#24 - Unicorn Signals, Alternative Milk & Movie Incubators

The Hustle's My First Million presents: Million Dollar Brainstorm is back. Host Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) and The Hustle CEO Sam Parr (@theSamParr) sit down and discuss what side hustles, trends and big business ideas that's keeping them up at night. This week they talk about creating a Y-Combinator for content production, signals that predicts future unicorns, transferring your work desk into your home, AirBnB for concerts, alternative milk boom and re-positioning existing products. We are holding a Q&A episode next week, send us your questions to: [email protected]. If you enjoy this and would like a weekly briefing on super in-depth research in these trends, Sam has offered a discount on The Hustle's Trends newsletter, go to https://trends.co/million. 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.

• 0:00Shaan Puri?

  Okay, we're good to go. Million Dollar Brainstorm.

• 0:02Sam Parr?

  Okay, so right off the bat, three things that are follow-ups. The first, Cloud Kitchen thing, we talked about it, you called it. It was reported Travis Kalanick raised $400 million from

• 0:14Shaan Puri?

  The Saudis.

• 0:14Sam Parr?

  From the Saudis, which was pretty controversial.

• 0:16Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 0:17Sam Parr?

  Regardless, it's still interesting. It's happening.

• 0:20Shaan Puri?

  And I would say that this is not one where I would shy away all of a sudden and be like, oh, because Travis Kalanick just raised 400 million, the opportunity is sort of gone because Cloud Kitchens are a very brick and mortar, go city to city and make this happen. You could do one in Tampa, Florida, and you could do one in London, you could do one wherever and

• 0:37Sam Parr?

  No, I wouldn't even go to the point of saying, oh, it's tapped out. What? No, I would say like, it's like, well,

• 0:42Shaan Puri?

  I would fear the big numbers.

• 0:43Sam Parr?

  If Chick-fil-A exists, can McDonald's not exist? Amongst Gen Z, I said this last time, eating out is the thing they spend most of their money on.

• 0:50Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, there's a great chart that shows like wallet share or dollar share over time and how takeout and delivery is just basically going up and up and up and it's people spending more money eating outside the home, like eating from restaurants rather than cooking, but the majority of that's coming from delivery, which is kind of like no surprise.

• 1:06Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it's actually, I think, more cost effective. Like it's, everyone says like, to save money, cook at home. I think I probably saved more money eating out.

• 1:14Shaan Puri?

  All right, I don't know about that. All right, that's one follow-up. So Cloud Kitchens, yes, a thing. What else you got?

• 1:18Sam Parr?

  One follow-up, I talked about the conference I went to, I wrote about that in the trends group and it got like 200 replies in a few hours. Did you happen to see that?

• 1:27Shaan Puri?

  No, I didn't see that. What did you say and then why was there?

• 1:29Sam Parr?

  I said two things that shocked me that had happened over the past couple of weeks. The first was, I went to this fancy conference, met a ton of people, the most attended session was one about like depression and anxiety and how shocked I was that some people who were there were billionaires and I'm like, man, these people should have their shit together and they don't. And that was kind of depressing but cool. And the second thing was, I had a friend sell a company and we looked at the ATM slip and it was like crazy high, yet he was still stressed out. $200 million. And people liked hearing that. I think it was like, they liked hearing that their people they look up to are fucked up just like them.

• 2:04Shaan Puri?

  The stars, they're just like-

• 2:05Sam Parr?

  Which I love hearing, right? I love, that's why I like reading biographies. I'm like, oh, this person I look up to is totally a shit show, just like me.

• 2:12Shaan Puri?

  Well, I love to know the real deal, right? Like, have you ever noticed if you meet somebody who's met a celebrity? I don't know about you, but for me, the first question is always, what was he like? Or what was she like? And if you think about that, I'm not saying like, what did you guys talk about? You know, I'm asking, what were they like? Meaning like, in reality, what was their personality like? How did you get along with them? How did they treat you? That sort of thing. And that does fascinate me. I want to know what the person's really like. And that's why conferences like lobby conferences is cool. Cause you've got to be kind of sitting right next to Tony Hsieh and all these other people who you otherwise would not know besides what you read in the news.

• 2:41Sam Parr?

  Tim Westergren from Pandora, I talked to him one time and I was like, have you met your musical heroes? What was that like? And he said, they're all fucked up. They're all, he goes, a lot of them are like weirdos or divas.

• 2:52Shaan Puri?

  Right. This is the founder of Pandora, right?

• 2:53Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 2:54Shaan Puri?

  By the way, if anybody hasn't seen the HustleCon talk where he talked, I don't know how many years ago this was, maybe-

• 2:58Sam Parr?

  This was in 2016.

• 3:00Shaan Puri?

  So a couple of years ago, go on YouTube. I think it's still there.

• 3:03Sam Parr?

  Or if you just Google like Tim Westergren employees HustleCon.

• 3:06Shaan Puri?

  Right. There was an amazing thing where Pandora was going through some tough times and apparently people loved Pandora so much and he was such a strong leader that he was like, look, we're in this dire situation. And basically they didn't pay people for a year.

• 3:18Sam Parr?

  Two years.

• 3:19Shaan Puri?

  Two years of deferred payments, basically.

• 3:21Sam Parr?

  And then he raised 12 million in funding after a few years of the business. And he said, like five or six million of that 12 million, he had to give to the employees or back pay. Well, he was at the conference I went to and I've, I've become friends with him since he spoke at HustleCon. And he tells me stories. He was like, so that's actually illegal, not paying someone.

• 3:36Shaan Puri?

  Right, exactly.

• 3:37Sam Parr?

  Even if they agree to it, it's illegal. And he said, I was going to go to jail. He got sued and he thought he was going to go to prison or jail or whatever it is. He was like, I went to the hospital twice because I was so panicked. I thought I was dying. And so I love hearing him talk about that.

• 3:49Shaan Puri?

  It's not a strategy I would advise, but it's a crazy effing story. And that's why I say-

• 3:52Sam Parr?

  And it worked. It won't always work. It probably rarely, rarely will work, but it worked.

• 3:57Shaan Puri?

  Right. You want to go into an idea first?

• 3:59Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 3:59Shaan Puri?

  If you've never listened to this before- It's called Million Dollar Brainstorm. Me and Sam just shoot the shit talking about different ideas or trends that we think are interesting. We piggyback off of the Hustle Trends Newsletter product, which is, I think you guys send that out once a week.

• 4:11Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 4:12Shaan Puri?

  And basically, it's like, super well researched trends and things that are interesting and early and growing, and spaces where there's still a lot of opportunity. So.

• 4:19Sam Parr?

  Yeah, so it's, it's trends, but it's also, it's like, we find problems that need to be solved.

• 4:23Shaan Puri?

  Yes.

• 4:23Sam Parr?

  Because like, I'm entrenched to my industry. Sometimes I don't actually know what problems exist out there. So if I want to go and do something, I'm like, oh, that's a cool, that's a validated problem.

• 4:32Shaan Puri?

  Right. And so trends, you know, it costs money, but it's a lot of value. What we do in this podcast is we react to the things that were in there, the things that we, you know, personally, me and you found interesting from it, or just ideas that we have thought about during the week.

• 4:43Sam Parr?

  Yeah, and things that we've heard about, because we have a big network.

• 4:45Shaan Puri?

  Right, exactly. Okay, I will start with one. This is something I would have never said like, three, four years ago, but I think it's a really good time to start a movie studio or a production studio. Here's why I say this. You have all these big companies, Netflix, Disney, Amazon, Facebook, that are trying to be, they're trying to all compete with Netflix, essentially. They're trying to have content that people pay for on subscription. Apple's another one of them, that has their TV Plus, Disney Plus, ESPN Plus. There's all these services that they're trying to get millions of people to pay 10 bucks a month to subscribe to their content. Now, the problem is, they all bid against each other for like, existing shows. So I think famously, people saw like, Friends got 100 million dollars for one year to stay on Netflix, because, you know, everybody wanted to have that piece of property. Friends, The Office, that sort of thing. So all these companies started saying,

• 5:28Shaan Puri?

  look, we need our own original content. We will pay to produce this content, and then we don't have to bid against each other for it, because Orange is the New Black, that's ours, whatever it costs to make, it doesn't matter, it'll pay off over time. So now there's this extreme shortage of talent and content that all these networks are really hungry to buy. In fact, this podcast, we are talking to Quibi, which is a new one, started by the guy who started Dreamworks. He sold Dreamworks for 4 billion bucks, and now he's got a new startup idea, and he's raised 2 billion dollars pre-launch for this thing called Quibi, which is basically like, short 10-minute videos.

• 5:56Sam Parr?

  The rumors that are around that company is that they're paying crazy amounts of money for content.

• 6:02Shaan Puri?

  Exactly. So, we plan to talk to them about, they're interested in having a show around money and finance and startup ideas, and so they want to turn our podcast into a show. That's cool. So anyways, my feeling is that there's a shortage of content. There's a large number of buyers and the buyers have a big, big business model because they're selling subscriptions around the world. So they have more money than ever, more money than TV stations used to have or Hollywood film studios used to have. So I think it's a good time. The way I would do this is actually like creating Y Combinator for movies. So I would go down to LA. Or I think Adam was telling us Humboldt is a good area near LA where they shoot a lot of stuff. And I would basically say, here, here's an accelerator. You want to create a movie? You want to create a show?

• 6:41Shaan Puri?

  This is an accelerator. You come in, we'll give you a small amount of funding and you go shoot a pilot and then we'll have a demo day at the end where the buyers from Netflix and Amazon Prime and Hulu and all the others, they'll all show up and they'll get to see these pilots and you can get funded. And so I think there's an opportunity to create the YC of movies. What do you think?

• 6:57Sam Parr?

  I'm a history guy.

• 6:58Shaan Puri?

  Okay.

• 6:58Sam Parr?

  Okay, I'm not gonna criticize or

• 7:01Shaan Puri?

  You can poo poo on the idea.

• 7:02Sam Parr?

  Compliment that idea yet, but let me tell you the histories. You've heard the phrase content is king.

• 7:06Shaan Puri?

  Yes.

• 7:06Sam Parr?

  Okay. So the guy, you know who created that phrase or who's a Sumner Redstone?

• 7:09Shaan Puri?

  Okay, who's that?

• 7:10Sam Parr?

  He started Viacom.

• 7:11Shaan Puri?

  Okay. Viacom owns MTV and a bunch of other stuff.

• 7:14Sam Parr?

  The Redstone family, they're some of the richest family in the world. He's about to die. He's probably 93, 94. They own dozens and dozens of media properties, hundreds of media properties that you definitely know about. And so the reason he started it is I believe his father owned a movie theater and he said, oh, there's these pipes. We have to give content.

• 7:31Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 7:32Sam Parr?

  So he created the phrase content is king. He went into the studio business, I guess you could say, or creation of of information business. Okay. Another person, Ted Turner.

• 7:40Shaan Puri?

  Your favorite.

• 7:40Sam Parr?

  My favorite, one of my heroes. I have a poster of him. I think that's a poster of him right there. Ted Turner, the way that he came to be was his father created a billboard company. He took the billboard company over. They extended into radio, then he extended into TV. Then he said, let's create a 24 hour news network.

• 7:55Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 7:56Sam Parr?

  When he created that 24 hour news network, as well as the other networks that he created.

• 8:00Shaan Puri?

  Came to be.

• 8:01Sam Parr?

  CNN.

• 8:01Shaan Puri?

  Exactly.

• 8:01Sam Parr?

  And as well as Turner Broadcasting Group, hugely popular. He bought the Hawks and the Braves because he needed content for those networks. He also bought MGM. You know what MGM is?

• 8:13Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 8:13Sam Parr?

  The studio company. He bought that because he wanted their library of content to put through his pipes. He paid north of a billion dollars. And then finally, there's actually one more of these, but I can name tons of examples. So this idea of people need content is actually has existed since the beginning of

• 8:29Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 8:29Sam Parr?

  modern media. The question is, is the demand higher now than it was then? I don't know. I'd like to see those data, but historically, what you're describing is incredibly lucrative if done correctly.

• 8:39Shaan Puri?

  So what I'm saying is I think there's new pipes, right? So there's

• 8:42Sam Parr?

  There's definitely new pipes.

• 8:43Shaan Puri?

  Amazon Prime, Disney Plus, Apple TV stuff, Hulu. Those weren't around 10 years ago, most of them, right? Those are largely new services, especially their content spend. So I think Netflix is putting up $12 billion in the next year or two, just Netflix. And like I heard Prime Video was spending $100 million just to produce Indian TV shows, like Bollywood TV shows. Because they want to go bigger in India. They're like, all right, $100 million, create some new Bollywood shows that are exclusive to us. Now, where are they going to get this? They need basically a bunch of talent to go create the content. And you kind of have a no risk proposition because if it's not one network, you have the opportunity to shop it to five, six, seven, eight other buyers. So I think these are new pipes. I think they're big pipes. They're not, this is not a new phenomenon. I agree with you totally.

• 9:22Sam Parr?

  It's not new, probably more. And then here's another example, you know Endeavor?

• 9:26Shaan Puri?

  The WME.

• 9:27Sam Parr?

  They own the UFC, who we were just talking about. They just pulled their IPO. They were about to go public. They pulled it probably because of the, I don't know why, actually.

• 9:35Shaan Puri?

  I think the market conditions are kind of bad.

• 9:36Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 9:37Shaan Puri?

  Also, their situation was kind of speculative. It was a little bit shaky. It wasn't a slam dunk case. So it's like, well, let's go back out when there's good timing.

• 9:44Sam Parr?

  However, I was reading the paperwork, huge company. Like they had some losses because they've been growing, then they took private equity money, but huge business, like billions in revenue or close to billions in revenue. Huge EBITDA, like so really interesting.

• 9:58Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 9:59Sam Parr?

  Way bigger than I thought. Sounds like a pain in the ass to work at, but huge.

• 10:03Shaan Puri?

  Yes. Okay, cool. And you know, the other thing is that even if you're not producing the actual content, if you created a like Lambda School where you're training people for the trade, so how do you get people who know how to do digital animation, sound, lighting, editing, all those things? I just think that there's a talent, there's demand for the talent because there's demand for the content.

• 10:20Sam Parr?

  And a follow-up thing to that is, do you remember how you were talking about religion and media? You know who Mark Burnett is?

• 10:26Shaan Puri?

  Yes.

• 10:26Sam Parr?

  Uh, did you see what he launched recently?

• 10:29Shaan Puri?

  No, what is it?

• 10:29Sam Parr?

  He's in the process of raising a hundred million dollars for a Christian streaming service.

• 10:33Shaan Puri?

  Ah, he gets it.

• 10:34Sam Parr?

  So if you're in the business of creating Christian content, he's gonna be looking for more.

• 10:38Shaan Puri?

  I can only assume Mark is a listener. That's the only conclusion I can make from that.

• 10:41Sam Parr?

  Likely.

• 10:42Shaan Puri?

  All right, what else you got?

• 10:43Sam Parr?

  Okay, this is not necessarily an opportunity, but something that I think was incredibly interesting. Okay, so Jason Lumpkin, who I think will be on here soon, owns this thing called Saster. Saster is a community for SaaS companies. It's also a huge conference. It's like a 25 million dollar a year conference business with only like six or eight employees. It's really small. But he created EchoSign, which could have been much bigger than it was, though it was quite big. It was a good exit for him. It was a, it was basically DocuSign, and it could have been DocuSign. Um, and he has a blog where he talks about SaaS. So he said something really interesting this morning, which was, if you're at 10 million ARR, growing at 100%, so you're doubling, or you're gonna double, if you have net revenue

• 11:22Sam Parr?

  retention of 150% and a lot of your leads are coming in viral, as well as an NPS of 50, you already have a unicorn. And the reason why, this is intriguing to me, is A, these numbers are actually lower than I thought. But he's incredibly bullish on creating B2B SaaS companies. And he goes, you could actually tell really early on.

• 11:42Shaan Puri?

  Right. These five signals, high correlation with that.

• 11:45Sam Parr?

  Signals. That's exactly what it is. And so I saw this tweet and I was like, oh, man, this guy has seen everything. Here's the signals for huge growth. And he always says, if you get to a million in revenue and you have high retention, it's inevitable that you're gonna get to 10.

• 11:57Shaan Puri?

  Right. Don't quit. Don't sell.

• 11:58Sam Parr?

  And if you get to 10, it's inevitable that you're gonna get to 100. Now, he's like way optimistic, right? So who knows? But I just thought that this was a really, really good insight, because it kind of gave like perspective on what's possible.

• 12:09Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I like that. When he's on the podcast, we will have him break this down a little more detail.

• 12:12Sam Parr?

  What I would do then, if I wanted to create a huge SaaS company, I'd be like, all right, what can I build that fits this criteria?

• 12:18Shaan Puri?

  Do you think you can come up with an idea that way? Like, you know, isn't that like saying if you have checkmate, you're gonna win? It's sort of like, can you just say if I had a company with 10 million annual recurring revenue and high retention, how do you back out from that to an idea?

• 12:32Sam Parr?

  You gotta start with pricing. So it's like, okay, so what's the pricing to this? I actually did try it back. I was like, as I thought I exercised, so you'd probably want to charge more than five grand a year. So you can get a sales team. You've got to create something that can have ancillary products and need more seats at a company signed up than before. I mean, there's like a bunch of like interesting things. So like that would rule out like perhaps small, medium business stuff. I think there's a bunch of implications there. It's just like interesting because you say, how do you build something worth a billion dollars? That's incredibly challenging to think about.

• 13:03Shaan Puri?

  So this breaks it down into more.

• 13:04Sam Parr?

  Yeah. So creating something that's 10 million in revenue, that's only 800,000 a month in revenue. That's a lot of revenue, but that's not that much revenue.

• 13:11Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 13:12Sam Parr?

  That's easy to work backwards to.

• 13:14Shaan Puri?

  Speaking of revenue, can I tell you an idea that I think is gonna have high revenue?

• 13:17Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 13:18Shaan Puri?

  Okay, so this is a company I saw yesterday that I was like, oh, this is really interesting. This is really smart. Okay, so I'll tell you what it is. The company's called First Base. And what they're trying to do is, so they're piggybacking off of the remote work trend, which we've talked about on here. Now, when most people go after, oh, remote work's gonna be big, I think that's probably a general statement right now that most people would agree with, especially in tech.

• 13:38Sam Parr?

  I've never been more bullish on it.

• 13:40Shaan Puri?

  So a lot of people are bullish on remote work. What most people are trying to do is trying to build these like tools for remote work, like Slack is a tool that helps people work remotely. There's people trying to make like Google Doc type of competitors that you can use remotely to work on projects together. Figma is another company. Some people are trying to tackle the problem of like, hey, when you're remote, you're not connected to each other. So here's some social things you could do together. All right, that's all interesting. This was a totally different take that I hadn't really thought about. So here's what these guys did. They're basically trying to take your work desk and they're trying to make it so that you can have that at home, right? So if you're gonna work remotely, you're gonna work from home. What these guys do is they say, all right, at HQ, you're the office administrator. When somebody comes to work at their office, you give them a laptop, you give them, you know, maybe a pair of headphones. They have a drink station over here that they can use. They have a desk, maybe sometimes it's a standing desk, they get a chair.

• 14:25Shaan Puri?

  That's what you get if you work in an office. What these guys are doing is they're making it so that you You can get all those things at home. So as an employer, you have a little checklist. What are all the things you want to provide?

• 14:33Sam Parr?

  Like a welcome box?

• 14:34Shaan Puri?

  It's a welcome box.

• 14:35Sam Parr?

  Awesome.

• 14:35Shaan Puri?

  For a remote worker. So it's like, what are all the things you want to provide to a remote worker?

• 14:38Sam Parr?

  Cool.

• 14:38Shaan Puri?

  A chair, ten bucks a month, and you're gonna have this type of office chair, and it'll be sent to that person. And so you just provision it.

• 14:43Sam Parr?

  What's that called?

• 14:44Shaan Puri?

  You push First Base is the name of the company.

• 14:45Sam Parr?

  First Base?

• 14:46Shaan Puri?

  First Base.

• 14:46Sam Parr?

  And so it's, they send you all the stuff that you need?

• 14:49Shaan Puri?

  They send you all the stuff that you need. The company sends it to their employees. So the employee gets like a branded, like, okay, cool, like, yes, I do work.

• 14:54Sam Parr?

  How big is this company?

• 14:55Shaan Puri?

  This is legitimate. It's brand new. Like, like, they're just, and they're applying to Y Combinator right now.

• 15:00Sam Parr?

  If I had time and I didn't care about these people, which I don't know them, but I don't want to completely rip them off, but I would just rip that off.

• 15:07Shaan Puri?

  Okay, well, that's fair, fair. If somebody wants to do that. I like these guys. I'm gonna meet up with them and try to help them.

• 15:13Sam Parr?

  It sounds awesome. I would get on that. The founder of Zoom yesterday said, if he had to start over again, it would have been all remote.

• 15:19Shaan Puri?

  Whole company.

• 15:19Sam Parr?

  Whole company. He said San Francisco's too expensive. Zoom's like the hottest thing going. It's prohibitively expensive. It's impossible for him to go from not remote to remote. But he would have done that.

• 15:28Shaan Puri?

  And remote is one of those things where if you start with it, then it's okay, because you build all your processes around the fact that everyone's gonna be all over.

• 15:34Sam Parr?

  We're going through that process now, where we're starting to do more remote.

• 15:37Shaan Puri?

  It's hard when you start with everybody in an office and you start adding remote, because then it's like, oh, you're in the meeting room, and you're like, oh, somebody, oh, we should call in in case somebody's here, and we'll never talk to them on the screen.

• 15:46Sam Parr?

  So here's something that's interesting. Facebook Messenger, or Facebook Portal, you know Facebook Portal?

• 15:51Shaan Puri?

  I have a portal.

• 15:51Sam Parr?

  I'm thinking about getting rid of our conferencing and buying one of those for every employee. So similar to the First Base thing, it's a hundred dollars.

• 15:58Shaan Puri?

  That's smart.

• 15:59Sam Parr?

  Put this in perspective, I'm gonna say it anyway, but I don't know if we're allowed to say it. Our contract for our conferencing system, well, I won't say the name of the company, uh, is twenty-four thousand dollars a year. A lot of money. That's almost a thousand dollars a head.

• 16:11Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 16:11Sam Parr?

  Very expensive. And now that we're about to end the contract, they're asking for the hardware back. Apparently, we've been leasing it the whole time.

• 16:18Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 16:18Sam Parr?

  So it would make way more sense to buy these Facebook things.

• 16:20Shaan Puri?

  But you can't do a giant call with that, right? Like Portal is one-to-one or just like a group of four. So that'd be one.

• 16:27Sam Parr?

  That's the big, the biggest downside. But it's only a hundred dollars.

• 16:30Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 16:31Sam Parr?

  And it's a one-time cost. So that's incredibly interesting. Um, okay, here's one real quick.

• 16:36Shaan Puri?

  Yep.

• 16:37Sam Parr?

  Have you, did you see the launch of digits.com?

• 16:39Shaan Puri?

  Digits.com?

• 16:40Sam Parr?

  Yeah. Or Co. Or?

• 16:41Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. I know.

• 16:42Sam Parr?

  Okay, so I've always been, I've been asking this for a long time. So tracking, a lot of people don't realize this, but did, did you do the finances at a?

• 16:50Shaan Puri?

  I did not. We had a COO who would take care of it.

• 16:52Sam Parr?

  I don't know if people notice this, but their whole premise is you started a business to solve problems, not to operate the business. What that means is you have to do a ton of upkeep and finances. Closing our books takes about one person like 10, 10 days. So I don't get our revenue and our expenses until the 10th of the month.

• 17:10Shaan Puri?

  Per how many, per what, per month, per quarter?

• 17:13Sam Parr?

  We close our books every month. So in order to get our profit and loss statement every single month, that takes 10 days.

• 17:19Shaan Puri?

  Insane.

• 17:19Sam Parr?

  That's one employee has to do that whole time. And it probably is one and a half employee because she has to ask everyone. So, but these guys, I don't exactly know what they're trying to do yet because they're being really

• 17:28Shaan Puri?

  Very stealthy.

• 17:29Sam Parr?

  Stealthy, but I don't think people who aren't in the mix know how challenging it is to track your revenue and your expenses.

• 17:38Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I'm pretty bullish on this because A, I agree with you. That's a big problem. B, these guys are both serial entrepreneurs. They already sold a company to Twitter.

• 17:45Sam Parr?

  Yeah, Wayne and Jeff.

• 17:47Shaan Puri?

  Multiple companies.

• 17:48Sam Parr?

  Crashlytics.

• 17:49Shaan Puri?

  Crashlytics, yeah, Twitter has. So they're really good at design and product. And so like if you can make finance software, like payroll software and whatnot.

• 17:55Sam Parr?

  Did you rely on QuickBooks?

• 17:57Shaan Puri?

  We used QuickBooks.

• 17:57Sam Parr?

  So do we. And it's okay, but I have an alert on my phone and it tells me every time there's a credit card purchase above $400. And so I kind of, but like, I don't know what our profit and loss is until

• 18:07Shaan Puri?

  Too late.

• 18:07Sam Parr?

  So what's the date now? It's today's the, the 8th. I still don't know how much profit we made in October.

• 18:12Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, that sucks.

• 18:13Sam Parr?

  And so it's actually a huge problem.

• 18:14Shaan Puri?

  Right. Okay. So you, so you like that. You like that company. I like that company too. That's good.

• 18:18Sam Parr?

  I like that space. I've always wanted, I'm like, just tell me, like, why is this so hard to, to create our P and L statement each month? It takes forever.

• 18:26Shaan Puri?

  Okay. Tell me what you think about this idea. I saw a company called So Far Sounds. Have you heard of this?

• 18:30Sam Parr?

  No.

• 18:31Shaan Puri?

  Okay. So So Far Sounds, what they're doing is they're taking the Airbnb model, but instead of saying they're, they're taking basic people's houses, cafes, lounges, extra space. But instead of saying use it to sleep in it, they're hosting like small musical concerts. So it's like an intimate musical concert venue. So you don't, it's not Coachella. It's like 50 people in a room with cool lighting, alcohol and food or whatever. And so you buy, you can look in San Francisco and you can basically see that someone's hosting it at their house. This other person's hosting it like you could use his office if you wanted to. People put all these unique venues up there. And as a person browsing, it's just like, do you want to go to like a little mini concert? And you get to meet the other people. You actually get to talk to each other and then you get to see an artist, usually one that you've never heard of, but it's like a local musician.

• 19:12Sam Parr?

  Are you bullish on this?

• 19:13Shaan Puri?

  I'm asking you what you think of it.

• 19:14Sam Parr?

  Horrible.

• 19:15Shaan Puri?

  Don't like it. Why do you?

• 19:15Sam Parr?

  I would run if I was asked to be part of that.

• 19:19Shaan Puri?

  What don't you like?

• 19:19Sam Parr?

  I would say I'm wrong most of the time. I hate it. I just think that it's not really a problem. That's like, what's the problem that's being solved? It sounds like a fake problem.

• 19:25Shaan Puri?

  I think, so here, I don't think it's a problem. I think it's people like going to concerts. In fact, like live music is like growing.

• 19:32Sam Parr?

  Yes, it is growing. I don't think anyone has built a big thing in that space, though.

• 19:36Shaan Puri?

  Well, the musicians are benefiting, right? So musicians, this is now their main business model is like live music performances. Cause the album sales and streaming royalties are like so low in comparison. So they make all the money like touring and doing shows. And so this is for the person that wants to go to live music, but doesn't want to go to banger. Right? So they're the.

• 19:51Sam Parr?

  I don't think that's a problem. I'm using this phrase, that's a stupid game with a stupid prize. Like that is not, I don't think.

• 19:57Shaan Puri?

  Sounds good. Okay. If you, if you agree, disagree, I want to know. Tweet at me and tell me what you.

• 20:01Sam Parr?

  At least it's not a venture funded thing.

• 20:03Shaan Puri?

  Right. I have another question for you. So this one comes from the trends email. In this email, it was a reference to type of alternative milk. I forgot it was like.

• 20:09Sam Parr?

  Oat milk.

• 20:10Shaan Puri?

  Tiger nut.

• 20:10Sam Parr?

  Oat milk, which we covered a while ago.

• 20:12Shaan Puri?

  Oat milk, almond milk, soy milk, whatever. There's all these alt milk.

• 20:15Sam Parr?

  Tiger milk, was that, it was from India, I believe.

• 20:17Shaan Puri?

  Okay. So this is what the trends blurb says. It says, in the alt milk market, tiger milk is relatively unknown, but the drink is highly popular in Nigeria.

• 20:24Sam Parr?

  Sorry, Nigeria.

• 20:25Shaan Puri?

  It's only beginning to touch the shores of the US and the UK. It's a superfood, super rich in vitamins and vegan friendly. And then there's the like signals over time chart. That's like showing it going up into the right. And people are using nuts to create dairy alternatives for milk, for butters, for sour cream or cream cheese, whatnot. A question to you is, say you saw this and you're like, yeah, I believe that this is an opportunity. How would you actually go about it? What would you do if you saw this tiger nut butter trend or oat milk trend? How would you actually go about digging into this opportunity if you were a reader or a listener?

• 20:53Sam Parr?

  First thing I would do is I would find out who the biggest players in the space. I imagine there's a massive conglomerate in Nigeria that is doing this.

• 21:00Shaan Puri?

  And you're really good at finding their financials. Where do you go when you're finding all these companies' financials? If they're public, you go to their.

• 21:06Sam Parr?

  Uh, I do a few things. The first thing that I do is go to the website and I scroll all the way to the bottom and I look at the trademark. I find out the trademark, then I search that with quotation marks in Google. So for example, my company, this company is called HustleCon Media Inc. It's not called The Hustle.

• 21:20Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 21:20Sam Parr?

  Loads of companies are like that. Your guys probably weren't.

• 21:23Shaan Puri?

  We were pigs in flight, even though we, Bebo was our company name.

• 21:25Sam Parr?

  Cool. So if you search pigs in flight. You're gonna go and see a ton of different stuff. You'll see like when they filed for different trademarks. If they do have to file any paper with the SEC, you'll be able to find that really easily. That's typically what I do.

• 21:38Shaan Puri?

  Okay.

• 21:38Sam Parr?

  The second thing I would do, so I would go on LinkedIn and I would find out as many people, see if I'm connected with any one people. Then I would email them and become friends with them and under the idea of this is really interesting. I want to learn more and I would appeal to their emotion of helping up and coming young person.

• 21:53Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 21:53Sam Parr?

  And they're just gonna spill the beans and maybe I'll partner with them in some capacity or just learn. Okay, so I would do that. And doing that, I would find out exactly how they make the thing or where they make the thing.

• 22:02Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 22:02Sam Parr?

  Then I would go to the distributor and find out what the minimum order number is in order to get their attention. After I did that, I wouldn't create it yet. Typically, what I would then would do is create a website. So like if that checked the box of the manufacturer's minimum order supplies within like within reason for what I'm willing to shell out at first. I would create a website and I would act like it was real. I would probably go to 99designs and pay someone a thousand dollars to create the design and build the website.

• 22:27Shaan Puri?

  Yep.

• 22:27Sam Parr?

  I would drive traffic to it and see if I can get sales to it profitably.

• 22:30Shaan Puri?

  Okay.

• 22:30Sam Parr?

  Then I would go and make the damn thing.

• 22:33Shaan Puri?

  And what do you do for the delay? Like start getting your first?

• 22:35Sam Parr?

  Oh, I would refund the money. I would say you caught us before we were ready. We apologize. Here's a refund.

• 22:40Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 22:40Sam Parr?

  And a 50% off code for the future when we're ready.

• 22:43Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 22:43Sam Parr?

  Or I would say we're sold out.

• 22:44Shaan Puri?

  Gotcha. And now you have the person's email address. So as the orders stack up, you can go back to all of them and say, hey, it's ready now.

• 22:50Sam Parr?

  That's what I would do. Some people think that's unethical, but I would have, I would do that and I would refund all their money. So no one is out anything.

• 22:57Shaan Puri?

  And if anybody's listened to the episode with Moyes from Native, this is the exact playbook.

• 23:01Sam Parr?

  Yeah. And just so you know, with Moyes, we shared an office when he started Native.

• 23:05Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 23:06Sam Parr?

  I saw this whole thing.

• 23:07Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 23:07Sam Parr?

  So it worked.

• 23:10Shaan Puri?

  Nice. Okay, cool. You got anything else for me?

• 23:12Sam Parr?

  Yeah, here's something that's interesting. I went to a UFC fight recently. Manscaped was one of the sponsors. Have you heard of Manscaped?

• 23:17Shaan Puri?

  I saw them as the sponsor, but I didn't, I don't know much about this.

• 23:20Sam Parr?

  They advertise with us and they spend a lot of money. And on that UFC thing, that must've cost, that could've cost 50 grand. And I don't know if that drove any sales. We'll see. Okay. I don't have any inside information other than what I just said. That leads me to believe that their revenues are huge. But here's why they're interesting. Manscaped, it's a razor for men's pubes, right? It's just a freaking head clipper. The, the power of repositioning things is amazing. I bought a dog trimmer the other day for my dog's nails and it was a normal Dremel, but they put a dog's paw on the logo.

• 23:53Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 23:54Sam Parr?

  And they tripled the price. And so what I'm fascinated by, I want to find more examples of this, is people who take the same thing, but switch the positioning and are able to find product market fit easier and make more revenue along the way. Manscaped is one of them. If they just sold that as a hair clipper, it would have been nothing. But now because it's called Manscaped, it's like, it's an intriguing thing. Loads of pet things are like this because you could say like this pet thing is for a pit bull or a cat. Or it's like, well, it's all the same shit.

• 24:22Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 24:22Sam Parr?

  One time I needed to buy a piece of plastic for like some building supplies that I was using. Turns out I bought a 199 cutting board, like a fiberglass cutting board because I need a piece of fiberglass.

• 24:33Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 24:33Sam Parr?

  And I was like, oh, man, if I just changed it in my head to just a cutting board, that's actually the exact same piece of fiberglass or like whatever the material I needed. Anyway, what other things are there like this where they've just switched the positioning?

• 24:44Shaan Puri?

  So I like what you're saying. I want to think more of them. It's not perfect, but believe that this is how orange juice was made. Do you know this story?

• 24:50Sam Parr?

  No.

• 24:51Shaan Puri?

  Okay, so I don't know it perfectly. Somebody can correct me, but from what I've heard, from what I understand, orange juice happened because we, there was this extreme surplus of oranges one year in Florida or wherever it was. And they were like, fuck, we can't sell all these oranges. What do we do? It's gonna be this like colossal failure because so much of this food was gonna go to waste. So much of the economics were gonna go out. And so instead they started just like smashing them together and created juice out of it. And then they started marketing that as like a premium product. It sold for way more than just the oranges.

• 25:20Sam Parr?

  You know, that's how Kingsford charcoal came to be too. I believe we started out a Ford Motor Company because they took the leftover wood, like ash that they had. And they just like, well, what can we do with all this extra shit? And they just mashed it together and they go, well, this will burn for a long time. Let's create coal.

• 25:34Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 25:35Sam Parr?

  So you're talking about like using leftovers. I like that.

• 25:37Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, exactly. And the, the cool part was it became a premium version of the product. Like orange juice sells at this like much higher price.

• 25:43Sam Parr?

  Yeah, just like this repositioning. You know, another guy who did that really well, and this is actually a copywriting technique. So I think that's why, another reason why people should study copywriting is, for example, have you ever heard of a watch that says it's got like quartz movement?

• 25:55Shaan Puri?

  Hmm, I'm not a big watcher.

• 25:56Sam Parr?

  Okay, so amongst watches, like if someone says, oh, it's a quartz movement, that's like, means like prestigious or a little bit more than not. Having it. Well, most every watch has that. But Joe Sugarman, this wonderful copywriter was like, tell me everything about this watch so I could figure out what to write about it. And they're like, it does this, it does that. He's like, oh, quartz movement. So it's got like a space age aluminum with quartz movement. And he's like, and they're like, yeah, but every watch has that. They're like, yeah, but like.

• 26:22Shaan Puri?

  No one's saying it.

• 26:22Sam Parr?

  No one says that. So let's like position it this way. And he did, and it worked wonderfully.

• 26:27Shaan Puri?

  That's like, isn't that the Mad Men thing? It's like our filters are smoked, not whatever. I forgot what it was.

• 26:33Sam Parr?

  Yeah. And they're like, well, every, everything's like that. It's like, yeah, but like, no one says it this way.

• 26:37Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 26:37Sam Parr?

  So this whole idea of repositioning is something I've been thinking about. And I think.

• 26:40Shaan Puri?

  This happens on menus in restaurants. So if you notice, like, basically the more words are in the description of an item, the higher you can get away with the price. So it's like, if you say local, hand-fed, you know, pasture-raised, blah, blah, blah beef, like that means more than just saying beef, right? And so we did this when we owned our sushi restaurant, we were trying to boost sales. And so we were like, okay, how do we get people to order more? Let's, you know, let's discount the price a little bit and, you know, discounts work. That's how people sell. And as soon as we discounted, our orders dropped. We were like, what?

• 27:08Sam Parr?

  Oh, they wanted the fancy stuff.

• 27:09Shaan Puri?

  We're giving you more value. And we had this advisor, whose name is Dan Ariely. He writes Predictably Irrational. He's like a famous dude for.

• 27:17Sam Parr?

  That guy was your advisor for your restaurant?

• 27:19Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, because I was at Duke and he teaches at Duke.

• 27:21Sam Parr?

  Oh, that's wild.

• 27:22Shaan Puri?

  So we went to him and he was like, within five seconds, he's like, yeah, nobody wants cheap sushi.

• 27:26Sam Parr?

  Yeah, because that means like it's spoiled.

• 27:28Shaan Puri?

  He's like, with sushi, expensive means valuable. And you will actually, he's like, watch. And so we doubled our prices of our sushi and our orders doubled too. And so we got this four X like benefit on our, in revenue because of how we did that. And what he told us was, he goes, you guys need to follow what the wine industry did. Because early on with wine, wine was this sort of like low perception product. He's like, but as they educated people into the different flavors, the words, they created a whole language and industry around becoming essentially a wine snob. And he's like, because of that, they could get away with charging way more for certain types of wine. He's like, do that for sushi and you guys will make a lot of money. And so we would do that. We would teach people and we would create, you know, we would create all these little distinctions. So that if you wanted to feel more intelligent and more savvy about your sushi, we gave you the opportunity to do so.

• 28:12Shaan Puri?

  And then you felt good about paying for that because you knew. The difference.

• 28:15Sam Parr?

  That's awesome.

• 28:15Shaan Puri?

  It's kind of like a reposition.

• 28:16Sam Parr?

  Idea. And similar to pricing, I think most entrepreneurs, particularly early stage people, and particular people who are engineers, I've noticed, suck at pricing. And interestingly, I am a part owner of a software company.

• 28:27Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, tell this story.

• 28:28Sam Parr?

  And we bought this company from this engineer. And all we did was, we more than doubled it to like $5.99 a month.

• 28:35Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 28:35Sam Parr?

  And the sales quantity remained the same, but revenue increased by however much we increased it by.

• 28:40Shaan Puri?

  And you had even talked to the engineer about like, dude, you should increase your price, right? And he was what? He was afraid?

• 28:46Sam Parr?

  They're like, well, I want everyone to be able to use it. And it's like, well, do you think that there's a difference between people who will spend $1.99 and $5.99? Like, definitely not.

• 28:54Shaan Puri?

  It doesn't actually price people out.

• 28:56Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it doesn't price people out. And also, I think the biggest thing is fear. People who, they're afraid. I also call it this, we've talked about this, the peanut butter and jelly theory, which is like, when my mother made it, it always tasted better than when I made it, because I see how simple it is. And like, people think like, well, I just threw this thing together, therefore I shouldn't charge that much. The amount of effort or money that you've put into something, that has nothing to do with how much you charge customers for it. How much you charge customers for it is dealt with the amount of value it provides them.

• 29:22Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 29:22Sam Parr?

  So it's like, Picasso could just take five minutes and draw something on a piece of paper. People are going to want it no matter what. It took them five minutes. But that's, that's the value that someone derived from it, right?

• 29:31Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 29:31Sam Parr?

  So anyway, the idea here is like, your pricing should not do with how much you paid or how much effort you put in something, but how much the value was. And so, anyway, I don't know how we got on this, but the whole pricing thing, I think you should charge more than you actually think.

• 29:43Shaan Puri?

  Totally.

• 29:43Sam Parr?

  It's always easier to go down. It's almost impossible to go up.

• 29:46Shaan Puri?

  Uh, we can wrap up. I also want to do a Q and A episode next week. So if you're listening to this and you want me and Sam to answer a question that you have, uh, we did one at the end of season one, and it was great. People really liked, liked it. And so we're going to do another one now. In the notes of this episode, you'll see my email. It's just puri, P U R I dot S H A A N at gmail dot com. I'll put it in the notes. Just email me your questions and then we'll answer it next week. Uh, anything else you want to leave them with before we go?

• 30:12Sam Parr?

  Listen to that last episode with Quiet, like Brokerage, Joe Valley, that's right. Uh, I think that a lot of people will be surprised at how you can build a really cool company by doing, by acquiring a very small business. And they're, they'd be shocked at how they can finance it. So you can finance it by getting a loan, by getting a bunch of stuff. I think that that is really interesting.

• 30:30Shaan Puri?

  Right. I think it is the fastest path to having a successful business because you're buying a already somewhat successful business. You can buy it with very little money down. And by the way, I'm not selling you anything. I don't give anything.

• 30:40Sam Parr?

  Well, anytime you say little money down, it's like you're selling.

• 30:43Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I had to catch myself. But like, this is the truth. This is why I think it's interesting. It's because like, you don't need a lot of money to enter the game, which is good.

• 30:49Sam Parr?

  This one guy named Ryan, I think it's Ryan K U L P. I saw he released a cool course called Micro Acquisitions, and it's all about buying these hundred thousand to five hundred thousand dollar companies.

• 31:01Shaan Puri?

  Nice.

• 31:01Sam Parr?

  It seems really cool. But last thing I would say is listen to that, because I think that's interesting and like something 1% of people know about.

• 31:09Shaan Puri?

  Right. Okay. Good. We're done. We gotta go back to our day jobs. You gotta go run the hustle. I gotta go to Twitch. Let's uh, let's get out of here.

• 31:16Shaan Puri?

  Sweet.

• 31:18Shaan Puri?

  Hopefully that recorded.