#54 - Atrium Closing Down, B2B Gifting & Curly Girl Hair

Sam (@thesamparr) and Shaan (@shaanvp) talk ideas, news, trends and businesses. We've partnered with Rippling! The startup that gives you back your time from payroll to employee compliance, making it unbelievably easy to manage your company’s HR and IT – in one system. If you want to try it out, visit www.rippling.com. Also, we had a listener actually start building an idea mentioned in our last podcast with turning tithing digital. He's documenting his journey and uploaded a video to share with you all in our private FB group -- which you are free to join: www.facebook.com/groups/ourfirstmillion. Here's Paul Graham's awesome essay on Do Things That Don't Scale: http://paulgraham.com/ds.html For detailed show-notes Topics for today: Greetings in the corona world & viral trigger content (0:14), Our run the world event is canceled (1:09), Henry has a mic now... but he's leaving the pod (1:49), A listener is building the tithing app (3:47), Cursing in meetings (5:55), Curly girl hair (8:27), Workout app making $100m/year (12:45), Mixed race shampoo (14:13), Atrium closing down and what Justin said to Sam at Hustlecon (16:24), Paul Graham's Do Things That Don't Scale (22:45), Trader Joe's founder passing away and it's fantastic business (29:25), Hotel franchising (33:49), B2B Gifting (36:14), CEO's discussed actually listen to the pod (42:30), Q&A: What's your best SEO hack for a new website? (43:53), Q&A: How to make your podcast profitable? (46:47) and Best interview questions featuring Henry (49:02). See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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

• 0:10Sam Parr?

  Namaste.

• 0:12Shaan Puri?

  Namaste. That's our Corona. Namaste.

• 0:14Sam Parr?

  Um.

• 0:14Shaan Puri?

  People are legit doing the foot handshake. Like several people have done this to me. Be like, alright, yep, Corona.

• 0:20Sam Parr?

  One of our, one of my coworkers Bobby, he on, on Instagram, he's like, handshakes are disgusting right now. You have to do other things. And he put a video of him and another coworker Katie, having their feet with their toes interlocking.

• 0:38Sam Parr?

  It was so funny.

• 0:39Shaan Puri?

  It just triggers everyone.

• 0:40Sam Parr?

  Yeah. He was like, you can't handshake anymore. You have to do other methods. Their toes were interlocking.

• 0:44Shaan Puri?

  That's like, that is the best content on, on social media is these photos that will just trigger people. When they see that, there was one where this guy was on a plane and he was barefoot and he put his foot on the armrest of the, of the person in front of him. And it got like, I don't know, whatever the max number of Twitter users are that could share, that's how many people share this thing.

• 1:03Sam Parr?

  We should, uh, I should take that from him and share, share it on my stuff. Cause I'll, uh, get some of their, I'll steal their clout. Uh, last podcast, we talked about run the world.

• 1:12Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 1:12Sam Parr?

  Okay. So.

• 1:13Shaan Puri?

  Retraction.

• 1:14Sam Parr?

  Yeah. Big, major retraction. I signed up. Me and Alan did it. Uh, sorry guys, it didn't work.

• 1:20Shaan Puri?

  Platform sucks right now.

• 1:21Sam Parr?

  Platform sucks. I think that if they're listening, you can get it right, but you missed it this time.

• 1:26Shaan Puri?

  And you tweeted at them. Did they respond to you?

• 1:28Sam Parr?

  Yeah. Good customer service and they, uh, I got a, I sent it to you last night. I couldn't go to bed last night, two or three in the morning. They just screwed up.

• 1:36Shaan Puri?

  So it's just kind of buggy right now.

• 1:39Sam Parr?

  Yeah. Yep.

• 1:39Shaan Puri?

  Alright, that's unfortunate. We'll figure it out.

• 1:40Sam Parr?

  We'll figure it out.

• 1:41Shaan Puri?

  We'll try another one at some point. Um.

• 1:43Sam Parr?

  But we definitely did it. Unfortunately it didn't work.

• 1:45Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 1:45Sam Parr?

  Um, is there any, okay. So we can get.

• 1:48Shaan Puri?

  Other updates. How about Henry with the microphone? Talking to that, get that, get that smooth voice, that Barry Manilow voice on here.

• 1:55Speaker 02

  What's up guys? I'm Henry.

• 1:56Shaan Puri?

  Oh man, look at that.

• 1:57Speaker 02

  On the pod.

• 1:58Shaan Puri?

  New fan favorite.

• 1:59Sam Parr?

  That's awesome.

• 2:00Speaker 02

  Jamie of, uh, from the, from the Joe Rogan experience for this podcast.

• 2:03Shaan Puri?

  Powerful young Henry.

• 2:05Sam Parr?

  But, but he is leaving.

• 2:07Shaan Puri?

  I know, but for now, it's powerful young Henry.

• 2:09Speaker 02

  I am leaving in a week, but Alan will be replacing me. So you'll have a new, fresh face.

• 2:13Sam Parr?

  That's awesome.

• 2:14Shaan Puri?

  So now when we need to look stuff up and then Henry finds the information because we don't know what the hell we're talking about. Now he can say it into the mic, which is great.

• 2:22Sam Parr?

  Are there any other updates that we have to talk about? Run the world didn't work. Henry has a mic.

• 2:26Shaan Puri?

  Uh, no, let's get.

• 2:27Sam Parr?

  Um, we asked people to subscribe and unsubscribe and send videos. I don't think it worked.

• 2:31Shaan Puri?

  Don't think that worked. Um, but podcast is growing anyways, so I feel happy. We're up, I think 55% since last month.

• 2:38Sam Parr?

  Which is awesome.

• 2:39Shaan Puri?

  Solid growth.

• 2:40Sam Parr?

  If you are listening to this, you don't have to do much. Just share this with a friend and you could tag either of us on Twitter and we will. I'll for sure reply. Sean will.

• 2:50Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 2:50Sam Parr?

  Say he will and he might.

• 2:51Shaan Puri?

  I may or may not reply, but here's the thing. I was on my way over here today and you know, I like to get in the mood like. I like to prime my, I like to prime the pump. Um. I couldn't, I was like, all right, what should I listen to? That's going to get the ideas flowing, get the wheels turning. Uh, so that when I come in here, my brain is already firing. There's no podcast to listen to that's like this, dude. I hate to say it. There's no other podcast that does this where it's like, there's a lot of good podcasts where it's great storytelling. Great interviews, but nobody is playing mental hopscotch with ideas. And so I couldn't get anything to get me going.

• 3:28Sam Parr?

  So.

• 3:28Shaan Puri?

  But it's a good sign for us.

• 3:29Sam Parr?

  When I wasn't here, Stu did it and, uh, I listened to it and I loved it and I loved the notes even more.

• 3:37Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 3:37Sam Parr?

  I love the notes. I had no idea about the whole Christian tithing, uh, business. Awesome. And I, that's when I know it's good because I typically hate anything I'm involved in.

• 3:46Shaan Puri?

  And how about the guy who's doing the tithing business? He like.

• 3:49Sam Parr?

  Oh, yes. A guy messaged us. Um, it sounds like he was English. He must be in England.

• 3:54Shaan Puri?

  He's in the UK. He's basically, so his thing was, we didn't give him the idea. He.

• 3:58Sam Parr?

  Say the background.

• 3:59Shaan Puri?

  So the background is we were talking about, uh, me and Stu were talking about. Okay, cool. Religious, religion tech, church tech. And one of the ideas that came up are one of the things I told him, I said, somebody had reached out and said, give me three months. I'm gonna be on the podcast, cuz I'm gonna build this thing. It's badass. You guys should know, you're talking about church tech. There's this company that does digital tithing. It's called PushPay.

• 4:20Sam Parr?

  It's big.

• 4:21Shaan Puri?

  Four billion process, ninety-eight million in revenue. There's another one called Tidely. And he's like, but they're not big in the UK or Europe right now. I'm gonna build it in the UK and Europe. And in the, uh, the, the Facebook group, which we'll put the link in the show notes. Uh, he's providing these video updates. So he posted his first video update. I don't know if you saw it. Uh, where he's like, I got twenty-three customers, churches who are interested in doing this, including one that runs two thousand churches.

• 4:44Sam Parr?

  And he's young.

• 4:45Shaan Puri?

  And he's a young guy. He's a smart guy. And he's like, look, here's how I came up with this idea and I'm doing it. I'm gonna provide video updates every week in this thing. And, uh, I love the wor- I love when people share their work. I love when people work in public. I think it's a extremely underrated thing to do. And every time you do it, you get this army of people who are rooting for you and opening up doors for you as you go.

• 5:05Sam Parr?

  I completely agree.

• 5:06Shaan Puri?

  And it keeps you accountable, which is good.

• 5:07Sam Parr?

  I'm excited to see what he's gonna do. Hopefully, his next video is a little shorter.

• 5:10Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, this one was like six minutes.

• 5:11Sam Parr?

  Eight minutes.

• 5:12Shaan Puri?

  I, I, I watched two of the, the eight, but I enjoyed all two that I watched.

• 5:16Sam Parr?

  I like that guy. Uh, so, show, I guess we should, we should put Abreu's, uh, I think that's how you say his name.

• 5:23Shaan Puri?

  Abreu?

• 5:23Sam Parr?

  Abreu?

• 5:24Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 5:24Sam Parr?

  Uh, we should put his show notes in the...

• 5:27Shaan Puri?

  In the description.

• 5:27Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 5:28Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 5:28Sam Parr?

  This guy is a listener. He just makes these great notes. We don't know him. I mean, I met him recently. He called me a little bitch when I first met him. That's what he did.

• 5:36Shaan Puri?

  Just to shock you or what?

• 5:37Sam Parr?

  Well, I met him and he goes, hey, why don't you follow me on Twitter? I was like, I don't know. I'm sorry. And he goes, just stop being a little bitch and follow me. That's one of the first things he said when I met him. I was like, nice to meet you. So, uh, kudos to that guy for whatever you wanna give him.

• 5:53Shaan Puri?

  I had this, uh, blog post. I used to try to blog about business back in the day, uh, when we were doing our very first startup right out of college. And none of my posts got read by anybody. Nobody cared. But one post went semi-viral and it was called the first curse advantage. And basically I was saying how in a meeting, the first person who, uh, who uses a curse word... Sort of establishes himself as the person who just doesn't give a fuck about the

• 6:18Shaan Puri?

  They put themselves in a position of power. And it also builds a different level of rapport because you're obviously using informal language with somebody else. And you're demonstrating that you're not seeking their approval in a way. And so I always in meetings, I do this, I try to be the first to curse in a meeting.

• 6:34Sam Parr?

  But can I say, I don't love that. And I'm like.

• 6:37Shaan Puri?

  Cause you don't like cursing in general?

• 6:39Sam Parr?

  No, I mean, I actually, when I hear myself curse, I'm like, man, I sound kind of trashy.

• 6:43Shaan Puri?

  I agree. I don't like when I hear myself do it and I think I do it too much. But I've noticed in meetings, it changes the dynamic like instantly and for better or worse, but I've.

• 6:53Sam Parr?

  But I think there's a difference between being crude and being cursing, actually. So like saying bitch, I fucking hate.

• 7:01Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 7:01Sam Parr?

  Oh my God, did you just hear that? That wasn't on purpose. So I don't like when people say that.

• 7:11Sam Parr?

  Quick story before we get into this. I went, I got married in September.

• 7:14Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 7:15Sam Parr?

  And I had to go, I got married to Catholic church and you gotta go meet with the priest ahead of time. And I was really nervous because I don't, I don't, I'm not practicing. I don't go to church. And but I wanted, I, the whole wedding was, they had to approve it and the whole wedding was on the line, right? So I had to like be a good Catholic or at least appear like one. And I remember I was sitting there and the guy was asking, the priest was asking me and my wife, my future wife about like, so do you guys agree on children? What do you think about birth control? All this stuff or whatever he was asking. And I would just say whatever I thought had to be.

• 7:42Shaan Puri?

  The right answer.

• 7:42Sam Parr?

  I was very nervous. I was like, yes, sir. Yes, we go to church three times. Like I just said all everything and then my phone rings and I was so nervous. I go, uh, I go, oh, fuck, sorry. It went really loud and then he looked at me and I was like, shit, my bad. I didn't mean to cuss. And I was so embarrassed and mortified.

• 8:02Shaan Puri?

  That's amazing.

• 8:02Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 8:03Shaan Puri?

  But he let it go.

• 8:05Sam Parr?

  He let it go.

• 8:05Shaan Puri?

  Good guy.

• 8:06Sam Parr?

  Yeah, he let it go. And then I made a joke about how I was asking what school he went to and he said he had a lot of student debt. And he said, uh, uh, he's like, yeah, but the church.

• 8:14Shaan Puri?

  A young guy, a young?

• 8:15Sam Parr?

  Like in his 30s or maybe late 30s. And he said, uh, but the church pays for it. And I made like a joke like, ah, so that's why you joined. And he didn't.

• 8:23Shaan Puri?

  Didn't appreciate that.

• 8:23Sam Parr?

  He didn't like that. You wanna get into it?

• 8:25Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, let's get into it.

• 8:26Sam Parr?

  Can you, uh, make that bigger?

• 8:27Shaan Puri?

  Curly girl hair. So you guys in trends did a post about nat, the natural hair movement.

• 8:33Sam Parr?

  Yeah, that's a big, big thing. And, um,

• 8:37Sam Parr?

  Mixed race, mixed race and black women.

• 8:39Shaan Puri?

  And so talk a little bit about what was in the report and then I'll tell you sort of what I've seen separate from that.

• 8:44Sam Parr?

  It sounds like you're more interested in it. You tell me what was in it.

• 8:47Shaan Puri?

  Alright, so, so I'll start with, uh, so my sister-in-law got, has super curly hair and-

• 8:53Sam Parr?

  And if you've never seen Sean, he's Indian.

• 8:55Shaan Puri?

  I'm Indian and she's Indian and she's got super curly hair and, um, curly hair takes a lot of maintenance, right? Like gets humid, boom, it's frizzy and you have, like, there's this episode of Friends where Monica's hair is like an Afro. Uh, that, that happens or it's flat or you want to straighten it or whatever. It's a lot of maintenance of curly hair. And so, um, she was telling me, she's like, yeah, I downloaded this, like, I joined this thing. I bought this PDF. That's called the Curly Girl, um, Guide or something like that. And, um, it's this method to like taming your hair and getting, cause I told her, I was like, your hair looks great nowadays. Like, what have you been doing? And I just thought she would say like, oh, I use this other product. She's like, no, there's like a 12-step process I'm doing every night. Anybody with curly hair, black women, anywhere else.

• 9:38Sam Parr?

  So my wife, if you're, uh, well, I guess they wouldn't be able to see this. My wife's black. She's half white, half black.

• 9:42Shaan Puri?

  She's also not here, even if they're watching.

• 9:44Sam Parr?

  Yeah. So she's half white and half black and she buys a lot of this stuff as well.

• 9:47Shaan Puri?

  Right. And so like, there's a whole thing of like, you know, when you go to sleep, you need to wrap your hair in a certain way to sort of like, whatever, the oils, blah, blah, blah. And so then, uh, and like some basics that you just don't do. So like she, you know, she had curly hair her whole life, but didn't know, oh, I'm not supposed to use shampoo in the same way that most people use shampoo. And so she was telling me about some of these differences. Anyways, opportunity, I was like, I like these businesses where you could put out content and information that just helps people and then, and then sort of on the back end, sell the kit. Um, that's like, oh, by the way, like if you just want to push a button and get the solution, I have the kit that has all the shit you need. Cause she spent hours researching all the different products.

• 10:27Shaan Puri?

  That like, what is the best version of this oil I'm supposed to have? What is the best version of the shampoo for me? And, um, so anyways, I think there's an opportunity to do this Curly Girl hair kit because, uh, there's this huge number of women that have curly hair. The spend is in the multi billions per year in the US for, uh, how this gets treated. And there is this natural hair movement where it's less about doing these really damaging things like permanently straightening your hair. Or, um, you know, weaves and whatnot. Like now there's a sort of a natural hair movement and so people need- Content like education plus the tools, this is sort of the hair care kit to take care of the hair.

• 11:05Sam Parr?

  Okay, I love that. Henry, can you do me a favor on a new tab? Type in Reddit curly hair. So there's a whole subreddit. One of the ways I like to look at validation and ideas for different companies is I like to look at the engagement and size of a particular subreddit. How many subscribers does this subreddit have? I can't read that from here.

• 11:24Shaan Puri?

  Use that, use that mic you got, Henry. What are you doing?

• 11:26Sam Parr?

  337,000. That's pretty good, I think, actually, for a curly hair and particularly because Reddit is mostly men.

• 11:33Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 11:34Sam Parr?

  And this is a woman's focused curly hair subreddit with.

• 11:37Shaan Puri?

  Exactly. So great way to sort of validate the demand and the community aspect to this where people are sharing information, recommending products to each other. The other side of this is it photographs great. So you know, before and after, I believe is the best ad that you can do. Before, which is a photo, after which is a better photo. And you don't even need to show your product. You just need to show whatever I took gave me this outcome. I was here, now I'm there.

• 11:59Sam Parr?

  So my wife loves this subreddit. Okay, so here's further validation. Okay, so particularly, so I think that the angle here is you have to go ethnicity or race specific.

• 12:10Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 12:11Sam Parr?

  So whether it's Indian, I have no idea if Asian women suffer from this, but if they do do that. I know from firsthand experience that mixed race women are, whether they're white and black or any other combination, suffer from this as well.

• 12:25Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 12:25Sam Parr?

  And further validation is Fenty. Rihanna has that brand that sold to the Louis Vuitton company or what's it called?

• 12:34Shaan Puri?

  LVMH.

• 12:36Sam Parr?

  LVMH. They, and you could read about the deal. I think it was valued at $800 million. And her, a lot of her thing is towards.

• 12:44Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, of course.

• 12:45Sam Parr?

  Mixed races. And then another idea here, and everyone knows about this woman, but Kayla, it's new.

• 12:50Shaan Puri?

  It seems.

• 12:51Sam Parr?

  It's thing?

• 12:51Shaan Puri?

  It's, it seems.

• 12:52Sam Parr?

  What's their thing called? Sweat or some?

• 12:54Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, Sweat's her app.

• 12:55Sam Parr?

  This is, I sound like a.

• 12:57Shaan Puri?

  Your wife does it, my wife does it.

• 12:58Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I sound like an idiot because I'm a guy and I don't pay attention to this stuff.

• 13:00Shaan Puri?

  This whole segment is like bros trying to talk about, you know, products they don't understand, but. I'm fascinated. I'm interested. I'm trying and everyone loves to try it.

• 13:07Sam Parr?

  So Kayla's thing, I heard that's a hundred million dollar a year company.

• 13:10Shaan Puri?

  It is the fitness app itself.

• 13:12Sam Parr?

  That's crazy. And it was just built off her Instagram following. So that's crazy.

• 13:16Shaan Puri?

  So she started with, she started with the same thing. Beach, uh, the bikini body guide, I think was her content that she was put out. And then it was PDF and then a PDF got circulated everywhere. And basically she allowed the like paid PDF to get bootlegged and just shared everywhere. And what that did was it just gave her tons of awareness, tons of marketing and, um, and then she launched the app, which you couldn't bootleg and you had to pay for it and then boom.

• 13:37Sam Parr?

  And the most interesting part about her thing was she, so she's like mainstream popular. And typically when things are mainstream popular, maybe sometimes like people who think they're cool can think it's kind of lame. And Sarah's an Ivy League educated New Yorker and she was like, oh, I love this PDF.

• 13:54Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 13:55Sam Parr?

  And so she has access to all types of interesting things and she still uses it. And I, and I thought that was amazing that people really respected and liked it.

• 14:02Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. She comes across very well. If you've ever seen her content, she's not like, um, she's not hateable. Like she doesn't come across as hateable.

• 14:10Sam Parr?

  I thought that's cool. Um, what, oh, and last thing, Diva Curl. Have you heard of Diva Curl?

• 14:15Shaan Puri?

  I have not, no.

• 14:15Sam Parr?

  Uh, another mixed race shampoo. Maybe it's for black women, but, or maybe it's, I don't know what the, I forget if it's black women or mixed race women. Uh, that's what we use for shampoo and, uh, it was acquired for, acquired for a quarter of a billion.

• 14:29Shaan Puri?

  Nice. And there's some things on the opposite side, like Tristan Walker, who was, I think either the co-founder or first employee of Foursquare, left to start his own African African American men's skincare, uh, product company.

• 14:43Sam Parr?

  Walker Brands.

• 14:44Shaan Puri?

  Walker Brands, where it was like, you know, shaving stuff because, you know, the hair is different. It's coarse. It's gonna, the traditional shaving gear was causing problems. And, uh, didn't work out, went under. And that kind of brings me to, I don't know why it went under exactly. I don't know if it was the business fundamentals.

• 14:57Sam Parr?

  Well, I can tell you why. They just raised too much money and fucked everything up. Okay. So when we started our business, we knew how to create our product and we knew how to get sales, but I had no idea how to run payroll. I didn't know anything about healthcare. I, uh, I didn't know anything about that stuff. And so when we first started, we used a handful of different. Uh payroll providers, a couple of different HR providers and none of them were that great. And so I read about this guy named Parker Conrad, who launched this fantastic company called Rippling a couple of years ago. And since I read about it, I've been researching it and we finally pulled the trigger and started using them. And they are actually today's sponsor. So it's called Rippling. And what it does is when you hire new employees, it makes it stupidly simple in order to onboard

• 15:40Sam Parr?

  them. It makes it really easy for your new employees to see your handbook, to see all the software you use, to get access to that software. Uh, and it actually makes something that I never even thought was a problem until I experienced it, which it makes it really easy to track all of your hardware and devices. You can see which employees use which computer, what software they're using. And uh, it's all one platform. So you could pay payroll, you can track healthcare, you can track hardware, you can do a bunch of really interesting things on it. They're today's sponsor. They're one of our only sponsors that we've had. We've been very selective of who we are allowing to sponsor this podcast. And we worked with them this time because I use Rippling personally, and I love it. So give it a shot, rippling.com. That's R I P P L I N G dot com.

• 16:24Shaan Puri?

  Uh, Atrium folded.

• 16:26Sam Parr?

  Yeah. So Atrium is a company that has raised 70 million dollars.

• 16:30Shaan Puri?

  Seventy-five million.

• 16:31Sam Parr?

  Seventy-five million dollars. Um, you made a great comment that I've stolen and I've told everyone, but basically Atrium, what they did, they never did anything really, unfortunately. They tried to do a bunch of things. So at first it was almost like you'd pay a flat fee and get a service done. And then they were like, all right, let's create software so lawyers can contribute with their clients and you could see what they're doing.

• 16:52Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 16:52Sam Parr?

  But you said, why didn't they just make a law firm?

• 16:55Shaan Puri?

  Exactly. So basically Atrium, if you don't know, started by Justin Khan, who's the founder of Justin, uh, Justin.tv, which became Twitch. And um, you know, well-known guy in Silicon Valley. So he raises 75 million, pretty much out the gate, like in two rounds, I believe. But uh, the first round, you know, I think they raised 10 million bucks out of 90 million dollar valuation on just Justin saying, hey, I'm gonna do a new thing. Um, and then they raised more money and they raised it all pre-product market fit. So before they knew what they had and what the what the market wanted, they raised a ton of money. And what I call this is the curse of money expectations and people. And so what does that mean? The curse of money is when you get too much money before you actually know what you're doing. You, that actually decreases your odds of success, doesn't increase your odds of success.

• 17:38Sam Parr?

  Right.

• 17:38Shaan Puri?

  The second is expectations. Justin Khan, famous guy, serial entrepreneur, raises a bunch of money at a high valuation. Now you have the weight of those expectations, which makes you less nimble, less agile and less responsive to, you know, changing up your own.

• 17:50Sam Parr?

  And you know what he told me? He spoke at HustleCon, I hung out with him backstage. One of my secrets of HustleCon is I make everyone come an hour early.

• 17:56Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 17:57Sam Parr?

  And I lie to them about when they have to speak.

• 17:58Shaan Puri?

  Right, starts at two.

• 17:59Sam Parr?

  Yep, so I hang out with them backstage and I meet all these people. I told one guy, the founder of Zapier, I hung out with that dude all day, Wade, doing this thing. And what Justin told me was, he goes, I have a chip on my shoulder that Twitch sold for $1 billion. This has to be 10 billion or I'm not interested. And I was like, I don't know if that's a healthy, healthy attitude.

• 18:19Shaan Puri?

  I don't know, Justin.

• 18:20Sam Parr?

  He goes, I have a chip on my shoulder, which I think that is actually healthy. I, I'm all for that, but he told me, he's like, here's what the expectations are. And I was like, that's a little crazy dude, but whatever.

• 18:29Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, that is a little crazy. And the last one is just the curse of money, expectations and people. And people is, when you have all this money and you have these expectations, you start hiring a bunch of people. So they laid off like, I don't know, 100 people.

• 18:39Sam Parr?

  I think 200.

• 18:40Shaan Puri?

  Why do they even have 100 or 200 people?

• 18:42Sam Parr?

  And they were lawyer, like lawyer type. I mean, they, these people cost a lot.

• 18:45Shaan Puri?

  Right, and so before you have product market fit, you want to have as few people as possible. You want to have as, you know, sort of lightweight expectations, you want to be extremely nimble and agile. So they tried to do a hybrid. Like you said, I went to one, so one thing they did really well was Justin leveraged what he had. Leverage your assets, right? So his asset was, he's got a name in the tech community. So here's what he did. He, first, when he raised money, he raised from like a bunch of VCs. Cause he knew, well, they have companies, they're gonna send their client, they're gonna send their, those are my future clients.

• 19:14Sam Parr?

  And I love what, what you're about to say now, I think that's even better.

• 19:17Shaan Puri?

  And so, I don't know if you know, but, so I'm talking about these weekend things he hosted. Yeah, so, did you go to one?

• 19:22Sam Parr?

  Nope.

• 19:22Shaan Puri?

  So I went to one of these. So he basically said, cool, weekend workshop. Justin Khan is gonna do an Atrium Academy workshop on the weekend. And I don't remember what the promise was, I think it was like, how to raise money for your company. And so I went to one of them because I wanted to see what was up. And it's a kind of an all day thing.

• 19:41Sam Parr?

  And he's talented.

• 19:41Shaan Puri?

  At the Atrium office and Justin's a very charismatic, magnetic speaker.

• 19:45Sam Parr?

  Yep.

• 19:45Shaan Puri?

  And so he starts telling the Atrium stories like, you know, when we, um, we started this company. And he's like, you know, one of the things about, I always thought, he's like, I became involuntary, I became an involuntary power user of legal services. I love that phrase. He's like, because, you know, when we were selling Twitch for a billion dollars, we needed a bunch of lawyers. And when I did this other thing, we raised money for, I needed a bunch of lawyers. And I do all these investments and I need a bunch of lawyers. So I just realized, man, the legal system sucks. And everyone's nodding their head. And he's like, you know, it's weird that you don't know the price of something, you know, they bill you by the hour. So they're incentivized to spend as much time and bill you as much as they can. You want it fast and you want to know your price. We're like, yeah, you're right, Justin. I do want that. And he's like, you know, the second thing is, he's like, why, I looked into it. Why isn't there a competitor?

• 20:30Shaan Puri?

  Uh, no, no. The second one was, he's like, I was having dinner with my friend who's a lawyer and I asked her, you know, what do you guys use for project management? She's like, what do you mean? He's like, do you use Trello or Asana? And she's like, I don't know what those words are. He's like, lawyers don't use anything for their project management. Isn't that crazy? We're like, yeah, that's crazy. Last one, he was like, he's like, so then I was like, why doesn't somebody start a competitor? He's like, I realized there's some legislation that says you can't start a law firm. And I'm going to butcher what the actual legal problem was, but like, there was a rule, you cannot start a law firm unless you're a lawyer. And unless you've been a lawyer for a certain amount of time or whatever it was. He's like, so that's why no outsider has done this. But luckily we found a loophole that let us start this law firm. So we're one of the only new law firms that started not by these people.

• 21:11Shaan Puri?

  And by the end of it, you're like, do you take my money? I want, you know, I want to invest in your thing.

• 21:16Sam Parr?

  Your impression of Justin Khan is the, is so condescending and so funny.

• 21:23Shaan Puri?

  I don't mean it that way. I was impressed. I'm trying to say he told this story and I was eating it up. And, um, and so I was like, this is amazing. This, this whole workshop was amazing. He brought in his friends who were giving advice and they were fucking awesome. Uh, they were so good at giving advice. And so anyways, by the end of it. And he gives me advice, he was just like, because we were building on the Twitch platform with like a Twitch sort of like the streaming app thing. And he was like, yeah, you know, we thought about doing that and we don't think it's valuable. I don't think everything's gonna be valuable. And he was pretty much right. We had to pivot. And so we, so anyways, by the end of this, I was like, this was an amazing way to acquire customers.

• 22:00Sam Parr?

  I agree.

• 22:01Shaan Puri?

  And that's my like, long-winded way of saying, he used his assets, he did these workshops, it's not a scalable thing, but man, he

• 22:07Sam Parr?

  I don't like when you say that.

• 22:08Shaan Puri?

  He won people over.

• 22:09Sam Parr?

  You're, I think you're so wrong.

• 22:10Shaan Puri?

  What?

• 22:10Sam Parr?

  When you say it's not a scalable thing. First of all, you don't need that many customers for this thing to make a very large

• 22:16Shaan Puri?

  He could have got a hundred clients easily within a couple of months.

• 22:18Sam Parr?

  Yeah. And I hate when people say that. They go, this isn't scalable. Like, they'll talk about agencies and they'll say, it's not scalable. It's like, what are you talking about? Some agencies have 20,000 people. That seems like it scaled to me, like perfectly fine. I do think those are scalable, actually.

• 22:34Shaan Puri?

  It depends, right? If you're a product that needs thousands and thousands of customers, then doing workshops with 20 people at a time is not going to get you there. So it's not scalable in that sense.

• 22:43Sam Parr?

  So you want to hear a cool story about that? The founder of Pandora, his name's Tim Westergren. I went and met with him. When I went and met with him, we were, we went out to lunch and he's like, oh, I forgot to do something. Can you walk with me? And I walked with him and then we go, he goes, I gotta get a haircut. And so I just sit next to him and this guy's worth probably 600 million dollars. We go to Supercuts.

• 23:01Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 23:01Sam Parr?

  And he gets a haircut for $12 and we're sitting there in the barber shop. It's on a Tuesday at one, no one's there. And he's telling me this story. I go, what did you used to do? How'd you grow Pandora? He goes, here's what I would do. Monday through Thursday. He goes, I had a COO who ran the company. I would go, I would just, he goes, this was, I think it was a little bit before social media was around. He said, I would email people and I would say, I'm going to be at this library in New York at this time. Any Pandora users in the area, come and talk to me. And he said he did that for four years. And he goes, here's the first one I did. And he showed me a picture of him at a coffee shop. He goes, two people showed up. And he goes, here's the last one I did. And he showed me a picture and it was at a library and there was two or 3,000 people there. He goes, I would do that Monday to Thursday. I did meetups everywhere. All I did was travel and I did it for years and

• 23:46Sam Parr?

  it worked out. He goes, he goes, I was like, did it work? He goes, every time I did it, so like, he goes, it would take a little while. But after a couple of years of doing it, I would go to the south or I'd go to Atlanta and we would see. More advertisers come. So it was just like, he goes, it worked out perfectly.

• 24:01Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 24:01Sam Parr?

  And because I said the same thing. I go, wow, that's a horrible waste of time. He goes, no, it worked. We made a lot of money off of it. And I got to connect with users and I would relay the feedback back to the, my, my CEO and they would do it.

• 24:12Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. So that case, he's not trying to grow Pandora's active user base. He's taking fans and turning them into diehards. And he's, he's generating advertising revenue, which you can get, that actually scales enough to where you can get advertisers. And he's getting feedback firsthand, which is like, great for the product to get better. Uh, that's a dope story. I love, I love, I love that story.

• 24:33Sam Parr?

  There's your, there's a clip.

• 24:35Shaan Puri?

  Related to that, by the way, there's a, uh, you know, there's probably like 10 blog posts that matter the most. If you're going to do a startup. One of them is the Paul Graham essay, uh, do things that don't scale, uh, where he's talking about with Airbnb, uh, early on. And if you're kind of in the startup world, just fast forward 30 seconds, but if you're not, you'll like the story, um, if you haven't heard it. So Airbnb is in Y Combinator. They're struggling. Airbnb is not really working. They have like, I don't know, 20 customers or something low. And they go into Paul Graham's office. He's the, the advisor from Y Combinator. And he's like, okay, so tell me how it's going. And they're like, well, you know, it's small and not really growing. And he's like, okay, but tell me, what, what have you learned from your customers? You've been out there. What'd you learn? And they're like, well, you know, most of our customers, you know, most of our customers are in New York and they're putting their apartments up.

• 25:18Shaan Puri?

  He's like, they're in New York? They're like, yeah. Like most of your customers are in New York? He's like, yeah. He's like, what are you doing here? Like go to New York. You need to go to New York now. And like, uh, why are you in San Francisco if your customers are in New York? So he sent them over there and what they did, which is something that nobody else was doing, was if you ever saw an apartment listing before, the photos looked like shit. Because it would be somebody on their crappy mobile phone at that time, taking a photo of a dirty apartment and, uh, listing it for rent. And so it was like the worst sales pitch. And so they started themselves going in. They said, hey, can we send up? They would tell their customers, hey, we want to do professional photos. If your place increases bookings by 40%. Are you open to that? And then they would show up as the professional photographer and be like, hey, by the way, I'm the founder. And they would take photos and that Airbnb listing started to look great.

• 26:02Shaan Puri?

  And everyone told them this won't scale and they also thought this won't scale. And to an extent it did. Because even now today, there's a sort of fleet of photographers that will come and take photos of your place. To list it because it was just that important and they found a way to make it scale.

• 26:16Sam Parr?

  I think that's a great story. Another thing that shocks people is I think even if you have hundreds of thousands of users. Maybe as high as millions, you could really, I I've done this with us. I will just call and talk. I only need to talk to about 10 people.

• 26:28Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 26:28Sam Parr?

  And I can see the pattern that represents 10s of thousands or hundreds of thousands of people.

• 26:33Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 26:33Sam Parr?

  I could, you could just tell you. So like what you could do is A B test shit and. Wait, if you're just starting, you're not gonna, it's not gonna be significant.

• 26:42Sam Parr?

  And that could work fine. If you just call 10 people, you really get the information you need.

• 26:46Shaan Puri?

  Totally. I was talking to Emmett. So Emmett's the CEO of Twitch where I'm working and. One, you know, being at a big company has all these different weird things that aren't really related to my core interest, which is startups. So I ask Emmett all the time, just tell me about the early days. And so I asked him, I said, hey, uh, when you guys were pivoting from Justin TV to Twitch, was that obvious? He's like, no, dude, at Justin TV, like, less than 2% of the watch time was on video games. It wasn't obvious that this was the thing to do. He's like, I just liked it and I thought there was an option. And he goes, and then I talked to a bunch of customers and I said, do you have your notes from that? And he's like, yeah, I do. And so he sent me his notes from the initial conversations he had with all these streamers, all these customers.

• 27:23Sam Parr?

  Can we publish those?

• 27:24Shaan Puri?

  No, no, probably not. But I was reading through them and it was fascinating. So first was just like, first lesson was just go ask the founder or CEO about the early days. I bet you they have a bunch of resources that are awesome. Like he sent me the old pitch decks and stuff like that.

• 27:37Shaan Puri?

  I think I sent you one slide, which was my favorite slide, the title of the slide, because it was a progress update for their early investors.

• 27:42Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 27:43Shaan Puri?

  And it just said, um, we're like a bulldozer in a field full of flowers. And it's just, and then it was a list of all the shit they got done that month. And I was like, this attitude, like if I said that today at Twitch, it would be like, what is this maniac saying? Like, why is your slide so aggressive? Uh, but that's how they were early on. So then he had all these notes of his customer conversations and he always tells everybody at Twitch, he's like. Go talk to people, by the sixth conversation, you'll hear the same thing over and over again. It takes six phone calls, basically, to figure out the pattern. And by the sixth one, you'll know. And you won't even want to do 50 conversations. You'll be like, alright, I can predict what this person's gonna say before they even say it after six.

• 28:21Sam Parr?

  That's awesome. I think we just got ourselves another clip.

• 28:24Shaan Puri?

  Clip it.

• 28:26Sam Parr?

  What do you want to, first of all, share that deck with me again, and also ask him if we can make that public.

• 28:31Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I will ask him, actually, because it's pretty cool.

• 28:34Sam Parr?

  What do you want to do?

• 28:36Shaan Puri?

  The one thing I can share out of that, by the way, he asked three, he's like, I said, you know, oh, customer interviews, is there a whole skillset to learn? He goes, no, dude, I asked three questions. I said, what do you like about your current platform? What do you dislike about your current platform? And what will it take to get you to switch to Twitch? And that's what he asked every single customer. And then he just heard the common things, and he would build it, and he'd go back to him, he said, you told me this is what it would take for you to switch. Two weeks later, here it is. Are you ready? And then sometimes they're like, no, still. He's like, okay, cool, what's next? And he would just like, keep doing that, three questions.

• 29:06Sam Parr?

  That's badass. Just to wrap that up, if you want to learn about this stuff, I think the best book I've ever read on this is called The Mom Test.

• 29:12Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I love that. Jack recommended me that book. It's fantastic.

• 29:16Sam Parr?

  It's the best thing.

• 29:17Shaan Puri?

  Tiny book, too, like, I don't know.

• 29:18Sam Parr?

  It's a long blog post.

• 29:19Shaan Puri?

  Fifty pages.

• 29:20Sam Parr?

  That book, in terms of your business life, it might change.

• 29:24Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, The Mom Test. Okay, so there was this great write-up in the Trends Facebook group by this guy Morgan, or Girl Morgan, I'm not sure exactly, but Morgan Key. And it was talking about, hey, the founder of Trader Joe's just died. I think Joe, I don't know how you say the last name, but Joe from Trader Joe's. Passed away, and, you know, so he dug into the model and said, what is it that makes Trader Joe's work? And there's a bunch of really fascinating things where they basically broke all of the rules. And I thought it was just like a great example of, of like, you know, when you want to do something different, or you want to like, make a splash in an industry, like, it pays to just change a bunch of the rules. So, some of the things that they do differently.

• 30:03Sam Parr?

  Yeah, let's go through the rules.

• 30:04Shaan Puri?

  So they, most grocery stores have a ton of SKUs. They're like, oh, people want all the options. We gotta carry everything that people ask for. Trader Joe's has, on average, I think, 4,000 SKUs. An average grocery store will be 40,000, so 1/10th. The number of SKUs. The next thing that I thought was interesting was they overstaff, not understaff. So every other grocery was trying to sort of have minimal labor costs and they go the exact opposite direction and try to provide like an experience for shopping. They private label basically all of their goods. So how do you, okay, great, I overstaff.

• 30:35Sam Parr?

  It seems impossible.

• 30:36Shaan Puri?

  I overstaff, but that's like expensive. So where do they make their money back?

• 30:38Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 30:39Shaan Puri?

  They make their money back by not buying, you know, not by buying wholesale and selling retail. They actually just private label their stuff and have a way bigger margin on their items.

• 30:48Sam Parr?

  So what's an example of that? So where's their product?

• 30:50Shaan Puri?

  So like their tomato sauce, for example. They will have, or salsa, it'll be called Trader Joe's salsa. And people will be like, oh, I love Trader Joe's salsa. And it's actually the same exact salsa that somebody else carries. They go straight to that supplier or manufacturer and they say, hey, we want our own line of this. And so it's usually things-

• 31:06Sam Parr?

  Oh, so Trader Joe's isn't making it?

• 31:07Shaan Puri?

  No, they, they, they go to the supplier, but they private label the, that, that exact item.

• 31:11Sam Parr?

  Oh, I didn't know that.

• 31:12Shaan Puri?

  They carry it, they, they get a much bigger margin because they're cutting out the sort of retailer. And they have all this pricing power to go to suppliers with and say, hey, we have all these locations, so we are already a big customer from day one. Uh, we want you to give us our own brand of popcorn, our own brand of this, our own brand of that. And then on the other side, that makes customers love it because people will get addicted to this and they think, oh, that pretzel, that chocolate covered pretzel I loved, I can only get it at Trader Joe's.

• 31:35Sam Parr?

  That's not the reality.

• 31:36Shaan Puri?

  Because there's no brand on it, but they could actually get that same thing. They just don't know the brand and it's from some other place.

• 31:41Sam Parr?

  I have felt that exact same way about a lot of their products.

• 31:44Shaan Puri?

  And so there was, uh, there was a few other ones that I thought were interesting. I'm, I'm gonna dig it up, but, uh, talk for a second while I just-

• 31:49Sam Parr?

  So I'll tell you guys a quick story since we were talking about scaling. I talked to Max Mullen at HustleCon and you, you listen to this story. He told me that when they first started Insta-

• 31:57Shaan Puri?

  Who's Max Mullen?

• 31:57Sam Parr?

  Max Mullen started Instacart.

• 31:59Shaan Puri?

  Okay.

• 31:59Sam Parr?

  He goes, he goes, our first store was Trader Joe's and they wouldn't let us go in there and they wouldn't give us all their inventory. He goes, I took, it took, he goes, it cost 25 grand. I bought everything in the store. We brought it to our apartment.

• 32:12Shaan Puri?

  Took a photo of it?

• 32:13Sam Parr?

  Took pictures of every single thing.

• 32:14Shaan Puri?

  I love it.

• 32:15Sam Parr?

  And it was $25,000. He goes, one of everything was about 25 grand. And he did that with Whole Foods and then five other stores.

• 32:21Shaan Puri?

  That's amazing. Okay, a couple of other points that Morgan brought up. So, uh, no data collection, so they're not collecting data on their customers.

• 32:27Sam Parr?

  Yeah, they don't ask for your-

• 32:28Shaan Puri?

  They don't do sales, coupons, loyalty, or, or advertising. Uh, the biggest expense of their marketing is samples in the store. So they go above and beyond on samples and don't, uh, do a whole bunch of other promotional stuff. They expanded very slowly, so they have about 500 locations after 50 years. And so they really went sort of slow and steady with their growth, sort of like an in and out or whatever.

• 32:49Sam Parr?

  And are they owned by someone at the moment?

• 32:51Shaan Puri?

  Private company. I don't think they got bought by a private, I think it's literally like owned by the

• 32:57Sam Parr?

  Joe.

• 32:57Shaan Puri?

  Original whoever's. There's a couple of people involved. And so in the end, their price per, or sorry, their earnings per square foot in their store, so they'll earn $2,000 per square foot revenue. And like Whole Foods would do 1.2K and then, you know, Walmart will do 600K. So they're way more profitable per square foot because of, or sorry, way more revenue per square foot because of these

• 33:21Shaan Puri?

  these different changes they made to the, to the standard model.

• 33:24Sam Parr?

  I dig that. I, we, we should, I don't know why we didn't, we should publish that.

• 33:29Shaan Puri?

  I think it's a $10 billion company overall.

• 33:31Sam Parr?

  I, I thought they were owned by Aldi's for some reason.

• 33:34Shaan Puri?

  You might be right. I don't know on that. But shout out to Morgan. I thought this was a great breakdown. Love it. Do more of that in the groups. We love this stuff and we'll share the information. Because yeah, more people need to learn from this stuff.

• 33:44Sam Parr?

  So that's actually an interesting take, which is what are the interesting components that make something special? So we're doing this thing that we're going to publish on Tuesday on hotels and I thought that that was really interesting. And so it's not live yet, so I haven't been able to read all of it. But basically, a lot of the largest hotel chains, what they do is they don't actually own the property. I mean, or sorry, sometimes they own the property, but it's all franchised.

• 34:04Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 34:05Sam Parr?

  And so 90% of their money is made via franchising.

• 34:08Shaan Puri?

  Hiltons, Marriott's, whatever.

• 34:09Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I had no idea.

• 34:11Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 34:11Sam Parr?

  And so that's one of like the secret sauces, which is you have to do franchising and it's really expensive, like could be $10 million to start a Marriott franchise.

• 34:19Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 34:20Sam Parr?

  Very expensive.

• 34:21Shaan Puri?

  That's not that expensive. $10,000? That's cheap for a franchise.

• 34:23Sam Parr?

  Sorry, I said 10 million.

• 34:24Shaan Puri?

  Oh, 10 million, okay.

• 34:25Sam Parr?

  It could be millions of dollars.

• 34:27Shaan Puri?

  Okay, yeah, that's a lot.

• 34:28Sam Parr?

  It's crazy. And so what, what we've been doing on trends and what I have always loved doing, which is what's like, what's like the, the thing that makes something special?

• 34:37Shaan Puri?

  What makes it tick?

• 34:38Sam Parr?

  Yeah, so for example, with software, typically it's just um uh what makes a great software business is like there's I I'm I'm just riffing here, but I'd have to find the exact numbers, but it's like are is the annual revenue per customer at least $5,000? Um, can you make it so churn is only 4% a month? And then there's a probably only one or two more rules, but it's usually churn and can it be at least five grand a year?

• 35:07Shaan Puri?

  For a SaaS business you're talking about?

• 35:08Sam Parr?

  Yeah, and so I love seeing those like.

• 35:11Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, you want so what investors do is they see so many deals and they talk to so many founders and they do this for a number of years. They get to see how these play out. They start to do what they call pattern recognition, which has pros and cons. The pros is great, you can recognize a good thing when it's a good thing. The con is if you're trying to make everything fit your pattern, you'll miss the outliers and that's a that's a big issue. But um but it's worth it's still a a tool in your tool belt that you should have. So I feel like it should this should not just be investors that do do this. This should be entrepreneurs as well. So you should be looking at different businesses, industries, breaking them down, uh listening to podcasts like this or others. And um trying to uh identify the patterns and commonalities and try to characterize, okay, what made that business tick? What made this have a different outcome than that?

• 35:53Shaan Puri?

  Uh, what are the sort of uh minimum requirements on, let's say, churn or customer, you know, customer value? Um, for a SaaS business to work and start to get these rules of thumb or like kind of common patterns in place in your brain?

• 36:06Sam Parr?

  Yeah, and what what I've been trying to do is figure it figure out those on on all types of things.

• 36:11Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 36:12Sam Parr?

  And that's been exciting. Uh, you want to do one more?

• 36:14Shaan Puri?

  Uh, yeah, let's do one more. So there's this thing called thinks uh T H N K S.

• 36:18Sam Parr?

  Wait, where's that on here?

• 36:20Shaan Puri?

  Oh, it's just right in the middle.

• 36:21Sam Parr?

  Oh, okay, what's that?

• 36:22Shaan Puri?

  So I saw this in a um an Instagram ad or something like that. I thought it was kind of kind of clever, so um B to B gifting. So what thinks does, or I think it's probably thinks that they're trying to do, which is saying thanks.

• 36:33Sam Parr?

  Oh, that's stupid. I hate cute spelling.

• 36:34Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, cute spelling kind of kind of tripped him up there. Um, so what it does is it's like from your phone, you can instantly just send a little gift to any business acquaintance. So it's like you could send um, you know, a a bottle of wine. You can send a box of chocolates, you could send an Uber ride, you can send $25, you know, Amazon thing, whatever. Uh, so they have a whole bunch of different um digital gifts that are it just looked the in the ad it looked frictionless of like how easy this would be to just send this little thank you to everyone. So for someone like you guys, you guys have advertisers. We have guests that come on the podcast and I know I would love to send them gifts. I know that I should. I know these little things go a long way, even though it just seems like they shouldn't.

• 37:16Shaan Puri?

  But I don't take the time to do it. And so I think if somebody actually made a really good B two B gifting platform that did both the actual gifting, so being able to send it to your contact. Uh, but also they sort of accounting for it. So keeping track of it in a spreadsheet and all that stuff, maybe helping you expense it. Um, I think that could be a big business. I think a lot of salespeople would use this.

• 37:34Sam Parr?

  I totally agree. The way, what, what do you point? Did he do that?

• 37:37Speaker 02

  Uh, no, there's a company called Alice and they do uh artificial intelligence powered B two B gifting. It's really cool. They basically scan your social profile and they figure out what your interests are. They send you an example of a gift they wanna send to you. Um, like on behalf of a company and then you're able to either donate the value of that to a charity of your choice or pick from the marketplace um a gift of similar value.

• 38:03Sam Parr?

  That's badass. I like that. What the what I would do uh one or two things. The first thing that I would do is I think the way that I would set this up is I would make it pretty heavy on Slack or integrate with Salesforce. So we've built a couple Salesforce plugins that we love and other people have asked us to give it to them.

• 38:22Shaan Puri?

  What's an example of one?

• 38:23Sam Parr?

  Uh, I'm not involved in our Salesforce thing, but basically uh like one example is we've connected our QuickBooks and our Salesforce really effectively. Um, which was a previous previously a really hard problem. I mean, that's real nitty gritty accounting stuff.

• 38:36Shaan Puri?

  Gotcha.

• 38:36Sam Parr?

  But it was really uh frustrating. Another thing that we built in Salesforce was so that we the way that we built our business is uh, we can get a line of credit on our invoices and we've synced it all. We've we've synced it all up. So our bank knows which invoices we have based off Salesforce and things like that.

• 38:51Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 38:52Sam Parr?

  And it's really effective. But what I would do on this is I would hook it up to to Salesforce or Slack and I would make it so you could send coworkers as well. And basically the boss puts your credit card down and he Or she allocates it. So every employee gets automatically like some number of $10 to $200 a month.

• 39:09Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 39:10Sam Parr?

  And you have, you can like type in like, send Henry a gift at San Francisco office.

• 39:16Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 39:17Sam Parr?

  And like, for example, I buy gift, gift cards for people all the time where someone has done something really cool or like. Edie was saying her car's, I don't know, if her car's messed up, I'd be like, send Edie a hundred dollar Uber gift card.

• 39:30Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 39:30Sam Parr?

  That I think that would be fantastic. And the way that I would build it is that it would remind every employee how much balance they have left at the end of the month. So you for sure know it's gonna get.

• 39:38Shaan Puri?

  Right, get used.

• 39:39Sam Parr?

  That's kind of, that's really interesting. And I would also look at, uh, what's the, what's the fruit baskets that are popular? Edible arrangements.

• 39:48Shaan Puri?

  Edible arrangements, yeah.

• 39:48Sam Parr?

  I would look at their, I would go.

• 39:50Shaan Puri?

  They crush.

• 39:51Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I, I think they're publicly traded.

• 39:52Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 39:53Sam Parr?

  I would go and read all about how they do it and where they say are the biggest markets for their B to B clients.

• 39:57Shaan Puri?

  Real estate agents who need to, you know, always be out there. Is it sales? Is it, um, you know, I don't know, whatever else. Uh, so there's some stats that are on here. I don't know who added these, but great. Eighty nine percent of.

• 40:07Sam Parr?

  He did, Alan did.

• 40:08Shaan Puri?

  Nice, Alan. Shout out to Alan. Eighty nine percent of C-suite execs believe that gifting brings people closer together. Okay, love it. Um, and then after receiving a gesture of appreciation, individuals feel like sort of the, what the, the rule of reciprocity.

• 40:21Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 40:22Shaan Puri?

  So 56% more likely to reciprocate. And, um, and I think it's, I think it's great. Um, I have a friend, Greg Eisenberg, who's all about. Gifting. Ramon is a great gifter as well.

• 40:31Sam Parr?

  He's almost obnoxiously good.

• 40:33Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. And so they, they just are so thoughtful and, uh, by little things that go a long way. It just makes you love the person.

• 40:40Sam Parr?

  Yeah. So another thing I would do to run this company is I would go to, is it, uh, it was, it's a book called Influence by Robert Cialdini. He's got this thing called the rule of reciprocity. It's summed up in, uh, basically. I can do a favor for Sean and he's gonna do a favor back to me, even if he didn't ask for me to do him a favor. And it is likely that he will repay me back in a disproportionate amount. So, for example, there's been times. You could like go up to someone and you could be like, hey, uh, you wanna, you wanna, can I give you a Coke or can I give you a? Like the small $10 gift and I could be negotiating with you for selling a car.

• 41:19Shaan Puri?

  And get a deal.

• 41:20Sam Parr?

  And get a deal.

• 41:20Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 41:21Sam Parr?

  Uh, or for example, I could say something like, hey, can you grab my mail? Or let me grab your mail for you when you're out of town. And then two weeks later, I could be like, hey, can I borrow your car for five days? And typically people will do it. And so I would make the whole tagline of my company, which is like, I would make, I always think of like in terms of headlines and copyrighting for sales pages. I would make the whole headline all about how you can manipulate, you have to use positive language, but how you can manipulate people by giving gifts. I mean, that I.

• 41:51Shaan Puri?

  What would, what would your headline be?

• 41:53Sam Parr?

  I would go to that book, uh, the rule reciprocity. And, uh, I would find it interesting.

• 41:59Shaan Puri?

  Find a great.

• 41:59Sam Parr?

  In fact, maybe that's what the headline would be. It would be the definition of the rule recipe, like I would make it look like a definition, rule of reciprocity, like noun or something like. Defined as inadequate or a disproportionate given in response to a gift.

• 42:13Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 42:14Sam Parr?

  In other words, we help you make more money.

• 42:16Shaan Puri?

  So, so theirs, theirs is, I just went to their website, growing business through, growing business with gratitude. Build strong business relationships through efficient, personalized and thoughtful gestures of appreciation.

• 42:26Sam Parr?

  That's whack.

• 42:28Sam Parr?

  That's whack. That sounds like.

• 42:29Shaan Puri?

  By the way, uh, dude, I get a, every company we mention on here, um, I get a message that's either the CEO starts listening to it or they were already listening to it. So like, we talked about only fans, the founders listened to this.

• 42:40Sam Parr?

  No shit.

• 42:41Shaan Puri?

  We talked about, um, pipe, the founder reached out, just, you know, hey, I love it.

• 42:44Sam Parr?

  Why don't they reach out to me?

• 42:45Shaan Puri?

  I talked about mystery science. Uh, I hung out with the founder yesterday and he was like, we were jamming.

• 42:50Sam Parr?

  Mystery science?

• 42:51Shaan Puri?

  Mystery science is the, uh, amazing business. It's Bill Nye, the Science Guy delivered into schools.

• 42:56Sam Parr?

  Yeah. Wait, why don't we get those people on here?

• 42:58Shaan Puri?

  Uh, we can. Yeah. He was, uh, he was awesome. And by, I didn't realize he had, you know, three little exits under his belt and he was doing this and the business is just spitting off cash. It's amazing. It's used by like a crazy number, you know, the public thing they, he told me some other numbers, but I'll say the public thing he told me, which is that 50% of elementary schools in America are active users of their product. Which is insane, uh, penetration, which that just means one classroom within the school. Well, whatever. You got to 50% of schools being active users on a weekly basis.

• 43:25Sam Parr?

  Um, I love that. Let's uh, get those people on here. Let's go to questions, eh?

• 43:29Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, let's do some quick ones.

• 43:31Sam Parr?

  Alright, uh, so we ask people to do subscribe and unsubscribe and send us a video of them doing it and we would answer a question that they sent. The truth is, is a lot of the questions were pretty okay. So we're gonna avoid some of the okay ones, like what would you do if you had unlimited money? I'm not gonna answer that. I think that's an okay question. Let's see, but let's see what is a couple of good questions.

• 43:53Shaan Puri?

  Love the podcast. What's your best SEO hack for a new website? From Steven Sintra. So I, I know zero about SEO. Um, so for me, I love marketing, I love growth, but you sort of specialize in certain sub-practices within that. SEO is not one of mine. But met a guy yesterday and he was like, uh, he was telling me he's growing these content sites. He's got a pretty repeatable model to grow content sites over a hundred thousand monthly visits, uh, up to a million monthly uniques like within two months. And I was, he's done it like 10 times. And I was like, okay, well, what's the formula? Are you an SEO guru or what? He's like, "Oh, no, I don't know SEO. I don't do backlinks. I don't know what a schema is. Like, I don't do any of that stuff." He's like, "I'm all content and I just try to rank on quality and relevance."

• 44:37Shaan Puri?

  And he's like, basically he just looks at what questions people search for using a tool like Ahrefs or whatever. And so he goes and finds what questions are people searching for, looks at the search result and if somebody's like, you know, "The 20 best tips for closing a sales meeting," he'll do the 30 best tips. And he'll put in a YouTube video and he'll like add all this value in. And so he literally just like crushes it on, uh, on those questions. And some of that, sometimes those questions are like, you know, people Google their deepest, darkest secrets. They're not like politically correct things. They'll be like, "You know, what's the best way to, you know, like, uh, tell your girlfriend you're cheating on them or whatever?" And so he'll be like, "The best way to tell your girlfriend you're cheating on them." Things that companies most- Sites are not blogging about, he's like, if there's demand, I will write the best content for it.

• 45:21Shaan Puri?

  And I will rank over the course of a couple of months and I'll get my, my website up.

• 45:25Sam Parr?

  I'll tell you a, a quick story real quick. First, I would say, my answer to this is I've done the same thing. I've accidentally been good at it. I would just use two tools, HA refs and then SEO Moz or is it SEO, sorry.

• 45:39Sam Parr?

  Yoast, Yoast, it's a plugin for WordPress. That's the, that, those are the, just use those two tools and you'll be fine. Uh, and when YouTube first started in 2000, from 2010 to 2009, 2012, I had a YouTube channel that had millions and tens of millions of views. And all I would do is I would find words, people, things that were, things people were searching for. And I would put a video with that exact same title. And then I would make it just a picture and not actually a video, the clickbaityest picture. And then I would sell space on that video as background music. And I made hundreds of dollars a month when I was a senior in high school doing that. So if you ever want to see a thumbnail video of a guy, the, the, my most popular video, they took it down.

• 46:23Sam Parr?

  It's called, uh, black guy beats up white guy.

• 46:29Shaan Puri?

  So people were searching for that.

• 46:30Sam Parr?

  Oh, yeah. And you could just type in, and what you could do is you could just type in the word white and it would autofill or type in the word like, uh, fight, and just fight videos were popular or probably still are.

• 46:40Shaan Puri?

  Look at the.

• 46:40Sam Parr?

  And it would auto, and it all autocomplete. And I did that same thing. And for some reason I, I learned that those fight videos did great.

• 46:47Shaan Puri?

  Uh, okay. Another question, so Robert asks, uh, what big picture, uh, thing should I be looking at for my podcast to be profitable? It's a medical podcast where I talk about certain diseases and interview people who have them. And then he shouts out the name of it, which is the patient will see you now. Uh, all right. So what should he be, how should he be thinking about making his podcast profitable? Should we tell him as experts of a not so profitable podcast?

• 47:08Sam Parr?

  Yeah, we do not have a profitable podcast. We don't have.

• 47:10Shaan Puri?

  Well, it's profitable, it's just small relative to like other opportunities we could be doing. It makes money every month.

• 47:17Sam Parr?

  What, what's your answer?

• 47:19Shaan Puri?

  Uh, I would basically so not try to go for big. So podcasts, you can either go big audience ads, or you can say my podcast is lead gen for other things that I do. And so like I've gotten more value out of businesses and opportunity, investment opportunities coming from this podcast than the ad revenue we get every month. And so similarly, I think here, if you're the people who are going to listen to this podcast, um, you know, they might be patients with a certain disease. You might be able to sell some premium ad spot to, you know, some pharmaceutical company, but you probably don't have the scale. And so instead, what I'd be looking for is I'd say, cool. If I had a podcast with 5,000 doctors listening to it every month, what, what can I do with that community? Uh, what other adjacent opportunities, business opportunities can I create out of that, that loyal community?

• 48:03Shaan Puri?

  And so I'm a big fan of just build the tribe first. The opportunities reveal themselves as you go. And that's how I would go about it. I wouldn't try to do ads for your podcast.

• 48:11Sam Parr?

  I've got nothing to add. I think it's a good idea.

• 48:14Shaan Puri?

  Cool.

• 48:14Sam Parr?

  You want to do one more?

• 48:15Shaan Puri?

  Uh, yeah, let's do one more. Okay. First three months of your business. What are your first three steps? Very generic question. Is that even useful?

• 48:24Sam Parr?

  Okay, let's combine it with best. Uh, man, some of these people, they ask the most general questions.

• 48:31Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. Okay. Here's some advice. I have a phrase, ask a better question, get a better answer. Um, so ask a specific question. Uh, don't ask like, you know, in the first three months of a business, what are your first three steps?

• 48:42Sam Parr?

  Saying like, what art is good?

• 48:44Shaan Puri?

  Right. Or like, you know, how do love you? Like what?

• 48:48Sam Parr?

  Like I can't tell you what it's like, how do you, how do you do art? It's like, I don't know, man. You want to talk about like, uh, oil painting, uh, the Renaissance era? We could, let's talk about that.

• 48:58Shaan Puri?

  Okay. Here, here's, here's a question that I will ask to entertain myself here. Um, what's your favorite interview question? When you're interviewing somebody for a job?

• 49:08Sam Parr?

  Uh, on a scale of one to 10, how lucky do you think you are?

• 49:11Shaan Puri?

  Nice. Where'd you get that from?

• 49:13Sam Parr?

  Uh, when I interviewed at Airbnb, the founder asked me it.

• 49:17Shaan Puri?

  It's the Jeff Bezos question.

• 49:18Sam Parr?

  Did he?

• 49:19Shaan Puri?

  He was the, I think, the originator of it, or made it popular at least. They asked Jeff Bezos, what's your favorite question? He said this, and now a bunch of us have stole this.

• 49:27Sam Parr?

  Joe Gebbia asked me it, and I told him a nine or a 10, and he said, why? And I explained to him why, and I go, why'd you ask me that? He goes, people who say they're really lucky are the people I want to be around. I was like, why do you think that? And he goes, well, if you're lucky, if you think you're lucky, you must be talented and things just fall in your place. Or you actually are lucky, and I want to surround myself with lucky people. I don't want to be around unlucky people.

• 49:49Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, the specifically question is, how lucky of a person do you think you are? One to 10, one, two, three is like, I'm not very lucky. I don't consider myself a lucky person.

• 50:00Shaan Puri?

  Four, five, six is, I think I'm pretty, I think I'm, you know, decently lucky, average, and I, you know, I think I know why. Or, sorry, I don't know why, that's just how it is. And then this, uh, the sort of eight, nine, 10s are, um, I consider myself a very lucky person, and here's why. And, uh, you want people who are either, you know, if luck is a thing, you want them around you, just like he said. Or if they're not, you want people who are optimistic, and, uh, you know, when you're building a, a, a young business, you need optimistic people. And then the, the why part is interesting too, because some people know how to, uh, engineer serendipity. They know how to engineer lucky situations for themselves, or they're looking out for situations where they may be getting lucky and pounce on those opportunities. And that's, again, somebody you want in an early business.

• 50:42Sam Parr?

  And then I'm going to ask you the same question, and I think I know what yours is, but I'm going to say another one that is deadly. I love this question, and this is when you back channel on someone and you want to ask about, so let's say I'm interviewing Henry, and you're his old boss.

• 50:55Shaan Puri?

  Reference check.

• 50:56Sam Parr?

  I'll go, I'll go, Sean, what would you give Henry out of 10? Just say a number.

• 51:00Shaan Puri?

  Uh, I'll give Henry a seven.

• 51:02Sam Parr?

  Okay, and you're going to give him a seven because you want to, you don't want to completely shit on him, and you, but you also want to be realistic. And so I would, then I would say, okay, well, what, what can I, what can he do to get the remaining three points? What can make him a perfect 10? That is the only way I've ever found to get critical feedback on a person, other than saying, what are they bad at? Uh, well, you know, they're pretty good, or like, that's, that's what they'll always say.

• 51:27Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, for sure, because people, like you said, want to be polite, and then people also don't want to, like, lie, based on their own experience.

• 51:34Sam Parr?

  That is the best way I've ever found to get it.

• 51:36Shaan Puri?

  Love it.

• 51:36Sam Parr?

  Okay, yours?

• 51:37Shaan Puri?

  Good reference check question for that specific thing?

• 51:39Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I know what it is, and you should tell it.

• 51:41Shaan Puri?

  I don't remember what, because I've told a story once, but I don't even remember what it was. The founder of Second Life told me once.

• 51:46Sam Parr?

  Who you are, who you want to be, or?

• 51:48Shaan Puri?

  Oh, this one. Yeah, this is a good one. Yeah, you know, I love questions like this. I ask this in job interviews, but I also just ask this in social situations to be awkward.

• 52:00Shaan Puri?

  Fill in, I say, hey, we're gonna play a little game. I want you to fill in the blank. First thing that comes to mind, first answer, best answer. I'm gonna say the first part, you finish it. And I'll say, life is, all right, Alan, let's play. All right, sorry, Henry, you have the mic. So, let's play. First answer, best answer. Answer as you go. Life is?

• 52:19Speaker 03

  Great.

• 52:20Shaan Puri?

  People are?

• 52:23Shaan Puri?

  I am?

• 52:26Speaker 03

  Henry.

• 52:27Sam Parr?

  Oh, okay. The middle one was the only good one.

• 52:29Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, so, and then you use it to sort of have a little bit of a conversation. You try not to judge people too much off the top of the mind, but I actually just think this is useful for yourself. So this is like your core outlook. It's like, what's life? And you said, life is great. Cool. Optimistic, sort of grateful person. Then you said, people are tough. That's interesting. Why'd you say people are tough?

• 52:51Sam Parr?

  Uh, are you, do you have a girlfriend?

• 52:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, I do.

• 52:53Sam Parr?

  Are you guys at a good spot?

• 52:54Shaan Puri?

  You dealing with some stuff right now?

• 52:56Sam Parr?

  You are?

• 52:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, totally.

• 52:57Sam Parr?

  That's what I was.

• 52:58Shaan Puri?

  What's a situation where people have been tough? Tough to deal with?

• 53:01Speaker 03

  I don't know. Right now, I'm trying to like, like, figure out where I'm going and like, figure out a job I'm like, and ultimately gonna get a career I'm gonna do. And it's just like tough, like just communicating with other people and like getting them to realize what like you want and like, making them like see what you see in yourself.

• 53:19Shaan Puri?

  People are tough to persuade, or tough to get on your page.

• 53:22Sam Parr?

  That's a great question. You totally have, you, like, you could see what he struggles with and values.

• 53:29Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, and then the last one, which is I am, and you went with Henry, which is a very literal answer. If you were gonna do another one, what would it be? I am?

• 53:38Shaan Puri?

  Student, I don't know, I don't, I don't know. Okay, and then the second question I'll kind of ask is, so I usually pause there, I do the psychoanalysis, and then a couple of things happen. People are like, oh, okay. They just like want to leave because they feel so uncomfortable. Or they'll be like, what are yours? Cool, I like that. That's a good sign when you ask, what are yours? And then I'll tell them mine, and then they'll do the same thing back to me. And the last question is like, I tell them, I say, you know, one thing I did was I did those answers top of mind and I didn't really like what I said. And then I just reassessed it. I was like, what do I think the answer should be for me? Like, what do I want my answers to be? What do I want my outlook of life, people and myself to be? Right? What do I want my mental model to be? And then I revised it.

• 54:19Shaan Puri?

  And then the best people come back a few days later and they're like, hey, by the way, I, you know, I came up with my own and here's mine. And those are the people I'm like, I'm going to be friends with you for a long, long time because you're like me. You like to do this stuff.

• 54:33Sam Parr?

  Clip.

• 54:34Shaan Puri?

  Cool. I think we're done. By the way, I got to call the guy from Levels. I got to get my glucose monitor installed for the weight loss challenge.

• 54:43Sam Parr?

  Oh, okay. We'll do an update on that. I didn't have to call him.

• 54:46Shaan Puri?

  I think we're supposed to.

• 54:49Sam Parr?

  Huh. Okay. Well.

• 54:51Shaan Puri?

  You can join me on this call.

• 54:52Sam Parr?

  Click share. Or is that like, is there a button, like a share button? If there is, do it. Just help us get more listeners. Thank you.

• 54:59Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, tell a friend. Bye.