3 strangers showed us how they made $8M, $10M, & $40M/year

140+ real business ideas database: https://clickhubspot.com/pkst Episode 852: Sam Parr ( https://x.com/theSamParr ) and Shaan Puri ( https://x.com/ShaanVP ) ask 3 founders to tell them the juiciest number behind their businesses and get advice live. — Show Notes: (0:00) Intro (1:31) Raav Gupta, Posha (20:03) Nick Saltarelli, Mid-Day Squares (39:48) Shreyas Parab, DayDream Dental — Links: • Posha - https://www.posha.com/ • Mid-Day Squares - https://www.middaysquares.com/ • DayDream Dental - https://www.daydream.dental/ — Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton (joinhampton.com): My community for founders. Average member does $25m/year. Many of the guests are members. Get after it...apply: http://joinhampton.com/mfm — Check Out Shaan's Stuff: • Shaan's weekly email - https://www.shaanpuri.com • Visit https://www.somewhere.com/mfm to hire worldwide talent like Shaan and get $500 off for being an MFM listener. Hire developers, assistants, marketing pros, sales teams and more for 80% less than US equivalents. • Mercury - Shaan uses Mercury across all of his companies. you can too: http://mercury.com/ Mercury is a fintech company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group, Column, N. A., Members FDIC • I run all my newsletters on Beehiiv and you should too + we're giving away $10k to our favorite newsletter, check it out: beehiiv.com/mfm-challenge My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by HubSpot Media // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano /

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

• 0:00Shaan Puri?

  All right. Today we're playing Shoot Your Shot where we let founders come in, sit in the hot seat and pitch us their business. We got founders that have million dollar businesses all the way up to a hundred million dollar businesses. They get 15 minutes and in it, they start by telling us the one big number. Give us the pitch and shoot the shot. They get to ask any questions that they want.

• 0:17Sam Parr?

  We've done this in New York City. This time it's in San Francisco. Whether you're listening on Spotify or YouTube, if you're working out right now, whatever you're doing right now, you need to stop and go to Spotify or go to YouTube, look us up on My First Million, and let us know in the comments which city you want us to go to next.

• 0:33Shaan Puri?

  All right, let's do it.

• 0:43Shaan Puri?

  All right, Sam, what's up? We are doing a new episode, new format. We're calling it Shoot Your Shot. And basically, we go from city to city. We invite founders from those cities to come and shoot their shot, to come pitch us. We got business owners that are doing a million dollars a year, two hundred million dollar businesses that you're going to see in this batch of founders. What should we expect?

• 1:05Sam Parr?

  Well, the best part about this podcast, the reason why people listen, the reason why we even do it, is we talk to like unique people. They tell us stuff that we don't normally see. And it's going to range from like people who are like way established and like killing it all the way down to people who are just getting started. And we don't actually know who's coming.

• 1:20Shaan Puri?

  We don't know who's coming. This is blind to us. These are all people who listen to the podcast, right? People who listen to this podcast, it's founders, entrepreneurs, business owners. It's like an audition. It's like American Idol, but for business, I guess.

• 1:33Shaan Puri?

  All right, let's do this. So Shoot Your Shot. Let's get the first founder in here. Who do we got?

• 1:37Sam Parr?

  What's up, dude?

• 1:38Shaan Puri?

  Here he comes.

• 1:42Sam Parr?

  What's up, dog?

• 1:44Shaan Puri?

  All right, have a seat. So you got 15 minutes, but take your time here.

• 1:47Speaker 02

  Excited to be here.

• 1:48Shaan Puri?

  What's your name?

• 1:49Speaker 02

  Ragav.

• 1:50Shaan Puri?

  Ragav, okay. And your company is Pasha?

• 1:54Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 1:54Shaan Puri?

  Pasha, okay.

• 1:56Sam Parr?

  Where are you from?

• 1:56Speaker 02

  I live in San Francisco, the Bay Area, to be precise. Grew up in India and have been here for five years now.

• 2:03Sam Parr?

  How old are you?

• 2:04Speaker 02

  I'm 32.

• 2:05Sam Parr?

  Is this your first company?

• 2:06Speaker 02

  It is my first company. I did run a project before this where we were trying to build micro winter mines. But everything that I've learned about Pasha has been at Pasha. Everything I've learned about building a business has been primarily at Pasha.

• 2:21Shaan Puri?

  So we have one rule, which is we are shameless numbers guys. And so we ask everybody, give us a big juicy, impressive or interesting number. Doesn't have to be that big, but interesting number. That would hook us. Go ahead.

• 2:34Speaker 02

  So we're amongst the 1% of robotics companies you have ever met that are actually shipping a real product in real homes, in real kitchens, with 1,000 real world deployments.

• 2:47Shaan Puri?

  Okay, so you're in the 1% of non-bullshitting robotics companies. You've shipped 1,000 robots. What do your robots do?

• 2:53Speaker 02

  We are putting a private chef in every home, and we're doing that by building cooking robots for homes. We thought that if Vemo and Tesla and Zooks can use computer vision and AI to take you from point A to point B, why can we not use the same technology to cook a fresh meal for you? Takeout is expensive. Eating at, I mean, cooking at home takes forever. There's no way for you to eat food that is fresh, that's delicious, that doesn't take 60 minutes of your time in the kitchen, that doesn't cost $25 per serving, and we're with alternatives.

• 3:27Sam Parr?

  Dude, my diet right now is man kibble. You know what man kibble is?

• 3:31Speaker 02

  I don't.

• 3:32Sam Parr?

  It's three pounds of ground beef with rice that will last me for three or four days in soy sauce. So I'm on board with this. Did you raise funding?

• 3:41Speaker 02

  We are backed by Excel.

• 3:43Sam Parr?

  How much did you raise?

• 3:44Speaker 02

  Eight million.

• 3:45Sam Parr?

  Eight million dollars. And how long ago did you start it?

• 3:47Speaker 02

  We started the company eight years ago. This was right out of my, you know, parents' ground floor. This was back in India. It was still a project. We formalized the company about five years ago.

• 3:59Shaan Puri?

  Is this the thing, by the way? This is the robot?

• 4:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's the robot. And it's cooking.

• 4:04Shaan Puri?

  Can you give us like, is there like a demo? Can it do something? Can it cook us something?

• 4:08Speaker 02

  So what we did was we just cooked spaghetti alfredo with mushrooms. The food's ready.

• 4:13Shaan Puri?

  I haven't eaten it. This is perfect.

• 4:15Speaker 02

  And, you know, you need to-

• 4:16Shaan Puri?

  This looks good. By the way, I don't know if the camera should have already seen this. This looks amazing. So wait, wait. Did it come out like this?

• 4:23Speaker 02

  We cooked using fresh ingredients, fresh olives, fresh garlic, fresh milk, fresh butter, fresh pasta, and we put some fresh Parmesan cheese on top, and it was all cooked on Pasha.

• 4:34Sam Parr?

  That machine did all of this?

• 4:37Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 4:38Sam Parr?

  How much does that cost?

• 4:39Speaker 02

  $1,500, which is less than a month of takeout.

• 4:44Shaan Puri?

  For who?

• 4:46Speaker 02

  For a family of four.

• 4:47Shaan Puri?

  Okay.

• 4:48Sam Parr?

  Okay, and so what all-

• 4:49Shaan Puri?

  So this is, I mean, give it a score here.

• 4:50Sam Parr?

  It's great. I mean, nine or 10?

• 4:52Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, this is very good.

• 4:53Speaker 02

  Yeah. As I said, 1,000 customers already use us three times a week, which is more than seven. Because you're numbers people, our M6 retention beats Doordash, HelloFresh, any other food service out there. Last month alone, we clocked $2 million in bookings. We did that again this month.

• 5:13Shaan Puri?

  Sam's already finished.

• 5:14Sam Parr?

  That was great.

• 5:14Shaan Puri?

  It's supposed to just be a taste.

• 5:17Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 5:17Sam Parr?

  Wait, so walk me through this. So the viewer, the listener won't know this, but the viewer will see what you did. But tell us, because it looks just like a bowl of-

• 5:28Shaan Puri?

  Can you grab a couple of the things in the back? It looks like basically there's ingredient containers.

• 5:33Speaker 02

  So here is a pan. It's a pan that's dishwasher safe. There's a detachable stirrer, detachable spatula. There are containers where you put ingredients. There is a drawer, which is super cool, which has spices. There's space for oil and water. And most impressively, there's a camera that looks at change in color, texture, consistency, makes sure it is mimicking a human chef's intelligence, so food can be cooked perfectly.

• 6:02Shaan Puri?

  How did you train this?

• 6:03Speaker 02

  So in the early days, we had chefs alone training Pasha. Now we have our customers training Pasha. We possibly have the world's largest culinary vision data set for cooking food. And we are taking the Tesla approach. Vemo spent 500,000 hours of supervised driving and $20 billion in venture capital to crack self-driving. Tesla did it a different way. Tesla said, we'll release something that's useful to consumers, also use it to collect tons of data, and then put robot axes out.

• 6:35Shaan Puri?

  Wait, so how does that work? Hey, I want to tell you about something pretty cool. We have a database of all of the business ideas that have been discussed on this podcast. So hundreds of episodes, the team at HubSpot went through, they pulled out all the simple, relatable, interesting, profitable ideas that we have brainstormed, and they're all available for download for free. Just click the link in the description below. Thank you to our friends at HubSpot for sponsoring this podcast and putting together this free resource for you guys. Back to the show. If a customer is that good at cooking, why do they even buy this? And how do they, how do they train your thing?

• 7:06Speaker 02

  So customers buy this because they want a freshly cooked meal. This can only cook one pot meals for now.

• 7:13Sam Parr?

  Oh, yeah. One part meal.

• 7:14Shaan Puri?

  No, one pot. Have you ever seen this trend of one pot meals?

• 7:17Sam Parr?

  No, I don't know.

• 7:18Shaan Puri?

  If you go to like Reddit or TikTok, there's like a whole, like, it's a category of cooking called a one pot meal, where you're just going to put a bunch of stuff together.

• 7:24Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I mean, I called that a crock pot growing up. So you're not going to make cheeseburgers.

• 7:28Speaker 02

  So it's not going to do a steak. It's not going to flip burgers. It's not going to bake a cake. Anything that requires spreading out, like pancakes, is something it won't do.

• 7:40Shaan Puri?

  What are, what's the most popular two or three things that people cook with this?

• 7:44Speaker 02

  So the data changes as we change our customer base, but our Indian users cook a lot of paneer. Our Italian users would cook a lot of risotto and spaghetti because it's so hard to cook risotto at home, because you have to continue to stir. Our Thai Vietnamese users would use it to cook Thai red curry, Thai green curry.

• 8:04Shaan Puri?

  Not to be a hater, but basically, is the robot just taking up the easiest part of cooking, which is just stirring?

• 8:11Speaker 02

  The robot is taking away the stirring. It's taking away the regulation of heat. It's taking away you being there to add ingredients at the right time. It's taking away you monitoring the food, because, you know, an eight-year-old needs to know what charred onions look like, what browned onions look like. So all the intelligence and all the babysitting is being taken away. It does not cut down your time in the kitchen from 60 minutes to zero. It cuts down your time in the kitchen from 60 minutes to 10 minutes.

• 8:43Shaan Puri?

  So what's, give us two things. Give us the big idea. Meaning you said something like it's already used more than the oven. So do you have this sort of vision that like, hey, look, our kitchens all come with these appliances? These three, and now here comes number four. It's going to be in everybody's home. That means it's this big. Like, get me excited about the big idea here.

• 9:03Speaker 02

  So 10 years from now, nobody is going to be cooking because they have to. They're only be going to cook because they want to. Same way, nobody's going to be driving because they have to. They're only going to be driving because they want to. Cooking is going the exact same way. Doordash is something you will only order when your robot at home cannot cook the meal that you want to eat, or when you're ordering corporate lunches. Cooking will become a leisurely activity, something that you only do for joy, but not Monday through Friday when it's a chore. And we are the company that's building the future, where every house will have a robot chef that cooks food for you, so you don't have to.

• 9:40Sam Parr?

  That's pretty cool. Okay, so how much revenue are you doing? What's your like run rate right now?

• 9:45Speaker 02

  So we did $2 million in bookings last month.

• 9:49Sam Parr?

  And it's $1,500?

• 9:50Shaan Puri?

  Why are you saying bookings? Just because you don't have the devices yet? So it's pre-sale?

• 9:53Speaker 02

  So we have about 1,000 units shipped on the field, and a long pre-order waitlist that we're trying to fulfill as fast as we can. So we're making sure our manufacturers can scale with demand. We're making sure our recipe library can scale with demand. We're making sure reliability, supply chain, logistics, all of that is just scaling with demand.

• 10:14Sam Parr?

  This is awesome. What's the, so the current bottleneck is manufacturing these things?

• 10:17Speaker 02

  It's manufacturing, it's also operations. So whenever you ship a hardware product out in the early days, you always need to handhold people. Something or the other can go wrong. And you need a service infrastructure for people to have support if something goes wrong.

• 10:35Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 10:36Speaker 02

  It's the same bottleneck that Vemo has.

• 10:37Shaan Puri?

  Where'd you get the 2 million in bookings? Is that just viral demos on social media, basically? Did you do anything to get customers, or it's just people like the novelty?

• 10:46Sam Parr?

  And did they give you the cash already?

• 10:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, they gave us the cash already. There are three ways that we drive demand. The first is organic word of mouth. Every paying customer gets us at least one more paying customer without us spending a single dollar on marketing. Second, Porsche is built for the camera. So a random nobody would get Porsche home, shoot content, post it online, and overnight they become internet celebrities. We had this creator who had 11,000 followers. Within six weeks, she got X number of followers. Guess what X is?

• 11:20Sam Parr?

  I don't know.

• 11:21Speaker 02

  She went from 11,000 to 450,000 followers. And all that changed was that she was not shooting Porsche content, and she started shooting Porsche content.

• 11:30Sam Parr?

  Have you seen The Medic?

• 11:31Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 11:32Sam Parr?

  Have you seen The Medic, Sean?

• 11:33Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I've seen it because of this exact reason.

• 11:35Sam Parr?

  I own it.

• 11:36Shaan Puri?

  Fancy Roomba.

• 11:37Sam Parr?

  It's awesome. And it like, there's like one viral moment, but there's probably a few, actually. One, it sucks up a sock and it like opens up its latch and it like throws it out. And it's huge, though. Like, I live in New York City. I, this sounds awesome. My wife complains about how much time it cooks. And I'm like, dude, just make man kibble. It's fine. And I would definitely rather eat that, but that's huge. I can't use that in New York yet.

• 11:58Shaan Puri?

  You can't use it because you don't have counter space, you mean?

• 12:00Sam Parr?

  Counter space. Yeah.

• 12:02Speaker 02

  So you're absolutely right. And the good thing is that the market is so huge, that there are enough people with space to put this in their kitchen. We're working on the next version of Porsche that will be miniaturized, that will fit in Manhattan apartments. But the version after that will actually replace the range in your home.

• 12:20Sam Parr?

  Oh, that's interesting.

• 12:21Speaker 02

  And cook four dishes at a time.

• 12:22Shaan Puri?

  So I got a question. This can't cook meat, right?

• 12:25Speaker 02

  It cannot cook steak, but it can cook meat as long as the meat has been cubed, and the size is one cubic inches or smaller.

• 12:33Shaan Puri?

  Okay, so you can put chicken in there cubed, and then it cooks it.

• 12:35Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 12:35Sam Parr?

  Hey, what do your parents think?

• 12:37Speaker 02

  They're extremely proud that I was able to break out of the family business, which was, which had nothing to do with tech, and I used my education well to actually make a big impact in the world. They're extremely proud and happy.

• 12:52Sam Parr?

  They're supportive. They like it.

• 12:53Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:53Sam Parr?

  That's badass. What was your family business?

• 12:55Speaker 02

  My dad runs a food grain business. So they grind wheat. You might have heard of this thing. It's called an atta chaki.

• 13:02Shaan Puri?

  Okay, they grind it.

• 13:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, they grind wheat and then they sell fresh flour. So fresh food has been something that's always been close to my heart from the very beginning.

• 13:10Shaan Puri?

  What do you need help with?

• 13:11Speaker 02

  You guys have built great communities. You with MFM and you with Hampton. We feel community is going to be a big lever of growth for Porsche. How do you think we should leverage community to continue to grow Porsche?

• 13:26Sam Parr?

  Let me say something really quick. I think people use the word community and audience differently.

• 13:31Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 13:32Sam Parr?

  So for example, MFM is an audience. Meaning if we quit doing this, the audience eventually is going to go away. Sean owns a brand that has a community, has a community online, where lots of his customers are talking and interacting, and that's a community. And I think you'd have to determine which of those two are you actually talking about.

• 13:52Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, the best thing I heard of this is if everybody was together, which way would the chairs be pointing? So an audience is all the chairs point at the stage.

• 13:59Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 13:59Shaan Puri?

  A community is the chairs point at each other. So for example, to your question. What's that air fryer brand that went crazy, like just like the?

• 14:06Speaker 02

  Ninja?

• 14:07Shaan Puri?

  Uh, yeah, maybe it's Ninja, but like, basically the air fryer in the last like five years had like a big renaissance. And actually.

• 14:13Sam Parr?

  Or the creamy did too.

• 14:14Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, ninja creamy did too, where there's a community of people that are sharing recipes. And it works because I think a little bit more than yours, the user can kind of figure out, like, create new things that rather than like the app only lets you do 14 items, pick one of the 14. And so if you have some element of UGC, user-generated cooking, in this case, user-generated recipes, that they could share and they could kind of get props for from one another, I think that's the key. And you have to find, you know, a hub for them. Is it on Reddit? Is it on Discord? Is it on Facebook? Is it on Instagram? How are you going to get people to share this stuff? But I would study what the air fryer community did. I would study what the ninja creamy did. And I would try to replicate as much as I could of the factors of that success.

• 14:57Sam Parr?

  Yeah, like, for example, I used to love this app called Aptiv. It was a fitness app. And they had a Facebook group. And I was very active on the Facebook group. And same with Peloton. I'm sure they have a Facebook group where you like talk about your favorite instructors. They're like, has anyone tried this type of workout? Another one is ladders. That's another fitness app that they have this like community. So that's their customers talking together. It's super valuable. And so what I would do is for every, I would put like something in your, when you ship it out, like, you just, I don't know, if it's like mostly moms, I would, in what age they are, might choose Facebook. If it was nerds, I would choose Reddit, whatever. Facebook groups, so I do think are still the best.

• 15:32Shaan Puri?

  I think the other question is, what do you, what's the bigger benefit you're attaching yourself to? So are people buying this fundamentally for time savings? So then you would say, well, this is for people who really value their time. Maybe it's a busy professional, the working mom, et cetera, et cetera. And you need to create metrics and success stories and attract that type of person. Go to those influencers who are going to spout that kind of religion. Or is the religion about foodies, people who love food, but they've been limited by skill?

• 15:57Speaker 02

  Good.

• 15:58Shaan Puri?

  I would love to cook risotto. I would love to eat risotto, but I don't know how to cook risotto. And that skill gap is getting bridged by this thing, and it lets me indulge my foodiness. And it's not about the time savings. It's not about brutal, like, efficiency, utility. It's about enjoyment. And so I would try to figure out, and the easy answer is going to be, oh, it's both, it's all. But in order to really get a community going, you want to have a beachhead. You want to have like an initial persona that you're targeting. And really, it's like, what's the happy ending, the dream outcome for that person? The kind of inner itch that they've been waiting to scratch, that your product is helping them do that. Your product's not the hero. It's the tool that the average person uses to become a hero themselves. And so which one, which one is that? Something I would kind of ask myself, because that'll change a lot of your marketing, a lot of your strategy.

• 16:43Sam Parr?

  But my gut tells me you're not going to have a customer acquisition problem.

• 16:47Speaker 02

  Right.

• 16:48Sam Parr?

  I don't think that's ever going to be the problem.

• 16:49Speaker 02

  A marketing team is like a total of one person.

• 16:52Sam Parr?

  I don't think that's going to be the issue. Your constraint is not going to be getting people to buy it. It's, they're going to be, does this thing actually work and kind of get it in their house?

• 16:58Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, but it'll change your product strategy. Like, if your product strategy is about utility, man kibble, like, he wants health and he wants convenience.

• 17:06Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 17:06Shaan Puri?

  So he's willing to sacrifice presentation, taste, and other things maybe along the way. But you would create a different product. Like, you would literally have different pieces of the robot, different constraints on the manufacturing side, versus if you were trying to make this, this beautiful, Parmesan topped, impressive thing when friends come over, yeah, I cooked this for the family. I was never able to do that before.

• 17:28Speaker 02

  Correct.

• 17:28Shaan Puri?

  Maybe making it easier or harder to manufacture.

• 17:31Speaker 02

  Right. I think community is important primarily because it's not growth necessarily. It drives, but, but over time, I think your CAC comes down. Because, you know, your K factor just jumps up. People start talking about you. Second, engagement increases, and so retention increases. And if retention increases.

• 17:49Shaan Puri?

  So let's pause them. Of the best community builders in the world, how many of them use phrases like K factor, engagement, stickiness, and CAC?

• 17:57Sam Parr?

  Not this early, at least. You get magic first.

• 18:00Shaan Puri?

  Community is from the soul, you know what I mean? And so you gotta like have two different parts to your brain. There's metrics guy, startup founder, go raise money from Excel.

• 18:09Speaker 02

  And there's feelings guy.

• 18:10Shaan Puri?

  And there's feelings guy. There's soul guy. We're going to do this because it's awesome. We're going to do this because it's the right thing to do. We're going to do this.

• 18:15Sam Parr?

  And they eventually can, but right now, it's like, cool shit that eventually gets popular does not talk about K factor. It talks about silly. It talks about emotion, you know, these types of words, not K factor. Don't worry about that. Just get the 1,500 people who are using this. Get them to log into Facebook groups every single week to talk about, to either, to complain, to celebrate, to nerd out. And then you also need lore. So lore would be like, for us, it would be like no small boy stuff. Like, we say these silly phrases. We're no nerds in a room. I'd be like, how do I get people to like us more? You know what I mean? We just make up dumb stuff. Like, we used to call this show, this episode, the denim dungeon, just because I wore denim. Like, do that silly stuff. It doesn't math. Who cares? But you just do this stuff where you create lore. You can create catchphrases.

• 18:59Speaker 02

  Shared stories.

• 19:00Sam Parr?

  A common bond, us versus the world. And that sounds silly when it comes to cooking, but like, you could still do it, right? So you create this, you create lore, and you repeat it constantly, and you have a face. Whether you or if you have someone else at your company, you seem very charismatic. I think you could do it. But you have like, every, every cult needs shared language, rituals, and a leader.

• 19:20Shaan Puri?

  All right, we got to wrap up.

• 19:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:21Shaan Puri?

  Ragav, thanks for coming.

• 19:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:23Shaan Puri?

  Porsche?

• 19:24Sam Parr?

  Porsche.com. You got the URL. Good job.

• 19:27Speaker 02

  Amazing. Thank you so much for the time.

• 19:29Sam Parr?

  All right, we appreciate you. God bless. All right, see you, dude.

• 19:32Shaan Puri?

  Thank you.

• 19:35Shaan Puri?

  Hey, let's take a quick break. You know that feeling when strategy is done, the brief is written, everyone's aligned, and you realize someone still has to sit down and actually create all the content? That someone is usually you, and it's due tomorrow. Well, the Breeze Assistant from HubSpot can help. It works right inside HubSpot. You can draft a campaign copy, blog posts, emails, all in your brand voice, all using your actual customer data. So you don't create just content, you create content that converts. Check out HubSpot.com, the agentic customer platform for growing businesses.

• 20:03Sam Parr?

  All right, we have another one. Who we got?

• 20:05Shaan Puri?

  Bring them in. Yo, what's going on?

• 20:10Sam Parr?

  What's good, boys? You sound like a hockey player.

• 20:14Shaan Puri?

  All right, we got-

• 20:15Speaker 03

  I spend too much time in the locker room, that's the problem.

• 20:18Shaan Puri?

  So I know you. So this is Nick, and I know your product because I've been addicted to these things. I actually had to wean myself off of them. I was like, I needed a midday break of eating midday squares. But do you know Nick well, or no?

• 20:31Sam Parr?

  Never. I don't, I've just met him a second ago.

• 20:33Speaker 03

  I just lurk on X.

• 20:34Sam Parr?

  Yes, well, I have these in my office at Hampton because my co-founder is obsessed with them, and I started eating them. They are awesome.

• 20:40Speaker 03

  I appreciate that. I appreciate that.

• 20:42Shaan Puri?

  So you're Nick, midday squares is your company?

• 20:44Speaker 03

  Sure is.

• 20:44Shaan Puri?

  That you and your wife do?

• 20:45Speaker 03

  I got two other partners. Yeah, I got my, shout out to my wife and my brother-in-law. So we didn't-

• 20:49Sam Parr?

  Oh, keep it all in the family.

• 20:50Shaan Puri?

  We gotta talk about his wife, she's amazing.

• 20:51Speaker 03

  She's the beast.

• 20:52Shaan Puri?

  Okay, so before we start, we want you to start with the one big number.

• 20:56Speaker 03

  We basically sold $40 million worth of $2.49 chocolate bars. That equates to about, let's just call it roughly 60 bars per minute have to be consumed every minute in 365 days a year for you to hit that number. So-

• 21:11Shaan Puri?

  Wow. 40 million in-

• 21:13Sam Parr?

  This year.

• 21:14Speaker 03

  In the last 12 months.

• 21:15Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 21:15Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 21:15Shaan Puri?

  60 of these bad boys every minute, every, every minute of the year.

• 21:19Speaker 03

  Every minute of the year, 365 days a year.

• 21:21Shaan Puri?

  Including, if I'm not wrong, wasn't Kim Kardashian spotted with, with these in her bag? Is that true?

• 21:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, she's-

• 21:27Shaan Puri?

  Not paid, right?

• 21:28Speaker 03

  Not paid. She's hooked us up two times on her social. And I think that's, that's the beauty of like, when you're, when you're hustling and we make it a point to be in with all the chefs. And so we're not looking for the direct connection to celebrities. That's what everybody's doing. So we've made it a point over the last decade to become friends with chefs. And, and that's, so Chef K, shout out Chef K, who cooks for the Kardashians. I mean, we were sending our product for years and years and years.

• 21:55Sam Parr?

  No.

• 21:55Shaan Puri?

  And influenced the influencer's strategy. So who influences the influencers? And then you, actually influencing them is a lot easier.

• 22:03Sam Parr?

  But you find who the chefs are of celebrities?

• 22:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's a lot of chefs on Instagram and TikTok that you can see who they're cooking for.

• 22:10Shaan Puri?

  Athletes and others.

• 22:12Sam Parr?

  And you just DM them, say, hey, can I send you some?

• 22:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:14Shaan Puri?

  What's special about the product?

• 22:15Sam Parr?

  What is the product?

• 22:16Speaker 03

  Okay, so we started out as chocolate bars. And crazy thing happened, you know, since we started this business in 2018, chocolate went parabolic, the cost of cocoa. And that means we lost like 27% of our gross margin overnight. We were killing it. And chocolate, we were paying $4,000 a kilo for cocoa butter. It went up to 32,000, just to give you perspective.

• 22:38Shaan Puri?

  There's like a cocoa-

• 22:39Speaker 03

  Crisis.

• 22:40Shaan Puri?

  Cocoa crisis? What, what, why is there, why was there the cocoa crisis?

• 22:43Speaker 03

  It's the cycle that happens all the time, which is super interesting. It starts off with like a real mismatch in terms of weather will come in, disease will spread, then there won't be enough cocoa coming to the ports, and then corruption kicks in, though. And corruption usually takes about two years. I got stories, I went into the Ecuadorian forest. So like, if you ever want to go there, we could go there. But basically, you know, when your back's against the wall, I remember, we started this thing with like no Uden economics, kind of like, I'm not comparing this to Tesla in any sense, but build the product, no gross margin, nobody wanted to manufacture this thing. Then we went to a big kitchen, and then we built the plant. And we had finally reached profitability, everybody, and then we get smashed by this cocoa thing.

• 23:26Sam Parr?

  Had you raised money, or is this whole thing bootstrapped?

• 23:28Speaker 03

  No, no, we raised money through quasi-equity in our government. So shout out to the Canadian government's super pro in agricultural manufacturing. So they were able to give us-

• 23:36Sam Parr?

  How much, in aggregate, have you raised?

• 23:38Speaker 03

  22 million in total.

• 23:39Sam Parr?

  So you've raised $22 million?

• 23:40Shaan Puri?

  They built their own plant.

• 23:41Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 23:42Shaan Puri?

  They're a great follow on social. In fact, I've stolen many things from your social strategy. So you guys, his wife in particular, they make this incredible content. So they got sued by whatever, Hershey, who, I forget who it was, Hershey's-

• 23:54Speaker 03

  I can't confirm nor deny.

• 23:55Shaan Puri?

  I can say this stuff. They got a cease and desist from someone being like, you can't use the color orange, or you know, like stuff like that.

• 24:01Speaker 03

  It was orange.

• 24:02Shaan Puri?

  It was like a ridiculous-

• 24:03Speaker 03

  I'm sure we could all put two and two together.

• 24:04Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, Reese's was like, hey, get off orange. So instead of just sort of taking the disadvantage, they said, how can we turn this into an advantage? And they came out with this campaign where they were making videos, talking about how they're just this independent company.

• 24:16Speaker 03

  We actually made a diss track.

• 24:17Shaan Puri?

  They made a rap diss track, they made a music video, him and his wife. And it's like ridiculous, but it kind of works. And they tell the story. And they tell the story about their plant. And they tell the story about the, they tell the story about the good things and the bad, which I think everybody only tells the good. And there's a lot to learn from y'all's strategy. But also, you guys have a lot of like natural charisma and storytelling ability.

• 24:36Sam Parr?

  Who named it midday squares? Cause it's perfect.

• 24:38Speaker 03

  Thank you, man. I think it was me and my wife brainstorming, riffing. Shout out to Five Hour Energy. So I listened to the podcast and Five Hour Energy, and I, he was so methodical about like, I want my product to be what it is. And we were, we really, so the big gap that we saw was that the afternoon market's just as big as the morning breakfast market, except it gets nearly no attention. So like, everybody's crowded into breakfast, and nobody's really focused on the afternoon part.

• 25:05Shaan Puri?

  For adults.

• 25:06Speaker 03

  For adults, yeah, specifically.

• 25:07Shaan Puri?

  And so was this a form factor that already existed, that people were already doing these like, kind of square, I don't even know what this is. It's half-

• 25:15Speaker 03

  It's a dual-layered square, yeah.

• 25:16Shaan Puri?

  What's the bottom?

• 25:17Speaker 03

  Peanut butter base.

• 25:18Shaan Puri?

  Okay, peanut butter base, you got jelly on top. This is a PB and J one. Or this, that's PBJ. This is also PBJ strawberry. But you also have chocolate, right?

• 25:26Speaker 03

  Chocolate's where I started the business.

• 25:27Shaan Puri?

  Chocolate's where it started. Where did the initial idea come from? You're just sitting around, and why this?

• 25:32Speaker 03

  So my cousins, my cousin was super high up at Smucker's, and he was just always pushing me to get into this gang, you know? And we would always riff back and forth. And finally, through a few of his friends and stuff, I started getting data. And it was the data that like really sprung to me was chocolate was growing at a ridiculous rate. So chocolate that wasn't using palm kernel oil at the time, and refrigerated was growing. So like, the refrigerated category at grocery stores, fastest growing section of a grocery store. So that's why I keep it seeing refrigeration pop everywhere. Like Fresh Pet at the pet section, they're starting to put fridges in the-

• 26:09Shaan Puri?

  Oh, so every category started to have a refrigerated-

• 26:13Speaker 03

  Item.

• 26:13Shaan Puri?

  Item. We were talking about this with vitamins, right? Like those liquid vitamins that you put in the fridge versus in the cabinet. Oh wait, so go back. Your cousin's at Smucker's?

• 26:21Speaker 03

  Yeah. Shout out to Aurelio, by the way, that's my cousin.

• 26:24Shaan Puri?

  And he's like, you gotta get into this jelly game. And you're, and so you're studying the data, you notice this trend of refrigeration in different categories. So you notice chocolates on the rise, there's not a refrigerated chocolate.

• 26:35Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 26:35Shaan Puri?

  You see a gap, you see an opportunity.

• 26:37Speaker 03

  Big time.

• 26:38Sam Parr?

  Tell us how much money you, you put in of your own money to do it? And then if you could remember each year's revenue leaving up to-

• 26:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, 100%. So basically, it took about 60 grand. Me and my partners basically put this together. We put in 60 grand. So we created a constraint. We couldn't use Facebook ads. We had to get to a million dollars of revenue, and we couldn't use Facebook ads. That was constraint number one. And number two, it all had to be in our city. So we couldn't like, just spray and pray. We had to, we chose Montreal is where we came from. We're like, we gotta get to a million dollars here. And if we get here, then we can go to the next level where we can really start to take this seriously.

• 27:11Shaan Puri?

  That's dope. It was the first one on Facebook ads, just because, hey, we don't have a lot of capital, so we're not going to be able to reserve this much money to burn there? Or was it, I get the Montreal one, which is like, look, let's try to get people that we can see, feel, and touch here to love it.

• 27:25Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 27:25Shaan Puri?

  Because if they don't really love it, we don't have it right yet, before we earn the right to go to other cities.

• 27:30Speaker 03

  I'm, I'm contradict, I think Facebook creates a lot of false positives for early businesses.

• 27:35Sam Parr?

  At least early on.

• 27:35Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 27:36Shaan Puri?

  So what'd you do to get Montreal on board?

• 27:38Speaker 03

  The content, man. It was, so this was, and this is where the brilliance of my, my wife and my brother-in-law. So it was, it was like really simple. Going out, none of us had social followings. That's a really important piece, right? Cause a lot of people feel intimidated when they're getting into this thing, like you gotta have a pre, we had no followings. And so for the whole summer, we just started posting, when you're making food products, you usually end up in really cool environments. You know, we were in labs with like food scientists and different manufacturing plants where we were testing stuff. And so we just all told each other, like, everybody, when we're doing something, cameras on, tell people what you're doing, but don't reveal what you're doing. Just show the environment. And people started getting interested, like, what, like, what the hell are you guys doing? You know, especially all of us had not come from this industry.

• 28:21Sam Parr?

  Okay, so it was like, pretty young guys are like, we don't know what the hell we were doing.

• 28:25Shaan Puri?

  But you're saying your friends, your own natural social network was like-

• 28:28Speaker 03

  My mom thought I was losing my mind.

• 28:28Shaan Puri?

  Was like, what's going on? What, why is Nick suddenly in this like, lab, wearing a hairnet, you know, testing different people?

• 28:35Speaker 03

  Correct. And cause we all, my wife was in fashion, my brother-in-law was like a Jim Buffett going around colleges. And I had typically been in software my whole career prior to that. So to see us with like hairnets, doing stuff was like, okay.

• 28:46Shaan Puri?

  So you use content, you use story to get, to get it going?

• 28:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 28:49Shaan Puri?

  Tell us about the ramp. So you start off, year one, what'd you do?

• 28:52Speaker 03

  This is where the magic happened, okay? So when we turned on the jets in September, so September 2018, we sold our product on our website for 50 cents. And there's two reasons, okay? So you could buy one square for 50 cents. And the idea was, it was all a content play. So we didn't want to actually make money, but we didn't want freebie people. So you had to get your credit card out, actually do a transaction. And we hand-delivered everything for five months. So it was all in Montreal.

• 29:22Sam Parr?

  He's an animal.

• 29:23Speaker 03

  So we did-

• 29:23Shaan Puri?

  By the way, Nick's the only one who's not based in San Francisco doing this thing. He flew in for this, too. This guy is the ultimate hustler.

• 29:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, Ben messaged me, he's like, you happen, are you, any chance you're gonna be in San Francisco Monday? I'm like, yeah, of course. He's like, here it is. I'm like, okay, perfect. I'm flying in, hustler. It's the only way, man, you gotta make opportunity. So yeah, so we're, we're getting in the car, we do deliveries for like five months. Here's where the magic happened on content. We would wake up in the morning, every morning, and this I took, I think I took do things that don't scale, and we just went way too far with it. So in the morning, all of our orders would be ready, and we would literally go on people's Instagram. So if you had a dog named Chuck, we'd be like, shout out Chuck, and we would wear these crazy outfits, and we took Polaroids of ourselves, okay?

• 30:09Sam Parr?

  Just meathead shit.

• 30:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, complete like-

• 30:11Shaan Puri?

  Poor customer.

• 30:12Speaker 03

  And we would take a Polaroid picture, and we would show up to their house, and this always happened, okay? So we would show up to the house to be like, wait, why are you doing the delivery? And then we would do, and so you would get to hang with the customer. We would get more content out of it. So we'd be filming the whole experience.

• 30:26Sam Parr?

  Oh my god.

• 30:26Speaker 03

  Then we would leave them the photo, then they would post the, we got to a million dollars in like four months. Like, it was like, boom.

• 30:33Shaan Puri?

  Dude, that's, that is amazing. That is such a great story.

• 30:36Sam Parr?

  Okay, so the number, tell us the numbers. So-

• 30:38Speaker 03

  So, okay, so year one, I want to say a million four, then year two, let's call it three million, then we did a big jump to like seven, 14, 22.

• 30:50Speaker 03

  Thirty, forty, and now this year, we're on track for about sixty.

• 30:55Shaan Puri?

  And you guys, you guys got into Costco.

• 30:57Speaker 03

  We ju- like, we, we, we launched Costco Canada National, Costco US is launching September first.

• 31:02Shaan Puri?

  How did you get into Costco? Not easy to do. Everyone wants to get into retail.

• 31:05Speaker 03

  This is a crazy story, too. This is a crazy story. Okay.

• 31:08Shaan Puri?

  We're gonna have to extend the time limit on Nick, just so you know.

• 31:11Speaker 03

  No, because this is a crazy story.

• 31:13Shaan Puri?

  Whoever's next, go, go, go take a walk for a bit.

• 31:16Speaker 03

  So Costco, they had seen, the content brings into action, okay? Brings in the action. So we get this meeting with Costco.

• 31:24Shaan Puri?

  Content brings in the action, baby. Let's go.

• 31:27Speaker 03

  Grab that action. So we, so we, we basically go to the first Costco meeting and everything I'm about to say Costco, shout out Costco, like, super respectful, like, we weren't seeing eye to eye. We knew that our second most searched term online was midday squares at Costco. Like, we knew we were gonna hit this out of the park. They didn't feel as

• 31:46Shaan Puri?

  Confident.

• 31:46Speaker 03

  Confident in that aspect. And we knew that the right price point was nineteen ninety-nine for our twelve pack. There was a disagreement that lasted about two and a half years, okay? Going back and forth.

• 31:58Shaan Puri?

  So gentleman's disagreement.

• 31:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, like, like, just, we just couldn't see eye to eye on the price. And for the record.

• 32:02Shaan Puri?

  They wanted it to be what?

• 32:04Speaker 03

  I'm not gonna state that price. Yeah, cuz, cuz they're a great partner. And they want it to be lower. And we just held our ground, you know, because this is

• 32:12Shaan Puri?

  It's a two and a half years.

• 32:13Speaker 03

  Two and a half.

• 32:13Shaan Puri?

  So during that, weren't you guys just kinda like, God, let's just go into Costco?

• 32:17Speaker 03

  Okay, so this happened on the third meeting. This is where things, it was the third meeting. We drove out to the head office for the third time. There's two ways to go into Costco. There's like, you're in line, or you could do a roadshow. And the roadshow is like, everything's on consignment. You have to show up. You only get paid for what you sell at Costco. And you gotta be in Costco for fourteen days.

• 32:36Sam Parr?

  You mean like, giving out sam-

• 32:38Speaker 03

  Physically.

• 32:38Sam Parr?

  Like sampling?

• 32:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, you're sampling, you're hustling. It's like the

• 32:42Shaan Puri?

  Oh, so that's what's happening. When you walk into Costco, there's kind of a cool product. Somebody's standing there.

• 32:46Speaker 03

  Bingo.

• 32:46Shaan Puri?

  They're taking a consignment bet on their product to prove to Costco that

• 32:51Speaker 03

  That there were the event, and there's no guarantee you're gonna get Costco. So I was really rattled. Again, we, we didn't see eye to eye. This is the third time. And like, we're talking almost three years at this point in time. And so I, I looked at the buyer, who we had started to develop, actually a good relationship with him. And I'm like, if we do the roadshow, and we break the roadshow record, like, the most sales ever in fourteen days, will you give us nineteen ninety-nine? And we shook hands that day.

• 33:18Shaan Puri?

  What, what made you wanna do that bold statement?

• 33:20Speaker 03

  Our search on Google was so high for, I knew

• 33:24Sam Parr?

  Yeah, but you knew that it's high for you, but you didn't know that it was how it compared to like, this, when the Swiffer came out.

• 33:29Speaker 03

  You're, you're correct. I don't know. There's just moments in life where you just

• 33:32Shaan Puri?

  Was that an impulsive thing, or you planned to say that?

• 33:34Speaker 03

  No, it was impulsive. We were

• 33:37Shaan Puri?

  Looks at you during the meeting, you're like

• 33:38Speaker 03

  It was like, my wife looked at me and we, but she was, she, I, I don't know. I guess you have nothing to lose at some point.

• 33:45Shaan Puri?

  Baby married a wild stallion. This is how it roll, how it goes. Sometimes I run away.

• 33:49Sam Parr?

  So how much did you guys sell?

• 33:50Speaker 03

  A hundred forty, a hundred, we can't put, a hundred sixty thousand in fourteen days.

• 33:54Sam Parr?

  And how much of that hundred sixty was your

• 33:57Shaan Puri?

  Was that, did you barely break it, or did you?

• 33:59Speaker 03

  No, we smashed the record. The closest record, I think, prior to that was sub

• 34:02Shaan Puri?

  I saw their content.

• 34:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 34:03Shaan Puri?

  And they made us

• 34:04Speaker 03

  No, we rallied, man. We rallied. We rallied. Like, we rallied. Okay, so first off, most founders don't spend fourteen, like, like, we were doing full days.

• 34:14Sam Parr?

  Don't wag your finger at me.

• 34:16Shaan Puri?

  Dude, when he's saying we rallied, that goes perfectly with backstage, we were talking about nicotine pouches, and he's like, oh, I used to put it in my toes before ice hockey practice. I've never even heard of this.

• 34:28Speaker 03

  It sounds like we have some degeneracy to explore today.

• 34:30Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I could tell by your tattoos.

• 34:31Shaan Puri?

  Costco, you, you put it between the toes, and you just went for it fourteen days.

• 34:34Speaker 03

  It was like, the craziest rally of life. And it wasn't fourteen days. We spent thirty-six days straight in a Costco. We had to do multiple Costcos, so

• 34:43Shaan Puri?

  What's the trick when you're in the Costco? Like, kinda getting, flagging people down? What'd you, what was the showmanship that worked?

• 34:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, two things that I think are really takeaway. Most founders don't do the roadshow themselves. They leave it to a third party. That's mistake number one. Like, that's

• 34:58Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, cuz everyone hates rejection.

• 34:59Speaker 03

  And then also time, like, you're, you gotta be in those for twelve hours in a day. Like, they open at eight and you're closing at nine, you know? So most founders brush it off and just, they pay the service and they don't go, every day, you don't understand. It was bananas.

• 35:15Sam Parr?

  Okay, so you were just grinding. You're living in the Costco.

• 35:17Speaker 03

  Me, my wife, our whole team was in there.

• 35:19Shaan Puri?

  First thing is founders do it themselves. What's the second thing?

• 35:22Speaker 03

  The second thing is basically, while you're there, you wanna be really methodical. So I would just stand in front and yell out keywords. Gluten free, diabetic friendly, and, and, and, no, I swear on my life. So you're doing keywords as people are

• 35:38Sam Parr?

  He bought like a, like a white girl dictionary.

• 35:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. And so you're throwing out like your keywords, and it really works.

• 35:44Shaan Puri?

  Hispanic.

• 35:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, yes. No, I mean, like, so we would have, so we would have this, we would get so warehoused at one point. Like, we were so out of our, you start to hallucinate, you're in there so long sometimes, that we would just be like, it's a dog and pony show coming. Like, you just start, but the keywords are really key. So the keywords, why are the keywords key? One, it, we changed our box because of the keywords that work. So when you go to a Costco, it is not this box. It is a specific box that went into Costco.

• 36:11Shaan Puri?

  You discovered it while you were there, changed the packaging afterwards.

• 36:14Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 36:14Shaan Puri?

  What'd you discover?

• 36:15Speaker 03

  Gluten free was a massive thing. Real chocolate's huge at Costco. So I, so I think the second thing, Sean, is like, don't just mindlessly be there while you're doing the roadshow. Be intentional about what you're doing.

• 36:27Sam Parr?

  Dude, this is awesome. Congratulations. What, um, so, okay, so ten years from now, what do you think's gonna happen? Are you gonna sell the company? Gonna run it forever? What are you gonna do?

• 36:35Speaker 03

  All I know is that my dream was to make the NHL, and I didn't make the NHL. And so, no, did

• 36:40Sam Parr?

  So now you're gonna buy a team?

• 36:41Speaker 03

  No, no, no. Only point five percent of companies make it past a hundred million dollars of revenue. I, that's been my goal since the beginning. And I don't know what will happen after, but that's the goal.

• 36:50Sam Parr?

  You're the shit, man.

• 36:51Shaan Puri?

  What's, uh, what's one thing we could help you with?

• 36:54Speaker 03

  One, having you here today, I, I can't tell you how much this means to me. Uh, you guys

• 36:57Shaan Puri?

  Have you been listening for a while?

• 36:59Speaker 03

  Dude, come on, you know, we met each other about five years.

• 37:01Shaan Puri?

  Well, we met in Club LTV. So I used to host this thing for PCOM owners. He was in there. You probably were only doing like, five, ten million in revenue at the time.

• 37:07Speaker 03

  Five million bucks at the time.

• 37:08Shaan Puri?

  Five million at the time, but he had amazing energy. I was rooting for you since then. So I'm not surprised that you're now at, you know, forty, fifty, sixty million.

• 37:15Speaker 03

  Keeping going, man. What would you like to see as a flavor? I mean, you guys actually consume the product. I would love to, even if it, it was a fully different direction. Let's not even say no bread, PB and J. What's a flavor you'd like to see us do?

• 37:26Sam Parr?

  That's a good question.

• 37:27Shaan Puri?

  I think what I would love to see, you told me three things today, and I've known about your brand for four years, that I didn't know. I think you gotta, this sounds weird, cuz you're doing content. It sounds weird, cuz you work on your packaging. I think there's actually still like, a long way to go in terms of like, being able to through, whether my point of contact is just seeing the box, whether my point of contact is seeing something on social from you, or from a celebrity. How do you make it where the story really pops? Because, you know, just, I, like, I didn't actually realize that the reason your stuff tastes better and is better for you is cuz it's real chocolate that's refrigerated. That's why there's no preservatives.

• 38:06Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 38:06Shaan Puri?

  So it's one thing to say, no preservatives. Like, it's kinda like, when I've heard that type of stuff so much, I just assume they're, they're shoving something else in there that I don't know. No pomegranate olive. Oh, then they're using some other thing. Who knows? And so I think just saying like, hey, this is chocolate you keep in your fridge because it's in the fridge.

• 38:23Sam Parr?

  But this isn't even chocolate, though.

• 38:24Speaker 03

  This one's no bread, PB and J.

• 38:25Shaan Puri?

  Is, is your chocolate still your popular skew?

• 38:28Speaker 03

  These are, no, I mean, uh,

• 38:29Shaan Puri?

  This is now the most popular?

• 38:29Speaker 03

  This is number one by far.

• 38:31Sam Parr?

  Dude, I would keep going with this. It seems like, dude, you know who's making a huge comeback is Uncrustables?

• 38:35Shaan Puri?

  But yours is like, fresh and healthier than like, dude, an Uncrustable, like, if I buy that for my kids, I know I'm making a

• 38:42Sam Parr?

  A bad choice.

• 38:42Shaan Puri?

  A bad choice for them. If I need it for me, I'm making a shameful choice. This I don't feel ashamed of. So congrats.

• 38:49Sam Parr?

  Well, thank you. All right, we appreciate you doing that.

• 38:51Speaker 03

  Thanks for having us, man. I appreciate it.

• 38:53Shaan Puri?

  Dude.

• 38:53Speaker 03

  Great to see you.

• 38:55Shaan Puri?

  Today's podcast is brought to you by my friends at Mercury. Uh, they make the world's best banking product. I think you know this already. I use Mercury for all of my businesses. I think I have like, maybe seven or eight businesses. We use Mercury as our business banking across all of them. And now, they actually just launched a personal banking account. So I have my personal account there. I moved off of Wells Fargo and Chase. I'm just all in on Mercury. Why? Uh, I like products that are easy to use. I like products that get me and the problems that I have. So like, very easy to make a joint account with my wife. Very easy to spin up virtual cards. Uh, one click and I get savings yield. It just has all the stuff that I need in one place. So if you're looking for the best banking product on the market, it's definitely Mercury. I will fistfight anybody who disagrees with me on that. Go to mercury.com slash personal and learn more.

• 39:38Shaan Puri?

  Mercury is a fintech, not an FDIC insured bank. Banking services are provided through Choice Financial Group and Callum N A, members FDIC.

• 39:45Sam Parr?

  All right, guess number three.

• 39:47Shaan Puri?

  Here we go.

• 39:48Sam Parr?

  What's up, dude?

• 39:49Shaan Puri?

  What's up, man?

• 39:51Shaan Puri?

  All right. Introduce yourself, your name, what you do, what's the name of the company?

• 39:55Speaker 04

  Okay, sounds good. Uh, my name is Shreyas and I'm the CEO of Daydream and we are adding a million dollars a month helping dentists automate back office tasks.

• 40:03Shaan Puri?

  Oh dude, I've been DMing you.

• 40:04Speaker 04

  We've been DMing, we've been in the DMs together.

• 40:06Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, we've been in the DMs. I love the name of the company. And then I saw you were doing something for dentists and I was like, that's so smart. I think I tried to invest or something. I was like, this is, you know, I do these like cold outreach to invest off of no information, just like a Twitter bio or like two tweets. And that's what I think I did with you.

• 40:22Speaker 04

  That's great. That means my Twitter is working.

• 40:24Shaan Puri?

  Yes, it's working.

• 40:25Sam Parr?

  There you go. I got you.

• 40:26Shaan Puri?

  All right. So you kind of already started with the big number. You say, let's say it again slower. So you said,

• 40:30Speaker 04

  So we're adding a million dollars a month in ARR every single month.

• 40:34Shaan Puri?

  Across a bunch of dentists.

• 40:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, across a bunch.

• 40:36Sam Parr?

  Explain what you do though.

• 40:37Speaker 04

  Yeah. So basically what we do is, I don't know if you've ever been to the dentist or a doctor and gotten a bill from the insurance company and been like, you know, what actually is this, right? And that's because the insurance companies are trying to screw not only the patients over, but the doctors over. And so the reality is in order to get reimbursed from the insurance company, the doctor has to do a bunch of administrative work. And doctors hate it and they do a bad job. They lose money. My mom is a dentist. She's losing 10 to 15% of her money to these insurance companies. So I was like, what if I could automate this process of dealing with the insurance company? So verify insurance to say, hey, this is what Sean's insurance is going to cover. We submit the claim, we appeal the denial because guess what? They love denying these claims. And then we do all the bookkeeping when the money does come in. And in exchange, the doctors pay us a small percentage of every dollar.

• 41:17Sam Parr?

  And so it's like AI like negotiating with the company.

• 41:19Speaker 04

  Insurance companies. Yeah, exactly. So we have AI calling the insurance company to get the status of these claims, AI submitting the claim.

• 41:25Sam Parr?

  AI voice being like, hey, you did not approve this. Why not?

• 41:29Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 41:29Sam Parr?

  Here's why you should.

• 41:30Shaan Puri?

  Well, the funny thing is on their side, they also have AI. And so normally it's a war of attrition. It's like, they're gonna, you have to wait to hear the menu, then you have to say the number, then they didn't understand it, but it's like, let's let my robot talk to your robot all day.

• 41:42Speaker 04

  Exactly. And you know what I always tell the insurance companies? I'm like, yo, you're spending a lot of money, we're spending a lot of money. What if you just gave us the data in an API? But this healthcare industry is so backwards that they don't want to.

• 41:52Shaan Puri?

  The incentive is not there.

• 41:53Speaker 04

  Yeah, the incentive is not there. And so we have to find all these creative ways to beat the system and make sure that our doctors and our patients get paid.

• 42:00Sam Parr?

  Can you write off a few facts? So how old's the company? How much funding? And like this year's revenue?

• 42:05Speaker 04

  Yeah. So we're about 926 days old, uh, two and a half years, about, about.

• 42:10Sam Parr?

  Did you know who started that? Was the Ramp CEO? Do you know his shtick? His shtick is,

• 42:14Shaan Puri?

  How many hours old?

• 42:15Sam Parr?

  Today we're 2,243 days old.

• 42:17Speaker 04

  Sorry.

• 42:18Shaan Puri?

  926 days old. What was the second part?

• 42:20Speaker 04

  Yeah. So we've raised 11 and a half million dollars to date. Um, by the end of this year, we'll finish north of 10 million in revenue.

• 42:26Shaan Puri?

  Wow.

• 42:27Speaker 04

  And another underrated thing is, so the way our business started was we actually went out and acquired an existing service business. So before, you know, people would be doing this work manually.

• 42:35Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 42:36Speaker 04

  So we actually bought this company and then we've just been improving their margin.

• 42:39Shaan Puri?

  How big was their book of business when you bought it?

• 42:41Speaker 04

  Less than a million. Um, and so really the goal was, you know, when you run a service business of, one day you run out of, you either have to hire more humans, you become more unstable, quality goes down. And so we got them right at the perfect time when they were like, hey, I think we could grow, but we just don't have enough human talent.

• 42:57Sam Parr?

  Who came up with this name?

• 42:58Speaker 04

  Uh, I did. My mom's, uh, practice, her name is, or the practice's name, uh, is Dream Smile. And so, uh, I grew up working my whole life in this practice and, I don't know if you've ever been an unpaid child worker, but like the first thing you're doing is like daydreaming, like,

• 43:11Shaan Puri?

  Shout out to the unpaid child workers out there.

• 43:14Speaker 04

  I see you. I've been there.

• 43:15Shaan Puri?

  Making shoes in the mines, wherever you're at.

• 43:18Speaker 04

  Yeah. Or, uh, you know, posting EOBs in a dental office in Philadelphia.

• 43:22Sam Parr?

  How old are you?

• 43:22Speaker 04

  Uh, I'm 25.

• 43:23Shaan Puri?

  Wow. So you were, you're working in your mom's dental office. You were forced to do some of this work or you saw Debbie was doing this work. And so that was there.

• 43:31Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 43:31Shaan Puri?

  Now you grow up, you start thinking, what can AI do? What was the actual reason you, you like had the idea? Like give, take us to the epiphany of the idea.

• 43:38Speaker 04

  Yeah. And it's, it's gonna get, it's gonna get dark, but then it's gonna get positive. I promise. Okay. So I'm, I'm forewarning.

• 43:43Shaan Puri?

  Thank you.

• 43:44Speaker 04

  My, my mom, she's okay now, but she had gotten sick. And so I was, I graduated Stanford. I was working at AI startup. I was like over the moon. I was like, yo, I'm gonna dominate the world. And then she gets sick. And so I, I go home and I start running our practice. And, you know, I go from like a hundred to suddenly being the most overqualified dental office manager in America. And that was when I realized how much money we were losing. Like, I think when I grew up, I kind of knew that it was a problem. But I was just, I was just doing it. I was just ready to just like finish and go like, go home. But then I saw it and I got to chance to see, and feel what my mom has felt for 15 years of her life. And I was like, this is just unacceptable.

• 44:18Sam Parr?

  You're like, it doesn't have to be this way.

• 44:19Speaker 04

  It doesn't have to. And like, you know, I've been, I've spent so much time, you know, more of a, like a NLP nerd. Like I always loved natural language processing and I'd seen the field like, develop. And so I was probably one of the first hundred people to have access to GPT-3 because I was really into words. And so when I got into computer science, I got access to,

• 44:36Sam Parr?

  Dude, there's this like,

• 44:37Shaan Puri?

  I'm into words.

• 44:37Sam Parr?

  There's just like, there's like this Venn diagram where like personality type meets with opportunity with like the circumstances in which you grew up and that you had the resources that you,

• 44:46Shaan Puri?

  Ding ding ding ding ding.

• 44:47Sam Parr?

  Yeah. It's like, okay, perfect.

• 44:49Shaan Puri?

  So you know who else was working in their parents' dental office and then went on to do big things?

• 44:54Speaker 04

  Zuck?

• 44:54Shaan Puri?

  Mark Zuckerberg.

• 44:55Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 44:56Sam Parr?

  Did he really?

• 44:56Shaan Puri?

  You know the story? Yeah.

• 44:57Sam Parr?

  No.

• 44:57Shaan Puri?

  His first project was like, he set up like the IT system in his dad's office and like souped it up and like made it sick. And he's like, okay, I guess I've kind of outgrown this. I should go do something else.

• 45:06Sam Parr?

  Oh, that's awesome.

• 45:07Speaker 04

  And Michael Dell, underrated. His dad was an orthodontist, I believe. Doc, uh, yeah, Dr. Dell.

• 45:11Shaan Puri?

  Children of dentists.

• 45:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, it's a mafia.

• 45:13Sam Parr?

  How big is it gonna get?

• 45:15Shaan Puri?

  There's tens of us.

• 45:17Speaker 04

  How big? I mean, I think we're gonna serve every dental practice in America.

• 45:20Sam Parr?

  Like, are you wanting to be like a CEO of a publicly traded company?

• 45:23Speaker 04

  Yeah, why not? I mean, I think like, to me, like, the opportunity here is today, what we do is we help dentists bring money into their business. But soon we can store their money. We can help them spend their money. We can lend money to them. I don't know if you guys have, you know, these PE rollups, they're buying up all these like Taco Bell's dental practices and, you know, the truth is 70% of the market are still independent guys like my mom. And they feel like they have no other choice but to sell to the big guy. I want to give them the third door, which is like, hey, if I handle this back office BS for you, would you want to still be a dentist and own your practice? And they're like, heck yeah. That's the multi-billion dollar business here.

• 45:57Shaan Puri?

  So let's go over the business model. So you said, you save dentists, you bring in additional cash flow that they were otherwise losing or was delayed. You take a percentage of that. So you said that basically, is it, let's just take a thousand dollars for every thou, or a hundred dollars, every hundred dollars that comes in, what do you guys take?

• 46:15Speaker 04

  Through anywhere from two and a half to three and a half percent.

• 46:17Shaan Puri?

  Oh, that's it. Okay.

• 46:18Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 46:18Shaan Puri?

  But how does that math work? So you said 10 million of ARR, but you're saving, bringing in a million a month from dentists, that's 12 million a year. So how does that work?

• 46:25Speaker 04

  No, no, we're adding, as Daydream is a business, we're adding one million in ARR net new. And so we are processing.

• 46:31Sam Parr?

  But is it ARR?

• 46:33Speaker 04

  Yeah, ARR. So, uh, when we submit claims and we post the payments, which is like entering it in, we take a fee. So it's not just money we recover. It's every dollar going into the business. We are helping them process.

• 46:43Shaan Puri?

  Gotcha. So you're like Stripe on the backside.

• 46:45Speaker 04

  Exactly. We're like,

• 46:45Shaan Puri?

  All their billing and then the better, the part where you guys are even better, you add that sort of 10%, 15% to their practice overall.

• 46:52Sam Parr?

  How big's your team?

• 46:53Speaker 04

  So we have about 60 people, but we have people on the billing team, the service delivery team. That's about 50 people. I think we only have about 10 people in the office.

• 47:02Sam Parr?

  So you're close to profitability.

• 47:03Speaker 04

  Yeah. Um, and I, I think that's like, you know, we did raise venture capital and I think like, I think it's nice to kind of have like, we could like go for profitability or we could keep on growing. I think like, we just want to do more. Like I, I know that there are like 150,000 dentists where the job's not done. Job's not even like, we can't even be talking about the job. We, we haven't even, you know what I mean?

• 47:21Shaan Puri?

  Job's not done. Is Job even in the room with us right now?

• 47:23Speaker 04

  No, I can't even see him.

• 47:25Sam Parr?

  So things are going great. You seem happy. What is bad?

• 47:30Shaan Puri?

  This is a safe space. You can tell us and the millions of people that are gonna listen to this, what's going bad?

• 47:36Speaker 04

  Everything. It feels like, you know what I mean? Like, I don't know. I mean, like,

• 47:38Shaan Puri?

  Where, where are the bottlenecks right now?

• 47:40Speaker 04

  I think again, like hiring engineers, again, like this is like, our job is to take this service business and make it software, you know, software experience. There's so few people talented to do this, like really weird work. And, you know, we're competing against like OpenAI and Anthropic.

• 47:56Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 47:56Speaker 04

  And I'm like, so yeah, it's, that part is tough.

• 47:59Sam Parr?

  Do you have to pay crazy amounts of salary?

• 48:01Speaker 04

  No, I think we get really people on the mission. Like you can get a job, you can have a career, you can have a mission. And like, when I get people on the mission, job's done. You know what I mean? Like everything else kind of,

• 48:10Shaan Puri?

  I don't know what you mean. When you, like, their mission is like AGI, cure cancer, and you're like, back office dental work. How is your mission winning out against the mission of these labs? There's no way.

• 48:20Speaker 04

  I think it's like, yeah, very fair, very fair pushback. I think it's like, to me, the dentists are the underdog, the small business, the people who are like, you know, we're dealing with people in Broken Arrow, Oklahoma. Yeah, great. You can like make AI SDRs, you can sell more AI slop to people in SF, or you could help the guy who you grew up to going for 15 years.

• 48:37Sam Parr?

  Yeah, that's awesome.

• 48:37Speaker 04

  And like, that's the mission. And like, yes, we, we sell to dentists, right? But like, to me, this, the, the story is so much more powerful, which is like, my mom knows who every one of her patients is going to prom with. She knows when their kids are sick. She knows, she knows, she knows more about them than she does about me, right? And like, that's the experience of healthcare. And like, that's, I think the mission that people get excited about is like, hey, like, I kind of miss being able to go to my guy, the person I've been going for 15 years.

• 49:00Sam Parr?

  You have a great pitch. He's got a, he's got a, he's got a really good ability.

• 49:03Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, you're great. Let's ask you a different question. What's not figured out yet in the business? So there's, you know, a business you only, you only need to figure out the sort of six inches in front of you as you're going. And there's might be some things you don't know yet, but it's kind of a little bit further away. You can keep punting it for, until you get there. What's unfigured out?

• 49:19Speaker 04

  You know, like, I think we're growing fast, but we could be growing faster. We, we do creative go-to-market things, but we could always be doing more of them.

• 49:24Shaan Puri?

  So how do I get more of that 150,000 dentists?

• 49:27Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 49:27Shaan Puri?

  Come get the benefits that we offer.

• 49:28Speaker 04

  We're going after like, you know, these guys aren't on LinkedIn. You've never met a dentist.

• 49:32Sam Parr?

  Well, how do they find you now?

• 49:34Speaker 04

  Honestly, word of mouth. We're in these like Facebook groups where there's like tens of thousands of dentists.

• 49:37Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 49:38Speaker 04

  And I just like, I just comment for 10 hours a week, just like following these Facebook groups. Um, we go to conferences.

• 49:44Shaan Puri?

  How do you make it an absolute no-brainer for a dentist to, to take you on? So today, how do you take all the friction out? The same way you're taking the friction out of the billing? How do you take the friction out of the onboarding? So for example, could you go to these dentists and just say, hey, Daydream, we will take over this, you know, this cost center of your business. But basically if you just said like, we don't charge you a penny until we've made you a hundred thousand dollars. The first hundred thousand we make you, we take nothing. And after that, we take two and a half percent or some, something like that where it's like, oh, these guys are basically saying, they're gonna make me an extra hundred thousand dollars. And for you, onboarding that person, your actual cogs is not a hundred thousand dollars. Your cogs to onboard a dentist is probably very, very small. And so you will just use that as your acquisition. Like create an offer so good, they would be stupid to turn down.

• 50:28Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah, it's so hard because some, most people are like afraid of change management. Like that's what like dentists are like, yeah, like maybe I am losing a little bit of money, but like,

• 50:35Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 50:37Speaker 04

  But yeah, I mean, that's oftentimes the biggest thing that comes to mind is like,

• 50:39Sam Parr?

  Dude, my, well, my dad is in this, not this space, but he owns a, um, an old school small business. And if you were gonna like, tell him like, like I made this post about him saying like, my dad makes, you know, this much money a year selling onions and his CRM is this notebook and filing cabinet. And he, all these people were like, use this CRM. He's like, what the is that? No, no, I'm done. Uh, and so I do understand like that pitch can be hard. Why don't you own a Facebook group that teaches dentist owners how to, uh, uh, make more money?

• 51:07Speaker 04

  So we've tried putting in offers for those other Facebook groups. And then we have started our own. It only has about 250 members, but we have someone offshore right now just adding them.

• 51:15Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 51:15Speaker 04

  Um, and then like friending them from my account, but like, yeah, like we need to like hypercharge it maybe.

• 51:19Sam Parr?

  Can you buy one of those groups?

• 51:21Speaker 04

  We've, we've tried.

• 51:21Shaan Puri?

  Sometimes they'll block you though, if you do that. So you have to be careful because you might just been making the offer. You might get blocked. What about the private equity guys? So the private equity rollups that are happening? They already own huge amounts. So in theory you sell one, you get many, but maybe they built this in-house or they are really sensitive to margin and they don't want to do this. What have you found so far?

• 51:39Speaker 04

  I thought that they would be like a much more straightforward, like very like logical. But many of them just like bought a bunch of practices in 2021 and like, they're just trying to stay afloat and like not, like be able to service their debt these days, to be honest. And I, I think like, yeah, we, we've tried one or two, like 50 location groups, but those have been the hardest deployments. Those have been the most like demanding things. And, and again, maybe this is like something that's bad. We've, we were just like, what if we just like stayed in the thing that like, we're very good at for now? And like, yeah. And like, well, I hope we can work there, but like.

• 52:08Sam Parr?

  Do you have a community manager?

• 52:10Speaker 04

  You're looking at.

• 52:11Sam Parr?

  Yeah. Which is smart that you do it. I would go super hard on like owning and running a Facebook group and creating like, you know, we, um, we're buddies with this guy named Tommy Mello, who has a garage door business.

• 52:22Speaker 04

  Oh, A1 Garage.

• 52:23Sam Parr?

  Yeah. And it does, uh, I think maybe close to a billion in revenue. And now his job is he's trying to buy more service businesses to implement his playbook. And so he actually created like a, uh, services mastermind conference type of thing. And he was like, the ticket prices will pay for my, my team, but the real thing was like, if I could find a handful that I can buy, I would love that. And if I was you, I 100% would have a community manager, probably an ex dentist or something like that. And I would create like a community on Facebook groups where it would be all the best practices where people share their tips and tricks on how they're making their lives easier, their businesses better.

• 52:58Shaan Puri?

  How, how many dentists are you onboarding every month?

• 53:00Speaker 04

  About 50, like 30 to 50.

• 53:03Shaan Puri?

  30, 50. And so really the question is like, how do you get that number to be 150?

• 53:06Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 53:07Shaan Puri?

  So you start by saying, well, what's working today? Where do you get the 50 right now?

• 53:11Speaker 04

  Yeah. So we do like direct mail campaigns like this where we send out like, like a photo, like what, what's a direct mail? You're not gonna throw away is like one with your face on it, right?

• 53:18Shaan Puri?

  Oh, that's them.

• 53:19Speaker 04

  Uh, yeah, that's them. And so we have all these different options.

• 53:22Sam Parr?

  This is a great idea. Who made this? What vendor?

• 53:24Speaker 04

  Like, you're looking at.

• 53:26Sam Parr?

  You did this?

• 53:26Speaker 04

  Me and the team, again, we have like some of the smartest go to market people I, I've ever worked with.

• 53:30Sam Parr?

  This is so good.

• 53:31Speaker 04

  Um, and then we do, we've done this one.

• 53:32Shaan Puri?

  Studied like the old school direct marketers?

• 53:35Speaker 04

  Not really. No, we've been mostly doing it vibes.

• 53:37Shaan Puri?

  You're doing, yeah, you're doing direct response marketing. You should study the guys who basically cracked a single sales letter, sent through the post.

• 53:46Sam Parr?

  Do you know what he's talking about?

• 53:46Shaan Puri?

  That would make like millions of dollars.

• 53:48Speaker 04

  No, sorry.

• 53:48Sam Parr?

  Okay. So listen, before the internet was the internet. It was copywriters, direct marketers. So basically, let's say I made vacuums and I would go to Joe, or, uh, Joe Sugarman or David Ogilvy. And I would say, hey, guys, I need, um, a bunch of people to buy this vacuum. So they would, uh, pay us a database, uh, to give them the addresses of a million housewives. And they would come up, that copywriter would come up with this amazing like angle to, to capture the housewives attention. And they would write out this letter, they would type it out, they'd put it in an envelope and they would send it to them. It says, here's all the reasons why you should buy this. Here's a little coupon. Tear it off. Write your checking information and put a check in there or whatever. Mail it back to me. That's a very arduous process. So they got so freaking good at copywriting that every single word served a purpose.

• 54:33Sam Parr?

  And it was beautiful and it was incredibly effective. And then the internet came along and the best copywriters tended to be people who are a little bit on the fringes of like, they would sell like how to pick up chicks or how to like these programs that were a little bit like fringy, but they were the best. And these guys still exist. And you could get someone to help you with, uh, this opening letter and they could sell the shit out of these people. And it's all via direct response, long form copywriting.

• 55:02Speaker 04

  You've sold me on this. Yeah. It's like, this is like a 12th grade English class.

• 55:06Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, what I love is that you're just doing the entrepreneurial thing, right? You're just stumbling around, trying to figure things out as you go, but you're going to be able to like, there are people who are masters at this. Either the old school people or the people who have studied them and do it today. Find them and be like, hey, I need you to acquire, you know, and here's a budget and I need you to acquire dentists at this, this cost and see what they can do.

• 55:26Sam Parr?

  By the way, this, like one of the frameworks for copywriting, one of the most simple one is A to attention, interest, desire, action. This is A. You are, that's the best attention grabbing headline you could possibly have. So you're kind of doing it inadvertently, but you 100% can improve this.

• 55:41Shaan Puri?

  And you have the, book a demo and get a free, get free AirPods. So that's another thing they would do is the Crackerjack, you know, gift, gift in the box.

• 55:47Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 55:47Shaan Puri?

  They would do a thing where they would, you know, stay, uh, they would paperclip a dollar bill onto the mail, onto a letter. And just by putting a, like, when you see a dollar, you're just, what, what is this?

• 55:56Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 55:56Shaan Puri?

  And it just had a higher response rate. They figured out like all the different things that you can do to do this, to make every, every step of this work. So this is one of the tactics. Is this bringing in everybody right now?

• 56:06Speaker 04

  No, no. I mean, there's not a single dental podcast in America that I've not gone on to.

• 56:10Shaan Puri?

  Okay.

• 56:10Speaker 04

  Um, just every single dental podcast, every dental conference.

• 56:13Shaan Puri?

  Sponsor or you just went on as a guest?

• 56:14Speaker 04

  Sometimes sponsor, sometimes I should go on as a guest. Again, the story is like very, you know, something that I think a lot of dentists can get behind. And then, uh, conferences, like I think on any given like month, I'll probably be at like three or four.

• 56:25Sam Parr?

  Dude, they probably think that you're like a freak. They're like, who's this young charismatic guy at a dentist? Like, we've never seen this. Like, you know, you probably stick out, right?

• 56:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, but for better or for worse.

• 56:34Sam Parr?

  In a good way. In a good way. Okay. Listen, Joe Sugarman is the author. It's called the cop, the add a week guide to copywriting. Read that and then read on advertising by David Ogilvy. Read those this week and your mind will change.

• 56:45Speaker 04

  Okay. And then I like the idea of the users conference too. The A1 guy does this where they bring people together.

• 56:50Sam Parr?

  Yeah. It's just like, we're gonna teach everyone, everyone's gonna, we're, we're just gonna be the meeting place for people to aggregate and share ideas and how to make their business better. And hopefully, and, and just so you guys know, we have this, but regardless if you use our software or not, this is like a great thing.

• 57:01Shaan Puri?

  Another question, who influences the influencer? So who, who do a lot of dentists listen to like, trust today? Obviously you've been on a couple of podcasts. I don't know if podcasting is the main thing. Are there people on Instagram? Like I found that for every space, like, uh, we invested in this company that was, uh, doing stuff with auto shops. And it turns out there was just like a guy who was like the auto body guy. And basically he had a 50 store chain. And so everybody who owned one wanted to own 50. So therefore they liked listening and respected this guy. And he was able to drive like crazy volume. I think this guy was making like 20 million a year himself as like an auto mechanic influencer, which is just shows kind of like, there's always influence in every niche. You gotta find it and figure out how to get them on board with what you're doing.

• 57:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, we've done like one or two, but like there are so many dental influencers because my whole feed is just dental influencers now.

• 57:48Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I'm friends with one of them. One, you know, uh, Aman, his wife is a dental.

• 57:52Shaan Puri?

  Oh, really?

• 57:53Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I know a few of them.

• 57:54Speaker 04

  Okay. Yeah. I guess we just got our first influencers and our first guest at DreamCon, the, the users conference.

• 58:00Sam Parr?

  You got the copywriter, uh, bugging you.

• 58:02Shaan Puri?

  What, what's your killer, like your kill shot with your marketing? Meaning, you know, the average practice is leaving X dollars on the table. Daydream captures 90% of that or whatever. What's, what's your version of that? Like a one liner that immediately makes me realize how much money I'm missing out on if I'm not doing, not using you guys.

• 58:20Speaker 04

  And we can improve your collections by 5% and decrease your median time to payment to 10 days. That feels clunky when I say.

• 58:27Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. So what does that mean in terms of like, I'm a dentist. I don't think about my median time of collection. I think about like how much money I made. If the average practice makes, let's just use a million dollars a year.

• 58:36Speaker 04

  Mm-hmm.

• 58:37Shaan Puri?

  And you're saying you increase their claims by 5%. So you'd be adding $50,000 to their practice, straight to the bottom line.

• 58:44Speaker 04

  Yeah. $50,000 more in your pocket and all your money in 10 days.

• 58:48Shaan Puri?

  We fight the insurance companies and on average, we add $50,000, take home pay for every single dentist that uses us. Right? Or like on average or whatever, whatever the claim is.

• 58:58Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 58:59Shaan Puri?

  You want to massage that, like try to get down to like a one liner that's just like a, a marketing kill shot. It's like, if this is true, okay, I'm interested, right? And it's just gotta be that juicy for them that if this is true.

• 59:12Speaker 04

  We used to have one that I like, it was like, oh, like your Ferrari is waiting or something like that. Cause that's how much you can buy. Like for some of these practices, we recover enough money to like pay for a car.

• 59:20Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 59:20Speaker 04

  We just gotta like, sorry, I like, this is like very helpful. I should be writing this stuff down.

• 59:24Sam Parr?

  Well, it'll be recorded and you can, you can rewatch it. Dude, thank you so much. You're the man.

• 59:28Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, sure.

• 59:28Speaker 04

  Thank you guys for coming on.

• 59:29Shaan Puri?

  Great to meet you.

• 59:33Shaan Puri?

  All right. That's the end of part one of Shoot Your Shot. We got three more founders coming up on the next episode. Make sure you're subscribed on YouTube, on Spotify. We looked at the data. I think 80, 90% of you guys are not subscribed who watch the episodes. What are you doing? Subscribe so you can watch episode two.

• 59:47Sam Parr?

  And do me a favor, whether you're a listener, then you're going to go to Spotify or if you're a watcher, go to YouTube. Put in the comments, the city that you want us to go to next. Right now we're doing this in San Francisco. We've already done New York. We'll go somewhere next to do it. So let us know in the comments right now.

• 1:00:10Shaan Puri?

  All right. Let's take a quick break. I want to tell you about marketing school. It is a podcast that is part of the HubSpot Podcast Network. And it is run by Neil Patel and Eric Su. And these guys are both marketers who are running businesses. And so if you want real world tactics from practitioners who are actually out there in the field doing it, this is the podcast for you. Check it out wherever you get your podcasts.