#173 - How Beachbody Makes Money, 75 Hard Explained, & Brainstorming "HackerNews for X"

Shaan (@ShaanVP) and Sam (@TheSamParr) dive deep into 75 Hard: what it is, who's behind it, and why it's so successful. From there they talk about a similar business: Beachbody. Beachbody does over $1B in sales, but the way they generate their profits will surprise you. The guys also brainstorm on "HackerNews for X" ideas and how to pull them off. Towards the end, Sam challenges Shaan on why he's running so many businesses and not focusing on just one. --------- * Want to be featured in a future episode? Drop your question/comment/criticism/love here: https://www.mfmpod.com/p/hotline/ * Support the pod by spreading the word, become a referrer here: refer.fm/million * Have you joined our private Facebook group yet? Go to https://www.facebook.com/groups/ourfirstmillion and join thousands of other entrepreneurs and founders scheming up ideas. --------- Show notes: * (2:00) Talking pod growth * (8:20) Shaan's funny story from college * (13:12) "HackerNews for X" * (30:12) What is 75 Hard? * (35:30) How Beachbody became a $1B behemoth * (52:04) Sam challenges Shaan on doing many businesses instead of focusing

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

• 0:00Shaan Puri?

  In this class, there was one guy who was always talking. He would raise his hand first thing for every single question. He had a big opinion on all these topics. I'm like, dude, how does this guy know about all this stuff? And he was just super into the internet. And at the time, my head labeled this guy as a loser. I was like, wow, this guy's like this over eager student.

• 0:18Sam Parr?

  Dork.

• 0:19Shaan Puri?

  Who's like kind of a know it all and like kind of sucking up to the teacher and like, why is he so into this? Wow, what a loser. He spends his nights researching the like pros and cons of naturality. Okay, now fast forward. Now, that's me. I'm that loser. I was just late to the game. And that guy Dan ended up joining Coinbase as one of the early employees.

• 0:49Sam Parr?

  Abreu, what is your rating of today's episode?

• 0:53Speaker 02

  Uh, I'd go A minus. Um, we rambled a lot, but I kind of like that, that we go into different topics. We were everywhere. Pod growth, hacker news stuff, crypto for hacker news, the origin stories of product hunt, 75 hard, Tony Horton, Sean pouring his heart out at the end. We got everything in there.

• 1:11Sam Parr?

  What was your top two favorite things?

• 1:13Speaker 02

  Um, I like talking about like the origin story. So, uh, product hunt, how Ryan kind of hacked his way to growing that. That was kind of cool. Um, the P90X origin story as well. That was kind of cool. I have to look up that YouTube video that Sean mentioned. That was definitely interesting.

• 1:28Sam Parr?

  Listener, let us know if you like having this up front. Um, let's get to the today's podcast. All right. What's up?

• 1:35Shaan Puri?

  What's up?

• 1:36Sam Parr?

  Sorry, I was late. I was, uh, sitting here working.

• 1:40Shaan Puri?

  It's a podcast, bro. Nobody knows you were late.

• 1:42Sam Parr?

  Um, I'm never the late one. I take pride in that. And I, uh, was just literally sitting here working and I had no idea. I didn't even look at the.

• 1:50Shaan Puri?

  The funny thing is, I was also two minutes late, but, um, when I saw your message, that was like, uh, hey, sorry, I'm running. It'll be there in a minute. I was like, boom, hop it. I need to hop in there now. It's on there first.

• 2:02Sam Parr?

  I'm not typically late one, but I was. But I will tell you a few things that I was working on. So. Just a quick recap. I'm working on some growth stuff, so I want to run just a few quick ideas by you. This will only take a second, but first, so in the last, whatever we launched, however long that's been, not including month one to month two, because it was like a 500 percentage growth rate. So we're not including that. We have grown on average 10% a month. Okay?

• 2:29Shaan Puri?

  Okay.

• 2:29Sam Parr?

  This month, uh, April's not over, but if, if you take the average of the trailing three weeks and give it a fourth week, it's going to be about 400, a little bit over 400,000 downloads, which, um, if you, so if you take that multiplied by then, uh, to January. So we're going to hit a million downloads a month by around January at 10% growth rate.

• 2:53Shaan Puri?

  If, if we keep going at this rate.

• 2:54Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 2:56Shaan Puri?

  So right now we're on pace for about 5 million downloads a year. And then what you're saying.

• 3:02Sam Parr?

  Well, it's, it's more.

• 3:03Shaan Puri?

  400,000 downloads a month. That's 5 million a year.

• 3:07Sam Parr?

  That's a, that's assuming zero growth.

• 3:09Shaan Puri?

  Right, right. With the, with the growth, it'll be like 6 million or something like that.

• 3:12Sam Parr?

  More, eight, eight ish.

• 3:14Shaan Puri?

  Eight, okay.

• 3:14Sam Parr?

  Yeah. Because the last, the end of the year is going to be start, starting to get 800, 900, a million downloads a month.

• 3:21Shaan Puri?

  And dude, if people start commuting, they need a little, they need a little good, good, good in their ears while they're commuting. That's what we needed. We took a 20% cut, I think, when COVID happened.

• 3:31Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 3:31Shaan Puri?

  I saw the numbers dip and then we rebuilt from there.

• 3:34Sam Parr?

  So the, the current growth rate is actually quite good. It's just like, it's, this is, this is the same thing of like, if you just focus and just do the same old same old over and over and over again, it's going to work. But of course we want to expedite that. And so the things that we're working on is we, we've already talked about what we've worked on, but let me bring up a few things. First, I actually think that we need to be a little bit tighter with our content, meaning what are like, I don't watch sports, but I know you do. What are like the sports shows where they like go through topic by topic and they like, you have like a time limit?

• 4:02Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, like pardon the interruption. They do that where it's like five minutes. It's like, all right, we're talking about, and they always have like, you know, the shit people care about or, you know, they have these, these little like names on the side. And it's like, you kind of want to tune in to hear what they're going to say about X and what are they going to say about Y?

• 4:16Sam Parr?

  So, um, I think we should start doing that. And I'm trying to figure out how to do it. But, uh, I, I would like us, we're going to start, I'm going to try it for an episode and I'll coordinate it. Uh, next, everything that is on Instagram and on YouTube, we have to drive all traffic to iTunes, not to Spotify, even though a lot of people say they listen to Spotify. The numbers are more people just barely they'll listen to iTunes. But if you click subscribe on iTunes, it automatically downloads and we get credit for that. Whereas Spotify, it doesn't do that. So gaming the, the system and playing within the rules, that's the way to go. And we currently are not linking to any of our iTunes stuff. Finally, um, or no, the second to last

• 4:57Sam Parr?

  thing is recapping old stuff. So we have 170 episodes. Did you know that? I didn't know that.

• 5:02Shaan Puri?

  That's a lot. Yeah.

• 5:03Sam Parr?

  Um, and so what I'm going to do is go through all the old ones and bucket them into categories. And we could re-release them just with a new intro because

• 5:11Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 5:12Sam Parr?

  Um, I think, uh, they'll be great.

• 5:14Shaan Puri?

  Dude, that's, that's really smart. If we basically take our best episodes from earlier, when we had half the size of the audience, and maybe we cut off some bullshit if it was like, there was something dumb, but we just take the, you know, in the month of like last year, this month, if we had three good episodes and we just say, boom, we're bringing back those business ideas and re-packaging them in a way that's better. Uh, and we sort of re-release our greatest hits. Uh, I think that's a good idea.

• 5:39Sam Parr?

  That's not what I was thinking.

• 5:40Shaan Puri?

  Trims the fat.

• 5:41Sam Parr?

  I think that will work, but what I was thinking of is grouping it. So, uh, let's say that in episode five, and then 34, and then in eight, we, we, there was a religion-based thing, like a church.

• 5:54Shaan Puri?

  Right. Make a religion.

• 5:55Sam Parr?

  Then you, yeah, yeah, yeah. So you do that. And the reason why is so you can create a how-to title, because what I've looked at, at all the data, anything that's how-to related gets more than pass, uh, more than other stuff. Speaking of which,

• 6:08Shaan Puri?

  Smart.

• 6:08Sam Parr?

  And this is the, one of the last things, we can retitle old ones to be more click. I'll fucking say it. Clickbait headlines. And then last but not least, Alex Garcia on my team, who's been going wild on Twitter, is gonna join the podcast team a little bit as growth. And then we also are hooking up with Hubspots. They've got a team that, or an outsourced production company that I want to look into. And they've claimed that if you get a lot of, like, if you increase the production value significantly, even on shit like this, it increases downloads. I don't believe it, but it's interesting.

• 6:48Shaan Puri?

  Right. Well, we're gonna throw it all at the wall and we're gonna see what happens.

• 6:52Shaan Puri?

  Speaking of growth, can I transition to an app that's growing that I want to talk about? Or we can actually, we can do your rundown of the things we're going to talk about in this episode. So I'm gonna talk about some things that are in the fitness space. So this app 75 Hard and how it relates to P90X and a whole bunch of different fitness things, trends that I've seen. So I'm gonna break that down in detail. We're gonna talk about Hacker News and basically niche news websites. And you have an opinion on that, and so do I. And then we might talk about MVNOs. I'm not sure if I'll get to it today. Did you have any other ones that you wanted to talk about?

• 7:28Sam Parr?

  And what was your last one?

• 7:29Shaan Puri?

  MVNOs. This is when you basically can start your own cellphone carrier company. It's pretty cool. There's a bunch of stuff.

• 7:35Sam Parr?

  I think that that, that actually probably might be a lead for, I think, next one. Because that's a pretty big idea. I think it's really interesting. And I, and I, and I, what I did this week is I actually just researched everything you had. And I have points and counterpoints. And I didn't research that one because it's very interesting. Can we wait for the next one?

• 7:51Shaan Puri?

  But it's deep. It takes a lot. Yeah.

• 7:53Sam Parr?

  Right. And instead, go to this Teachable for Devs thing, because I have some intel for that. So I went and got some intel on that. I went and got intel on 75 Hard. And I think the most interesting is the Hacker News stuff. I went and talked to a friend, Andrew, your friend, our friend, who owns a company in this space. And I got all of his numbers.

• 8:16Shaan Puri?

  Okay, great. All right. Where do you want to start? We can start on any of those topics.

• 8:18Sam Parr?

  Hacker News.

• 8:20Shaan Puri?

  Okay, so, so I was looking at, I saw this tweet from this guy, Dan Romero. And Dan Romero, actually, it's kind of a funny story. I'll just lead in with with a personal story. So when I was in college, I don't know. When you were in college, were you trying like, what was your strategy? Were you trying to take the hard classes, the easy classes, what you're interested in? Yeah. So, so if you could take, so some people do the hard ones, some people do what they're most interested in. And some people like me were just looking for the easy way out.

• 8:45Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 8:46Shaan Puri?

  And it sounds like you're the same. And so I took.

• 8:48Sam Parr?

  Thank you. Rate my professor.

• 8:50Shaan Puri?

  I use rate my professor and I would find the easiest classes. I would find out what classes the football players and the basketball players got to take because those are the easy classes. So like rocks for jocks was the code name for this class. I was like geology, but it was like the easiest fucking class ever. I got into this class.

• 9:08Sam Parr?

  Rock.

• 9:08Shaan Puri?

  I don't even know how. I was genuinely trying to take a like an interesting class about sports, sports psychology, sports medicine, or something like that. And it turns out this was a class only the female basketball players at Duke were in. So there was 10 students. They were all the female basketball players at Duke. The class never, I looked at the schedule. I was like, oh, there's no classroom. Where does this, where do we go? Where do, where do I go for my class? I emailed the teacher. He's like, there's no physical meetings for this course. I don't know how you got into this.

• 9:35Sam Parr?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 9:35Shaan Puri?

  But he's like, you just need to read this one book. It was the Lance Armstrong book, uh, lives, whatever his book was called. And at the end of the year, so read that one book, which is like the easiest fucking book to read, by the way. And then at the end of the year, you write a two page report on it and that was the whole class.

• 9:50Sam Parr?

  No, you're kidding me.

• 9:51Shaan Puri?

  Sorry, Duke. You know, you definitely do the thing that all schools do with education.

• 9:56Sam Parr?

  I, I get that why it's cool when you're a kid, but also as a kid and now as an adult who's going to send his kids to college. I'm like, what a waste.

• 10:03Shaan Puri?

  Waste of money.

• 10:04Sam Parr?

  What a bullshit, dude.

• 10:06Shaan Puri?

  I thought I had hit the lottery.

• 10:07Sam Parr?

  I was a D one athlete in college and they'd made me take, I was a runner, mind you. They made me take gym and the gym class was aerobic walking.

• 10:19Shaan Puri?

  It's like if you got to the classroom, you're done.

• 10:21Sam Parr?

  You show up and then you go for a walk. That it was called a broken walk.

• 10:25Shaan Puri?

  And I was a one athlete. So, okay, so anyways, in that process, one class that I took that I was just trying to find an easy class was called like the internet or something like that. I was like, oh, bingo. I know about that one. Let me go to that one. And at this time, I'm not thinking like, I'm not who I am today, right? I don't, I wasn't thinking about business. I didn't think I was going to go into the tech space. I thought I was going to be a doctor. I was a pretty, I was very average student, like B minus student. Very lazy. And that's who I was. And so I go to this class and in this class, I'm basically just there again, because I'm trying to coast to an A in some easy class that's called the internet. It can't be that hard. And it really wasn't that hard. It was a discussion about like internet topics, like net neutrality and stuff like that. And I didn't really give a shit.

• 11:05Shaan Puri?

  I just sat there quietly, like doing the crossword puzzle in the like school newspaper, eating Chick-fil-A in this like classroom, hoping the professor never calls on me. But in this class, there was one guy who was always talking. He would raise his hand first thing for every single question. He had a big opinion on all these topics. I'm like, dude, how does this guy know about all this stuff? And he was just super into the internet. And at the time, my head labeled this guy as a loser. I was like, wow, this guy's like this over eager student, who's like kind of a know it all and like kind of sucking up to the teacher and like, why is he so into this? Wow, what, what a loser. He spends his nights researching the like pros and cons of net neutrality. Okay, now fast forward. Now, that's me. I'm that loser. I was just late to the game.

• 11:47Shaan Puri?

  And that guy, Dan, ended up joining Coinbase as one of the early employees. And he basically helped, Brian Armstrong, the CEO of Coinbase was kind of like did this tweet storm the day they went public, right? They go public at a hundred billion dollar valuation. And he's like, talking about the journey. He's like, when we started this, you know, it was such humble beginnings. Nobody knew about this space, blah, blah, blah. He's telling, and then this happened. And then Dan Romero came on board and like helped break us into Europe. And that was a pivotal moment for the company where we became like the only crypto company that was like partnered with banks in Europe. And I was like, oh, my God, it's that fucking guy from my classroom. Like, holy shit, he made it. And, you know, I bet this guy, you know, banked tens of millions, if not a hundred million dollars plus easily

• 12:29Shaan Puri?

  just on Coinbase. And if he owned any Bitcoin along the way, which of course he did, because he, he joined in 2014. And if you're a believer at that time, you probably grabbed some. So anyways, that's my short story of like, wow, if you're a college student listening to this now. Just be the nerd now. Trust me, you're gonna want to be that nerd later and really think through, what are you, what are you optimizing for? Like ease or like learning something like doing something interesting?

• 12:52Sam Parr?

  I think, um, I think we have to send this podcast to Dan. I think you should apologize.

• 12:57Shaan Puri?

  I, I, I will issue, he doesn't even probably know who I was because again, I was this fucking silent guy eating Chick-fil-A in the back of the class, never said a word. I was just judging him in my head and I, I do apologize to Dan for judging him and clearly I was wrong and he's done amazing. So anyways, he, he put out a tweet, I follow him and he was like, why isn't there a hacker news? So if you don't know, Hacker News is this website that you people just post links. It's like Reddit, but it's just for engineers.

• 13:22Sam Parr?

  Reddit, but only one forum and well, it's not a forum. It's like you post links and it's all nerd culture, internet nerd startup culture.

• 13:32Shaan Puri?

  We, you know, back in the day, we used to get the newspaper every day and open it up and like my dad would go to the business and politics section. I would go to the sports section. Well, the internet just made it so that there's an infinite number of sections. And so now if you're an engineer, you would wake up and you would maybe go to Hacker News.

• 13:46Sam Parr?

  I go to Hacker News every single day.

• 13:49Shaan Puri?

  Same. And so anyways, it's cool. I'm sorry. It's, you know, started by Paul Graham and sort of baked into Y Combinator. I, I've, I've, I've done an exercise, by the way, of trying to like, what would you value Hacker News at? And I think it's sort of priceless. I, I pretty much think there's no price where Paul would sell Hacker News.

• 14:06Sam Parr?

  No, he would not sell it because he's probably a billionaire and he loves it. But if you were just like a normal guy and you had a valued off revenues, I think it'd be worth 50 to a hundred million dollars. I bet you it can make eight million dollars a year in revenue with no employees and I bet you it's been capable of doing that for about 10 years.

• 14:24Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I would say easily a hundred million dollars because it's, it's also the category leader. It's the N of one in its category. Anyway, so Dan tweeted this out. He goes, why isn't there a hacker news for crypto? You know, like any like discussion for all the interesting things that are happening besides the price, which I think is like the key distinction here, uh, which is that almost all the conversation, there's a lot of places that talk about crypto and they're almost all just tracking the daily price moves. Like over the weekend, crypto went down like 17%. And so everybody was like talking about the price. And in reality, there's a whole lot of other interesting developments, technologies, kind of like usage that's happening that's not price related. And you almost need a firewall to say, look, in this forum, you don't talk about price because otherwise price is always going to dominate the conversation.

• 15:10Shaan Puri?

  That's just the nature of crypto. And so I thought that was kind of interesting. I started looking into some of these. And I guess like for me, I would say like, there is an opportunity for somebody to create the hacker news of crypto. And so I'll throw out a couple that were pretty cool that I found. One is casebitcoin.com. And this is basically a website that's just, it's just a dashboard of stats. So it's not like news and links. It's just dashboard of stats that's basically saying, um, this is the case for Bitcoin. It's like Bitcoin is now 10% of gold market cap. Here's new, here's the top headlines about pro Bitcoin. It's just a pro Bitcoin dashboard.

• 15:44Sam Parr?

  Do you remember that time that you made Bitcoin headlines? Because you tweeted that you're putting 20% of your net worth into Bitcoin and someone wrote like, entrepreneur and investor Sean Perry, and then you didn't, I don't think you did put 20% of your net worth.

• 15:58Shaan Puri?

  No, no, I did, I did. I tweeted I was putting 25%. I ended up putting 20% and then it grew. The price started going up so fast that that quickly became, it's now like almost 50% of my net worth or something. So it's, you know, it ended up being more, but, but it was ridiculous that there was news about it because I think they thought I was much wealthier than I am. Like I'm not going to move the needle in crypto. I could put 100% of my net worth in it. It was not going to move the needle of crypto. Crypto is too big. And so that was funny. My, actually my college friends texted that news article to me this week and they were like, whoa, what, what is this? By the way, what have you become?

• 16:32Sam Parr?

  Yeah. And that was like before you actually got famous fame. I mean, you're like kind of a big deal now. And that was like pre big deal.

• 16:39Shaan Puri?

  Well, that's part of the strategy of becoming a big deal was, uh, care yourself like you're a big deal, right? Me announcing how I'm moving my net worth around is sort of like carrying yourself like you're a big deal even before you are. And people started like, they just accepted my, my implication that I'm a big deal for tweeting.

• 16:57Sam Parr?

  They're calling like my car, my furniture assets and just start using words like assets.

• 17:01Shaan Puri?

  Exactly. I'm doing a liquidation. It's like, no, you're doing a garage sale, bro.

• 17:06Sam Parr?

  Well, we're gonna, yeah, we're having a fire, a fire sale on some of the assets.

• 17:11Shaan Puri?

  Exactly.

• 17:12Sam Parr?

  Not the garage.

• 17:13Shaan Puri?

  Anyway, so, so I was looking at some of these websites, CryptoPanic.com is a cool one. Anyway, so there's some of these, nothing I would say has, has broken through as like the place where people who care about this long-term and are not, they don't want to get caught in the price roller coaster day to day where they go. All right, so I'm gonna pause there. That was just the idea. Hey, I think somebody can create this. I think maybe Pomp or somebody who's like a central figurehead in crypto, similar to Paul Graham, maybe Pomp should be creating the hacker news for crypto that is specifically not about price. I, I, I think that would be a smart move. If I was Pomp, I would consider doing that. But you had some thoughts on these types of businesses and I think that's where more value will come. So, so go into that.

• 17:53Sam Parr?

  Yeah, so let's call these aggregators, I guess, because you're not actually creating anything, but you're aggregating. And, and the hustle is like a, is a little bit of an aggregator. We, we create stuff, but we aggregate a lot. So I know a little bit about aggregating aggregator businesses and I think that they're really, really great if you can have them, if you can make them. I was with Ryan, what's his name? Ryan Hoover, the day before he was launching Product Hunt, which is ultimately kind of like an aggregator. And he, and he was telling me about it and I go, oh, this is really dumb. This is not going to work. I was wrong. It worked out wonderfully. He did a really good job. Financially, it was mildly successful, but it, it was culturally incredibly successful and could have been even more successful if he owned it for a long time.

• 18:35Sam Parr?

  But anyway, now I went and talked to Andrew Wilkinson, who's going to be on the podcast actually tomorrow, which I don't know for the people listening, when that actually airs, tomorrow, the next day, something like that. He bought this thing called Web Designer News. So it's actually just web design.

• 18:49Shaan Puri?

  I think it's just Designer News.

• 18:50Sam Parr?

  Oh, just, is it just that? Are you sure?

• 18:52Shaan Puri?

  I think it's just DesignerNews.com. Yeah, I'm pretty sure it is.

• 18:54Sam Parr?

  Um, let's see. Oh, yeah. Sorry, not web designer, Designer News. Okay, so basically this was a hacker news thing. It was just for designers.

• 19:06Shaan Puri?

  It's like, it was literally a clone. Like, it looked almost the same, except for then Hacker News is kind of ugly. They just cleaned up the design a little bit, but it's the same idea.

• 19:12Sam Parr?

  Yeah, and it was pretty, pretty good when he bought it. And I asked him, "How's it going?" And he said, "It's basically dead. It's done." So I think he got the money back from what he paid for, as in he earned that much back, but he, I don't think he anticipates making a lot more money. And what I thought was his case, his opinion and what happened, my opinion and what happened to his site is actually kind of the same. But basically, here's what he told me. He goes, "The issue is you have to get a whole bunch of people to visit daily, and you're only as good as your posters because it's social news. And there's endless amounts of way to game the system with a bunch of bots, which oddly, people do it a lot. So you need constant moderation in algorithms, which is very expensive to hire the devs to make that.

• 19:56Sam Parr?

  And then you also need real live moderators, which also is expensive. And then if you have any period where the content gets bad, then everyone just moves to Reddit. So it's a little bit like lightning in a bottle, and it has this kind of magical network effect, but it's hard to catch lightning in a bottle, is what he said. And I actually agree with that. And so my point is, I actually think that if you can build this, it is one of the greatest things that you can own. And there's a few examples of this. So there's TechMeme, which is all, these are all things I'm a fan of, so it's all going to be a little bit...

• 20:25Shaan Puri?

  But TechMeme, I can't submit to it as a user, right? It's not social news. They curate it themselves.

• 20:31Sam Parr?

  Well, it solves the same problem.

• 20:34Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, it solves the same problem for the end customer, which is you go to a place and you see all the interesting links of the day in my niche that I care about.

• 20:41Sam Parr?

  It's the same habit. And the reason why it's important to mention TechMeme, because with Hacker News, as with Reddit, the creators or the owners of the site can actually just submit a ton of fake stuff that you wouldn't even know they submitted, and it would look populated. And that's in fact how Reddit got started. So the hard part is...

• 20:57Shaan Puri?

  There's a great video, by the way, on YouTube, if you want to see the how Reddit got started, their "Fake it till you make it" strategy, where they had 20 or so accounts of different names, and they were posting every day on the subreddit, like, from 20 different personalities, to try to make it look like there was this great young community of interesting people. And then they described, they were doing that for like, I don't know, a couple of months or something, and then they described the day where they went on it and just... It was all happening before they went with their fake accounts like the real people had built up enough steam had learned the like monkey see monkey do they had learned how to behave here and they were just posting the links and commenting and it was like wait dude that's not my account this is a real account holy shit this is actually working and so

• 21:36Sam Parr?

  And it takes a lot of time and Reddit was is 10 years old so when they were get I mean like the amount of websites that existed versus then then versus now they had a lot less competition it was still really hard but what I have found with this okay so there's tech meme tech meme just automatically pulls headlines based off what's most shared on the internet and then another example is let's run so let's run.com the listener or the owner of let's run.com is actually a listener of our podcast and I'm a big fan of let's run.com and it's basically the same thing it people submit articles and they comment on on it

• 22:05Shaan Puri?

  That's in the running niche

• 22:06Sam Parr?

  Yeah it's like dorky runners long distance runners very dorky

• 22:10Shaan Puri?

  So so let me tell the story of product hunt at the beginning how how Ryan did it right because I think for a lot of these it's one thing to hear oh it's like I would agree with you these social news sites social news aggregators are amazing when they work and they usually don't okay so how do you get it to work well I actually got to see Ryan build product kind of from the inside from day one and if anybody doesn't know like there's a funny article but basically Ryan was interviewing to come work at Monkey Inferno where I was the CEO at the time I was trying to recruit Ryan because I loved his blog posts and he was interviewing with us and he got the final interview and didn't didn't make it and I kept in touch with him I was like hey you know sorry didn't work out but like I'm still a big fan of yours and you know I want to give you the feedback

• 22:54Shaan Puri?

  why it didn't work hope that's not salt in the wound but you know if I view I'd be curious why didn't I get it and you know I really do want to keep in touch and then the next week he was like starting product hunt literally I think one week later he launched product hunt and and I remember like you I was thinking oh this is like cool but this is like just some pet projects not going to go anywhere why doesn't he come work on the real shit and in reality product hunt was more successful than anything we did in the lab so you know he won in the end but I would say What worked for him? So he started it on this thing called LinkyDink, uh, which was like an off the shelf little social news tool. I don't even think it's still around.

• 23:29Sam Parr?

  It's not.

• 23:29Shaan Puri?

  He started it there.

• 23:30Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it was like an email. It was so weird. It was like a.

• 23:33Shaan Puri?

  So the way it worked was it was like Hacker News. It was a list of links, but then it would send a recap to all the subscribers of that board, like an email recap. So even if you forgot to go to the website, you'd get the wrap up automatically. That was kind of like a killer feature there because you're trying to build the habit of people coming, but they first like, if you could just deliver them value through email, this will work. So I would say like, that was one like nice thing he did. He didn't need a tech. He didn't need an engineer at the beginning. He used LinkyDink and LinkyDink, the key was that they would email the recap. Then he only invited like friends that he had developed that he knew were as nerdy about products as he was. So I think I'm user number 15 or 17 of Product Hunt and it's because I was one of his nerdy friends who really like geeked out about new apps and new products, right? That's what this podcast kind of is.

• 24:17Sam Parr?

  This word product or like now you'll see people like, oh, I'm a product guy. I'm almost.

• 24:22Shaan Puri?

  It wasn't that popular then.

• 24:23Sam Parr?

  I'm almost positive people didn't really use that word or phrase. Or if they did, people were like, what are you talking about?

• 24:28Shaan Puri?

  Well, it was around like product manager was obviously a phrase. People talked about product, but it wasn't as like, it wasn't seen as like an anime fan or a sports fan. Like it didn't seem, it wasn't like a thing and he really said it a lot. Like this is for people who geek out on products. That was his tagline and at the beginning.

• 24:45Sam Parr?

  And I had never heard that phrasing. I knew what he was talking about, but I'd never heard anyone say that. And so he definitely kind of created a little bit of a category.

• 24:53Shaan Puri?

  He made it cool. I'll give him that. I think that he made it cool to do this thing.

• 24:56Sam Parr?

  That's what I mean.

• 24:57Shaan Puri?

  Then he, he curated the initial people and they were cool people. So it was like, cause he had been blogging for four years before that. He had built up a nice network in Silicon Valley. So that again, that's the hard work that happened before that prepared him to succeed. So then he invites Kevin Rose, he invites, you know, a bunch of interesting people onto this thing. And so people share and he set out some rules. So just like I was saying for crypto, hey, this is for all crypto news, except price. He said that for product. And he's like, this is for cool new products. Don't post Facebook and Instagram. Like, we all know about that. This is for the shit that you don't think the rest of the group has seen yet. So that's where the real value came. That's where you would get here. That was different than going to Tech Project, going to the App Store charts or wherever. It's like here you were going to

• 25:38Shaan Puri?

  discover the new thing first and not going to see shit that everybody already knew about. So it kind of made it an insider, like it set the level playing field of like, it's like if you were creating a wine club, you would say like, you know, this is for people who actually know about wines. Don't bring, you know, the $7 yellowtail, you know, wine here. And so anyways, I thought he got that right. Then he made it where you had to be whitelisted to participate in the community, meaning the average person could not just go post. So that solved the bots problem and the moderation problem because he was only letting trusted people post and anybody could view. And that had this double effect of it was now exclusive. People wanted to get in. They would beg to get in. They would prove themselves and if they got in,

• 26:20Shaan Puri?

  they would be on their best behavior. So they wouldn't get kicked out. And the last thing he did was he was pretty maniacal about curating the the community and the products. Like every morning he would wake up, I don't know, he's like kind of a robot. He like wakes up at 5am or 6am every day. Like, he's one of those guys. He's like, super productive type of person. And good habits, you know, he would go to Phil's coffee shop, he would sit down on his laptop, and then he would immediately be scouring Twitter. Anybody who mentioned Product Hunt, he would thank them. Anybody who posted a cool product, he would say, hey, I'd love for you to post this on Product Hunt. He wouldn't do it. He would tell them, hey, this would be really cool if you posted Product Hunt. I just gave you access. And so that like built this habit. And he did that every goddamn day for like, I don't know, nine months or something like that before he hired a community manager.

• 27:02Sam Parr?

  And it's still probably crushes. I use Product Hunt regularly. I don't actually know the numbers anymore because I don't, I'm not sure. But I bet you it's still quite successful and it could potentially be successful for 10 years plus.

• 27:13Shaan Puri?

  If you've ever seen somebody build a fire without matches, like I watched Survivor. So that's only, I'm not a, I'm not a camper. I don't know how it works, but on Survivor, this is like one of the mainstays is build a fire. That's how I view building a community. Like when you build a fire on Survivor, it's like first you're gonna like take the flint and you like just gotta, you gotta shave the magnesium off the flint. Boom, boom, boom, boom, boom. All right. Now you got enough of that. And now you're gonna like, you know, add the next piece. You're gonna like, try to get that to catch. And then as soon as it catches, you gotta very carefully, don't let it like extinguish. It's so like fragile at that time. You gotta start adding the little like brush wood or whatever. I don't know the words, but like, there's a certain type of thing you add next. Then you add the sticks, then you build, and now you have this raging bonfire. To me, that's like

• 27:56Shaan Puri?

  what building a community is like. And I've seen the people who actually do that, that like really hard work of shaving the flint first. And I'm like, oh shit, that's what it takes to do these like, once these communities are actually up and running. I've seen it once or twice. Now I've seen you do it as well with trends where you were posting every goddamn day in the trends group.

• 28:13Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 28:13Shaan Puri?

  For I don't know how many months.

• 28:14Sam Parr?

  A lot.

• 28:15Shaan Puri?

  That was your flint phase where you were just shaving magnesium onto the wood.

• 28:18Sam Parr?

  So let me tell you about something that we're launching at the hustle. I, you guys can use it or not. I don't care. I'm not pimping it out right now, but it's related to this. So what we're, what we are launching tomorrow on Tuesday, this podcast comes on Wednesday. So it's actually already live, but I don't even know if you're gonna be able to find it yet. But anyway, it's called Hustle Plus. And what we're doing is we're kind of launching something just like this because I'm obsessed with these types of products and I love these things. And so when a user signs up or they can click out of the email once they're already a subscriber and they can tell us, they can either explicitly tell us what they like or implicitly, we can see some of your behavior. And then we're gonna have a section of headlines. And in order to get those headlines, we built this tech that crawls the internet and finds the most shared stuff and shared headlines. And then,

• 29:03Sam Parr?

  let's say that you tell us or you click on a bunch of articles related to media and we tagged all the links, like this is a media, this is a media and a. Bootstrapping story, whatever.

• 29:14Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 29:14Sam Parr?

  You're going to get those links in your email. So you're going to get the hustle, which is like 2,000 words of like editorial stuff, but you're going to have one huge section with 10 or 20 just headlines. Then we're having, we're hiring a team of editors to write a one sentence description of that article. So it's part human, part machine telling you interesting stuff.

• 29:36Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 29:36Sam Parr?

  Very, very similar to Hacker News, Tech Meme, things like that. So that's actually, we.

• 29:42Shaan Puri?

  That's cool.

• 29:43Sam Parr?

  Yeah. And so we're, I'm doing that because I love these types of things. So it's basically a hack. It's very similar to a Hacker News, not so much user submitted right now, but kind of a similar idea. So I love these businesses and we've talked about Drudge Report. I think that if you can get this to work, it takes a ton of work upfront, very little work to maintain.

• 30:03Shaan Puri?

  Yes, yes, exactly. Okay, so let's, let's switch topics. Let's do one of the other ones.

• 30:08Sam Parr?

  75 Hard. 75 Hard. Okay, so you've done a ton of research about 75, 75 Hard. I've had so many friends talk about this, friends that mostly are not fit and this has inspired them to get fit.

• 30:21Shaan Puri?

  Okay, so tell, tell me about that part. I, I haven't heard, only Ben has told me about.

• 30:25Sam Parr?

  Oh, my gosh, everyone is talking about this, man. So do you remember Van Trump Report, the newsletter guy?

• 30:32Sam Parr?

  I told, I told you about this guy who's got this newsletter that crushes it in AgTech. I became friends with his son. His son lives in Kansas City. He's kind of talks with a southern accent. He's not like a techie. He came over to my house because he was visiting in Texas. He's like, hey, I know you have a gym. I'm on my last workout. I need to come use your gym. Can I use it? And then another friend, Sujan Patel, has been doing it. And 75 Hard has taken over like my friends and they commit to it like a religion, like they don't miss it.

• 30:58Shaan Puri?

  Right. So describe what it is to somebody and then I have a bunch of thoughts around it.

• 31:03Sam Parr?

  So 75 Hard, I think what it means, it's the, it's only got like six rules. It's basically you have to do for 75 days, two workouts a day. Each workout needs to be 45 minutes. One workout needs to be outside. I don't think either workout needs to be particularly hard. The only rule is that you have to sweat. The second rule is you have to have a diet for all 75 days. It doesn't matter what diet, you just have to do it. And that might be it. Is that the only rule?

• 31:32Shaan Puri?

  I think that's it. So, so I had heard about this. Ben told me about this a little while ago. And then today he's like, check out the app charts and it's the number three paid app in America right now. I said, wow, that's kind of amazing. And so I started looking into it. And I actually didn't do a ton of research on 75 hard, but I researched this category. I'm very interested in this category.

• 31:49Sam Parr?

  Finish the story on 75 hard. It started by this guy, Andy. I don't know his last name. You wrote it here. I don't want to.

• 31:54Shaan Puri?

  P. Prashila.

• 31:54Sam Parr?

  Okay. Everyone makes fun of me because I can't say stuff. He's actually based out of, right near me, Fenton, Missouri. He has a supplement company called, I think, Forma, and it does about $200 million in sales. He was in my local newspaper. Because he, um, they like, they bought a $20 million building and invested it and made it nice. So I think they're, it's legit.

• 32:13Shaan Puri?

  He's had several supplement companies because I was like, who is this guy? Because if you see, if you Google him, it's like, it's one of those red flag type of profiles. Like entrepreneur, speaker, best seller, coach to celebrities. You know, it's like, oh, fuck, what have you done? Who are you?

• 32:26Sam Parr?

  It's green, not legit, but he is legit.

• 32:30Shaan Puri?

  Exactly. And I, I mean, I can't shit on it too much. Like I'm a big Tony Robbins fan. And if you were to describe Tony Robbins, it'd be very, very similar. And like, but you kind of got to dig in and be like, I definitely, what I don't do is I don't take that at face value.

• 32:41Sam Parr?

  Right.

• 32:42Shaan Puri?

  Cool. So what are those businesses? Okay, great. What is this book? Like, you know, let me, let me check this out. Let me, let me get a sense here. So this guy's got actually the top, one of the top podcasts in our category, in the business category. It's called MFCEO or something like that.

• 32:56Sam Parr?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 32:57Shaan Puri?

  As you know, mother F and C or something. He's got a big Instagram following. So who is this guy? From what I know, which I just did a very quick dive. Actually, I'd love to have this guy on the pod. He, he basically, he's, uh, he started a couple of supplement companies. I think first was like a brick and mortar supplement company called Something Supplement. Super Supplements or something like that. And he's got, he's done that two or three times. His third one is called Form One. And that's, I think, the biggest one. It's been the most successful. And the, you know, the, the hook or the tagline is like, you know, these brands do over a hundred million dollars a year. So, okay, he's in the supplement space. He did well with that. Great. And then he like translated that into like a life philosophy. And I think he preaches kind of, he's like a bit of the Jaco Willink, like kind of school of thought, which is just like. You know, it's hard.

• 33:42Sam Parr?

  Man up.

• 33:42Shaan Puri?

  You gotta work hard.

• 33:43Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 33:43Shaan Puri?

  Man up, do it, grind, hustle, blah, blah, blah. Those are the words, right? So he's like Gary Vee. If Gary Vee was like jacked, you know? And so he's like, you know, in that, that vein. That's the outsider haven't got, I have not drank the Kool-Aid of what his stuff is. That's my outsider quick point of view. Okay, great. But I started thinking about this category.

• 34:02Sam Parr?

  By the way, I just wanna, I'm gonna cover your ass here. Sean sounded, and so did I, a little dismissive of this guy. I, I don't think you are trying to sound that way, and neither am I. I think this guy's a, seems like a good dude.

• 34:15Shaan Puri?

  I view it very much in the, like, I can have two thoughts at the same time. One thought is, oh, when I hear this stuff, it's usually a bit of hand wavy. And usually these people are kind of like stereotyped or it's kind of caricatures. But also they're probably like actually giving out good information, inspiring a lot of people, have had great success in their life and live up to a lot of these things. And like, I think both of those are kind of true. Like I, I kind of make fun of Gary Vee, but I think Gary Vee has built like kind of an awesome brand and an awesome company and he's an awesome guy. Like, you know, like, I don't know him personally, but I can simultaneously make fun of the character while also being like, you know, respect, you did your thing. Like you did the thing you want to do and that's not easy. Most people do nothing. So, you know, props, props for not, not just doing nothing, but doing something very unique.

• 34:58Sam Parr?

  So.

• 34:59Shaan Puri?

  Ace. So this space, so I'm very interested in this for kind of a reason. I've actually considered launching something like this. So that's why I looked into it. So 75, I'm very interested in these time bounded challenges, time bounded programs. So the big one that I personally had experienced with was P90X. So I don't know if you, did you ever do P90X?

• 35:18Sam Parr?

  Of course. Tony, Tony, what was his name? What was the guy's name?

• 35:22Shaan Puri?

  Tony Horton.

• 35:23Sam Parr?

  Tony Horton, of course.

• 35:24Shaan Puri?

  Okay, so here's the kind of backstory of P90X I think is interesting. There's this company called Beachbody. And what Beachbody did was it was started by this guy Carl Deichler. I would consider him our Billy of the week. So he's a CEO, he's worth about $600 million. And this guy is kind of the king of infomercials and the king of, of, of, of, of sort of at-home fitness. So he created Eight Minute Abs. Um, you know, he, he created Eight Minute Abs, which was like, he was inspired by Buns of Steel. He like loved this like branding of a fitness program. And he, he was pretty early and jumped on in the kind of early 90s this time, really started hammering infomercials on TV. That was his main channel.

• 36:06Shaan Puri?

  Like today, Facebook ads is, I think, the infomercials of today, but he was really the master of infomercials back then. And so he's like, all right, I'm gonna do, I'm gonna create this company. And originally, he wanted to call it, I think, like, um, he, so he, he's like, I want to start this company. He goes to his friends and family. He raises $500,000 from angel, uh, angel investor friends and family. He says, all right, I'm gonna test five products and I'm gonna see what sticks. And they're gonna be in this like fitness space. And the whole idea was like, I'm, I have this distribution channel, infomercials, and I'm gonna create products that are sticky, that people, that help people lose weight, essentially, get more fit. And so he starts with, the very first one, I think, was Tony, he goes to Tony Horton. Tony Horton, at the time, is a celebrity trainer.

• 36:50Shaan Puri?

  So he's training Bruce Springsteen and like all these kind of like musicians and actors and actresses in Hollywood. So he goes to Tony and he says, let's create a product called Great Body Guaranteed. And he's like, oh, I love it. Great Body Guaranteed, how can it miss? And he goes to, he tries to get greatbody.com and it's taken. And so he's like doing his thing. He's walking around on the beach in LA, walking home one day and he's like, he's on the beach, he just thinks Beachbody, beachbody.com. He runs home, checks out, checks, beachbody.com is available, so he grabs it. And so he starts trying to produce these infomercials with Tony for this program. And they produce many, many programs. Um, and, and he, he realized at the time, okay, like, I can't afford celebrity endorsements, right? Like, that's why Tony had a good name, was because he was training for celebrities.

• 37:34Shaan Puri?

  But he couldn't really afford celebrity endorsements, so. They start just trying to do like, like, kind of like infomercials without that. So customer testimonials. So he comes up with this idea that the customer is the celebrity. How do I make the customer a celebrity? And so what he, the initial batch of infomercials had all actually failed where he was just saying, you know, get a great body and it's just super jacked people on screen saying how jacked they are, basically. And so instead, you know, it's kind of just money down the drain during that part. And instead they try one version of the infomercial where they took a few testimonials that had been sent in from their buyers. That said, hey, look at, you know, this was me before and this is me now.

• 38:14Shaan Puri?

  And me now wasn't like, didn't look like a Greek god, but just like definitely looked better than the out of shape overweight person, you know, in the before photo. So they slapped those into the infomercial, like real customer testimonials. And boom, this thing starts selling like hotcakes. And so he realizes, oh, wait, the more authentic these look. And so he started curating, he goes, I want the customer testimonials to almost look like America's Funniest Home Video footage. Like somebody at home, their cat's jumping on them while they're doing a sit up. Their plant is, you know, dying in the background. They can barely hold their balance while doing the pose. And then you see the after photo 90 days later that they look great. And that was his kind of core insight that was working really, really well.

• 38:57Shaan Puri?

  And he was very differentiated because everybody else was, who was doing at home was really at this time was doing like some gimmick product, like thigh master, ab roller, bow flex, like selling some equipment. This equipment will solve your problems. And instead he was like, no, no, I'm going to make a promise. You do my program for 90 days, you get this result. And that promise marketing was much better. And that's what 75 hard is too. It's another variant of this promise marketing.

• 39:23Sam Parr?

  Well, there's a slight difference, I think. So if I, I don't know, I don't think it's like this anymore, but when 75 hard first started, it was around as a free movement. So basically this guy would say like, all right, everyone, it's that time of year, we're doing it. And he would do it.

• 39:38Shaan Puri?

  It's like no shave November.

• 39:39Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I, I forget the months, but I've, I've seen, I've seen it for a couple of years now. And he would basically, I guess Instagram, like now's the time for the challenge. And I think he did it for like. Maybe four years before it even became a thing. So P90X, I think it's a you enroll and you have 90 days to get it done. This 75 hard thing was a, you know, November 1st, get ready, like, you know, time to get

• 40:01Shaan Puri?

  Seasonal thing.

• 40:02Sam Parr?

  Yeah. And it worked really well. I guess it's 75 hard now, like a rolling 75?

• 40:06Shaan Puri?

  I think it's, I think so because they have this app. So I don't think it's just one time of the year. But, um, and if it's number three right now and we're in June or we're in April. So I think, you know, it's, it's definitely not the November thing as it was before. And so just to go back to Beachbody. So Beachbody, the company does over a billion dollars a year in revenue. Just to break down their business. They basically, so he, he comes up with this concept of a, a gym at home instead of a home gym. So it's like, how do you do the gym workout at home? And, uh, he's like, okay, we have, we're going to use infomercials and we're going to use DVDs. DVDs are going to be great because you're going to be able to put it on your TV and you do it whenever you want, sort of on demand. Great. Um, and so he starts selling DVDs and the DVDs do well and programs like P90X are part of it.

• 40:49Shaan Puri?

  And for P90X, it was actually a little bit of a pivot for them. There's actually these cool videos on YouTube of them in their meetings. And he's pitching this. He's like, okay, look, right now we're all about losing weight. It's all weight loss. It's all, um, uh, like, kind of like belly fat. That's the market we go after for Beachbody. But for P90X, I want to do something different. He's like, we need like an extreme program for the muscle builder. He's like, I noticed there's all these magazines like Men's Fitness and Muscle, Muscle Monthly and all this stuff. Where people are really trying to like build huge muscles. And so let's set out the tenants for this thing. And he's like, doing a presentation. He's like, this is not for beginners. This is at home. This is meant to build muscles, get shredded. You're going to get shredded in 90 days. And he's like, that's the promise we're going to make to people.

• 41:33Shaan Puri?

  And so he, you know, I like seeing these meetings where people are like coming up with the, the concept that then, you know, takes over the nation type of thing. And so their model is you have the DVDs and then he's like, okay, cool. Distribution through infomercials was good, but we've kind of hit our limit there. So then he took a page out of the Amway MLM playbook. He's like, here's what we'll do. We'll get our, our most successful customers will become our coaches. We'll teach them how to sell this program for themselves, how to be their own mini Tony Horton. So they go and they build this nationwide network of 400,000 coaches. And then of course, the coaches can train other coaches and they can keep a share of their revenue. Right. Classic MLM, multi-level marketing. Some people call it a pyramid scheme or a Ponzi scheme, but there's a, there's a legal way to do this. And he's doing it the legal way.

• 42:18Shaan Puri?

  And so the top coaches-

• 42:19Sam Parr?

  Yeah. And I, I think in his case, it's an, I'm reading all about him. It's an MLM, but it's not, I don't find this to be unethical or bad. I mean, it's just, he's, he's making customer salespeople for him.

• 42:30Shaan Puri?

  So I was once talking to a friend and he was like, dude, we need to create this product and we'll do it. We'll sell it as an MLM. And I was like, dude, MLM, isn't that like, you know, isn't that like a sin? And he's like, why? He's like, it's basically you get your, your hardcore believers-

• 42:43Sam Parr?

  Do I know this friend?

• 42:44Shaan Puri?

  You own them with the ability to sell it. You know the friend.

• 42:46Sam Parr?

  Yeah. I think, I, I think I know, and I think they love MLMs because an MLM almost bought them.

• 42:52Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 42:53Sam Parr?

  And MLMs inherently are not wrong. Now-

• 42:57Shaan Puri?

  Exactly. The way he described it, he goes, look, there's a knob. Think about it this way, this is a model, just like affiliate marketing or any kind of viral marketing. You basically give people products and let them sell it. It's like, there's a knob though. The knob is like, kind of like your evil knob. And you could turn it down to zero. And when you're at zero, you're basically saying, hey, if you're a fan of our product, you can become one of our coaches. And you could, there's no minimums. You don't have to subscribe to this monthly thing. You don't have to like, uh, you know, do this the wrong way. He's like, or you turn it up to 12 and you go super evil. And you basically say, hey dude, you could become a millionaire if you become one of our coaches. Look at this guy. He's a millionaire. Don't you want to be a millionaire? And then you basically get them to sign up for this thing where they have to pay you a hundred dollars a month. They have to buy $10,000 of product.

• 43:40Shaan Puri?

  And now their, their, their kid's bedroom is full of like this, this, you know, hair, hair loss, uh, you know, shampoo treatment. That they need to sell and then they can't sell, but they bought $10,000 worth and you made- Your money anyways, and then they go broke because they try to become one of your reps. And like you, you that knob is like in your control to turn how screwed up you want to be with it. And so anyways, I think Beachbody is like somewhere in the not so evil category from what I know. Their top, their coaches and trainers make about like two to three million dollars a year. And a lot of that revenue again comes from the coaches that they brought on board. They get a percentage of their sales.

• 44:14Sam Parr?

  And the company, by the way, Beachbody, I'm reading all about their CEO and he's giving an interview and he says they do this year in 20, they'll do a billion in sales and they do about 10% EBITDA. So a hundred million in net profit.

• 44:30Sam Parr?

  On a billion in sales.

• 44:33Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I'm surprised it's not better. The way that they.

• 44:36Sam Parr?

  Probably buy a ton of ads.

• 44:38Shaan Puri?

  The way they describe their model is like they have the DVDs, which now has become streaming. They have the coaches to go like distribute those, like that's their sales, their sales force. And they make all their profit on the shakes. So the whole thing goes, comes down to this like shake product they have called Shakeology. And basically it's like, okay, the, the streaming or the DVDs, the content is good, but it's not like it costs so much to market it. It's not that good. Okay. You know, the coaches, well, you gotta recruit them. You gotta train them. They gotta sell. They're good, but they're not that good. The shakes, it's like a hundred thirty dollars for your one month of nutrition shakes. And that's like pure margin. It goes back to the Andrew Fosso guys, like supplement company. It's like they make all their money on the profits come from the shakes.

• 45:19Shaan Puri?

  And the whole thing with the coaches is like, cool, we get you hooked on this program and then you want better results? You want better results, you gotta trim up that diet. Hey, here's what I do. I drink these delicious shakes. They're so tasty and they are.

• 45:31Sam Parr?

  I didn't know they own psychology. I did not know that.

• 45:34Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. So that's their, that's their model. So I think Beachbody is a pretty fascinating company. I think that these, I think that marketing your product as a X days promise is a very smart idea because you're basically saying you're going to get this result in this much time. Whether that's eight minute abs or P90X or 75 hard, or it's that diet, Whole30, where you're going to do 30 days of eating whole foods only. Like I've seen this work so many times. I'm very fascinated by it. I don't know why it works in the psychology of the, of the customer, but it definitely does work. And then the last piece is, I think one of the reasons it works is because. Customers can sort of commit to like, well, I can do this for X days. That doesn't sound too hard. Ninety days? I could do anything for ninety days. Thirty day diet?

• 46:17Shaan Puri?

  Okay, like, maybe I'm not gonna change my diet and become a vegan, but can I eat Whole Foods for thirty days? All right, that's a challenge. And I thought it was very interesting the way he talked about this, which was, there's two ways to market it. He goes, we've always marketed our products as, you can do it. Like, this is so easy, you can do it. And what's seventy-five hard and P90X do is the opposite. They go, can you do it? It's a challenge to you. Like, I don't know if you could do it. This is, it's hard, right? So then they started creating all these, they have, they have two versions of their marketing. You can do it marketing, and can you do it marketing? And I love that. I thought that was such an interesting way of like, thinking about your business. They have a program called insanity. Why is it called insanity? Because it's meant to sound super fucking hard and

• 46:57Shaan Puri?

  too crazy. And why is P90X, it's the extreme home workout. It's not that easy beginner sit-ups and push-ups stuff. This is the extreme. So I thought that was pretty cool.

• 47:06Sam Parr?

  Okay, so what are we gonna launch in this space?

• 47:09Shaan Puri?

  So, I've been working with my trainer now, and I'm actually like, I've hit some tipping point where I'm starting to get results. Like, I look at my body, like during the, during our sessions in my, we work out in my garage, there's this one area where the sun like, comes into my garage, and the shadow is just perfect, and I look fucking great. And I'm like, dude, this, I need to stand here.

• 47:27Sam Parr?

  That's how it works with exercising. It's like, no results, no results, no results, boom, it all kind of, it feels like it happens.

• 47:33Shaan Puri?

  Dude, that's how everything valuable is like, slowly, slowly, slowly, then suddenly. And so it's like, all business success works that way. And I'm now saying, even fitness success works that way, where there is this tipping point. And where now the workouts, I don't dread them, I enjoy them, I'm looking forward to them, I feel bad if I ever get to miss a day. Whereas before, I was like, sweet, snow day, don't have to work out, you know, like, I was looking forward to missing it, now I'm, now I'm looking forward to doing it. So anyways, I was talking to my trainer, and I was like, dude, I'm gonna help you. I'm gonna help you create, because he's always hearing me talk about business, and it's like, he's a black belt in fitness. I like to consider myself like, really good at, at business, and we're trying to help each other out. And so I told him, I was like, dude, why don't you do this? Like, why don't you create, like, he's a gem to me. He's not like a normal

• 48:18Shaan Puri?

  trainer. He's like, I've told many stories about how he helps my mindset and all this stuff.

• 48:21Sam Parr?

  And he's really cheap, too.

• 48:24Shaan Puri?

  I'm like, dude, you're a cut above like of most people. I was like, we should create one of these where it's like, I was like, just with my friends, like just the people I know in my, my, my life. Who if I post a photo of me today and I post a photo of me like a few months ago before I started working out with you, like, I'm going to post that before and after photo. That's my own pride moment of like, I did it. I actually turned the corner on this thing that's been forever a really hard thing for me. I've never really considered myself fit or shredded or like been proud to take off my shirt, but I think I'm going to get there pretty soon. Like within a few months, I think I'm going to get there. I was like, when I post that after photo, I was like, we should open up something that says, if you want to do it, like let's create our own 90 day program and like let people in. Cause I was like, the way I was thinking about it was he has this philosophy, which is like,

• 49:10Shaan Puri?

  we, we talked about like, um, how do you feel when your friends get successful? And, um, and I told him honestly, I was like, yeah, like it's been hard for me. Like when my friend, when Sam sells his company for 10, all of a sudden Sam's got tens of millions of dollars. That's like, I'm happy for you. Yes. I'm not like, not happy for you, but there's a, a bigger part of me in that moment, right? When the news hits, that's like, oh, fuck, I'm behind, you know? And I was like, the honest truth was like, I get kind of jealous or like, I get kind of envious. And so he helped me sort of reframe that in my mind. This is not about you, but like, it's been this way for decades, you know? Like, I always felt this way. If somebody's successful, like good for them, but bad for me. And he's like, you know, it doesn't have to be that way. Good for them, bad for me. It can be good for them. It's good for me.

• 49:52Shaan Puri?

  He's like, it's just this philosophy you gotta have where do you carry yourself where you say, it's not just that I'm going to win. I'm going to help bring up all the people around me. We're all going to win. And it's going to be more fun that we're all going to win. He's like, you do this with investing, right? You share your deals and you co-invest and you let your, you want your friends to invest in your companies. Because when you win, it's more fun to toast together and drink together. He's like, same thing with like all aspects of life. You should be thinking about, I'm not just going to win. I'm going to win so much. There's going to be so much like success around me that all the people around me are going to be successful too. Anyway, long story short of, of, I heard him tell me about that and I, I took it to him. I go, I'm going to help you build a business that does this. I'm going to take the thing you're really good at that you're doing for me.

• 50:33Shaan Puri?

  And now I have him working with my sister, my mom, my sister's kids, uh, my sister-in-law, I pay, you know, like, we do all of their fitness now through him. He's like my family's personal coach.

• 50:42Sam Parr?

  Really?

• 50:43Shaan Puri?

  And so I'm like, yeah, he's, he's doing, that's, I'm, we're his only clients anymore. It's just my whole family.

• 50:48Sam Parr?

  What, uh, can you like, tell me what you pay this person?

• 50:53Shaan Puri?

  Uh, no, I don't want to put him on blast like that.

• 50:55Sam Parr?

  You want to, you want his name? You want to say his name? Or do you want to even hide him?

• 50:58Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I mean, I call him J. That's his name is John Alexander. So he goes short for J. And he's not being on social media and nothing like that. Like, he doesn't try to be like some influencer guy or whatever.

• 51:07Sam Parr?

  A trainer?

• 51:09Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, he's a trainer. That's what he's been doing. He's been, you know, fit his whole life. And, you know, he's really good at this.

• 51:14Sam Parr?

  I think I see him. A shaved head white guy?

• 51:17Shaan Puri?

  No, I'll send you his Instagram later. But basically, I want to, I want to help him be successful. I think we can use one of these, like, I think we can use this model of this P90X or 75 hard. Let people commit to something that's reasonable for them. That's the way I did it with him. I was like, all right, I'm gonna, I'm gonna commit. I don't know how good you are, how bad I am. I don't know if I can do this long term, but like, I'll commit, I'll give you 30 days to get my ass off this couch. Like, I'm just, I'm sick of this. Get my ass going. 30 days, I will do anything you fucking say. One hour a day, I will sweat my ass off. And like, that got me hooked. And so I think we're gonna come up with some program like that. This is, we're like months away from actually launching something, but I want to do that because I think, A, I want to share him with more people. And B, I just think this is a cool business model.

• 52:01Sam Parr?

  Why do you do everything you do? Why, like, why do you not focus more on one or two things? And I criticize you. I don't criticize you. I, I, I challenge you often. Why continually, why do this, do that, do that, do this? Why not just do one thing and crush it? Because it, your, your answer might be, well, because I just want to explore and see everything out there. But it's pretty obvious what you're good at.

• 52:30Shaan Puri?

  Which is what?

• 52:31Sam Parr?

  I have a feeling that your rolling fund is going to be wildly successful. Uh, I have a feeling that, like, you pull a lot of the weight on the podcast because you're, you're very good at content. Why do everything instead of just be the best at this, at your, this, in this little lane?

• 52:49Shaan Puri?

  I do think about that. I think I've graduated out of being an operator. I no longer want to operate one entity. The only entity I want to operate is, you know, Sean Coe, my life. And when I think about like, what would be the most exciting version of that? How do I, how do I marry this part of me that's just super curious and every day, you know, I want to go down the rabbit hole and learn how 75 hard works and not, you know, P90X works, right? Before this podcast, I would do that anyways. I just didn't have an excuse. I didn't have an outlet. I would just do the research, shove it in my head, and then I would go about my job and my life and I would keep running my company, which had nothing to do with fitness, right? This podcast was a cool thing because it gave me an excuse

• 53:31Shaan Puri?

  to do more of that thing I'm interested in, I do good at, and now it's a win-win. Now I go down those rabbit holes. I learned those things. I come here, I share the learnings and cool, we, we get

• 53:42Sam Parr?

  Step three, which we're both doing, which is, and then you like, oh, I think this is actually a really good idea. Let's go put money

• 53:47Shaan Puri?

  And then I seed a company and then I basically say, cool, now I'm going to invest my money. I'm going to share my knowledge to an operator who can go start that business. And so my, this will be my trainer's business. It's not going to be my business. But I will plant the seed with him that, hey, this will be great. And I'll do everything in my power to help you be successful. Meaning I'll give you seed funding. I'll be your test customer testimonial. Like that's, that's on me to get, you know, make my after picture better than my before picture. And then lastly, like I'll share, I'll spread the love. I'll spread the word about, about your thing when, when the time comes, whenever you're ready. Like I wasn't planning on talking about it today. It's just coincided with us talking about Beachbody. So anyways, I would say like, that to me is a more fun life. I basically decided, all right, I want my life to be

• 54:26Shaan Puri?

  where I wake up and whatever I'm most curious about, I go do because I have a way to monetize my own curiosity. I have a way to monetize my own learnings. Okay. So how do I, that's what I've decided is my thing for the next decade.

• 54:37Sam Parr?

  I'm going to push back there a little bit because I actually think that that, that your premise might be a little flawed here, which is I'm going to wake up and I'm going to do what I want.

• 54:47Shaan Puri?

  I'm going to, no, no, I'm going to go learn about what I'm most interested in, what I'm most curious about.

• 54:54Sam Parr?

  And I would actually, I would actually challenge, I would challenge that a little bit because it's like,

• 55:00Sam Parr?

  well, you're kind of implying that you're each day, you're going to do a new thing. And I would-

• 55:05Shaan Puri?

  Not necessarily, like, like for crypto, like I've spent months in crypto, right? Because, you know, years of curiosity, but then like months of pretty hardcore curiosity around that.

• 55:14Sam Parr?

  I think that's good.

• 55:15Shaan Puri?

  And it's become like a bigger part of my portfolio of time and money. And so, you know, same thing with e-commerce. I got more interested in e-commerce, right? Same thing with live streaming. For many years, it was all about live streaming. So these don't have to be every day. It's a new topic. I think that would be a bit extreme, but, um, but with the podcast, yeah, you know, we do two of these a week. We talk about three different topics each time. We're by no means experts at any of those. It's like very, kind of like off the cuff type of conversation and research. But I think it's like, the way I think about it is like, Tim Ferriss has done this. If I've seen anybody do it, I think that Tim Ferriss has done this where he's, uh, he's very curious about certain things that he wants to go learn. So then he goes, talks to people in that space. He does experiments on himself. He reads books about that topic. He reads research papers about the topic.

• 56:01Shaan Puri?

  And then he packages it up into something that's sellable sometimes. And sometimes it's not sellable and it's just for him. It's just for his own curiosity. I think I could do that. I think I can create the new, new business model of being Tim Ferriss. So that would be, what's my one thing? I think it's that, but to the outside, it looks like a lot of variety. And to me, that's good. It's, but it's-

• 56:21Sam Parr?

  Well, I'm not trying to criticize it here. I'm just trying to bring in a different perspective. Because I was thinking about, I, I saw, I know this guy who's like getting something off the ground. And I see him constantly talking about like side projects, day trading,

• 56:37Sam Parr?

  Bitcoin, yada, yada, yada. And this business is related to something totally separate. And I'm like, what are you doing, dude? Just like, lock yourself in the room. Don't do anything except for like, be with your family, exercise and like work on your thing.

• 56:52Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 56:53Sam Parr?

  Because like, it seemed almost in, not, not impossible. Some are really good at it, but for most, it seems almost impossible to create anything meaningful without a maniacal amount of focus, at least early on, for an extended period of time, more likely than not, though.

• 57:11Shaan Puri?

  I think that's true. I think that's true. And it's, it would be definitely true if I said, oh, I'm gonna go start a company, I don't raise much money, and this is gonna be, I'm gonna make this huge company. I'm not doing that. That's not my thing right now. So like if, when I was doing that, I didn't have a podcast. I didn't have a fund. I didn't have a blog. I didn't have, I didn't have a girlfriend. I didn't have many things. I sacrificed on many of those because I was all in, sleeping at the office 200 days a year. I just know that that's not what this next phase looks like for me. I could do that again. I don't really want to. And so I'm trying to see, is there a better model for me that that is more, that feels effortless to me? That always felt like a lot of effort. And I think that there is a version of life that it doesn't have to be so hard. I think it can be speedy and easy. I think it can be effortless. If you're doing the thing you really enjoy doing.

• 57:58Sam Parr?

  I agree with that.

• 57:59Shaan Puri?

  On a day to day basis.

• 57:59Sam Parr?

  I wouldn't use the word effortless, but it's a, it's, it's a rewarding.

• 58:04Shaan Puri?

  Like, when you play, do you feel like you're working hard? No. Like, I can go play basketball. I could be really tired by the end of it. So meaning fatigue, because I've played basketball for three hours. But at no point in it would I feel like I'm having to like, do something I don't want to be doing.

• 58:17Sam Parr?

  Well, no, I actually disagree with that. I mean, if you want to use that play thing, like, I don't always, I love to exercise, but I don't always want to go do it. But I'm always happy that I did do it. And like, oh, I don't want to do.

• 58:27Shaan Puri?

  Because to me, working out is not like play. Play is a really specific word. Play is like, you know, I could be tired from my job, and I'll come home, and I could play video games. And video games take actually like, you know, focus, hand eye coordination, strategy, talking to your teammates, all that stuff. But because it's fun, it doesn't feel like work to me. Right? And so I'm interested in, in play now. I'm not interested in hard work.

• 58:51Sam Parr?

  So where do we go from here?

• 58:54Shaan Puri?

  I think we might wrap it. It's been a little, we went on kind of tangents there.