#171 - How to Generate Millions from Paid Events (Bootstrapped)

Shaan (@ShaanVP) and Sam (@TheSamParr) break down the events business step-by-step. Sam explains how he grew HustleCon from nothing into a powerhouse. Sam shares numbers and the techniques he used to generate sales and keep costs low. It's a masterclass on how to run an events business. The guys also discuss the "Billie of the Week" Sam Bankman-Fried, and how he became a billionaire at 29 from crypto. At the end, they brainstorm on the idea of "accountability coaching for X". --------- * Want to be featured in a future episode? Drop your question/comment/criticism/love here: https://www.mfmpod.com/p/hotline/ * Support the pod by spreading the word, become a referrer here: refer.fm/million * Have you joined our private Facebook group yet? Go to https://www.facebook.com/groups/ourfirstmillion and join thousands of other entrepreneurs and founders scheming up ideas. --------- Show notes: * (1:20) The amazing story of how Sam Bankman-Fried made his fortune by the age of 29 * (14:01) How a gambler beat Vegas and a kid took over the internet * (22:27) Sam explains how to run and scale a profitable event step-by-step * (47:07) Brainstorming on "accountability coaching for X"

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

• 0:00Sam Parr?

  When I first hosted my, I hosted my first event in June and the event happened, or I decided to do it around June 1st and the event went place seven weeks later in August. And when I started, I had close to nothing. I had a 200 person email list. So there wasn't like this, oh, it's easy for you. You had to hustle. No, no, no, it didn't exist. There was no website. There was just a domain name called HustleCut. And I hosted this event. In the first six weeks, it made about $60,000 in revenue and $50-ish thousand in profit. And a lot of people were surprised by that. It was, but it wasn't that hard. The second event, you can see here.

• 0:39Shaan Puri?

  Explain that. So how, how did you sell the $60,000 of tickets during that process?

• 0:55Sam Parr?

  Today, Sean, let's actually jump right. You, I think, want to do this Billy of the Week right away. And then I have a thing on events. Do you want to do events? Do you want to save that? What do you want to do today?

• 1:04Shaan Puri?

  I want to do that. So I want to do this Billy of the Week. I want to hear your stuff on paid events. And then I have two ideas. One is a cool idea I've seen. And then the other is a brainstorm of a potential idea. So I want to do all those things. So let's start with, let's start with the Billy of the Week. This one is very interesting. Have you ever heard of this guy before? Don't, don't Google. I want to tell you the story. So don't, don't Google this guy.

• 1:28Sam Parr?

  All right. Fine. I just want to see his picture. I'm just, I Googled them. I'm just looking, oh, wow. Okay.

• 1:33Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 1:34Sam Parr?

  Young guy?

• 1:34Shaan Puri?

  Young guy. 29 years old, I think.

• 1:36Sam Parr?

  I don't know who he is.

• 1:37Shaan Puri?

  So his name is Sam Bankman-Fried. I think is the way you say his name. And when you, if you heard him talk, like, I actually want you to listen to a YouTube video for a second because he sounds like, you know, an absolute dweeb. And I loved it. I was like, oh, this guy sounds like he would be a self-made billionaire by the age of 29 because he sounds like a genius. He sounds like a tech genius.

• 1:56Sam Parr?

  Have you brought this person up to me before?

• 1:58Shaan Puri?

  No. I just discovered him about two days ago. Okay. So what's this guy's story? So this guy, well, you know, I'll just call Sam for short, but so this guy Sam, he's a, he, he's a young guy, he's very smart. He takes a job as kind of like a hedge fund trader or something like that. With a group called Jane Street, I guess. And I don't know, I forget these details. They don't really matter. Guy's got a job in finance and he leaves and he starts something called Alameda Research. And it's called Alameda Research because he needed it to sound as legit as possible and not like what it actually was. So what was it? So what this guy did was he was into crypto.

• 2:39Shaan Puri?

  And there was this known thing in crypto where as crypto was getting popular, this is around 2017, when the first big run up happened and Bitcoin went, you know, from $3,000 to $20,000 and it crashed later. But during that time, 2016, 2017, 2018, Bitcoin was emerging. And there was this, as any new thing, there's these like kind of, uh, it's like the Wild Wild West a little bit. And so there was this thing where in the US, the price of Bitcoin was, let's say, $10,000 a Bitcoin. And in other countries where the exchanges weren't built or the country had some regulations or whatever, there was like a premium for Bitcoin. There was more demand than there was Bitcoin available to buy in those countries.

• 3:20Shaan Puri?

  Because you need like, let's say, like in Korea, there was a famous thing called the kimchi, the kimchi premium. And the kimchi premium was that in Korea, there wasn't

• 3:30Sam Parr?

  Kimchi, like the

• 3:32Shaan Puri?

  Like the food.

• 3:33Sam Parr?

  Like the, the food.

• 3:34Shaan Puri?

  So this was known as the kimchi premium. And basically it was like, uh, whatever Bitcoin was selling for here, let's say it was $10,000. In Korea, it was trading for $15,000 because

• 3:43Sam Parr?

  It was that big, a 50%.

• 3:44Shaan Puri?

  50% premium. And it fluctuated, obviously. And I think 30% was kind of like the average of the kimchi premium over time. So everybody wanted this. So everybody, you know, any smart person saw, oh, wow, there's an arbitrage. What if I could just buy it in the US for 10 grand and immediately sell it in Korea for 15 grand or for 13 grand? And so you had this like ability to flip it. And so a whole bunch of people were trying to do this, but there was all these problems, right? Like, well, the reason, you know, the reason it wasn't easy, the reason there was this premium is because it was hard to buy Bitcoin in Korea. So one idea was you buy it in the US off a US exchange. You go to Korea and you sell it, but you're going to sell it for in the Korean, you know, won, which is like the local currency. But now you need to like for the for the arbitrage to continue, you have to convert

• 4:28Shaan Puri?

  the Korean won back to dollars to go buy more, go buy more Bitcoin in the US. The problem was you can't convert the Korean won back to dollars easily because the government was very like tight fisted regulations. You couldn't funnel large amounts of money from the Korean one back to dollars very, very easily. So a whole bunch of people were trying to get this like pinata of money and they couldn't crack it. And what this guy did was he was like, okay, fuck the kimchi premium. He went for the Japan premium, which was far less appealing. It was only 10%. But he's like, still, if I can, if I could trade a US Bitcoin for 10% more in Japan every day, I'm making 10% compounding daily. And so he went through this like odyssey where for like a year, all he's doing is setting up this trade.

• 5:11Shaan Puri?

  So he like, actually, by the way, first, when he was trying to figure out, could I capture the kimchi premium? He was like doing calculations, like if I filled up, if I chartered a private plane and I filled it up with 100 people and I flew, you know, they buy Bitcoin in the US and I flew them all to Korea and then they, you know, sell it there and then I could, each one of them could convert some amount of that money and I could fly them back and every day I could fly this plane back and forth between US and Korea, like, could I make it work? And he was like, I don't think it works.

• 5:39Sam Parr?

  So wait, so you had to be there physically?

• 5:42Shaan Puri?

  It's not that you had to be there physically. You have to do all like all legs of the transaction. So you have to be able to buy in Korea or like, sorry, sell your Bitcoin in Korea at the premium, but now you have Korean one. Now you need to convert that to dollars. And so how do you do that? You need to convert it there, but there's caps. They won't let you convert it because the way he described it is like, look, he's like, what I wanted to do essentially was to be, you know, selling $5 million of Bitcoin for the local currency and converting 5 million of local currency back to US dollars every day. He's like, if you, if you just go to like, go to Korea, go to Japan, go to wherever and you say, hey, I'd like to, it's like a one way flow of money. I have $5 million of your local currency. I'd like to convert it to dollars and exit

• 6:24Shaan Puri?

  the country. And they're like, okay, but where are you getting all this money? And why are you doing such a large amount? And like, what is this?

• 6:29Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 6:30Shaan Puri?

  He's like, you know, if you if you go to bank school 101, that's like money laundering. That's what money laundering looks like. That that is what money laundering, that is exactly what money laundering looks like. So he's like, even though I'm not money laundering, I'm buying and selling a good that's differently priced in different regions. To them on the ground, to the bank on the ground where I need to do these conversions.

• 6:49Sam Parr?

  It's shady.

• 6:50Shaan Puri?

  It's too shady. They won't let me do it. So he spends, I see, a year of his life where he's like, goes to Japan. Now he's got to find, uh, he's got to do each, each one of these was hard. So anyways, the net end of this story is this guy's arbitraging $25 million a day of of this currency. He's making a 10% compounding, you know, margin every single day. And this guy, you know, in the three years, basically, he's become a self-made billionaire. He's worth $10 billion now, which is a combination of the money he made from the arbitrage trade, as well as he then created his own exchange. And like, you know, so he has a trading company that's, you know, has made hundreds of millions of dollars on this arbitrage. And then he built

• 7:33Shaan Puri?

  the, he used that to create an exchange, which is worth billions of dollars on paper. So anyways, this guy's worth $10 billion.

• 7:39Sam Parr?

  So he, and his, because the currency is called FTX, right?

• 7:44Shaan Puri?

  That's his exchange. His exchange called FTX.

• 7:46Sam Parr?

  Sorry, sorry, exchange. And that is, is that basically an alternative to basically a more higher end?

• 7:53Shaan Puri?

  It's a more sophisticated Coinbase where you can do like derivative trades, option trades on all different types of coins internationally.

• 7:59Sam Parr?

  And that's like, and that's like a proper company.

• 8:01Shaan Puri?

  It's a proper company.

• 8:02Sam Parr?

  With like, so.

• 8:03Shaan Puri?

  Alameda Research made hundreds of millions of dollars in the span of a few months, just doing this one trade over and over again, every day. So I'm going to describe a couple of things. But he got on people's radar because he was the biggest donor to Joe Biden this year in the campaign. He wrote, he wrote like a $5 million check at the last, like at the 11th hour, that let Joe do like, you know, as part of this, like, you know, last minute blitz they did on TV ads in all the swing states. Because this, this kind of interesting, this guy's like very, his whole business philosophy is this thing called effective altruism, which is basically like. Go be a greedy capitalist, go try to make as much money as you can and your goal is to give at least half of it away while you're doing it. So he's got like, it's not like a philanthropist

• 8:43Shaan Puri?

  giving away 1% of his money or 10% of his money as a tie. His goal is to give away like 50% of his liquid, liquid like net worth, you know, like that he makes every year. That's his like, kind of like his mindset.

• 8:54Sam Parr?

  Where did he get the money to start this?

• 8:57Shaan Puri?

  So he started it with a very small amount of money and it just compounded very quickly because he's basically like getting 10% extra every day. So I don't know exactly where he got the initial seed capital or how big it was. He hasn't specified that, but he did say at the max, they were doing 25 million a day on the trade, which is basically like a $2.5 million like, you know, like profit per day that they were making on the trade. And so he describes that, okay, so what he's like, basically, if you want to do this, you have to like break it down into small chunks. He's like, okay, so I need on one side, I need to be able to go buy a shit ton of Bitcoin in the US. So how do I get exchanged in the US? It's going to give me really high limits, even though I'm this dorky kid who's got no track record and I have no like

• 9:40Shaan Puri?

  collateral or brand name. And so he's like, finds a way to solve that problem of like being able to buy $25 million of Bitcoin in the US. Then he had to like go to Japan and be, he had to be able to sell a huge amount of Bitcoin there. Then he had to be able to convert it from the Japanese yen or whatever to US dollars. And he had to do that all in the same day and wire transfer it all back to the US to buy it again the next day, to buy the full max amount again the next day. So he's just cycling the money every day. And so he described like they would, just the way that the timing worked, it was always in the last hour of the banking day that he would be trying to get all the wire transfers done to get the money back to the US so that they could execute tomorrow's trade. And any day that they couldn't get it done.

• 10:21Sam Parr?

  What does he sound like? You said he sounds like I'm looking at pictures. Oh my God.

• 10:24Shaan Puri?

  He sounds extremely genuine, humble, high pitched voice, kind of like just a nerdy guy. Who was like, he accounted for about 10% of all the Bitcoin trading himself, his alimony research during that time period, I believe, which is just like insane because he was moving so much money.

• 10:40Sam Parr?

  Dude, I love these people. I love, I love freaks. This guy is a freak. I love these types of people.

• 10:46Shaan Puri?

  You know, his desk is him with six monitors hanging above his head. His neck is like cramped because he just needs to constantly monitor the spot price in the US. What's the price in Japan? What's the conversion of yen to dollars? What's the conversion of dollars to yen? And he's just constant. And anytime anything broke. It was just costing them tons of money and he had always had to make sure nobody's gonna like stop his trade to stop the bottleneck and then he's stuck with all this like Japanese yen and can't move it or it gets seized by the government. And so he was like, the main banks wouldn't work with him. So that's why he picked Alameda Research as a name to like be more legit. He hired like this like, kind of like sophisticated guy like who spoke the local language to be able to go talk to bankers and be like, hey, here's what we're doing. He also like went to like these rural banks in Japan, not the main ones in the city.

• 11:29Shaan Puri?

  He's like, okay, these rural banks will take my business because they're like more open to what I'm doing than like the city banks that are like, you know, have a tighter filter on what I'm doing. So anyways, I just thought it was super interesting to like, he identified one arbitrage like Moneyball style and then dedicated like a year or 18 months of his life to just hammering this one arbitrage and ended up making hundreds of millions of dollars and parlayed that into becoming, you know, his paper net worth is $10 billion. And he did that, I think, four years total of how he built.

• 11:57Sam Parr?

  It's 10 billion because the, because the exchange.

• 12:01Shaan Puri?

  The combination of the research, the, the, the trading company plus the exchange,

• 12:06Shaan Puri?

  10 billion is what he, what he estimates is his net worth to be at.

• 12:08Sam Parr?

  God, I love people like this. I, um, I mean, that's astounding. There's very, he's, that's one of a kind, but I love people and I try to do this with the hustle with email addresses, uh, with an email list, but that's peanuts compared to this and what some other people do. But basically who take a small, tiny, kind of like silly thing and just amp it up on steroids. So I love that. I think that is the coolest thing. I love people who think like that. I think it's so fascinating. Um, I'd have to think of some more examples of that, but you totally know what I mean, right?

• 12:38Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, absolutely. I've, I've met this before with like people who make a poker bot. And it's like, what are you doing? It's like every day there's tweaking this little bot that's running 24/7 at the, at the one and two cent tables of full tilt poker. And they have this like small edge, like this like 15% edge. And then they're just like tweaking the system. And, and what, what it reminds me of is what happens a lot of times is people will go buy information. They'll go say, oh, I pay, I pay, like my, my uncle does this. He was paying $19 a month for like this guy's like stock tips. I had to like sit my uncle down and be like,

• 13:10Shaan Puri?

  Look, like, if these are amazing stock tips, do you really think this guy's gonna give it to you for $19? Like, no, like, you know, if this guy really had an edge in the market, he would not need to make money educating you. He would be pounding his advantage and trying to make as much money as he can, as long as that window exists. And so like, oh, I have another example of this. This guy on Twitter called Harala Bob. Do you follow him?

• 13:33Sam Parr?

  No.

• 13:34Shaan Puri?

  Pretty fascinating guy to follow. So this guy is a high stakes gambler. He's a professional gambler, which usually is an oxymoron. Uh, like, there's no such thing as a professional gambler. But he, he was a professional sports better. And what he realized was back in, I think, 26, I forgot, it was 2013, 2012. I don't remember when it was. It's like, maybe it was even longer than that. I think it might've been like 15 years ago now. He realized that in Vegas, the books were like, they were, so sports books, it's kind of like hard to beat the house. The bookies are always like spot on. And there's one type of bet called the, you know, over under. It's basically like in basketball, it's like, what's the total score gonna be? Is it gonna be? If you add up the total of both teams, is it 200 more? And then you bet if it's gonna be over or under that.

• 14:16Shaan Puri?

  And the over under is really, really accurate. But what he noticed was that, um, he noticed two things. One was the bookies did not take into account that actually in the first half, like in the basketball game, the second half, the score is usually higher than the first half. Because at the end of the game, the team that's losing will start fouling. Uh, cause they're like, look, we have to try to get back in this game. So I'll foul you to save, the clock stops. You get two free throws and then I'll come back, try to hit a three. And so that's usually the end game for most, most teams. Like if you're down, you foul the other team, the clock stops. Uh, they score while the clock is stopped. And then I try to shoot threes to get back in the game. And I'm pretty desperate. So what he noticed was that the total over under, if you just divided it by half, that's what they would, just 50%. That's what they were making as the first half over under.

• 15:01Shaan Puri?

  And very few people bet the first half over under because it's not that fun of a bet. It's like, who cares what the halftime score is gonna be? If you're gonna bet the score, you just bet the end of the game score. So he realized it was a small edge where they thought they were taking the full score and dividing by half and making that the line. He's like, oh my God, this is almost always gonna be under. And he specifically noticed that these three teams, their coaches would like do that foul strategy way more in the second half. So he's like, okay, there's these teams that these coaches do this strategy more. And the first half is like my arbitrage. And he doesn't say shit to anybody. He just starts hiring people to go to the books. All the difference.

• 15:38Sam Parr?

  What's this person's name?

• 15:39Shaan Puri?

  This guy Harala Bob. And I'm kind of like.

• 15:41Sam Parr?

  Harala?

• 15:41Shaan Puri?

  I'm kind of paraphrasing.

• 15:42Sam Parr?

  How do you spell that?

• 15:43Shaan Puri?

  H A R A L A B O B. Harala Bob. And so, and now he works for Mark, he works for the Dallas Mavericks, I think. He works for Mark Cuban because he like.

• 15:54Sam Parr?

  Wow.

• 15:54Shaan Puri?

  Got a big personality on Twitter because he was a sports better. And like, the way he made all of his money was like, he had identified over these like 10 years of being a sports better. He found like three different edges. One was he just like went super hard on the Shaq and Kobe Lakers. The second was this first half, like a first half over under bet that was just mispriced. And he just took that mispricing and he just went all in on this mispricing.

• 16:15Sam Parr?

  Wow, this guy's crazy.

• 16:16Shaan Puri?

  Anytime a sports book would limit him, he would then like pay a guy, be like, hey, go walk up and bet $25,000 of this game, please. And then he like, do that, he had like people betting at all the sports books in all the different casinos at the same time. So that he could be betting the type of money he wanted to bet to maximize his advantage while this arbitrage existed. And so anyways, I love people who find these arbitrages and then like the lengths that they have to go through to maximize it. It's like the movie 21 where they're counting cards in Vegas and they're like strapping cash to their body, walking through this airport. Because they like need to go like pounce on this edge.

• 16:51Sam Parr?

  You used to have this guy who worked for you named Steve or Steven, I think. He, and then he, so basically, if I remember correctly, what he did was he would create these, I don't know if he created or bought, but like. So he would buy a really small Twitter handle that was called like Today in History. And it would just tweet like a picture of what happened 50 years ago, you know, JFK was shot. Then he would buy like a cool car Twitter one where it was like, here's all interesting cars. And then like, I can't believe it can fly, which is like weird flying devices that when you look at them, they look silly. And he eventually bought, I believe hundreds of them to the point of where he built a business. So he did one of, he did two things that were interesting. The story you said was, he goes, basically, I control the internet.

• 17:36Sam Parr?

  Let me show you how, by the end of the talk, I'm going to have X trend.

• 17:41Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 17:41Sam Parr?

  Like, I'm going to have this thing.

• 17:43Shaan Puri?

  Take a word from the audience, he'd be like, say a word. And people like gobbledygook, he'd say, all right, cool. While we're talking, in 30 minutes, we're just at a clock here, we're gonna check Twitter in 30 minutes. And then sure enough, Gobbley Gook would be trending on Twitter, the number one trend in all of Europe. Because his accounts would all start talking about Gobbley Gook in meme format. And it would just like start to go viral, basically. And nobody even knew what it meant.

• 18:04Sam Parr?

  And so what he, and he parlayed this into getting sponsorships. And now, I don't know if you know him anymore. I don't know him at all. But I read about him and I, and this company went public. It went public in a really shady way. So I don't know if I believe everything. There's something about it. I don't have too much evidence.

• 18:20Shaan Puri?

  It's just a roll up of a bunch of, bunch of media companies.

• 18:23Sam Parr?

  Something was weird about it, but basically, I think it went public in England for like 200 or 300 million dollars market cap. And so it turned him into quite wealthy, a quite wealthy person.

• 18:33Shaan Puri?

  By the way, he just released a book called, what is it?

• 18:36Sam Parr?

  Happy Sexy Millionaire.

• 18:37Shaan Puri?

  Happy Sexy Millionaire. Yeah. So go buy Steve's book.

• 18:40Sam Parr?

  So anyway, pretty interesting.

• 18:41Shaan Puri?

  Same principle. He found mispriced assets. So I remember the first one that he discovered was one that was like shit freshmen say. Or it's like, but you know, whatever the, the, the UK slang for that is. It's basically like a parody account that tweeted out funny things that freshmen say on a college campus. And what he found, the reason it was mispriced was, most of these accounts were made by accident. By somebody who was 18 years old and 16 years old, and they were bored at home and they just made a, you know, like Harry Potter, you know, Harry Potter jokes Twitter account. And it gets to a million followers and they don't know what to do with it. And then they kind of like, they get paid like 75 bucks on Venmo to like shout out some app.

• 19:21Shaan Puri?

  Or like, they get paid like $200 to like say a protein powder or like, or they would make a blog selling, you know, like protein powder. And they would just like try to funnel some traffic to that. But it didn't like make sense. It wasn't very sophisticated. He needed, he needed promotion for his business. So he was working with these guys. Then he realized, screw my business. This is just a really powerful promotional engine. We used him early on when he was, you know, we brought him on and he was part of my team. We used him and we became the number one app in the UK, number one app in Europe because. We used his like network to like, talk about our app. And what he had the insight was, was that you don't say, like, our app was Bebo at the time. So it wasn't, go download Bebo, it's a great app. No, he's like, that shit doesn't work.

• 20:05Shaan Puri?

  I was like, well, we need that and we need the link in there so we can track how many clicks it gets. He's like, no, that's not how people talk on the internet. I was like, okay, so tell me, what do you mean? He's like, you gotta think like, what you wanna do is, we have so many accounts that we want somebody, when they scroll on Twitter, they see Bebo mentioned like seven times and that they don't even, nobody's explaining it, nobody's selling it to them. They just realized, why is everyone saying this thing Bebo, what is that? And then they go Google it, or they go search for it, and then they actually download the app, because they think this is what's hot, this is what people are talking about. He's like, so what we'll do is, we'll make content that's like,

• 20:38Shaan Puri?

  you know, my mom, when she sees me check Bebo for the 50th time today, and it's a meme of the mom throwing your phone out the window. And it's like, so the implied meaning is that Bebo is this addictive app that you keep checking, that your parents hate that you keep checking. Well, what is that app? Why would, why would this person check that app 50 times? I don't even have that app, never heard of it, right? And so that was the genius of his marketing like tactics at that time. And then he had the like, audience to back it up. So they got Spotify and Microsoft and all these companies to pay them tons of money, because anytime they needed to spread the word about a new thing that they were doing, this was the most effective way to reach a bunch of people, a bunch of young people. And so then he parlayed that, he started right, launching his own consumer brand. So if they have a bunch of food accounts, they would launch like a food subscription product.

• 21:23Shaan Puri?

  Or they had a bunch of fitness accounts, they would launch like a women's athletic wear, you know, like, company. It didn't all work, but man, like, crazy ass like business that came, you know, out of nowhere.

• 21:32Sam Parr?

  If you, if you wanna go research it, it's called Social Starts, right?

• 21:36Shaan Puri?

  Social Chain.

• 21:37Sam Parr?

  Social Chain, Steve, what's his name?

• 21:40Shaan Puri?

  Bartlett, yeah, you should follow him on Twitter, he's a great follow. Now he tweets out just like, I don't know, inspirational shit all the time, like motivational stuff.

• 21:46Sam Parr?

  Yeah, he's like a mini Gary Vee, although.

• 21:48Shaan Puri?

  He's like a better Gary Vee, to be honest with you.

• 21:50Sam Parr?

  Probably a getter, yeah, I was gonna say, he's probably more popular.

• 21:52Shaan Puri?

  Five years and he's gonna be much bigger than what Gary Vee is today, I think, if he sticks with it. But, uh, yeah, and there's some articles that are cool. If you go search like, the 21 year olds that control the internet, I think there was like a Vice article, like 22 year olds that control.

• 22:06Sam Parr?

  BuzzFeed.

• 22:06Shaan Puri?

  BuzzFeed, yeah, so BuzzFeed and Vice did like crazy articles about them. I mean, at one point, they had 25 employees that were all under the age of 22 years old, and they were all just managing these media accounts, and they were just making tons of money and they like. Yeah, it was insane. They built like an office with like a playpen inside and you know,

• 22:22Sam Parr?

  No, it's a good article. So do you want to talk? Okay, so I was doing research. Abreu showed me this and a few other people did. Basically, our most watched recent video is something I you've you've kicked ass on Instagram. I think I've got the YouTube prize so far. But because our most watched article or most watched video is on paid communities. I think the title is how to make $20 million a year doing a paid community, something like that. Because we talked about a company that does that. And now we'll make this title like how to make like a million dollars or how to make $100,000 a year doing a paid event. And Abreu asked me to talk about it. So I came with a few bullet points. So you want to talk about paid events?

• 23:06Shaan Puri?

  I want to because this is how the hustle started. So this is like your roots.

• 23:10Sam Parr?

  And also, we're starting to plan HustleCon again. And I have a feeling now more than ever is the time to plan a paid event, an in-person paid event, because I think you can you can do really well, because there's going to be very little competition and people are really eager to go. We talked about it in the past about events. But so Sean, if you go to the my the Million Dollar Brainstorm document, you'll see I'm highlighting my name. I actually listed all of oh, you're on your phone. So it might be a little challenging. But I've actually listed a whole bunch of our old profit and loss statements from our events. If you hit metrics all time, you can actually see our all time metrics, although actually this only goes to 2018. So it's not all time. It's missing three years. But you can kind of see the data. You can see how much money we're making. And we're

• 23:55Sam Parr?

  making in the first couple in the first year of business about, I think, I think about $500,000 with like 84% margin in our first year of business. And so let's talk about events. So

• 24:10Sam Parr?

  And this won't, this isn't gonna, this is gonna be a 10-minute segment here probably. But basically, when I first hosted my, I hosted my first event in June and the event happened, or I decided to do it around June 1st and the event went place seven weeks later in August. And when I started, I had close to nothing. I had a 200-person email list. So there wasn't like this, "Oh, it's easy for you. You had to hustle." No, no, no. It didn't exist. There was no website. There was just a domain name called HustleCon. And I hosted this event. In the first six weeks, it made about $60,000 in revenue and $50-ish thousand in profit. And a lot of people were surprised by that. But it wasn't that hard.

• 24:54Sam Parr?

  The second event, you can see here-

• 24:56Shaan Puri?

  Hold on, explain that. So how did you sell the $60,000 of tickets during that process?

• 25:00Sam Parr?

  I'm gonna explain. And so I just wanna give a little, also give one more bit of context. The second event, I think it made about $150,000 to $200,000 in revenue and something like $150,000 in profit. And I did these events six months apart. I would basically host an event, go travel. When I needed money, I would host another one. And so I was starting each time with close to $0. So, so let me explain to you guys a little bit about how I started my events and what I would, what I would do if I was starting again, which is basically if I was starting again, I would do mostly the same stuff. But I think everyone in the next, if you're listening, if you're willing to spend eight weeks, working 40 hours a week dedicated to this, I think you could make at least $100,000 profit,

• 25:43Sam Parr?

  starting probably in September, because that's when I think events, conferences are gonna be okay. So anyway, the biggest thing that you have to do here is your email list is the most important thing. So the HustleCon.com, I launched that website on June 6th, okay? And within just a few weeks, we were averaging around 1,000 to 2,000 unique visitors a day. And the email list jumped from about 200 people to about 2,500 people in seven weeks. Keep in mind, at the time, I didn't even have a Twitter. So there was no Twitter. I mean, there was, but I didn't use it. And so what I would do is HustleCon.com was basically a landing page where it explained what the event is and then you'd enter your email. And that was called the front door. The side doors were all these blog posts.

• 26:28Sam Parr?

  So I would write two to three blog posts a week on each speaker. I would post that on Hacker News. People would come to the website via the side door only- 5% of them would say, "This is interesting. What's this website?" And they would click the homepage, and I would collect their email there. And then, once I collected their email, I would send them a variety of other blog posts that I'd written. And at the end of each blog post that I sent them, it would say, "P.S. This person is speaking at HustleCon on August 1st and September. You can get a ticket right now for 10% off if you buy in the next 12 hours."

• 26:59Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 26:59Sam Parr?

  By the way, the next 12 hours, that code was working all the time.

• 27:02Shaan Puri?

  It's always the next 12 hours.

• 27:04Sam Parr?

  It was always the next 12 hours. The countdown clock, there's a simple plugin that you could buy, and it just shows up.

• 27:10Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 27:10Sam Parr?

  So, sorry, guys. I'm sure everyone knows this now, but I don't even... Shopify wasn't popular at that point, so not everyone had that technology. But that's what we did. Pretty easy, pretty basic. And in doing that, I sold...

• 27:23Shaan Puri?

  Give an example of the blog post, because I remember, like, I remember vividly the one you did about iCracked, which you kind of did, like, as an infographic. I remember the one of Pandora.

• 27:31Sam Parr?

  Yeah, so I would do...

• 27:32Shaan Puri?

  But explain what you did, and like, also, these were speakers. So you got speakers to agree, legit speakers to agree, before you even had an audience or anything.

• 27:42Sam Parr?

  Yes, which is the second thing I'm going to talk about, is how to land a speaker. But the blog post, I basically would just use Forbes, Business Insider, all these places, and just write a biography on the person. But I would do it in an interesting way. And eventually, what happened is, we would create infographics. So I had John, who worked there, and I would say, "John, here's the bulleted points of their life. Turn it into an infographic, please." And that's what we did. We had infographics. It could have been a blog post, which is what I used to do. This time, we made infographics, and it worked quite well. And it was basically, I read the book, made the stick, and I just copied that. So I took information about their company, and I made it really easy to understand. So, for example, Pandora streams this amount of music per hour, which is the equivalent of X, Y, and Z.

• 28:27Sam Parr?

  The reason why they were able to do that is they were one of the first people to launch on the iPhone. And then, I'd just tell that story.

• 28:35Sam Parr?

  Pretty simple. I thought it was simple. Very effective. Now, that's how we got our initial sales. Now, the thing about sales for events, it's incredibly stressful. The reason it's stressful is typically 20% of your sales come in the first five to seven days, and then 20%, sometimes more, 30% of your sales comes in the last like four or five days, which means that dead time, so you're, you want, you have to kick, you gotta kick ass right out of the, right out of the gate. So your first launch series, you need to kick ass. Your first email launch series, you need to do really well. Then there's a fair bit of dead time and it feels, we're failing, we're failing, we're failing. And then the last 10 days or so, you get a wave of sales and it all comes down to the last minute and it is incredibly nerve

• 29:19Sam Parr?

  wracking and anything could ruin it. For example, a pandemic, or if there was like a terrorist attack, if there was um, um, um, bad weather, as simple as bad weather, you're fucked. And so you've been working for seven weeks. Now, eventually, in our case, a whole year on this event, and you're screwed. So it's very stressful. But the way that you can actually make more money, and this is something that I didn't learn until later on, for the tickets, you actually want to charge higher than you're, than, so let's say you want to make a hundred thousand dollars and you want to get a thousand people to pay you a hundred dollars, you always charge 250. And then you give more, you give discounts in order to get to 100 average sale price. And so you want, in my opinion, you want to be very generous with discounts, but you want to charge a lot of money. So

• 30:03Sam Parr?

  it anchors at a high, at a high

• 30:05Shaan Puri?

  Precedent value, yeah.

• 30:07Sam Parr?

  Correct. And one other thing that you want to do is you want to run this like an e-comm site. So for an e-comm site, you say, well, I want to make a hundred grand this month. Therefore, I need to get um, um, you know, a hundred thousand people to my, a hundred thousand high quality people to my website, of which 3% are going to convert. I know 3% are going to convert because I'm constantly tinkering with my landing page. The average sale value is going to be X dollars. Therefore, this is how you do it. Now, I just need to get people to my website. That's what a lot of conference people don't do. That's what you should do. And it works quite well. And then finally, time is one of the best ways to create sales. So you have to give discounts

• 30:46Sam Parr?

  early on and at the end, and you in the goal is you want to have five, three to five tiers of pricing. So you want to have early, early bird, and then early bird, and then middle bird, and then you're late. Okay, seriously, this is the last reminder you're late. Like you, because if you actually look, so can you actually see, if you log into that doc, I actually put a chart of my very first event from July 24, you're going to see big spikes. Every single one of those big spikes was a new ticket tier ending. And there's a direct correlation between the amount of revenue that I made that day and the amount of like the tier ending and me sending

• 31:28Sam Parr?

  an email blast reminding people. And I would email some two or three times a day in order to remind them.

• 31:33Shaan Puri?

  Wow. And so, so you were going to Hacker News for traffic. Were you going anywhere else? And is that where you would go today if you were doing it again?

• 31:42Sam Parr?

  Well, if I was doing a tech event, if I was doing a tech event, yes.

• 31:47Shaan Puri?

  Okay.

• 31:47Sam Parr?

  I would go to Hacker News.

• 31:48Shaan Puri?

  And what's the secret? Because a lot of people will say, like, you know, you know, when I post on Hacker News, you know, I get, you know, I know traffic, I get downvoted, I get what, you know, I get removed because it's like.

• 32:01Sam Parr?

  Well, I would say the obvious, or not the obvious, but maybe obvious is, well, your content might suck. But I would say you, I would actually write content or invite speakers who's who I knew I could write about, that would go viral on Hacker News. And also, if you post 10 times, only three times it will go viral. But those three times, you'll get like, on Hacker News, like 100,000 views. And so that it's like a hits driven business. So you got to post a ton, actually, for it to work.

• 32:30Shaan Puri?

  And so you, I remember when you were doing your events. So, okay, go 60,000, 150,000. I remember you were basically like, yeah, HustleCon brings in $500,000 of revenue and like 300,000 of that is profit, or even more sometimes, you know, if I recall correctly. So is that typical that it was so profitable? Or were you doing something different than the average event host?

• 32:51Sam Parr?

  Yeah, so when we would, towards the third, fourth event, we could easily make $700,000, I think, maybe, let's just say easily 500,000, I forget the exact, but we were making seven figures a year from events. And yeah, we could do 50% margins, but the margins get smaller as we actually grew. And so it was actually more profitable to do some of these smaller events. But we did a few things that made us profitable. The first, I paid, I'll say, it's against the contract, but I'm gonna say it. I paid Casey Neistat money to speak at HustleCon, which is no surprise. Like, you could just Google what a speaking is. But besides that, I've had probably 300, 400, 500 people speak. Not once did I ever pay

• 33:33Sam Parr?

  for another speaker. Not one time. Now, what I think I did do a few times is I would pay for their flight, but I would pay economy. I had Sam Yagan, who's the CEO of Match.com, or was, who's very wealthy. I paid a $350 flight from Chicago to San Francisco, and then maybe I think we got him a hotel, but I think it was just a 350 flight. And he actually, we reimbursed him for that, and he would email me to remind him, oh, you guys owe me that 350. So, we didn't pay for any speakers, other than Casey Neistat. The second, I used a shit ton of volunteers, because there's these kids, and not necessarily kids, but people who will email you, once you have an event, to volunteer. There's a whole crew of them.

• 34:17Shaan Puri?

  They get to go for free, and they want to be around you, and they do the work.

• 34:22Sam Parr?

  They do the work, and it's fun for them. It's a lot of fun to be part of something. We would schedule it so they could go see some talks, but they didn't really even care about the talks. They just wanted to be in the mix. It was exciting for them. And so these people love doing that. I use volunteers for everything. Now, the third part is actually important, and this might get some flack, but I would never work with, or I would try my hardest to avoid union venues. You want to avoid union venues and Ticketmaster venues, because if you work at a lot of venues, sign contracts with Ticketmaster, or something like that, and you have to work with Ticketmaster. F that. Sorry, Ticketmaster, you guys, I don't want to work with you. And so, the goal is to work with someplace that isn't bogged down by that, or bogged down by a union, because there were some places where I would

• 35:06Sam Parr?

  say, alright, I want my volunteers to be at the door, and they would say, nope, you have to have our union guy do it. We charge $50 an hour, you have to have 10 of them.

• 35:13Shaan Puri?

  Right, yeah. So I remember you had the sickest venue in Oakland. So right outside of San Francisco and it's the Oakland, whatever the theater, what's the theater called?

• 35:23Sam Parr?

  The Paramount.

• 35:24Shaan Puri?

  Paramount Theater. This thing, it looked so grand. I remember you were like, dude, guess how much this cost us? I don't know if you could say, but it was amazingly affordable, like to rent that thing.

• 35:34Sam Parr?

  Like 10 or 15 grand.

• 35:35Shaan Puri?

  10 or 15 grand to rent out for the two days.

• 35:37Sam Parr?

  Including all the people.

• 35:38Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 35:38Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 35:39Shaan Puri?

  And, and so, you know, when you're doing an event that's bringing in 700 grand, like, and you, you needed a kind of like a notable, nice, big venue. I thought that was, I, I, I thought that thing would be a hundred thousand dollars, right? Like my wedding venue costs that much, you know? And it was like,

• 35:54Sam Parr?

  Right.

• 35:54Shaan Puri?

  just for me to get married. It wasn't even like a business, you know, I wasn't like, couldn't host thousands of people.

• 35:59Sam Parr?

  And there's a few things, which is we, I preferred hosting conferences in places that typically aren't used to hosting conferences. So I would do it there. I did at the Braava Theater in San Francisco, which I think, I don't remember exactly. I'm pretty sure that was $3,000 to host an event there and I made a hundred grand there.

• 36:15Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 36:15Sam Parr?

  So I would do it in venues that typically weren't meant for conferences. And the reason why is if you go to a hotel or if you go to a conference center, they're going to charge you for the union stuff, which is going to add up really fast, which is actually going to be probably two X the price of the hard cost of the venue. And they're going to charge you something like $50 a head for meals, because you have to use their caterer. And that's something I would avoid like crazy. Instead, I would find local mom and pop places and I would call them and I would say, $8 a meal, I need them prepped and ready to roll in, in a box. Can you do that? And I would get loads of cool people to do that. Now, the thing is, is that in my opinion, the food, not really that important when it comes to a conference. Some people will debate me and say, oh, it's actually really important. I got the cheapest shit I possibly could. And I thought it was fine enough.

• 36:58Sam Parr?

  And then that morning or that night or the night before, we would go to Costco and we would buy every single Danish that they had. And we would rent a truck and bring it there. And that's how we did stuff. I did it on really cheaply. You don't always have to do that, but if you want to make a lot of profit early on in your career, it's a great way to do it.

• 37:13Shaan Puri?

  You also had vendors that were like, uh, like I, I make a keto breakfast bar. You're like, great, you're providing breakfast for everybody. You know, that's your, you're paying me for marketing and you're giving away free goods to my, you know, oh, you make vitamin water or whatever, like some, you're the, you're the startup that wants to be the next vitamin water? Well, you need to be here.

• 37:31Sam Parr?

  And now that's the third, that's the fourth point, which is the way to make money is. You get stuff for free. So usually when I first started, I only typically had revenue from ticket sales. That's actually foolish. As you grow, usually 50/50 ticket and sponsors is your revenue. Early on, I didn't charge people that much in sponsor money. Instead, anyone that emailed me that had free stuff, they would say, hey, we want to sponsor you. Or I would email people and say, hey, instead of sponsoring us, just bring your stuff. I've got 300 great people who are going to be there. Will you come and bring 600 bottles of vitamin water or whatever it is? And they would say, absolutely, I'm there. And I would say, awesome, I'm not charging you any money. I just want you to provide free stuff. And

• 38:13Sam Parr?

  people did that. We got someone to pay $17,000 for the lunches because all they did was hand out free stuff. And they would just get a little bit of business from it and it would be worth it. So we got tons and tons and tons of free stuff. So the point of I actually didn't provide anything. And that is actually quite effective. And then a few more points. A lot of times your sponsorship money is going to come in the second year because the first year, you want to just invite the sponsors there. And they're going to see that it provides value and that you're the real deal and you'll follow through and they'll sponsor you the second year. You have to sell the second year sponsorships and sometimes the second year tickets immediately, like the day of or 24 hours after.

• 38:48Shaan Puri?

  When you're in the heat of the moment, they're seeing everything. Wow, this is great. Oh, people are loving us. Next year, are you in title sponsorship?

• 38:57Sam Parr?

  Exactly. And you want to do that right away. And the big guys like the Intuits and the Microsofts of the world, every once in a while, they'll plan that cycle two years out. So you can actually book your two, three, four. Sometimes it's that crazy. And you could get hundreds of thousands or even millions of dollars from them. And so if you're going to, so don't worry about getting, not getting sponsors the first time. You'll get them the second time if you do well. And finally, a few points on speakers. So for content, I didn't pay anyone, but what I would do is I would try to land, I would put all my work in early on to get the biggest speaker I possibly could right away. For example, I convinced the founder of Pandora, Tim Westergaard, to speak and he was one of the first people I had. The truth is, I kind of lied about who else was coming. I said, all these people

• 39:40Sam Parr?

  were, all these other people were coming to speak. None of them had actually committed. But once- Said yes, then I went to all those other people and I told him Tim was coming and they again said yes and it was way easier to land bigger name speakers because I got the whale.

• 39:53Shaan Puri?

  You had your anchor. Yeah. So, so, and you've actually published your cold emails that you sent to speakers. I think on either your blog or Neville's blog. So if people search, what do they search for to go find those? I've, I have copy pasted those many times already because I'm like, this is great. How, how Sam did this.

• 40:08Sam Parr?

  Yeah, just Sam Parr, Neville, cold emailing. And you'll see it and that stuff worked well. And I don't want to hear this nonsense. If you're starting, if you're going to start an event, well, you already knew everyone. No, I know everyone because I hosted the, these events. That's why I have a huge network, not because I had them before I started this event.

• 40:26Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. So I think, so I think what you just said is like a mountain of gold. I think people would pay thousands of dollars to hear that. How do you do this? You know, as a consultant or a course or something like that. I think you, you, you gave them the goods for free on this pod, which I think is amazing and that's what we're all about. The other thing I would say is,

• 40:47Shaan Puri?

  I think there's, it's not just about making money doing this. The way I look at this, if I'm, if I'm 22 years old and I don't want to have like the traditional career, this is how you bring luck to yourself. You go host the party, you go host, host the event. That's how Sam built his world-class network. That's how Sam made a bunch of friends. That's how we met. You know, like that's, that's how these things happen. You bring luck to you by going and taking a bunch of action and all you have to do is be the hustler who connects a bunch of dots and do it in a topic area that you're interested in. And so if you're super interested in like biohacking, then you create the biohacker conference. You don't need to know anyone. You just go figure out who are all the biohackers that I need to speak here? How do I get in front of biohackers? Well, I need to create content about, you know, biohacking and I need to get that in front of people using Reddit

• 41:31Shaan Puri?

  or Hacker News or some other source. I need to collect emails, then I need to keep telling great stories. And at the end of each of those stories, I need to say, hey, if you like this kind of stuff, there's a thousand people like you, including these big names at this event. Come, you know, like buy your ticket now to join.

• 41:47Sam Parr?

  I think you 100% should do that. And I think if you're going to do it, start planning now and it will change your life. And it's actually not that hard.

• 41:54Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 41:54Sam Parr?

  Now, last thing, I'll wrap up with this. We've had Ryan Beagleman on the podcast. I actually, did you see that email I sent you?

• 42:00Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I saw that one.

• 42:01Sam Parr?

  So in 2017, I called people who worked at Ryan's company. Ryan's company was, I mean, I guess it was the other way around. My company was basically Ryan Beagleman's company for tech and business and entrepreneurship news. Ryan Beagleman ran this thing and started this thing called Biz Now Media, which was basically what my company is.

• 42:19Shaan Puri?

  For real estate.

• 42:20Sam Parr?

  The Hustle, but for real estate. And so they did about $18 million in revenue the year they sold, which they sold for about $50, $60 million, 75 employees. The revenue was made up a third from media, so a third from advertising, a third from event ticket sales, a third from sponsorships. The average revenue per event team member was around $300,000. They did 250 events around the year before they sold with the average ticket price being $80, and they wouldn't do an event unless they could make $10,000 in revenue. Most of the venues that they got were free, and a lot of times, programming was very short. So an event would start at 7:00 a.m., it would kick off for an hour of breakfast schmoozing,

• 43:01Sam Parr?

  followed by a 90-minute session for panels and discussion, and then hanging out and talking, and then you'd be back in your office by 10:30. And it was very effective. And that's my final point about events, which is the content, actually not that important. All the speakers do and all the content that you're going to have, all it does is it brings a particular like-minded person, and the value is from that people, or those people being there. And the content is basically just a way to, as marketing, to get the right people.

• 43:28Shaan Puri?

  And the way you know that that's true, if you go on YouTube, you can go watch all the talks from HustleCon, like, all the years, they're all on YouTube, and they'll have, like, 2,000 views, 3,000 views. You would think, oh, if people are coming to hear these great speakers, they're willing to fly and pay, you know, basically it's a thousand dollars all in to go have this experience. If you're from out of town, which I think a lot of people are, then wow, you know, 10 times more people should be just consuming the content for free from the comfort of their own home. Nope, it's not what happens. People don't actually take the like, it's just like same thing with Coursera. They have Harvard's, all of Harvard's courses online. If you want the Harvard education, you can go get it for free right now online. Turns out people don't want the Harvard education. They want the Harvard label. In the same way, people don't want the content from HustleCon.

• 44:12Shaan Puri?

  They want the experience and the network and the kind of serendipity that can happen by going out there and getting amongst it with a bunch of other people and like putting yourself in that position. That's really the value that you get. Uh, sorry, that's what I should say. That's the value you're providing to the person who's deciding to come. Don't fool yourself into thinking they're coming to hear this mind blowing content. Although there is this like charade you put up where you say that's why you're coming and they say that's why they're going, but that's not really what they get out of it.

• 44:40Sam Parr?

  That is, that is absolutely correct. And I'm showing, I actually, if you put this thing, if you pull this thing up, Sean called, I don't really want to share this publicly, but you can look at it. It's called event metrics all time. I've listed 46 events that we've done. Uh, and I list out how many people showed up, how much revenue came from tickets and how much revenue came from sponsorships. There's this one event series that we came up with called 2X. It stands for like 2X chromosomes, meaning women have 2X chromosomes. And it was a evening event that we would host from 9:00 PM until, uh, I don't know, uh, whenever it ended, or sorry, 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM. And we would get a sponsor to pay for it and we would invite these people to come. The first one had 400 people.

• 45:22Sam Parr?

  I'm pretty sure towards the end, um, we would get a thousand people. So here's one, this one had 982 people coming. We did $24,000 in revenue, $7,000 in sponsors, $31,000 in, uh, total revenue. And then it looks like $16,000 in costs. Frankly, we probably didn't even need to spend that much. And we made 15 grand in profit. And then we would host that almost monthly in a variety of cities. We would do LA, Chicago, yada, yada, yada. One night it can make you 15 grand. Do that 12 times a year. Then you launch a paid community on top of that. You got yourself a multimillion dollar business inside 18 months. If you just rinse and repeat this, it works very well.

• 46:02Shaan Puri?

  While building a great network and being the kind of the hub in between all these different people. The downside, of course, is that event planning fucking sucks. Events are stressful and like, you know, it takes years off my life every time I have to do an event. So I hate events, but I love this business model. I love that you laid it out for the person who gets energy and like, wants to do this, right? Like for me, the nightmare job would be wedding planner. But for some people, they dream of being a wedding planner. And so for people who find that fun, they like that version of stress, that flavor of stress. I think you just laid out a pretty amazing playbook. Okay.

• 46:38Sam Parr?

  Yes. Hopefully it's a good plan. Someone can go do it. And by the way, if you just Google the hustle 2X, literally like the number two and then the word, and then the letter X, I think, what's it say? We did, we did in 2018 from that event series, which is just, I think we only had one, we did about $200,000 in revenue and $110,000 in profit in 12 months from launch to the first year. It's pretty good. Anyway, that's that. That's, that's information on paid events.

• 47:07Shaan Puri?

  Do you want to do one idea before we go? I'm kind of excited about this one. So, yeah. Okay. Have you heard of this company, Future Fitness? Future Fit?

• 47:17Sam Parr?

  Yes, I have.

• 47:18Shaan Puri?

  You tried it?

• 47:18Sam Parr?

  I was, I, I tried it. I was one of the, I think I was one of their early users and they did a good job of onboarding me, hand onboarding me, you know, nicely, but the product didn't stick with me. But I do think it's a good idea. Well, so I don't know exactly how it ended up being, but when I first signed up, it wasn't that unique, but it was slick. It was just, you have a personal trainer. So I would pay them a hundred dollars a month. A personal trainer made a plan for me and I would tell them what sports I cared about, what I wanted to be good at. And I would talk to them, I think weekly about my athletic or about my progress. That's what it was when I first signed up, but it was all tracked via a watch and they would send you an Apple watch.

• 48:01Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. So, okay. So I think, I think it's evolved a little bit. So basically what Future Fit is, is it's your, it's a personal trainer. It's really like an accountability coach. And that's what I'll call this bucket of ideas I want to brainstorm within of accountability coaching. So Future Fit basically says, hey, okay, a personal trainer is like a hundred dollars per session. You know, so, so let's say it's $150 per session in, in big cities like New York or SF. And then, you know, a gym membership is like $15 a month, right? So you, you have this like big discrepancy there where one is like, one session is over a hundred dollars. The other one, a whole month is $15. But then there's something in between. And what these guys did was they said, well, look, for $150 a month, you're going to get a fitness coach. And they're not going to come, you know, they're not going to be with you, you know, like sort of spotting you while you do your bench press.

• 48:47Shaan Puri?

  They're going to be spotting the accountability of you actually working out. So what they would do, they would ask you about your goals. Then they would send you a customized workout plan based on your goals. And in reality, they just have a huge library of workouts. It's like, oh, guys who want to build muscle, here's a bunch of workouts to choose from. You know, a woman who wants to have toned butt, okay, you know, here's a bunch of workouts to, to, to use. So the trainer sends you a workout that's, you know, for you, based on your goals. And then they'll kind of text you and be like, hey, did you get that workout in? And they also connect to Apple Watch so they can kind of see if you did it and they can say, hey, great job. Or they can be like, hey, what's up, man? Like, don't, don't let go of the rope, like, keep, keep going. Like, we said we wanted to do this, keep, keep, keep doing this.

• 49:27Shaan Puri?

  And so I think this is a very smart idea and a very smart business model, which is basically the core thing that stops most people from being fit is the habit of fitness, the habit of exercise. Yes, if you work out with a trainer, you can get more out of every workout. But for most people, the bigger problem is just sticking to the workout, like, schedule and routine. And actually, like, not just feeling lazy and not going to the gym, you know? And so I like that they, basically accountability is the primary feature of this app. And so I, I like that. There is knowledge, there is technique, but it's packaged around accountability. So I was talking to Ben and my right-hand man Ben, and he was like, he just had a kid. I'll say, how's it going? How's, how's baby life? You know, you getting any sleep?

• 50:11Shaan Puri?

  He's like, actually, we hired a sleep coach, same model. Oh. Woman, woman in Texas, and she basically What's it called? So she's just like an independent person, there's not even like a service. So we talked before about Patel, which is like my friend Damian, who's, who's starting this company to do this. So he just used, you know, somebody he found that's like known to do this in Texas. And so he just said, uh, great, like, you know, here's kind of what we're doing today. Like, here's my, here's my current, like, routine. You know, we'd like to be getting some sleep and here's my rough schedule. Here's my wife's, you know, rough schedule. So we'd like to make it work. We don't want to have the baby cry it out. So that's like our constraint. So they, you know, your coach basically downloads your goals and your kind of like your limitations, your constraints. I said, great, I got a program for you. And I was like, oh, wow.

• 50:56Shaan Puri?

  What's her technique? He's like, honestly, it's like, not that much. He's like, you know, just, he needs nap at this time specifically. And like during these times, he needs to stay awake. So make sure you're playing with him or you're feeding him. You're doing something then, don't let him fall asleep. And then like at this time, you're going to put him to bed every single night. And like, you know, when he cries, you're going to go in for this many minutes and whatever. It's like a little bit of a coaching on the technique. But he's like, honestly, it's not the technique. He's like, it's just the accountability of like, she asks us, okay, what time did he nap? What time did he wake up today? What time, how did he sleep last night? And because we keep having to report to this lady, it forces us to not like, throw in the towel and just be like, oh, man, like, I don't know, I give up. Just let him sleep if he wants to sleep right now. It's like, no, our coach told us he needs to stay awake during these daytime hours so that he's going to sleep well at night. And he's like, dude, it's amazing.

• 51:41Shaan Puri?

  He's now sleeping eight hours a night. He's two months old, like life, like the first month was so rough and the second month is so much better just with this coach. He's like, and it's not even like anything that we couldn't have just Googled a schedule. He's like, it's how having this woman who we're accountable to, to maintain the schedule is much more important than like just taking a schedule off the internet of a, and the same way of like, you can go download a workout off the internet, but this coach helps you stay accountable to actually doing those workouts. So I thought, okay.

• 52:08Sam Parr?

  Yeah. Let's break this down a little bit. Let's talk about what this could work. So I actually use a service called, uh, do you have your phone on you?

• 52:15Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 52:15Sam Parr?

  Okay, go to mybodytutor.com. Mybodytutor, like a tutor, like a, like a, you know, like a coach tutor.

• 52:23Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 52:23Sam Parr?

  Look at that website. How ugly is that?

• 52:27Shaan Puri?

  Oh, my God. Okay, so I'm on a 1990, I'll just describe this. I'm on a, well, it looks like a 1990s website. It says, at the very top, it's like this awful logo. And then it says, celebrating 2007 to 2021, 14 years. So that, you know, this has been around for a while.

• 52:40Sam Parr?

  It looks like it's 2007, yeah. And so what it is, it's a guy named Adam Gilbert, and he's got a variety of people who are on the, um, on the payroll and you pay, I was paying $500 a month. And all I would do, it was very simple. I would, every time I ate a meal, I would take a picture and he would comment on it. Once a week, I would do a 20 or 10 minute phone call and they would say, how's it going? And the stress that knowing I was being watched

• 53:07Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 53:08Sam Parr?

  made me change my habits and I got and I lost weight. It's almost like when you're writing in a Google Doc, that stress makes you do it.

• 53:15Shaan Puri?

  Yes.

• 53:16Sam Parr?

  That's what this is.

• 53:16Shaan Puri?

  Right. When you see somebody else's cursor there. Okay, so, so I just started using one because I was like, oh, when we, when you told me about this, I started looking into like, okay, where else could you do this? And I thought, well, it's anywhere you have a goal. And that the goal, like, it's not that you need like some specific strategy that no one's ever heard of. It's like, no, you kind of even even know what to do. It's just helpful to have somebody who's on your side, in your corner, supporting you and keeping you focused, keeping you on track. And so productivity, I think is a big one. So you're probably like me. You know, you have like goals for what you want to do. And probably everybody listening to this is like, you know, I want to make five more sales this month. I want to get five new clients or I want to grow 20% this month. Or I want to like grow my email list to 5,000 people or whatever.

• 54:01Shaan Puri?

  Doesn't matter what your goal is, you have a goal. I want to get promoted. So you have a goal. And then like your progress is basically like, sometimes you need tactical help, like strategic advice. But really, what I what I've found for myself is that

• 54:15Sam Parr?

  You just need pressure.

• 54:16Shaan Puri?

  I need accountability. I need to make each day count. And if I just get like, you know, like 25 out of the 30 days a month to count, I'm going to actually hit my goals. But if I'm like, ah, I kind of had a off day there. I was distracted. I went down this rabbit hole of doing this other thing. Oh, I got stressed out or, you know, like whatever. If I lose four of those days of like, I didn't actually like make the most of that day. Now I'm down to like 20 days out of the 30. And I've like, I'm off track. I didn't get my goal. And like, what's that difference of like staying on track towards your thing and and off is like, for me, it's accountability. It's why I work well with a co-founder because a co-founder helps you like every day, you're kind of focused on, all right, what do I need to do today? Do I get it done at the end of the day? Did I like make enough progress or not? Like that sort of thing.

• 55:01Shaan Puri?

  And so I found this service. So You can do this, actually, if you want. Anybody who's listening to this, so you can basically go and it's called, it's called We Focus. And it's basically you and your coach, and it helps you focus on getting to your goals, your professional goals. So anything you want to do with your work or your projects. And so you just text this number, right? It's like, I'll put it in the description. It's 434-505-4769. I'll put it in the comments. But basically, it's 434-505-GROW is the kind of like the handle of it. And you pay 150 bucks a month and you basically get a coach. And the coach basically just texts you like, at first, it's like, all right, what's your goals for the month? All right, it's, it's, it's April. What would make for a great April? And honestly, just that question is actually pretty powerful because you gotta like articulate it.

• 55:44Shaan Puri?

  You say something, but then you realize like, oh, I want to really make progress on my book. Well, what does make progress mean? Like, you want to have a draft that's like 100 pages? Would that be the goal? And so they help you like actually set a good goal. And then on a day-to-day basis, they sort of like, it's kind of like the manager you need. It's like the kind of nag you enough to make you get it done, but they're not annoying about it.

• 56:06Sam Parr?

  And this is WeFocus.app?

• 56:09Shaan Puri?

  There's no app. There's no, there's no website. There's no app.

• 56:11Sam Parr?

  No, what's the?

• 56:11Shaan Puri?

  It's just a phone number. It's literally just a phone number you text. And so they, they have these like coaches.

• 56:17Sam Parr?

  Wow. Okay. So I can't Google anything to find it.

• 56:19Shaan Puri?

  My friend was using it. And so, so I was like, okay, what's the number? So he just gave me 434-505-4769. And so anyways, they have like a waitlist, I think, but I got let in recently. So, so basically you, you pay 150 bucks. And then what happens is the coach will basically say in the morning, they'll be like, all right, great. Like, we said your goal was, let's say to, you know, grow revenue by 20% this month. And you said you're going to do that by like ramping up your sales efforts. So it's like, all right, cool. Hey, hey, you know, it'll be like, hey, Sam, like, like, let's get it today. Like, you know, what would make today a great day? Like, what would be really satisfying at the end of the day if you've done what? And you're like, oh, I want to make like 10, 10 sales calls. Like, all right, great. And then like in the evening or the afternoon, they'll check in, they'll be like, you know, like, remember, keep, you know, keep the vision in mind.

• 57:03Shaan Puri?

  We want to get there. Like, go for it. Make sure you get those 10 in today. At the end of the day, they'll, they'll text you something that'll be like, you know, hey, did you get the 10 calls in? You know, if not, you know, what do you think held you up today? Let's reflect on it. Or if you got it, it's like, awesome. Like, you know, high five. Plus, like, think back to one of those calls where you really kicked ass, like. Like what made it kick ass? And so it just helps you and you can put in as much or as little as you want. So if you just want it to be like, just check in with me once a day or once a week, it'll do that. But if you want it to be like more reflective, like I like it where it's like, all right, let me, let me think back on my day. Like what's, what's something I could have done better today?

• 57:39Sam Parr?

  So I actually disagree with you strongly on this one. This is far too broad. I would want to make it incredibly narrow. So for example, uh, we guarantee you're going to be a better writer, or sorry, uh, the service to make you write more.

• 57:54Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 57:55Sam Parr?

  And you have to log in every day. And if you don't get a thousand words, you get, um, you get your coach yells at you like, dude, what the fuck do you even want? Do you really actually want to be a good writer? Cause you're not writing. Um, and so I actually would make it far more.

• 58:07Shaan Puri?

  Vertical.

• 58:07Sam Parr?

  Specific.

• 58:08Shaan Puri?

  For.

• 58:08Sam Parr?

  Yes. So relationship, I think could.

• 58:11Shaan Puri?

  Relationship.

• 58:11Sam Parr?

  Actually work.

• 58:12Shaan Puri?

  Yep.

• 58:13Sam Parr?

  You know what I would do? Another one? I would just call it gratitude.

• 58:15Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 58:15Sam Parr?

  I'm going to make you happier by so.

• 58:17Shaan Puri?

  You're going to practice.

• 58:18Sam Parr?

  Why didn't you write?

• 58:18Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 58:19Sam Parr?

  Why didn't you write here what you were thankful for this morning?

• 58:22Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 58:22Sam Parr?

  What the hell? Um, you could show gratitude. Um, what else? We said, you said relationships. I actually don't know how you would do a relationship one.

• 58:29Shaan Puri?

  Well, I think, I think, I think for relationships, it's like, you know, people think relationship is, when people say they need, they want a better relationship, what they're really saying is, uh, fuck, my partner does these things and it annoys me. Why don't they just not do those things and not annoy me? And in reality, to make a better relationships, like you need to be the best version of yourself in the relationship. And if your partner agrees to do the same for themselves, uh, you'll have an amazing relationship over time. And so, uh, so what you would do for relationships is you would basically say, awesome, what is the best version of you you're going to bring to your relationship? And it would just coach you on you doing your part and not doing tit for tat, measuring, oh, I'll behave if my, I'll be great if they are great. It's like, well, that's a recipe for failure. Uh, it's, I'll be great because that's who I am. That's what works. And in the context of being a great boyfriend, great girlfriend, great husband, whatever.

• 59:16Sam Parr?

  Okay, so that could work for relationships. So we've diet and fitness is easy. I think that's easy. You know, you have to run, you have to hit this mileage.

• 59:25Shaan Puri?

  It's anywhere you have a goal. So it could be like as narrow as people who are training for a triathlon. I know a lot of people hire like a marathon, the hire a marathon coach who helps them like structure their ramp up, running and all that stuff. So it could be as narrow as any, it's anything you have a goal on. So the reason I like this one is because my, I have like goals when it comes to work, right? And I know that if I can just, if I can be a little bit more productive every single day, if I can be a little bit better at my projects, make a little more progress every day, $150 in a month is like nothing compared to the value I create by actually doing better in my project. So it's anywhere you have a goal, fitness, diet, relationships. And so, you know, whatever those goals are for people, I think that accountability coaching is going to be a

• 1:00:07Shaan Puri?

  bigger thing because it's like anywhere that there's a, like, so for example, relationships, you have a relationship therapist or a couples therapy, right? So you have this thing, you could go pay $150 an hour, or you could read a $10 book. Well, now there's something in the middle. It's like a human on the other side, but you don't have to pay $150 an hour, you pay $150 a month because they're digital and they're managing multiple clients this way in a light touch model. Same thing with fitness. You can have a personal trainer, or you can have a gym membership, or this is the thing in the middle, your accountability coach. So same thing with, you know, work, you can have an executive coach who's like, you know, thousands of dollars as your, as your CEO coach, or whatever your job is, if you're not a CEO, you have an executive coach, or you could go read a management book. Well, this is something in the middle. It's a way for you to be better at

• 1:00:50Shaan Puri?

  work with accountability coach. So that's the model I see here. And I bet there's a bunch of areas where this could apply.

• 1:00:57Sam Parr?

  How big do you think FutureFit is?

• 1:00:59Shaan Puri?

  So FutureFit says that they're, they're trying to get to 1,000 coaches this year. They've raised $35 million, Series B. So I think they're, you know, they're probably doing fairly well. And they're kind of in that Peloton model, right? They just need like, you know, if you're making $150 subscription per month, it doesn't take that much to be at $15 million, you know, a year of revenue. It doesn't take that much to be at $150 million a year. Like it is an, these are achievable numbers as you get to like 10,000 subscribers, 100,000 subscribers type of thing. I don't know what their subscription.

• 1:01:29Sam Parr?

  So the issue is churn though?

• 1:01:31Shaan Puri?

  The issue is of course churn. Yeah. Because, and I think that's why the harder the goal, the more the churn. This is the unfortunate part of this business is like fitness. People fall off that horse and even if your product is great, sometimes they just stop wanting to work out, eat right. You know, so I think diet is going to have a lot of churn. I think fitness is going to have a lot of churn. Work, I think will have a little bit less churn, but maybe, you know, still will have churn. Relationships, I don't know where that would fall, but I don't know. I find this pretty fascinating. So, and I, I, I now we're trying it for a few days. I like it.

• 1:02:04Sam Parr?

  Have you invested in Futurefit?

• 1:02:05Shaan Puri?

  No, I invested in Fitness AI, which is an AI version of it.

• 1:02:09Sam Parr?

  I wouldn't invest in Futurefit because of the churn. That was, that would be something I'd be concerned about. But I would love to own one of these companies.

• 1:02:17Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, totally.

• 1:02:18Sam Parr?

  I for sure would like to own it. Do we want to do one more?

• 1:02:22Shaan Puri?

  No, I gotta run.

• 1:02:24Sam Parr?

  All right. Well, did, by the way, do you know that we get criticized for Irish goodbyes? We just end the podcast?

• 1:02:31Shaan Puri?

  It's our thing. I actually do the same thing with my family too. Like if I'm talking to my mom or my sister, like there's no like, okay, well, you know, I'm gonna go run to the store now. So it's been great chatting. No, it's like, gotta go bye. Or I'll just be like, bye. And I'll just hang up the phone.

• 1:02:44Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I do the exact same.

• 1:02:45Shaan Puri?

  They know, they know the deal and they can do the same right back to me. You don't even need to tell me why you need to leave. If you need to leave, you just yell bye and you hang up before I reply.

• 1:02:54Sam Parr?

  I do this at gatherings too. I don't, I actually don't say goodbye. I just walk out.

• 1:02:58Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I do that too.

• 1:02:59Sam Parr?

  Because I think it's, I think goodbyes are pointless. Like, what's the point?

• 1:03:02Shaan Puri?

  It's just like, I don't know. It's just a lot of effort for something that's uncomfortable for me to do. And like, uh, yeah, once I've decided I'm moving on to my next activity, like I've moved on already. It's too late. I'm here. I'm there. I'm not here anymore. I'm gone.

• 1:03:14Sam Parr?

  Right. Like I gave you the beginning, in the middle, I don't need an end. The ending's stupid. You just need the, it's, it's pointless. Um, all right. So that's the end of the podcast.

• 1:03:29Speaker 02

  I feel like I could rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off. On the road, let's travel, never looking back.