The Craziest Stuff We Found On The Internet This Week

Episode 557: Shaan Puri (https://twitter.com/ShaanVP) and Sam Parr (https://twitter.com/theSamParr) spent all week combing the Internet for the weirdest stuff happening in business. Want to see Sam and Shaan’s smiling faces? Head to the MFM YouTube Channel and subscribe - http://tinyurl.com/5n7ftsy5 — Show Notes: (0:00) Intro (1:00) 1 - Genius VC dealflow hack (3:30) 2 - Group therapy on Reddit (7:30) 3 - The 10M Hormozi bump (13:30) 4 - Breaking down other people's personal finances (18:30) 5 - Liquid Death viral marketing stunt (21:00) 6 - Product reviews sites on blast — Links: • Stealth Startup Spy- https://twitter.com/StealthCoSpy • MVMT - https://www.mvmt.com/ • Skool - https://www.skool.com/ • Circle - https://circle.so/ • MFM episode on Liquid Death - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OVU3bP8jIuA — Check Out Shaan's Stuff: Need to hire? You should use the same service Shaan uses to hire developers, designers, & Virtual Assistants → it’s called Shepherd (tell ‘em Shaan sent you): https://bit.ly/SupportShepherd — Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton - https://www.joinhampton.com/ • Ideation Bootcamp - https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/ • Copy That - https://copythat.com • Hampton Wealth Survey - https://joinhampton.com/wealth My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by The HubSpot Podcast Network // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano

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

• 0:00Sam Parr?

  It's insane. I think it's insane and brilliant. That's a good find.

• 0:03Shaan Puri?

  Nobody knows about this account, by the way. This account only has 750 followers. So I kind of, maybe I'm blowing up my own spot here.

• 0:18Shaan Puri?

  All right, what's up? It's time for the first ever Friday Quickie. This is a little idea me and Sam had where we share basically the little things that we saw this week that were either the best article, the best tweets, the best, you know, a little video that we saw. Normally this is stuff we just only share in our group chat. And we wanted to try it out on the pod, showing it to each other. I don't know what he's gonna say. He doesn't know what I'm gonna say. We each have three, so we're gonna do a list of six things. Let's run through it. Sam, you wanna go first?

• 0:45Sam Parr?

  You wanna go first? Oh, jinx.

• 0:48Shaan Puri?

  I'll do, I'll do one. I have a quick one. So this is a genius deal flow hack. You ever heard about how hedge fund traders will like move their servers to be as close as possible to the, to the pipe? Or they'll use a certain kind of wire so that the trades get executed faster? I used to hear all these things about like how in traditional finance, people would go to crazy lengths just to get that little edge, that little extra edge. And I always felt a little sad that us, you know, the soft boys of Silicon Valley, we don't really do that. We're all nice, paying it forward, just blogging everything that we know. There's no like kind of, you know, real secrecy, the real ruthless secrecy about things, until I saw this. So our buddy Suli tweeted this out, that there is a company that started to help VCs improve their deal flow.

• 1:31Shaan Puri?

  So he was like, basically every VC knows deal flow matters. Normally the way you do it is you're hosting dinners or conferences, or you go on podcasts, or you make, you know, a Patagonia vest that you give away, shit like that. But they were like, the problem is you're, you're, you don't know what deals you're not hearing about. So what if there was a way where you could know about the deals you're not hearing about? So what they did was some company basically puts a photographer in front of the offices of like Sequoia and Andreessen and all these, like the top funds.

• 2:03Sam Parr?

  Is this real or an idea?

• 2:04Shaan Puri?

  I think this is real. So when people are leaving the office, they're like, hey, do you want a picture in front of the Sequoia thing? I'll send it to you. They take a picture because it's a great moment for the entrepreneur. Oh, this is when we pitched Sequoia. And they're like, great. What's the name of your company? And they're like, awesome. And they basically sell that list to all the other funds. It's like, hey, did you know these guys are out raising? They were talking to Sequoia. And he's like, he's like, I heard about this and I thought it was amazing. Genius deal flow hack. He's like, the VC who told me about it was like, we don't pay for this, but I know it exists and others do.

• 2:33Shaan Puri?

  I think that's brilliant. What do you think?

• 2:34Sam Parr?

  I think it's brilliant. I think it's insane. I think it's insane and brilliant.

• 2:38Shaan Puri?

  There's another version of this that I follow. There's a Twitter account called like Stealth something. And it's anytime somebody who had like working on something new or stealth, blah, blah, blah. Anytime they change that to like the name of a project, it immediately tweets out, this person just announced they're doing this thing. And so you could reach out to them and be like, hey, you know, that's really cool. I like what you're doing.

• 2:59Sam Parr?

  What's the name of that handle?

• 3:00Shaan Puri?

  All right. So that account is called Stealth Co Spy. So if you go to at Stealth Co Spy, it's a real time notification of anytime like people, it also tracks like LinkedIn. Like if you leave a company that they consider like a high trajectory, like fast growth startup. It's like this person's leaving to do something new and you could see it. So like, for example, the last tweet was Julia is now building in stealth mode. She's the ex data science director from GitHub and now, and she lives in Boston. Here's her LinkedIn. She just announced, or she just posted that she's, she's working on something new that's in stealth.

• 3:32Sam Parr?

  This is awesome.

• 3:33Shaan Puri?

  Or it'll be like Noah comes out of stealth. He's got a platform for no code SDK tooling for enterprise LLM applications. Here's the link. Here's his LinkedIn.

• 3:41Sam Parr?

  This is awesome. All right. That's a good find.

• 3:42Shaan Puri?

  Nobody knows about this account, by the way. This account only has 750 followers. So I kind of, maybe I'm blowing up my own spot here.

• 3:49Sam Parr?

  This is a good find. There's also that for when people remove their employer off of their Twitter handle or their LinkedIn. And they'll be like, this person is now available. I like this. Um, all right. Let me give you another one. So I was reading Reddit the other day and I found this old post. It's over a year old. Do you remember Jake Cassan or Casson? I don't actually know how to say his last name, but Jake. So we started Movement Watches. And they were one of the first like D to C guys to go big. And so they started this company where they sold watches. They got popular on Instagram. I think he sold it for a hundred million dollars. Then there was another hundred million dollar earn out, which I'm not sure if they hit or not. But the company was bootstrapped. So he made north of 50 million, I would imagine. I found this post. I don't know why he did this, but he did, and I think it's great.

• 4:33Sam Parr?

  But he didn't really talk about it on social media, but I found this on this subreddit called Find a Path. For those who have a hobby, passion or a passing whim that they want to make a living out of, but don't know how they can get there. So that's the, the description of the subreddit. But he's got this description or this post on the subreddit and says, I sold my company Movement a few years ago for a lot of money and thought all my problems would be solved. I made my life really cushy and comfortable and I optimized to be as stress free as possible. And then he goes on to say that he's new to this subreddit and he's still trying to find out what he's, what he wants to do to his, with his life. And that he set up his life to be easy. And now it's been two years since he sold the company and he's 31, single. He never has to work again, but he's never been lonelier and depressed or depressed than ever. And he basically talks about what he's trying to do in order to find his passion.

• 5:15Sam Parr?

  And I think that what's interesting about this post is A, people never talk about this type of stuff like publicly, where they put their name on it and they truly say how they feel. That's fascinating. And B, he like, you see his replies of people saying like, asking him different questions. And he goes through really detailed replies of what he's trying to do. So he's like, I love video editing and making movies. So now I bought a camera and I've been, and I took a YouTube class and I'm trying to learn how to take pictures and film new videos and chop them up or whatever. And it's super fascinating to see behind the scenes of someone who's young. I think he was 29 when he sold. So 29, worth tens of millions of dollars. He's pretty lonely. He's depressed and it's really fascinating to see someone break all this down. I thought this was a really, really fascinating Reddit post that I didn't see shared anywhere.

• 5:59Shaan Puri?

  I love this. I thought it was awesome. I saw it because somebody on Twitter goes, I wonder what the guys who like crushed it in the early wave of e-comm are doing now. I bet they're just killing it. There's somebody tweeted this and then this other guy goes, actually, I just saw this post on Reddit. This is a year ago. He's like, I saw this post on Reddit from the founder movement saying exactly what he's been doing. And actually, you know, he's been kind of wandering and trying to figure it out. And then I read this thing. I was like, dude, that's the magic of the internet. Someone just tweeting a random question, somebody else being like, oh, here's an obscure Reddit post that's like filled with, you know, the answer to your question. And also just that this guy, you know, I almost felt bad. I didn't bring this up on the pod because I was like, it's kind of personal. It's kind of personal. Maybe he doesn't want this like on blast. I mean, he posted it publicly on Reddit, so I guess it's fair game. But he's

• 6:42Shaan Puri?

  being very vulnerable. He's like, you know, I'm lonelier than ever. I'm deeply depressed and I'm trying to figure it out. But props to him for doing that and doing it with his name on it. Because he could have very easily just like done this same thing and just say, I sold my company. He didn't have to say who he was. So, you know, respect to him for doing that. I really, really appreciate that.

• 6:59Sam Parr?

  I think it's awesome. I think that this is a problem that not a lot of people go through, but it's really fun for people who are dreaming of making money or who want to sell their company. What happens on the other side? You know, I think someone described this thing as called the second mountain. So you've climbed the first mountain, but you still need another mountain to climb. And, and he talks about, they're like, why don't you start another company? He was like, well, in the past, money and ego were the huge motivators for me. And I kind of, those motivators are gone now. And so whatever I do next, I need to find fulfillment and to help others in some way. And so I think it's really interesting. All right. What do you got?

• 7:30Shaan Puri?

  All right. Number three, I'm gonna do the Hormozi bump. Okay, so Alex Hormozi, a friend of the pod, good dude. He bought a company recently, School, from another guy who has been on the pod, talking about School, the original founder of it, Sam Ovens. So that's like his new thing. And that was like, he tweeted out, he's like, this is the biggest bet I've ever made. You know, I'm investing a bunch of money into this. And now he's wearing a school hat on every interview he goes on and every video he creates. And he's trying to promote school.

• 7:59Sam Parr?

  It's an awesome product. School's really good.

• 8:01Shaan Puri?

  I haven't, I've never used it. You actually used it?

• 8:03Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it's a good product. That guy Sam is very savvy and it's a very good product. Yeah.

• 8:09Shaan Puri?

  And so basically, it's a, it's like a community building tools people, you can make, create a paid community and people can join it on there. It looks like it's heavy in like the like affiliate marketing, like drop shipping type of game when I went, I went and browsed like the top communities that were on the site or whatever. Anyways, I think it's a, it's a good, good investment. So I was curious, how much of a bump do you think school got in web traffic after Hermosy did it? Because obviously he's doing it with this belief that, hey, I've just spent two years plus building my audience, huge audience of entrepreneurial people, and I'm going to invest in this thing and then I'm going to try to use my weight to drive traffic. So I can, you know, this is very much the same strategy I've used, which is you could

• 8:53Shaan Puri?

  buy something at a fair price, knowing that you have a growth lever to bring more traffic to the site. So I'm curious, how much do you think it went up? So I'll give you the

• 9:02Sam Parr?

  The before. Yeah, what was the before?

• 9:05Shaan Puri?

  The before was, let's say, web traffic was in, let's say, three months ago, if I was, let's say, no, one, two, three, four, five, five months ago, was at about eight million in, in monthly, monthly visitors. What do you think it is?

• 9:22Sam Parr?

  I would have guessed, I would have guessed 10 or 12.

• 9:24Shaan Puri?

  Okay, so it went from eight million to in January, it looks like spiked at almost 17 million, according to like SimilarWeb, which is not exactly accurate, but directionally correct. So almost double the, about, about double, double the traffic for that month. Now, a lot of it is people just coming and checking it out because of the announcement. It's not like necessarily the most sustainable thing, but let's now look.

• 9:49Sam Parr?

  Wow.

• 9:50Shaan Puri?

  So go Mostly through February. So what's the February numbers looking like?

• 9:54Sam Parr?

  But check this out. So circle dot, circle dot SO, I think they're called, circle dot co or circle dot SO, they're a community platform that's a competitor to school. They've raised, I think, tens of millions of dollars. School has more than doubled their traffic. They had doubled their traffic before. They even took the money.

• 10:10Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 10:11Sam Parr?

  That's insane. And Sam actually told me, and he posted it on their about page, that he has invested $10 million of his own money, which I think was a large percentage of his money that he had into making school a reality.

• 10:23Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, it's interesting what these are. So I just sorted by paid. So you can see it's the digital growth community, which is like basically internet marketing. Number two, Mark's manifestation thing, pay $49 a month and you join his thing. It's got 284 members. Digital Wealth Academy, right? It's like, it's a lot of the like, the Adonis school, like-minded men who want to live the Adonis lifestyle. It's like a lot of like Andrew Tatey type stuff, which I find interesting. But it's cool because you know, I think you've done a bunch of paid communities on Facebook and now Slack and other places. You didn't use this for Hampton, right?

• 11:02Sam Parr?

  No, because when we started, I didn't know enough about it and I didn't think it'd be any good. But then I met Sam, the guy who started it, and we were already on Slack. But I was like, oh, you actually are really smart. I should have, I kind of regret not using it. And I have nothing to do with this company, but I thought it was awesome. But they have a bunch of like non-businessy stuff. So there's like a stuff on like style and clothing. And then there's one on meditation. So there's stuff on non-business stuff. It's just-

• 11:26Shaan Puri?

  It's like anything aspirational you would want, right? So what do you, whatever you want. You want a better body, you want a better style, you want a better finances, whatever it is, that's how you get there. I think it's a great move also, just in general, the business model of I take a kind of crappy but high volume business model, which is, let's say, media, but I use it to buy assets in the best business model, SaaS, which is what he did, right? So he converted his YouTube fame, which doesn't pay very well, into owning a SaaS asset, which is like one of the, SaaS is one of the best business models out there. So good move by Alex on that one. And congrats to, to all involved on the, on the big spike.

• 12:01Sam Parr?

  I hung out with Sam Ovens once, my wife and I, we were at a restaurant with him or some type of bar or something. And we were just talking and Sam Ovens is, he's a wonderful person, but he's, he's almost a little awkward. Like he's, he's really awkward in the sense of he's comfortable with silence. And it got to the part of the conversation-

• 12:17Shaan Puri?

  You're like, turns out I'm awkward.

• 12:19Sam Parr?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 12:20Shaan Puri?

  He's, he's- He's actually kind of normal, I guess.

• 12:22Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it was me. And it got to the point, the conversation where there was some silence. And I was just like, I was just like, I'm going to sit in this for a minute. Let's just see what this feels like. Let's sit in the silence. And so we sit and we finish a conversation and there's about five seconds and he goes-

• 12:37Sam Parr?

  I delivered my baby, you know, and he's, he's from New Zealand. And I was like, uh, what? What do you mean? You delivered your baby with what? He goes, my hands. And he tells a story about how like his wife went into labor and like the paramedics couldn't make it in time. And he's like, I just, he delivered it on his own. And it was a, and he just threw that out there. And I was like, oh,

• 13:02Shaan Puri?

  Doug, I would join a paid community of him just sending me a voice note every morning of that.

• 13:07Sam Parr?

  That was like, that was like the silence breaker was, I delivered my baby.

• 13:14Sam Parr?

  It was awesome. And I was like, you're the best person I've ever met. All right. Let me show you another one. There's this tweet I saw, her name is Julia Chang. All right. So this, uh, she just shared this woman on Instagram named Amanda Wolf. So she goes through, what she does is she gets people to share their finances and then she like is a personal finance wizard or something like that. And so she writes out all the, all, I don't know. What do they call these people?

• 13:39Shaan Puri?

  She's some sort of magician.

• 13:42Shaan Puri?

  She's a witch, some personal finance witch.

• 13:45Sam Parr?

  I don't know, whatever you call these people, but it's normally like people who are making like 80 grand a year. And then she talks about like, you know, this looks normal. This doesn't work, look normal. She got this couple that's 39 and 37 years old, a husband and wife. One's an attorney, one's a CIO. Their net income or their personal income is $3.7 million. They live in Alpine, New Jersey, and their expenses each month are roughly $77,000. And they break through or they break down what their expenses are. So the biggest one being mortgage, $29,000, utilities, $1,200, but then it gets to like some wild stuff. So where does it say their,

• 14:24Shaan Puri?

  Oh, the $29,000 mortgage wasn't wild?

• 14:26Sam Parr?

  That's wild. That's wild. But, but, but, but a $29,000 mortgage, I think that's what it costs to have a like $4 million house. I mean, so that I guess that makes sense, but their personal trainers are four grand a month. And she breaks down all these expenses and I thought it was really fascinating to see kind of like what these people are spending on. And like basically how you can make almost $4 million a year and you're not really saving a lot of money at all. It's pretty ridiculous how much these people spend. And so they are able to invest. So they invest like something like a million dollars a year. So that's a ton of money. But then she kind of like, Perp shows that off in a weird way where she's like, look, they only have $2,300 left over each month after they invest a million dollars each year.

• 15:11Sam Parr?

  But it's kind of ridiculous to see like these expenses. Sorry, the mortgage for $29,000 is 5.2 million dollars at a 4.25% interest rate. But pretty crazy, right? To like, see these expenses of 80 grand a month.

• 15:25Shaan Puri?

  And so what does she do? I see it all written out with nice handwriting here. Does she just like cross it out at the end and be like, no, start over, change, change this? Like, what is the, what's the punchline of this? What does she take? What's the takeaway?

• 15:38Sam Parr?

  Well, her takeaway was just basically like, I don't think her takeaway is important.

• 15:43Shaan Puri?

  She's just like crazy, right?

• 15:44Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it was just like crazy. I mean, I don't think that the takeaway, her takeaway is actually that interesting to me. But I do think that four grand a month at personal trainers is ridiculous, but a nanny $10,000, their kid's school $2,500, kids tutors and coach is $3,000. My takeaway is just, if they live in Alpine, New Jersey, I bet they work in Manhattan then. Just that lifestyle out there, even if you're making close to $4 million a year, it is really hard to get terminal velocity out to the point where you don't actually have to work anymore. So in order to, in order to not work and spend a million dollars a year, you have to have something like $25 million liquid. I think that would be the number, right around there. If you want to withdraw 3% of your money every month, a year, sorry, a year.

• 16:27Sam Parr?

  And so in order to like, actually save up that amount of money, even when you're earning almost $4 million in the Manhattan area, really, really challenging if you live the life like these types of people. And I thought that was wild.

• 16:39Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I think that's the key is if you, if you want to spend $29,000 a month on your mortgage, if you want to spend 10 grand on your nanny, another, you know, basically eight grand on miscellaneous and personal trainer, 6,000 a month on shopping, right? Like, the shopping is separate from, like, just on shopping, fun and dining out is four grand, four grand and six grand. Right? So like 14 grand a month on shopping, fun and dining out. I don't know, if you're not having fun with the shopping and dining out, maybe don't have another, maybe don't spend another 4K on fun. Like, you gotta, this is just excessive spending for that level of income, I think.

• 17:15Sam Parr?

  I agree, but it's just interesting. I think a lot of people who earn that amount of money, by the way, I think they spend that way.

• 17:22Shaan Puri?

  I think the real takeaway of this is whoever posted this is just good at social media. They're like, how do I enrage everybody? Okay, let me post this because all this does, this is just engagement bait, right? You're just, everyone in the comments is just like, oh, man, what the fuck? Like, I can't believe this. This is not real. These people are so out of touch, they get like so angry about it.

• 17:40Sam Parr?

  Dude, I know so many people who live like this, by the way. I know a lot of people who live like this, who make multi millions and they spend almost all of it. I know a lot of people who earn millions of dollars a year and they still live almost paycheck to paycheck. It sounds crazy, but I know people who do that.

• 17:53Shaan Puri?

  What's it like having dumb friends?

• 17:59Shaan Puri?

  You know, you are the average of those five people you're spending time with. Those five idiots that are somehow burning four million a year.

• 18:06Sam Parr?

  Dude, it's insane, man. If you live in the East Coast, man, it's insane. You spend a lot. Um, all right, you do one and then I have one more.

• 18:13Shaan Puri?

  All right, my last one, a quick one. Did you see this liquid death marketing campaign that they did?

• 18:17Sam Parr?

  No.

• 18:18Shaan Puri?

  Oh, okay, genius. So, Super Bowl was a couple of weeks ago and they were like, hey, all right, how do we? We want to do an ad, we want to hijack this moment of this marketing moment, but we don't want to buy a $6 million Super Bowl ad. So they, there you go. They put on eBay, um, they, they called it the biggest ad ever. And they go, we have a national run of half a million liquid death cases. And it's the side of this box and, uh, you can have this ad space. It costs you six million bucks to get in front of 110 million people on the Super Bowl. But 200 million people are going to walk through the doors of these retailers and see, see our, uh, our liquid debt thing. Pretty big leap of faith, by the way, that all of those people who attended grocery store will look at this ad, but whatever. And they auctioned it off.

• 19:02Shaan Puri?

  Coinbase ends up buying this thing for half a million bucks. So they get first, like pump one of PR in the marketing community, um, because marketers are like, oh, so smart. Then pump two was Coinbase actually pays them $500,000 to buy the ad space. So they got 500 grand off this thing that was just excess inventory for them anyways. And then pump three was the news that somebody actually bought it and they got three hits out of this thing. Very smart marketing by Liquid Death.

• 19:28Sam Parr?

  Dude, the guy who started Liquid Death, he came on our podcast, I think two years ago. So they were getting going, but they were still big, but they weren't this big. And if I remember correctly, his background was he worked at an agency. And my takeaway from the podcast was basically when you're selling water, the product's not that important. It's just water. And I don't think it tastes particularly different than any other water. But he was just like, I'm really good at advertising and I'm going to do all of these funny things in order to get eyeballs. And I would not have predicted that that would have worked. And it has. He's, he's, he's completely crushed it. His name's Mike. I don't know his last name, actually. I just remember him being

• 20:06Shaan Puri?

  I don't know how you pronounce it.

• 20:08Sam Parr?

  Uh, but if you can go back and listen to that pot, it's really good. He was really fascinating.

• 20:12Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, that was a few years ago and they were a lot smaller than now. They're like prepping for an IPO or something like that. It's pretty crazy. Um, I don't know how healthy the business is, but it definitely went way further than I ever thought it would, uh, probably way further than you ever thought it would too, because it's basically the bet was we're just going to be incredible at marketing. Like that was the entire bet was, uh, yeah, it's water. Um, and then we're going to be absolutely incredible, world-class at marketing and that'll be the thing. And they pulled it off. Props to them.

• 20:39Sam Parr?

  All right. Here's the last one. So I found this article. It was from houseoffresh.com. So if you, if you Google house of fresh and then David and Goliath, you'll see this article. But I'm going to tell you what, uh, why I was interested in this. So do you ever use review sites like decide which product you want to buy?

• 20:56Shaan Puri?

  Not anymore, but I did for a long time.

• 20:58Sam Parr?

  Me too. I did for a long time and I started diving deep on, on this. And I was like, okay, so how does BuzzFeed like, which is like a, I don't even know what their specialty is, know which air purifier is best? Like, I don't know if they can actually test all of this stuff. And I started noticing that there's all these websites like menshealth.com and a whole bunch of other stuff reviewing products or posting like this is the 10 best these items. And I'm like, I don't think that they actually review these things, but maybe I'll trust them. Well, I read this article and at this point I'm not going to trust any of them. So let me give you Like a little breakdown. So this company that wrote this house of fresh.com, they're a small company and all they do is they review air purifiers.

• 21:37Sam Parr?

  And that's all they do. And they're like a missionary in the mercenary game, meaning most of the people who review air purifiers, they're just like Buzzfeed. And they're just like, look, we can rank on Google. So we're just gonna like read a bunch of Amazon reviews and we're gonna like, whatever, pick the one that looks best. And we're gonna put that at the top of our list. Whereas these other guys, House of Fresh, they actually buy the products and they don't, they're not giving it. So they're not like owed good coverage to any of the manufacturers and they tested out whatever. Well, they did this big article explaining how review sites work. And so the takeaway is basically 16 companies. So it's like Meredith, uh, which owns a whole bunch of, uh, different magazines, dot dash, which owns a whole bunch of stuff, Buzzfeed, um, Penske Media, who we talked about in a podcast.

• 22:21Sam Parr?

  They own all this stuff and they basically 16 media companies get three billion clicks per month. And they basically dominate, uh, Google and it's really hard for any small company getting into the review space in order to, they can't actually rank high. Because these 16 companies control the whole thing. But this article went and dive deep into how they're doing reviews. They basically hire a freelancer just to like go out and do whatever. And then they post the article on their websites. But then they own like, they each own like 50 different websites. They'll post it across all the other websites and they don't actually show how they're doing the reviews. And the takeaway is that they're really likely what they're doing is they just go to Amazon and they just review what Amazon people have actually said.

• 23:02Sam Parr?

  And they just aggregate those, curate them and put that into their article. And it's not a great way in order to like, find out actually what's best. Cause you're trusting someone else versus going out and doing the research. And I read this article and my takeaway was two things. One, I don't trust any website now that's doing reviews. But number two, I only trust a few of them. There are a few. So I used to trust Wirecutter. Now I'm nervous about trusting them because they're owned by the New York Times and so it's owned by much larger companies. So I think they have different incentives. Besides that, there's very few companies out there who I trust for reviews. I go to Reddit, but that's even hard. But I think there's actually an opportunity to create some type of trusted review website. I don't know how exactly you could do that and get big, but I'm pretty certain you could still do that while remaining small.

• 23:46Sam Parr?

  But there's a whole bunch of like these niche websites that used to talk about really interesting stuff. There was one for VPNs, there was one for mattress companies. And then the mattress company like Casper did, or the large VPN companies, they go and actually buy the review sites and they put their link up top. And so at this point, I'm skeptical of the entire industry. And this made me not trust any reviews. And I've already written, written lots of articles about how Amazon reviews, most of them, or a lot of them are total bullshit. I used to have friends that would make products and they'd be like, hey, I'm going to make this product free on Amazon. Will you buy it? So you, it says that you're a proper customer and then just give me five stars. It's all a circle jerk and I don't trust any of the reviews online at this point. And it's, it makes me very skeptical.

• 24:28Shaan Puri?

  100% agree. This is crazy. It's gotten completely out of hand. This is, so it's the main way that like, or not the main way. It's one of the major ways that news sites actually stay in business is that they basically sell their SEO juice to the highest bidder. This is for everything, like what you're talking about, air purifiers, but also mattresses, but also everything. It's, it's all just SEO hacks. So for example, if you want to find the best mattress and you Google best mattress, you're not going to find the best mattress. You're going to find who is the best at SEO. Which mattress company is the most aggressive at SEO? Is the only answer you get when you Google best mattress. And I'm totally with you. I wish there was a better solution to this because there's more products than ever.

• 25:11Shaan Puri?

  And you do want to find out if they're any good or which one to buy. It's just that you can't really trust any of the current solutions. I actually think that there's probably something you could do with a combination of video and subscriptions. So what I would do is I would say,

• 25:23Shaan Puri?

  Hey, we're coming out, we're calling out the BS that exists in this space. We're gonna do a subscription product. You pay for this and you're gonna get access to like the super high quality reviews. Only like conscious consumers will do it. And so you start small, but again, it's like the athletic. So you're gonna get people to actually care enough to pay. And then you tell them like, look, because you pay, now you get no bias in the, in the results. We are not going to take affiliate commissions anywhere. I think if you drew the line there, there would be a market for that. Maybe you could even let people sort of share their subscriptions so that a bunch of people could, you know, chip in and basically say, cool, I want access too. And it's a hundred bucks for all of us in order to make the economics work.

• 26:03Sam Parr?

  I completely agree.

• 26:04Shaan Puri?

  That's the solution is somebody's got to say, I'm gonna choose a different business model. I'm not gonna get paid on my affiliate links. And that's the person that would end up getting trusted because their incentive is not to just push, you know, affiliate products.

• 26:16Sam Parr?

  You know how there's that infographic or image where it's a, where it shows that like four companies or five companies own like 80% of the food in the grocery store?

• 26:25Shaan Puri?

  Yes.

• 26:26Sam Parr?

  That's what this article has. They have one of those infographics where it's basically 16 media, or 16 media companies, Hertz, Dot Dash, Bustles, Ziff Davis, The Arena Group, Red Ventures, and a handful of others. And it shows all of the companies and titles that they own. And you scroll through this and you're like, those are all supposed to be the reputable ones. And I'm like, I don't trust any of this anymore. And so it almost makes me a little bit of a conspiracy theorist when it comes to this stuff. And it completely ruins like my, my browsing experience. Cause now I see this stuff and I'm like, I can never go to those websites in order to get reviews. And so it kind of opened up my eyes. It's kind of interesting. You could see it, House of Fresh, just Google, House of Fresh, David versus Goliath. Very fascinating article that has kind of changed my opinion on review sites. And they do a huge breakdown.

• 27:11Sam Parr?

  All right, is that the pod for our, what do we call it? Quickie Friday?

• 27:15Shaan Puri?

  The quickie.

• 27:16Sam Parr?

  The quickie. All right, that's it, that's the pod.