

  Got it.

• 54:40Shaan Puri?

  It was a bit old. They started in two thousand and fourteen, so, you know, seven, seven years or so. And I think, you know, charging money is always, is always hard, but, uh, but these guys are super smart. I talked to the guy Keith, and I just really respected what they had built. I thought, wow, what a cool product. Amazing that they've gotten this level of saturation and it was like, the way they sold was it was like, you know, like bottoms up in a way, I think, where like teacher, it was just so like teachers couldn't help but talk about it to other teachers. Cause they were like, oh, this is amazing. It's like normally when I wheel out the TV.

• 55:13Sam Parr?

  Well, yeah, it makes your job way easy.

• 55:14Shaan Puri?

  Guilty. I'm like copping out. It's like, yeah, we're going to watch a movie today, class. But it's like, this is different. This is like, it's interactive. It's based on questions, based on science. And they're like, we're just going to teach science this way. And yeah, I thought it was amazing.

• 55:28Sam Parr?

  That's so good. This.

• 55:29Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, they reached 50% of the US elementary school market, which is.

• 55:33Sam Parr?

  How much revenue were they making?

• 55:34Shaan Puri?

  I don't know. At the time I was talking to them, they were doing like somewhere between 10 and 20 million in revenue profitably.

• 55:42Sam Parr?

  And did they make money through ads or they like sold worksheets?

• 55:45Shaan Puri?

  They sell the like subscription, I think to the.

• 55:47Sam Parr?

  It was a subscription.

• 55:47Shaan Puri?

  I think so, to the software.

• 55:49Sam Parr?

  Dude, how do you reach that many teachers but only have and only sell for 140? That's crazy to me.

• 55:54Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I don't know. This wild. Anyways, I gotta run, dude. I gotta call with this crazy crypto thing that I'm trying to get into. So I want to see if I can do that.

• 56:04Sam Parr?

  All right, we'll talk soon. Oh, all right, Sean, if you want to leave, you can leave, I think. Ben, do I got to read out some names?

• 56:11Ben?

  Yes. Actually, just one name.

• 56:15Sam Parr?

  All right, we did this thing where we gave 60 minutes of Sean and I's time. What did the person have to do to win?

• 56:22Ben?

  They had to review, rate and review us on Apple Podcasts.

• 56:26Sam Parr?

  Great. And the winner is, is it SS?

• 56:29Ben?

  Yes.

• 56:30Sam Parr?

  Spencer Scott, you are the winner. Has Spencer, he follows me on Twitter. He always replies to my stuff. Does he know that he won other than right now?

• 56:38Ben?

  Yeah, I told him.

• 56:39Sam Parr?

  Nice. All right. Spencer Scott's the winner. Last week, we gave the winner for the TikTok thing. So we did this TikTok thing where if you made videos on any platform and you use MFM clip hashtag, you, you could win five grand. We gave three? Did we have three or two?

• 56:55Ben?

  Two.

• 56:55Sam Parr?

  Two. And then before that, we did a contest where if you rate and review us, you won 60 minutes with Sean and I. So we gave you that one to Spencer Scott and we're going to keep doing these. We're not doing it yet, but we're going to keep doing them. So that's the episode. That's the winner.

• 57:09Sam Parr?

  Check it out.

• 57:20Sam Parr?

  Subtitles by the Amara.org community