#92 - A Three Month Old Company Profiting $90,000 A Day

Joined our private FB group yet? It's a page where people share each others million dollar ideas or what they're already working on: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ourfirstmillion. This episode Shaan and Sam talk: Ford's small raise, a mask business doing millions per month, software distribution, agents for engineers, private Twitter, Etsy for kids and Golden Hippo. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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

• 0:07Sam Parr?

  What's going on?

• 0:09Shaan Puri?

  Not much, dude. Before the podcast, Abrey was telling us about a guy who is just uploading, you know, instead of competing on YouTube, he's just uploading his videos of him hanging out with his friends, talking onto Pornhub. It's getting popular because it's not porn.

• 0:23Sam Parr?

  Wait, is he really?

• 0:24Shaan Puri?

  It's not porn on Pornhub.

• 0:27Sam Parr?

  How big is it?

• 0:28Shaan Puri?

  Maybe we should do that with the podcast to grow this thing. Just a bunch of guys talking about ideas on Pornhub. Abrey, how popular are these videos getting?

• 0:38Speaker 02

  I'm not sure how many views they have, but he gets a ton of free press from. I've seen so many articles, like every, every, every now and again, I'll see articles on it.

• 0:47Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, you just linked a BuzzFeed article. Okay, so what do you want to talk about?

• 0:51Sam Parr?

  I've got a few quick fun updates that are just funny. Okay, so Heineken 0.0. I've been talking about how I drink a ton of these each day.

• 1:00Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 1:01Sam Parr?

  They just DM'd me trying to get that sponsorship, so.

• 1:05Shaan Puri?

  There we go.

• 1:06Sam Parr?

  Shout out to Heineken.

• 1:06Shaan Puri?

  0.0.

• 1:08Sam Parr?

  Yeah. Second, have you seen, did you see this thing? I'm testing out Tempo.

• 1:14Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, you posted a video of this on your Facebook or in the Facebook group, and it looks like a bootleg mirror. Is that what it?

• 1:21Sam Parr?

  So these guys aren't a sponsor or anything, but they did give me a free thing to try out. It's like a mirror, so it's, it looks like a TV, but it's self-standing, but it's got this like, what was that video game that had a camera that would tell where you are? A Kinect or something?

• 1:35Shaan Puri?

  The Kinect?

• 1:36Sam Parr?

  Yeah, like Xbox or something. It has one of those on there, so it tells you if your form is shitty or not shitty. And it also has like 200 or something pounds of weights. And I'm testing it.

• 1:46Shaan Puri?

  Oh, okay. Like as a resistance band or is it a dumbbell?

• 1:50Sam Parr?

  Like literally like plates of weights, and it has a barbell and a dumbbell, and you put it on, and, and then there's a leaderboard, and it can tell what type of weight you have on and how many reps you're doing, and you compete. And anyway, it's freaking awesome. But there are a few bugs that I'm noticing. No big deal.

• 2:08Shaan Puri?

  Is this like released or is this a private beta type of thing?

• 2:11Sam Parr?

  It's out, it's out, it's out now, but they are a new company and they uh, it just makes you realize how hard that type of hardware is.

• 2:19Shaan Puri?

  Why, why did you buy this versus like Tonal or Mirror or whatever?

• 2:22Sam Parr?

  I didn't buy it. They just, they, they saw that I liked this type of crap and they go, hey, you want this for a few weeks? You can try it. If you want to share, you can. If you don't, you don't have to. I go, yeah, I'll try it. And I just like trying this stuff out. So Tonal is kind of like this, except if you install it to your garage. Like you have to like nail it to the wall.

• 2:39Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 2:41Sam Parr?

  Um, and Mirror is no weights. This is just Peloton, like Peloton with weights. You know what I mean?

• 2:46Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. So do you like, now that you use it for a couple of days, do you, are you like, this is the future? Yes, I'm, I'm in?

• 2:53Sam Parr?

  No, but it's cool. It's kind of like, it's as revolutionary as Peloton, which is like, it's just got to get maybe a handful more people into that sport.

• 3:02Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 3:03Sam Parr?

  No, it's not revolutionary, but it's quite fun.

• 3:06Shaan Puri?

  But like, would you be disappointed or it goes away, they take it back from you in a couple of weeks?

• 3:10Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I would have bought it.

• 3:10Shaan Puri?

  Bummer. You would have bought it.

• 3:11Sam Parr?

  I would have bought it. Yeah. It's pretty, pretty sick. And then I want to bring up one more thing that I'm learning about.

• 3:16Shaan Puri?

  And what was the name of that one again? Let's shout them out.

• 3:18Sam Parr?

  I think their URL, like you can't find them anywhere. If you, it's called Tempo, but if you Google Tempo, you don't find it.

• 3:23Shaan Puri?

  I think you said, I think it was tempo.fit? Is it something like?

• 3:26Sam Parr?

  Tempo.fit.

• 3:28Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 3:28Sam Parr?

  It's cool. It's just nifty. The guy who started it is like 27, real young, 26, like a young guy. It, it's neat. And it, it uh, are you on the website?

• 3:39Shaan Puri?

  I'm on it right now.

• 3:40Sam Parr?

  It's like, cool.

• 3:41Shaan Puri?

  So I like the idea and obviously Mirror got bought and that's cool. And everyone's like, wow, that, what is this thing?

• 3:48Shaan Puri?

  I, I think this device is not like as good looking as those are. It looks more like an air conditioning unit than Mirror, which looks like a slick, you know, mirror on the wall, but.

• 3:58Sam Parr?

  That's because Mirror, it's just bought, like Mirror was like, the woman who started it was a ballerina. So it was all about like body movement. No, I mean, that's what she was. She was a ballerina.

• 4:07Shaan Puri?

  I've never met someone who's actually a ballerina.

• 4:10Sam Parr?

  Yeah, she was a ballerina. So it was all about mobility and, and body weight stuff. This is just a little bit different. It's, this stuff's fun though. I love it because when you go, the, the bad part about work at home is, or uh, work, working out at home is the lack of competition.

• 4:25Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, it doesn't feel as intense.

• 4:26Sam Parr?

  Yeah, this stuff's fun. And the second thing that I'm learning about. What did I watch? I watched, you know, I like history, so I watched Alexander Hamilton. Then I somehow Wikipediated my way to Ford. Let me tell you something about Ford. And this, I see this consistently of businesses of this era. So when Ford started, Ford Motor Company, Henry Ford, when he started Ford Motor Company, they raised $28,000, okay? And that was in like 1903, I think. So $28,000 in 1903. Inflation calculators are never entirely accurate because there's just too much. It's too hard to, yeah.

• 5:07Sam Parr?

  But like, we could probably say that, let's just say it was 10 to 20 times X, 10 to 20 X, 10 to 20 X bigger. So let's just say $700,000 or that's, or 100 or a million dollars, whatever. It's a fucking car company. So they started, they started Ford with $28,000 in 1903, okay? And they used that, and by 2000, or sorry, 1905, three years later, they were giving out dividends to shareholders to the point of shareholders 3Xing their investment, their, their investment. Is that crazy to you? Like, I read about this all the time. And that A, these companies take so little money to start back then.

• 5:51Sam Parr?

  And B, they're paying out dividends so quickly.

• 5:55Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, it's surprising because there's obviously like a, you know, fixed capital costs there to, to do things. I don't know how they did that, but I don't know, it seems like. All right, so there was this tweet over the weekend that's related where some VC, this guy Josh Felser.

• 6:10Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I know him.

• 6:12Shaan Puri?

  He was like, he's a freestyle capital, also a Duke alum. So he was like, oh yeah, you know, give me a great, I'll take a great entrepreneur over a great product any day. Or something like that. Just tweeted that out. And two funny things happened. One, this other founder replied and he was like, "You don't take founders. That's the problem with VCs. You have it all backwards. Uh, you, you're, you know, capital's a commodity. You get chosen. You don't choose, you don't choose founders." So this guy got like really upset and like, this is totally not what he was talking about. Like, "I will take you." He was just saying like, "I would..."

• 6:43Sam Parr?

  He's just poop tweeting.

• 6:45Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, exactly. Exactly. He was not thinking that he was about to get sideswiped by this guy. And then he had to like apologize because every VC has to like, you know, toe the line, it seems like with this type of stuff. So then the second thing was, there's this old Marc Andreessen article called "The Only Thing That Matters." And Marc Andreessen has this blog that's like offline, but there's a thing called the P. Marc Archive that still has his old blog posts. And the blog that says "The Only Thing That Matters" basically says, "Hey, there's this debate. What matters most? Team, product, or market?" He's like, "A lot of people, you know, think the best product wins, but, but once you get some experience, you realize that's not true." You know, you do need a good, good enough product, but that's not the, the most important thing. And a lot of people will say team because that sounds really great because you, you seem like somebody who's betting on people.

• 7:30Shaan Puri?

  It's a great way to get people to feel flattered and take your money, uh, as an investor. But, you know, there's that old Warren Buffett quote, "When a great entrepreneur walks into a crappy business, the crappy business keeps its reputation."

• 7:41Sam Parr?

  Yeah. And, and he says, he goes, "A great team is, it's a nice to have."

• 7:45Shaan Puri?

  Right. And he goes, "I will propose that a great market is the most important thing for any, any startup. I'll take a great market over a great team and a great product any day of the week." And he explains why. So anyways, a long way of saying, how much of, you know, like when you talk about Ford back then, uh, cars, like the whole automotive industry, I mean, what a hell of a market, right? That's still today, one of the largest markets that's out there. Being early to that market, like, I think you can perform miracles. You can start a business on a little, small amount of money, be returning capital within a couple of years and, you know, grow a brand that endured 100 plus years later because of how good that market was, how strong that market was.

• 8:26Sam Parr?

  I get that. Yeah, you're totally right. But even for, let's say like the Bitcoin guys, like that in 2000 and, uh, what, what did all that craziness go on? 14?

• 8:37Shaan Puri?

  It started like 2009, 2010, but then the hype happened 2012, 13, 14. Yeah.

• 8:43Sam Parr?

  So even if you started a, um, Bitcoin thing around the hype train, I mean, that's like... I mean, you're gonna take off, it doesn't matter how bad, if you have Bitcoin in it, you're taking off. But even then, like, a lot of these businesses had to raise a lot of money.

• 8:57Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 8:58Sam Parr?

  And I'm like, and this is my favorite era in history, about 1900 to about 1930. Carnegie did the same thing, where he built a bridge and was turning crazy amounts of dividends to investors in like one or two years. And dividends from startups isn't really something you hear about right now. It's more so, and so anyway, this is just like, I'm crazy fascinated on. So there is one major thing, which is income tax didn't happen until like the 1920s, I believe.

• 9:26Shaan Puri?

  So. And also, I don't study history like this at all, but my questions would be, I would love to just see the use of funds. So where does that $28,000 go into starting this? So, you know, what were the wages of people? Was there actually just a lot of debt that he was able to use? So he raised a little bit of money, and then mostly there was a huge amount of loan financing back then that he was using to build this company? I'm not sure, but that's what I would need to know to kind of judge how the hell you could pull something like this off.

• 9:54Sam Parr?

  It's just fascinating. I just love, what I love reading about, and this is the reason.

• 9:58Shaan Puri?

  Hey, how much money did you initially start the hustle with?

• 10:01Sam Parr?

  Nothing.

• 10:02Shaan Puri?

  Zero. And then you raised, what'd you raise, like a million bucks?

• 10:07Sam Parr?

  Yeah, and I didn't, I shouldn't have done that.

• 10:09Shaan Puri?

  You raised a million bucks and you never needed that money? You never used that capital, correct? You like, kind of always had a surplus, basically, of cash in the bank?

• 10:18Sam Parr?

  For sure, but I'm not building a frickin' car.

• 10:21Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, but like, you know, whatever, you're a modern day Henry Ford, that's what I'm trying to say.

• 10:26Sam Parr?

  No, noted. It's just fascinating. I think I love reading about these people who just do things differently. And I have no idea if they were different back then, but they're certainly, they're different to my perspective. And I think that that's exciting to see someone who's doing something different than what your expectations are. You want to talk about ideas?

• 10:47Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I got a bunch. Okay, where do you want to start? So let me start with, also with the company I saw that was kind of cool. Okay, so I saw this guy on Twitter.

• 10:56Sam Parr?

  And before you get into that, did you get a ton of tweets, thulily?

• 11:01Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, said it wrong.

• 11:03Sam Parr?

  Sorry, guys. I've been talking about Thule for two episodes now. Thule and it's Sweden and it's is it Thule? And it's not Switzerland. Oh, wait, it's Sweden, not Switzerland. Sorry. I'm reading. We're I'm reading while we're talking. So my apologies.

• 11:18Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, look, this podcast, the energy is great. The ideas are interesting and the facts may or may not be correct. Like, that's what you need to know coming in. That's the disclaimer. If we were if we were sitting here trying to do research on the pronunciation of these Swedish company names like, you know, then I wouldn't have time to do anything else. So.

• 11:34Sam Parr?

  And it's.

• 11:34Shaan Puri?

  Thank you for the corrections, though.

• 11:36Sam Parr?

  And it looks like it rhymes with mule. Thule. Give me a break. That's their fault. That's not my fault.

• 11:42Shaan Puri?

  Okay, so there's this guy, I'm gonna say his name wrong, too. Lloyd Armbrust. So I saw this guy's Twitter and first of all, Twitter is the most fucking amazing thing in the world. Like, Twitter today still is just so awesome and you don't have to know anybody, you don't have to be anybody, and you can just like get the best education, best network, you know, on Twitter. So anyways, I saw this guy and his his bio says tech founder, then there's the American flag, which I, you know, thought was great.

• 12:09Sam Parr?

  Where are you, Sean, on this?

• 12:10Shaan Puri?

  I'm on this guy's Twitter. His Twitter is L Armbrust, A R M B U S T.

• 12:17Sam Parr?

  I know Lloyd. I had dinner at his house.

• 12:19Shaan Puri?

  Okay, great. So you can tell me about this guy. So here's what I saw. So I saw Y Combinator 2010. I saw five acquisitions and then he says, parentheses, five kids, but five kids too, but unrelated. And I was like, okay, this guy's, you know, already caught my attention. This guy's a legit player. I don't know what these five exits were. You probably know better than I do.

• 12:36Sam Parr?

  I I my good friend Noah and Neville, we had a, what's the dinner on Friday night for Jewish folks?

• 12:43Shaan Puri?

  Shabbat?

• 12:44Sam Parr?

  We had a Shabbat at Lloyd's house and so I had an intimate dinner with him for three hours. That's how much I know him.

• 12:50Shaan Puri?

  Intimate. Excellent. Okay.

• 12:51Sam Parr?

  Well, you know, like a family, a family dinner.

• 12:54Shaan Puri?

  So what caught my eye was that he's working on something new. So if you go to Armbrust USA, um, he's doing US-made medical masks, which sounds like the most like simple, obvious idea right now with coronavirus. Uh, but when you go to the site, you can tell that this guy's like gone all in on American-made, you know, medical equipment, starting with N95 masks. And I was looking at his interviews, I was watching his videos, and I definitely think that the pendulum is swinging back this way, which is that. From a government level or a consumer level, I think made in America is finally gonna matter.

• 13:27Sam Parr?

  I've been talking about this for months.

• 13:29Shaan Puri?

  And yeah, and so I think, you know, he's trying to bring manufacturing back to America. I think the government is, has realized, holy shit, we had way too much dependence on China. China's an adversary as well. It's a friend of me, basically. And, um, you know, yes, things were cheaper there. Yes, we could outsource a lot of our labor there to, to, to markets with cheap labor. But man, that nurtured this like massive dependence. And yes, we lost jobs, but we also lost our, our freedom because we depend on China for medicine, for clothes, for toys, for, you know, for masks, for whatever, whatever the hell, you know, you can think of. It's manufactured outside of America for the most part. So I think this is, uh, the right idea at the right time is to become, if you're playing the long game, which it seems like this guy is, if you've got five acquisitions under his belt.

• 14:12Shaan Puri?

  I think if you're playing the long game, I love the idea of trying to build an American manufacturing company, starting with masks right now in Texas.

• 14:19Sam Parr?

  I completely agree. I've, uh, and I'm gonna send you, I'm sending you an email right now and we're gonna bring up this file. I have the financials from a mask business that we can kind of go over, but, um.

• 14:29Shaan Puri?

  That's cool.

• 14:30Sam Parr?

  So I've been buying Red Wing boots for a long time and I actually think that the little secret is, is that they're not made in America anymore. But they're like, their, their whole shtick was that they've been around since 1900, yada, yada, yada, and they're hardcore and American. I agree. I think that, I completely agree. And I actually surveyed my audience on Twitter and asked how many would, are gonna pay extra for items that are made in America. A significant amount said they would. I completely agree. I mean, when I see, when I see made in the USA, I, I buy it over other stuff. Now, there's definitely a threshold, but.

• 15:06Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, my brother-in-law was telling me the same thing. He's like, yeah, I buy these jeans. I buy this type of gi for my jiu-jitsu stuff. And I was like, whoa, you are actually paying the premium? Like, you know, these are not small premiums, like 50% more, 100% more in some cases. And he's like, yeah. And he's like, I don't know if it's the time. I don't know if he always did that. I don't think he always did that. I think the, the way the world is going, I think there's a strong nationalist, um, movement around these, these sorts of things.

• 15:34Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I've been about that since I was, um, you know, I grew up in Missouri with a lot of union guys and like, and the parking lots would always say, for American cars only. Which at this point, like, at this point, like Nissan's an American car, like, they make Nissan in Tennessee. You know what I mean? Like, what, what, who knows what, the definition of made in America is like, pretty skewed at this point. Uh, I just sent Sean the financials of a mask business. I'm not gonna say who it is or where I got it from, but it is the month of June, it's their financials. And what you can see, let's not say exactly what's going on, Sean, but let's just say that they're doing around

• 16:17Sam Parr?

  two thousand to five thousand orders a day, and they're making around thirty to, eh, thirty to ninety thousand dollars in net profit a day. And this company was launched in, I think, May.

• 16:33Shaan Puri?

  That's insane. And it also doesn't seem like this is big enterprise, like, it's not selling to hospitals, because the average order value is more like, you know, fifty bucks. It's not like it's, you know, fifty thousand dollar orders by, you know, small, sorry, like, a handful of large hospitals or companies.

• 16:51Sam Parr?

  Yeah. And so what, what Sean and I are looking at is, um, it says date, order number, units sold, shipping fees, average order value, cost of goods sold, gross margin, uh, returns, and Facebook spend. So they're spending a lot of money on Facebook.

• 17:09Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. But they're still profitable. Every single day is profitable in the, you know, tens of thousands of dollars. That's cool. Uh, this is awesome. Uh, thanks for sharing that. And, you know, if you're listening to this, don't run out and start a mask business unless you know what the hell you're doing. Because literally you're putting lives at risk if you're fucking up, or if you're like, you know, working with some random supplier who says it's N95, but it's not really N95, which is a big problem that's happening right now. Or you're like, the third middleman in a four-middleman chain. And, you know, you're just ending up marking up these things a lot. So, uh, but I think if somebody's going into this with some authenticity, which it seems like this guy's doing with his American manufacturing facility and his plant that you can see the videos of.

• 17:48Sam Parr?

  Lloyd's a hustler. I'll say that. Like, the, the small amount of time that I've hung out with him, great guy. Total, uh, like real sharp businessman.

• 17:58Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Cool. Anyways, I thought this was a good idea and I wanted to shout it out because I think it's a good thing. It's a good thing for a smart person to work on now.

• 18:07Sam Parr?

  So what I'm doing with the hustle lately is I've been emailing out surveys. So last week I asked how many people are going to move into the next six months and thirty-three percent of peoples told me they're moving and within six months and, and I think seven or eight thousand people answered the survey. This week, what I was going to ask was how many of you will be able to pay your mortgage or rent in the next two or three months? I'm curious, curious about that, but I could do made in America about what are you partial, partial towards made in America or made in your home country?

• 18:38Shaan Puri?

  Right. Or like, you know, in the last thirty days, have you, have you knowingly chosen American-made product and spent more on it? You know, like, do they actually put their money where their mouth is versus like, yeah, I, I would consider it. I think everybody's like, yeah, I, I would prefer an eco-friendly product. And then do they choose it or not? You know, it's a different question.

• 18:57Sam Parr?

  So well, I'll, let me see if I can ask something like that.

• 19:00Shaan Puri?

  Okay.

• 19:00Sam Parr?

  I said, the, the, the, those financials are freaking crazy that I sent you. I think that it's bullshit. I think that if, if you're going to start a mass company just for like the revenue that you're going to get out of it, I feel like you're going to get crushed. Or it's just not going to exist in like three months.

• 19:16Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. I would not do it as a, I would not be thinking of it as a durable business.

• 19:22Sam Parr?

  Yeah, and I would, I, I'm, I'm not a fan of it. Um, what, what's software publisher, Sean?

• 19:28Shaan Puri?

  Software publishers. Alright, so this guy brought this up, uh, again, stolen from Twitter because that's where I get most of my ideas. I forgot who it is. I wish I had wrote it down so I could give him credit, but somebody said, you know, in many other industries, right? Music industry, you have publishers, uh, you know, book writing industry, you have publishers where you have, you have a separation between the talent that creates the thing, the creative talent, and the, the body that's, that's meant to do the sort of distribution, sales, getting you into, getting you in front of customers. And so there are a whole bunch of industries where you have publishers, but weirdly in software, there's very few software publishers. Usually when you start a software company, you're going to be responsible for the idea, for the creation of it.

• 20:11Shaan Puri?

  For the iteration of it, for the distribution of it, for the sales and marketing of it. And I thought, you know, that's actually kind of interesting. I was curious why, why, why you think that might be the case that, you know, that's not the case with music. It's not the case with books. It's not the case with a whole bunch of other, you know, fields where you have publishers. Why don't we have software publishers where a random engineer can build an app, you know, pitch it to, or get picked up by a publisher who says, hey, this is a good utility. You know, you're great at programming, but I'm great at distribution and marketing. I'm going to take it from here.

• 20:40Sam Parr?

  Okay, this is a great one that I know a little bit about. So someone who's a little bit older than me might criticize me because I'm not getting it exactly right. But in the 1980s and 1990s, when I-

• 20:50Shaan Puri?

  This was the model.

• 20:50Sam Parr?

  This was a thing. And so it actually worked like SoftBank. I've mentioned SoftBank a lot. They had a magazine, a tech magazine. Well, they would also, like, there was many companies that existed that were basically like software stores. So you sign up and they tell you all the latest software and you go in, you buy it and they send you the CD, like Amazon for software.

• 21:11Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 21:11Sam Parr?

  And one was called, that's what SoftBank had. That's how they grew to be so big, so fast. The other one was started by one of my favorite guys ever. His name was Felix Dennis and he had Micro Warehouse. And it was a warehouse for software. And you could go and buy whatever you want. And they went from zero to publicly traded company in like four or five years, massive. And so I think that this, and there's many other examples that I could find like that.

• 21:35Shaan Puri?

  And we should also say, the gaming industry still works like this, where software for games, you know, whether it's a small, little, you know, boredom killer game where you play with your thumb or you're flicking noodles around a screen, you might get picked up by Catch App or by, you know, Lion Studios or whoever. And then also on a bigger level, great games can get bought by Riot or Blizzard Activision or whoever. And then, okay, cool, now it's under that umbrella. That's the publisher.

• 22:02Sam Parr?

  But games are kind of like their own thing a little bit, like- The games are weird. The games are their own beast. But like if you're talking about like software tools, which I think you are. I have also wondered that because I'm like this model did exist and it is weird how. Like when you picked Slack at your company, it was probably only because some other company used it or a friend used it.

• 22:25Shaan Puri?

  I I saw Mark Andreessen tweet out the growth curve of Slack and I was like huh, what the hell is that? And then I downloaded it, started using it.

• 22:33Sam Parr?

  Yeah, now some people like a small insider inside baseball community might discover stuff on Product Hunt. But that's only the latest and greatest in the trending.

• 22:43Shaan Puri?

  Or just the latest, really, not necessarily the greatest, yeah.

• 22:46Sam Parr?

  It's not the greatest, it's just the latest. It has always baffled me why there isn't a more central place to discover all types of stuff that exists. And like your Amazon, like people also bought XYZ.

• 22:59Shaan Puri?

  Right, or or put differently, maybe there's a there's room for a publisher that says, hey, there's a whole lot of apps out here for managing social media for companies, whether it's like a Hootsuite type of app. It's an app like Mention, it's, you know, some analytics thing, whatever. And I'm surprised that there's not a software publisher that takes either one area of the business like. Either one business model like SaaS or one area of the business like HR tech. And just says, okay, cool, we're going to be the best HR tech software publisher. Uh, we already have our one flagship thing that everybody uses. But then we're going to sort of become the publisher for these independent projects that we think we will find the best in class. You know, customer service chatbot and then that will get distributed under our umbrella.

• 23:44Shaan Puri?

  I I feel like somebody could, you know, an enterprising individual could try to bring software publisher. Model back and basically not be creating products, but just be curating products because there's so many products out there. So if you have the trust of the consumer and you have the relationship with the buyer, then. Being a great curator is way better than being just yet another creator in a sea of in a sea of creators. Who are all building, you know, these tools and just like, oh, which mail software should I use? There's fifty thousand. How do I how the hell do I know which one to use?

• 24:11Sam Parr?

  One of these companies is called G2 and they're just in the news today because they laid off a ton of people and raised a hundred million dollars. Even though they took five to ten million dollars from the PPP thing.

• 24:22Shaan Puri?

  Right. But they're not a publisher, right? There's a reviews platform, right?

• 24:26Sam Parr?

  Uh, there's a fine line. I think that you could argue that maybe they are, but correct. Yeah, they are not, not in the way you're describing. No, they are not, but they are a central location to discover new stuff.

• 24:38Shaan Puri?

  So the other, I, I'm not even convinced that this is a good idea. I just thought it was an interesting question. Why doesn't this exist here where it exists in all the other fields that are very similar? The other one of this that I've heard that's interesting is basically the Hollywood agent model for top programmers. So the same way that like athletes, musicians, actors have agents who do the negotiation for them, take them from project to project. Engineer, like top, top engineers are compensated in the millions of dollars at tech companies today. So why don't they have agents and why don't they have agents who negotiate on their behalf? Who move them from company to company and will, will take offers and solicit bids and say, look, I like, I think a good agent negotiate.

• 25:19Shaan Puri?

  I think anybody who negotiated for a good to great engineer could get them an extra 20% annually, just, just on better negotiation.

• 25:27Sam Parr?

  How many engineers at Twitch do you think make over seven figures a year annually?

• 25:34Sam Parr?

  Twitch has 3,000 employees, right?

• 25:36Shaan Puri?

  No, just under 2,000.

• 25:38Sam Parr?

  Okay.

• 25:39Shaan Puri?

  So the product and engineering would be like, I don't know, let's call it 700 folks. I give or take, I have no idea.

• 25:44Sam Parr?

  Well, of 2,000, of 2,000 employees at Twitch, how many think you think make over seven figures annually?

• 25:52Shaan Puri?

  10 to 10 to 15, something like that. That's what that'd be my guess. 10.

• 25:55Sam Parr?

  So that's 10 to 15. Are they all, are they all, um?

• 26:00Shaan Puri?

  Those are like senior execs or like probably super senior engineers. Now, the problem with, with that is that the stock price appreciated. So whatever their offer was, their offer might've been worth $400,000. But Amazon stock has gone up so much that that $400,000 offer is now worth 1.2 million because the stock price. Has you know, quadrupled in the last, you know, five years.

• 26:20Sam Parr?

  So 10 to 15, I mean, I think you want, you're kind of explaining why, why this doesn't exist.

• 26:25Shaan Puri?

  But that's, that's one company and that's a small company, you know, at Google, there are, there are individuals who, uh, at Google who are making $50 million a year.

• 26:34Sam Parr?

  No way. Who?

• 26:36Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, it's public. There's, there's guys you can look up. I forgot the guy's name, but there was a guy who either left Google to go to Facebook or whatever. And in that transition, um, they basically said what this guy was making every year at Google. And this guy was literally making $50 million, $50 million a year. Now he's a, you know, exception, not the rule. But I think that at Google, there are easily, easily 250 plus people who are making, uh, over a million dollars a year. Easily that could be, could be a thousand people.

• 27:04Sam Parr?

  Isn't that nuts? Isn't that nuts to create a widget that's so big that your, uh, non-owners are making 50 million or even a million a year? Like, I understand, I, I understand if a salesperson makes over a million dollars a year, that's easy. That's a no brainer. It just, you're just, you, you just get a percentage of what you make the company. So yeah, the upside's unlimited. But the fact that just like a salary or like normal-ish non-sales employee can make over seven figures is fucking mind-boggling to me.

• 27:35Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. So, so I think, you know, you don't have to have huge quantities in the same way that there's, I think, 350 or 450 total NBA players. Period. So I think in the same way, there are more people in the technology industry that earn a million dollars plus. Then there are NBA players who earn a million dollars plus. That'd be my guess. And so if NBA players can have, have, have agents. I, I, I'm curious why top talent in the tech industry also doesn't have agents that work on their behalf. Yeah. So look, I, so, so Aubrey just found the article. Google paid a total of 105 million to Andy Rubin and this guy Amit Singhall. That's the guy I was thinking about.

• 28:11Sam Parr?

  Well, Andy Rubin.

• 28:13Shaan Puri?

  He got acquired. That's different.

• 28:14Sam Parr?

  He built, he, yeah, they created Android, but yeah.

• 28:18Shaan Puri?

  This guy, Amit Singhall, they agreed to pay $45 million, but ended up paying just 15 million because he went to go to a competitor. Imagine getting guaranteed $45 million and then leaving to go to a competitor. That's amazing. Um.

• 28:32Sam Parr?

  That's what, uh,

• 28:33Shaan Puri?

  It's crazy.

• 28:33Sam Parr?

  Zappos guy did.

• 28:36Shaan Puri?

  Well, he walked away for the money. I'm saying, imagine what the other offer must have been that this guy switched teams.

• 28:41Sam Parr?

  It's crazy, man. It's crazy.

• 28:43Shaan Puri?

  Like the top AI people, the top machine learning people, the top self-driving cars people, these guys are making millions of dollars a year.

• 28:50Sam Parr?

  God bless America. Let's talk about the CB Insights. So I did a call last week with the founder of CB Insights. You know what that is?

• 28:58Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 28:59Sam Parr?

  Okay, so listeners, CB Insights, they're most famous because they have a newsletter like The Hustle, and the guy who owns the company or is CEO, like writes it, and he's kind of quirky and funny and irreverent. What they do is, so CB Insights dot com, the guy Sean, who is the CEO, he's like kind of, he's got a huge Twitter following because he's really funny. His Twitter handle says like, buy, buy a CB Insight subscription. I owe people money.

• 29:25Shaan Puri?

  Do you know who he is? What's his name?

• 29:27Sam Parr?

  It's Anol, A-N, I don't know how to pronounce it, A-N.

• 29:31Shaan Puri?

  Anad.

• 29:31Sam Parr?

  Anad, sorry, Anad. And so what CB Insights does is, if you go to their website, they say they like help you find which company to buy next. So you're thinking like PE companies subscribe to them. And I just did a call with him. They're huge, by the way, huge company. I'm not going to reveal anything else other than that, but they're big. And if you, and everything else I'm going to talk about is public. But if you go to their pricing, their top tier pricing is $250,000 a year. And I go, what is CB Insights? And he was like, basically, we are a cover your ass, cover your ass.

• 30:07Shaan Puri?

  CYA, yeah.

• 30:08Sam Parr?

  Have you ever, I never heard that term before, and apparently.

• 30:10Shaan Puri?

  Dude, go to a big company, you'll see CYA all over the place.

• 30:13Sam Parr?

  I've never heard of that. It's, it means basically like, if you're going to make a decision, you need to cover your ass. So you're not the one to blame if that decision is a bad decision. And so, an oversimplified example of this is, let's say you're a huge company with 5,000 employees, and you have to choose between this company and this company for, let's say, like your Salesforce thing, like you're, you're trying to figure out, do we use HubSpot, Salesforce, this or that or this? Now, that's a little, that's oversimplification. Usually it's for like smaller vendors, and you've got to do research on them to figure out like, are they going to go out of business in 10 years? Shit like that. And I have never heard that, I've never heard of someone needing to spend 50 to $100,000 a year to solve this problem. Have you?

• 30:57Shaan Puri?

  I didn't know how much we spend on it, on things like that, but I have seen, yeah, CYA type of business. I've always thought this, this is exactly what they are. I love that he just said it. Most people never say that that's what they are, but it's true. You know, when we have to write a report or, you know, say how big, hey, you know, I think we should go into Russia because Russia is a growing market. Well, nobody cares what Sean thinks about Russia. Nobody cares what Sean has heard about Russia or Sean's opinion of how big Russia is going to be. What Sean needs to do is go and get these great reports that are done by third-party consultancies or research firms, pay thousands of dollars for our annual subscription to those reports, and pull out a number that

• 31:37Shaan Puri?

  says Russia's mobile market is growing at 30% CAGR. Okay, great. That's the, that's the thing I need to justify the budget I'm asking for, to justify the headcount I'm asking for, to get the green light on my project. And that's just the way the world works. These are like, you know, insurance for schmucks, you know, on, I don't have to put my name on the line, I put their name on the line. And in order to put their name on the line, I just have to pay them a nice little fee every year.

• 32:04Sam Parr?

  It's just crazy that a business that can be worth maybe a billion dollars or billions of dollars, in the Gartner's case, exists on bullshit politics inside of a company.

• 32:17Shaan Puri?

  Well, okay, look, they do do good research, so that's cool. They are also often wrong because their forecasts are forecasts and people suck at forecasting things. And the things people want to know are usually the uncertain things, and you're going to be more wrong on those. So I'd say they do provide value. Like, it's not like you don't get anything from it, but you would never pay that amount for that, for that level of information. You pay that amount because it's a seal of approval. It's a, it's a source cited for your decision-making.

• 32:46Sam Parr?

  Well, I got curious about that. So I'll give you another example. Have I told you about WGSN?

• 32:52Shaan Puri?

  No.

• 32:53Sam Parr?

  Okay, so let me make sure I said it right. WGSN. Yeah, okay. It stands for, well, I don't know what it stands for actually. WGSN.com. It's owned by a public company in England, so you can go and learn all about it. What they do, and this is again an oversimplification, is they tell you which color is going to be popular in the next year. So if you're Starbucks, yeah, if you're Starbucks and you need to.

• 33:16Shaan Puri?

  That's all they do or no? That's just like one thing that they do?

• 33:19Sam Parr?

  They.

• 33:19Shaan Puri?

  That's what they're known for?

• 33:21Sam Parr?

  That's what they're known for, but they'll tell you like what type of outfit will be popular in a year. So if you're Starbucks and you have to buy, you know, a hundred thousand uniforms, you want to know which shade of pink is going to be cool. Or if you want to make like a new sleeve for your cup, you need to know which shade of red is like the thing. And so i- it's an oversimplification, but it's fashion forecast, particularly around colors, I believe. And this company makes around ninety million dollars a year recurring revenue just off this stuff.

• 33:54Shaan Puri?

  Amazing. Looks like they have like food and drink, beauty, fashion as their like kind of core things. Okay, this is incredible. I'm going to sign up for get a demo. I hate to get a demo, schedule a call. That works.

• 34:07Sam Parr?

  Is this not crazy fascinating? A Bray you just sent me one called scentair.com and they do the same thing, which they tell you which scents are going to be the most popular. Like not even like perfume, but like what what smell you want your cut, your restaurant to be or your casino or your office or your hotel. Uh, that's fucking crazy. And it it's just nuts. It's nuts. And I think it's awesome. And I actually understand this one, but.

• 34:34Shaan Puri?

  I I want to know how these guys get customers. So is it that they, that's more interesting to me, right? Because, okay, I can see how this would be useful.

• 34:41Sam Parr?

  You just get a sales team, bro, and you just, you got it. You, a lot of these.

• 34:44Shaan Puri?

  Is it outbound sales or is it putting out free reports, but then like kind of the full report? If you want the full report, you know, click this button, you know, is it content marketing or is it outbound sales or is it both?

• 34:55Sam Parr?

  Oh, it's it's both. It's both. Um, I mean, I have experience a little bit with these types of things. Yeah, it's both. I mean, the the fact is that a lot of people are afraid to it. I don't know if they're afraid to admit this, but they don't want to acknowledge it for some reason. But a sales team creates demand. So when I had the hustle, we were at. Me personally, I sold advertisements and I got us to thirty grand a month in revenue. Like right away, like it was like we got to like fifty thousand or hundred thousand subscribers. I go, all right, I'm gonna go do ad sales. I got us to thirty K a month. Then, like with the same amount of subscriber base, we went and hired two or three salesperson. And it got to like two hundred thousand, like immediately. And I was like, holy shit, that fucking worked.

• 35:35Sam Parr?

  And, and then I learned more about this and I learned that like I, I listened to an interview with the founder of maybe Squarespace. Or WordPress, who was like this like engineer, door type of guy, who typically hate sales and marketing. And they're like, yeah, sales and marketing just lit us on fire and we just exploded once we hired a sales team. And so the fact is, my point is, is like, if you have like a pretty good product, that solves a problem. If you hire a sales team, you explode.

• 36:00Shaan Puri?

  So how, how do you count the economics of a sales team? So you're like, how much does, does each salesperson need to make for you for that to be viable?

• 36:08Sam Parr?

  Yeah, so you traditionally give a relatively low base. So it could be fifty grand, it could be a hundred grand, it could be a hundred fifty grand. And then you say you get two percent to five percent usually of all the sales that you bring in. And so you're on target.

• 36:24Shaan Puri?

  How much do you think a salesperson needs to generate? And what does one individual salesperson need to generate for you? What's your target?

• 36:30Sam Parr?

  At least a million, but tip, tip, so in media sales, it's around one to three million. In software sales, it's probably around five hundred thousand to one point five million.

• 36:41Shaan Puri?

  So you need a, you need a salesperson to bring in a million dollars a year of revenue?

• 36:45Sam Parr?

  Yeah, um, and, and I'm, I'm doing some rounding here, but uh, yeah, that's.

• 36:50Shaan Puri?

  It's not a hundred thousand, it's more like a million is what you're saying.

• 36:54Sam Parr?

  Yeah, and that's very doable. Um, and a, a software company that has recurring revenue, you could get, i- if you had a salesperson that cost you a hundred fifty grand a year. And they are bringing in five hundred grand a year, that's pretty good because hopefully, a lot of those folks are gonna renew.

• 37:09Shaan Puri?

  TV is there, yeah. Okay, uh, yeah, I've never built sales teams. It's always something I've gladly not had to do.

• 37:17Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 37:17Shaan Puri?

  But in the right circumstance, it's obviously, it's great, you know, if that's the, if that's the model, if that's the growth engine, then you need to become a fucking master of building sales teams or hiring people who have built sales teams before.

• 37:28Sam Parr?

  But that's what, what you just said is how most of the smart nerds who build the great stuff think. They go, oh, I don't want a sales team. And I'm like, you do.

• 37:38Shaan Puri?

  No, it's the same thing as I don't want to learn taxes and, you know, how to optimize that. It's the same thing of like, oh God, I gotta incorporate and figure out if I should be a C corp or an LLC and I gotta set up my blah, blah, blah. It's like the perceived schlep of doing it, uh, makes me just not want to do it at all. It makes me want to be ignorant to it and makes me want to avoid it. Until I'm like, oh, the money is on the other side of that wall. Okay. Now I need to learn how to climb this wall. And then when I climb, I'm like, oh, that's not so bad. Actually, I kind of like that wall. That's, that's a pretty useful little thing to get over here and get this pile of money. And that's how I feel about taxes now. That's how I feel about, that's how you feel about sales teams.

• 38:15Sam Parr?

  Yeah, and I, I feel that way about taxes too. There's this company that I hung out with in Austin and I won't name their name, but they have software and they have like, it's a software company and they have like 200 employees and like 150 of them were salespeople. And they like grew it just like crazy. And I'm in my head, I'm like, as like someone who is a little bit more nerdy than I am salesy, I'm like, uh, that you are selling vaporware, but they got results.

• 38:40Shaan Puri?

  So let me, okay, I'm going to give you two ideas that could use salespeople and I want you to tell me what you think. All right. So I'm going to start with the one I'm more excited about. Maybe I won't even get to the second one. Let me, let me see if I can articulate why I'm excited about this. So.

• 38:53Shaan Puri?

  Okay. At the last two companies I've done, I created, so we use Slack as the primary way the community, the company communicates. And Slack's great. Slack did a great thing, which was it got us out of email and it got us out of direct messaging where I just like, oh, I'm going to bug Sam about this or create a giant group for like everybody who's working on the marketing campaign or whatever, right? And Slack created channels. Channels are sweet because it's like you make a channel for the marketing, for marketing, that's where I go talk about the marketing campaign. And whoever is interested, like a lot of people can see it, but nobody feels obligated to reply. So it's a really helpful way for information to spread inside a company. But what I found was that there was a whole bunch of things that I just wanted to share

• 39:36Shaan Puri?

  that like I didn't, didn't need to go into any specific channel. And it wasn't like, I wasn't trying to create work by sharing it. I just wanted to share a thought on my mind. So I created this Slack channel on my Slack called Sean's Inner Thoughts. And I branded it like that because I thought people would be curious what my inner thoughts are. And so I then a whole bunch of employees joined that channel. And really, all it was is just a place for me to dump random thoughts that I have about stuff, something I saw was cool, something I thought we were doing, something I'm noticing, blah, blah, blah. And, and that was always well received. And now, after we got acquired, my coworker Jason did that at Twitch. He created Jason's Inner Thoughts. And there's like 80 people subscribe to this thing. And it's kind of like, just like a private Twitter. He just posts random

• 40:19Shaan Puri?

  stuff. And sometimes people react to it, but nobody feels obligated to respond. And because that's like, that's the norm of that channel. And so I've been thinking about this, like, why isn't there a place to share stuff that is like, the stuff that didn't need to be shared necessarily, the non-essential communication of a company that, that does actually bring out interesting conversations, it helps people bond because they see what you're all about, what you're into. So the, the, the way I'll phrase this is Twitter for companies, which is not a new idea. So basically, this is what Yammer was, like, I don't know, when Yammer started, like a decade ago. So Yammer was started during, like, the social media hype phase. It was like, oh shit, we have social networks for

• 41:02Shaan Puri?

  our friends and our family. We need a social network for our company. And they basically just copied the UI of Twitter slash Facebook. And they were like, cool, it's Twitter slash Facebook, but the only people that will see this are all your coworkers. And so you, you know, you close a sales deal, you could post it there and a whole bunch of people could react to it or get excited about it. Um, or you could post a funny video from the, the, you know, the office kitchen and post it there and it'd be relevant to all those people in that group. So it's a kind of like the non-work chatter.

• 41:30Sam Parr?

  And they shut it down though, like it doesn't.

• 41:32Shaan Puri?

  So it got bought for a billion dollars by Microsoft.

• 41:34Sam Parr?

  Like three years after starting.

• 41:36Shaan Puri?

  Very quickly. Yeah. So it grew super fast, like ridiculously fast because it was a social network inside company. So it had this amazing network effect, amazing in, in company virality. And then it started making money because they would then, first they just got the company that like employees to start using it. And then they went and they sold the keys of the, the car to the, to the admins. And they said, hey, you know, all your employees are using this thing. Don't you want to have some oversight over this and be able to manage and monitor it a little bit? Um, well, here we have an admin tool that will, will charge you an arm and a leg for, because now your whole company is already addicted to this thing. So the get, it gets bought, kind of gets shut down, kind of gets lost like many acquisitions do. Yammer is not a thing anymore, blah, blah, blah.

• 42:16Shaan Puri?

  I think that there's still a big need for this. I would literally, if somebody, if there was a credible person out there that said, I'm going to restart Yammer. I would write them a $50,000 check tomorrow and I would say, great. I think there's a great need for this. I think you could do a better job of it today, um, than you could have done back then because the tools are much better. And I think there's a more need for this now that everybody's in the cloud because now there is no office chatter because you're not in an office. So let me, let me read this online.

• 42:40Sam Parr?

  Let me pitch this a little differently.

• 42:41Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, do it.

• 42:42Sam Parr?

  Have I told you about what Washington, Washington Post is toying with?

• 42:48Shaan Puri?

  You told me that they kind of have like a software arm where they're like making other tools.

• 42:52Sam Parr?

  Yeah. I don't know if it's gonna, yeah, I don't know if it's going to be any good, but they're piloting it and, uh, and it's what inspired me. What I would do is I would build a media company. It's almost like you have media companies, um, or media websites, but only for internal stuff. So you.

• 43:10Shaan Puri?

  We talked about like the high school newsletter or high school newspaper for a company. Yes.

• 43:14Sam Parr?

  Yeah. Like that's what I would do. It's like a weekly, like it's just a, it's like a. Here's what's going on in the company. Here's what people are thinking. Here's some ideas like I that's what I would build is I would build. And I I think at Airbnb, they built their own for this. At our company, I tried building our own and it was just Google, like a Google website. What their things call. But it's a solving a similar problem as to what you're describing, which is.

• 43:39Shaan Puri?

  I love this idea. I love that. I love your idea, actually even maybe more than my idea.

• 43:45Sam Parr?

  Like you could have podcasts, you could just like a you just have like Airbnb internal.com and you just you either you have your login and it's just a. Like we've aggregated all the happenings of the of the business going on and you can.

• 44:00Shaan Puri?

  So what's what's interesting here? Is it what's happening as in like kind of company announcements, news, the metrics? That's maybe a part of it.

• 44:08Sam Parr?

  That's a part of it.

• 44:09Shaan Puri?

  Is it like a high school newspaper where somebody could just write an op ed? You can just write an article if you're interested and like you basically contributed a column basically for the day?

• 44:19Sam Parr?

  I think I think I think that is yes. And but I would make it so where the thing about you said like a private Twitter is that like some of these like. When people think of like media or an article, they're like, oh, that's a lot of work. Then when I think of Twitter, they're like, oh, I'm just gonna do this in five minutes. But the thing is, is that often those old five minute tweets add as much value or more than a long article.

• 44:42Shaan Puri?

  Absolutely.

• 44:42Sam Parr?

  So you have to build it in such a way that like you can solicit this information from your employees and in a low pressure way. Because someone like I have this woman, Becca, who runs our email business. I'm like, you don't write this report. Just is this a good idea or not? Yes or no? Why? Just like riff, like you already I already know you know off the top of your head, right? Because you're in the thick of it. Something like that, but where you have to make it like a little bit more knee jerk reaction.

• 45:09Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, you like the lightweight, low pressure Twitter not or not blogs, basically.

• 45:15Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I mean, there's a both are important, but a lot of people undervalue those little just like gut instinct things like you've described, like they're just like. But anyway, I agree with you. I do think that there's room for there's room for that.

• 45:30Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I like this a lot. I'm excited about it. Maybe I'll do this.

• 45:33Sam Parr?

  We've talked about this with, uh, there, there's a bunch of, there's a bunch of movement going around. I, um, I Axios, the media company Axios, I actually somehow got my hands on a demo. They're launching a product where they're doing internal newsletters.

• 45:54Shaan Puri?

  Right. Oh, yeah, yeah. In the, in the concise format that they use for their company, right?

• 46:00Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it's not there yet. Like it's because it, it, right now, the way that it's built out is it's like mail. I'm like, I could just use Mailchimp, but you're just allowing me to send emails to an internal email list. Um, so they have to add more stuff to make it interesting. But I understand the problem you're trying to solve for, and I agree with you. I think it's quite interesting.

• 46:21Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I, I actually like the Axios thing, even if it is just a mail list, because people today just use Google lists. And Google lists are fucking awful. They're awful to find. Google Groups is like miserable. That whole process, the whole listserv is, is awful. Then people reply, oh, and it's miserable. It is, that whole thing is terrible. Somebody just said, I'm going to make Google lists and listservs for companies less shit. I'd be like, oh, wait, that's, that's so smart. Uh, why are you so smart? Is what I would say to them.

• 46:49Sam Parr?

  I, and there's two interesting things about this. If you get it done well, you can charge a lot of money, but the switching costs, once you start, seem to be quite high. And so you'd probably have a pretty good, like a low churn number and a high net retention rate for revenue. Like you could probably add a lot more people. The more people your company hires, the more people who need access to it.

• 47:12Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, this thing can make money. And, um, okay, I like that a lot. All right. So two other quick ones. So, um, so one thing I saw that was pretty clever, um, that I think is a great example of a niche product that somebody's doing to build like a lifestyle business. I was on Reddit and I saw an ad that said, get notified when your company is mentioned on Reddit. Have you seen this?

• 47:34Sam Parr?

  I've seen things like it, but not that.

• 47:37Shaan Puri?

  I'm like, so there's products like this that are out there like monitor Twitter, monitor, you know, newspapers, media, Forbes and shit to see when your company gets mentioned. But this is a bigger, this is a bigger, is a more niche version of that, which is Reddit. Reddit's its own little beast. You kind of have to scrape it in its own way to be able to track things properly.

• 47:56Sam Parr?

  What's it called?

• 47:57Shaan Puri?

  I don't even remember. I saw an ad for it. I was like, this is smart. And I moved on like, because I don't need that right now. But I was like, if, you know, for most companies, I'd like for you guys, I bet, I bet the hustle would want to know every time you get linked to or referenced.

• 48:08Sam Parr?

  Yeah, or on, or on dig or anything like that.

• 48:11Shaan Puri?

  And so, so yeah, so I think that that's a really smart, simple idea that somebody could do. They're using Reddit ads to distribute it. They, all they had to do was really like focus on being able to track keywords on Reddit. And then, you know, market to a bunch of companies who are like, yeah, actually, I do want to know when there's a conversation about my brand going on on Reddit. I do want to use the interface.

• 48:33Sam Parr?

  I think, I think a browser just find, is it track reddit.com?

• 48:35Shaan Puri?

  If this wasn't it, this is just like it. And Reddit is so huge now that you kind, but it's still underestimated. It's not as mainstream. So the, the traditional tools don't typically take in Reddit. But Reddit is more influential than, you know, any, you know, article actually is, like, you know, some general publication. And so, anyways, I thought it was a very simple, smart idea. And I think if you're looking for like, how do I come up with an idea that I could build in two weeks that I think could make me 250 grand a year or more, this would be a great example of a simple app that I'm sure does that.

• 49:09Sam Parr?

  I just use like a no code version of building software, like a platform. What's it called?

• 49:18Shaan Puri?

  Bubble.

• 49:18Sam Parr?

  Bubble. Oh, my gosh. Have you seen Bubble?

• 49:21Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 49:22Sam Parr?

  Is that, okay, so can you give listeners background here?

• 49:26Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, so Bubble is one of the no-code platforms that's pretty popular. And I think bubble.io is the handle for it.

• 49:35Sam Parr?

  I found it Friday and I was like, this is.

• 49:36Shaan Puri?

  And it's one of those, so when we say no-code, no-code can mean a lot of things. But Bubble is, is one of those, it lets you build apps, not just websites. So there's a lot of website builders, Squarespace, Wix, whatever. What Bubble does is it lets you actually have a backend. So like, for example, this weekend, I built myself an app in no-code in one hour as a challenge to myself. I wanted to have a meal tracking app, like a food journal. And so I was like, oh, I want an app that just, I take a photo of what I eat and it shows it on a grid. At the end of the day, I can see everything that I've eaten for the day. And so I built myself a little thing. I was gonna use Bubble. I ended up using this other thing called Adalo. And I actually built it, like, you can have it. If you download this app, you can see what I eat every day. But I was like, this is amazing that I was able to do this thing where I'm like, I have a UI.

• 50:19Shaan Puri?

  It takes, you can use the phone camera, it saves it in a database. I don't know what the hell a database even is, but okay, you know, it's saved somewhere. And I can display it in an Instagram-like feed. And I was able to build that in an hour and I'm below average intelligence. So I'm like, this is amazing shit now.

• 50:33Sam Parr?

  So, and you did that on that, that site?

• 50:36Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I did it on something called Adalo because they let you actually make a mobile app. So like, I have an actual app now. So you can see, this is my food grid.

• 50:45Sam Parr?

  Wow.

• 50:46Shaan Puri?

  And if I wanted to add something, I could just add like another one.

• 50:50Sam Parr?

  So what's this, what's the thing called that I mentioned?

• 50:53Shaan Puri?

  Bubble.

• 50:53Sam Parr?

  Man, I went to it, it was so cool. I'm like, I don't know if they're promising too much and they can't deliver on it, but it's still complicated, but it was.

• 51:01Shaan Puri?

  It's definitely complicated. I used the other one because I thought it was simpler, but I think Bubble can do way more. So like, there's people who are just gonna specialize in Bubble. They're called no-coders and they just learn these no-code tools. And they overcome the learning curve on these things. And they're not really traditional programmers, but they know how to use Bubble and all these other little random no-code tools really well.

• 51:21Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I thought it was awesome. That thing, that was really cool to me. What else you got?

• 51:27Shaan Puri?

  Did I talk about this kids Etsy thing before?

• 51:30Sam Parr?

  No.

• 51:31Shaan Puri?

  Okay, so kids Etsy, what the fuck's kids Etsy? So this is a half baked idea.

• 51:36Shaan Puri?

  So I have a niece who's six or seven years old. She's like, she wakes up and she just starts making shit all day. She's just like, okay, start doing art, then gets bored of art and decides I'm gonna make Legos and something gets bored of Legos and just takes a bunch of paper and will make like a paper fort. And then we'll do this like imaginary restaurant and like her whole day from like the moment she wakes up to the moment she sleeps, she is just imagining, creating and just like building random stuff. And obviously it's mostly crap, like she'll do a drawing or she'll make a book. She'll literally draw like 10 pages, you know, 10, 10 different pieces of paper, staple them together, bind it. And it's like, here's a book for you, Uncle Sean. And I'm like, wow, this is amazing. But of course it's not actually amazing, right? Cause she's six and it's like kinda crappy.

• 52:21Shaan Puri?

  But I was like, you know, kids love making stuff. They love arts and crafts. It is one of the core things they do, but there's kind of this like, there's only so much stuff you can put on the fridge. And so I was like, wouldn't it be cool if you could also teach your kid like, kind of like a mini lemonade stand? So what if you had kids Etsy where they just push a button and they set up their store? And it's just a camera and they take a picture of the thing that they made and that becomes a listing. And then they can browse any pictures that other kids made and they can just click like buy it. You just create this little economy. So every parent pays like 15 bucks a month. That gives you like five tokens. And then you use a token to buy something that somebody else made. And then that kid gets excited, it's like, whoa, you get a notification, it's like, whoa, you know, Zoe in California just bought that little stupid book you made or that little like book

• 53:06Shaan Puri?

  you, you made out of paper mache or whatever. And then you're like, you have customers. And so it's like this mini fake Etsy for kids that I think kids, I would think it'd be really cool to teach kids kinda like both arts and crafts and entrepreneurship to like own a little store online. And it's kids buying from kids. What do you think of this idea?

• 53:23Sam Parr?

  I am so wonderful. I'm so not in the know of this market. Like someone told me about kids Uber, like when it launched, I was like, that's

• 53:33Shaan Puri?

  For like carpooling, like to school, you mean?

• 53:37Sam Parr?

  Yeah, or like an Uber driver that you can put your children in.

• 53:41Shaan Puri?

  Trust with your kid, yeah.

• 53:42Sam Parr?

  Yeah, and I was like, that's the stupidest shit ever. It's, that's a big thing now.

• 53:47Sam Parr?

  So is it, would people love that? I don't know. That's wild to me. I'm the kids market is just so foreign. It'd be like launching a company in China. Like, I just don't know anything about it. I like, because I see these like toy review sites and they just crush.

• 54:05Shaan Puri?

  I see. This is how I feel when you tell me about like Henry Ford in nineteen oh three. I'm like, dude, I don't know, man. I have no, I just don't have the, I don't have the insights on this. Like, I just don't know. And it sounds like you're not around kids a whole lot.

• 54:17Sam Parr?

  Not at all. And I don't understand, like, I, I understand, I understand the idea of like, you'll do anything for your children. Okay, get it. That's the only thing that matters. I, I feel a little bit of that with my, some of my nephews and it's like, okay, I'll give them anything to make them happy.

• 54:33Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 54:33Sam Parr?

  I get it. Love that perspective. Um, but like, it's like, do kids want to buy other children's books?

• 54:41Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I don't know if they, that's the part I don't know. Like, do, do, do they actually want like other kids junk? Are they only like their own junk? Because it's all junk. But, um, the reason I thought this might be interesting is because they do this at school. So like, you've, you remember like science fair where it's like, everybody makes kind of a crappy thing. And then you get to stand by your little volcano and everyone walks by and you get this good feedback of like, oh, cool, you know, whatever. And somebody wins a prize. So my, my niece's school did like an in-person version of this where people would make stuff and then they could, they, it was like a school fair and all the vendors were just other kids. So you brought all the stuff you made and you're at the kids fair and then you could go walk around and see what the other kids made. And some people are actually pretty good at it and some people are really bad at it.

• 55:23Shaan Puri?

  And you could kind of barter or exchange or like buy, you know, each other's stuff. And the parents are happy to pay a little bit just to give each other the good feeling. It's like Burning Man. It's like, I'll bring a little bit of money and then like, we'll all have the good, you, every kid gets the good feeling of getting to buy and sell an item. And so I was like, oh, that'd be cool to just do online at scale, basically. And I bet some kids are actually amazing at building stuff. And they would be kind of the star Etsy shops that would like actually be making cool bracelets and stuff that other kids want. But I think for the most part, it's about the good feeling of having your kid make something, post it, get good feedback from other people where they want your thing or they buy your thing. And having that feedback loop. And I think parents would just pay a subscription.

• 56:02Shaan Puri?

  And then the actual buying and selling is all funny money. That's just Chuck E. Cheese tokens. Uh, but I think you could get, you know, thousands of parents to pay fifteen bucks a month to have their kid be on this platform.

• 56:12Sam Parr?

  That's, that's wild. I, uh, let's get someone to make it.

• 56:16Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, it's cool.

• 56:17Sam Parr?

  Let me bring up one more thing.

• 56:19Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 56:20Sam Parr?

  I heard about this. This is all rumors, but I did some digging. I can't find any verification. There's this guy I'm friends with on Facebook. He owns this company called Golden Hippo. Have you heard of Golden Hippo?

• 56:32Shaan Puri?

  Um, no.

• 56:34Sam Parr?

  Okay.

• 56:34Shaan Puri?

  Not Golden Hippo.

• 56:35Sam Parr?

  Probably have never heard of Golden Hippo. If you go to Golden Hippo, all it says is, "We build brands that make the world a better place."

• 56:41Shaan Puri?

  Okay.

• 56:42Sam Parr?

  And I'm like, that, that means that that could be anything. And so what they do is they partner with like, for example, they have this one doctor called Dr. Marty, and I don't know if this is scammy or not, but Dr. Marty sell is a line of pet food. They also have this other doctor that sells like something for your gut. So like potentially scammy stuff, but all those ads that you see at the bottom of Breitbart or Fox or CNN.

• 57:10Shaan Puri?

  Outbrain.

• 57:11Sam Parr?

  Yeah, they buy all these Outbrains ads and they use long form copywriting to get people to buy pet food and things like that. And they do about a billion dollars a year in sales.

• 57:23Shaan Puri?

  The companies that Golden Hippo supports?

• 57:25Sam Parr?

  They own those companies. They own, I believe.

• 57:27Shaan Puri?

  These are their companies?

• 57:29Sam Parr?

  I, I believe they own about 12 of them.

• 57:31Shaan Puri?

  Did you say a billion dollars a year in sales?

• 57:34Sam Parr?

  I did.

• 57:36Shaan Puri?

  And your friend owns this thing?

• 57:38Sam Parr?

  Um, he's, I'm Facebook friends with them. I don't chat with them on a regular basis, but, and then I did.

• 57:43Shaan Puri?

  What's an example? I want to see one of their brands. They like, don't list their brands on their website. What's a brand?

• 57:47Sam Parr?

  Yeah, and when I heard, when I, it said they have 800 employees and they don't list their brands on their website. I was like, oh, this is awesome.

• 57:54Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 57:54Sam Parr?

  So Google Dr. Marty. That is one of them.

• 57:58Shaan Puri?

  Dr. Marty.

• 57:59Sam Parr?

  And I think they're, I don't mean to like disparage them. I think they are legit, a legit company. Um, or they are, they are a legit company. I, I just don't know any of their brands.

• 58:10Shaan Puri?

  Interesting.

• 58:11Sam Parr?

  I have another one called, uh, there's this one doctor, he's like a white guy doctor with, uh, fuck him. I'll look him up.

• 58:20Shaan Puri?

  Dr. Seuss, I don't know who this guy.

• 58:21Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 58:24Sam Parr?

  Uh, Steve Gundry, G U N D R Y. So Google Steven Gundry.

• 58:32Sam Parr?

  Doctor Steve, Doctor Gundry's Books and Podcasts, and he sells books on a family cookbook book for a crock pot. He sells, it's just all types of crap. It's just freaking crazy. These guys like, it's just so funny to hear about these people that aren't in the mainstream are kind of behind.

• 58:53Shaan Puri?

  So here's, here's what's interesting. All right. So I go to Dr. Marty, right? He's got an ad, he's running an ad around this article that's called Three Dog Behaviors Caused by a Poor Diet. Now, the ad is actually going to a different website called CanineCodes.com, not his sales website. So Dr. Marty writes this article, Marty Goldstein, DMV, I don't know, the DVM, I don't know what that means, doctor, veterinary medicine, maybe. What does your dog's behavior actually mean? And he's talking about this stuff and then,

• 59:25Shaan Puri?

  how does this link to their dog food? I'm sure it's somewhere here.

• 59:29Sam Parr?

  You probably give them your email, but like, all right, if you go to GundryMD.com, you'll see his website and he sells something called Vital Reds, which is concentrated polyphenol blend. I have no idea what that is. I'm looking at their website and it's $70 for one jar. I'm looking at their website. According to a similar web, they get north of 2 million visitors a month. If you get north of 2 million visitors a month to a store that sells a $60 product, you're, you're probably most likely crushing it.

• 59:59Shaan Puri?

  Right. So this guy seems legit. So Dr. Steven Gundry is a renowned heart surgeon and a New York Times bestselling author of The Plant Paradox and The Plant Paradox Cookbook. Okay. So he's not like, I thought for a second, they're just making up fictional like Aunt Jemima or like, you know, Colonel Sanders. I didn't, I didn't know if they were like trying to create like characters or if these are actual like, actual doctors.

• 1:00:21Sam Parr?

  No, I think they're like Dr. Oz types, but I don't know for, but this guy, GundryMD, he sells supplement, skin and hair care, food, dog food, books and magazines.

• 1:00:33Sam Parr?

  And they're not, the websites aren't slick.

• 1:00:37Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, not at all.

• 1:00:38Sam Parr?

  And Tony Robbins is an endorser, he endorses them. It's just crazy. Like I said with Henry Ford, I love seeing things that break my frame.

• 1:00:50Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, that's a great way of putting it. It's like, my brain is like, I'm struggling to even talk because I'm just like, my brain's like breaking and trying to re-figure out, okay, what is this new, new, new information that I need to process and figure out what the hell this is for and, you know, why am I not doing this?

• 1:01:09Sam Parr?

  But I can tell you, like, people have emailed me and I, I'm almost 100% positive they're pushing a billion dollars a year in sales. They have 800 employees. This is all on Glassdoor. And I looked them up on Reddit and it says, Golden Hippo Media is constantly hiring copywriters and constantly hiring media buyers. And I've seen this Dr. Guntry all over the place on these Outbrain, so I know what they do.

• 1:01:35Shaan Puri?

  It would be interesting, we should like, find out who are the top advertisers on Outbrain? Because I think Outbrain is something, if you don't know about it, you're like, what the fuck's Outbrain? If you know about it, you're like, oh, fucking Outbrain. And you just like disregard it, but like, look, there's a reason Taboola and Outbrain, like, there's a reason they make all this money. There's a reason people are spending money on these ads because they're working. So who are these advertisers? Who are their top 10 advertisers? What I would want to know. And, you know, I bet I would have my brain broken five more times in that list.

• 1:02:07Sam Parr?

  So I just did a quick Google, editorschoice.com is the largest advertiser on Outbrain, followed by admins.com, which is cars.

• 1:02:15Shaan Puri?

  Cars, yeah.

• 1:02:16Sam Parr?

  Followed by healthgrades.com.

• 1:02:21Shaan Puri?

  Have you been to editorschoice.com? What is this?

• 1:02:24Sam Parr?

  I have no idea.

• 1:02:26Shaan Puri?

  It's like bootleg WordPress site with like random articles.

• 1:02:31Sam Parr?

  It gets 10 million unique visitors a month.

• 1:02:33Shaan Puri?

  I must have typed something wrong.

• 1:02:35Sam Parr?

  No, no, you're right. I went there too.

• 1:02:40Sam Parr?

  It's crazy, man. It's crazy.

• 1:02:44Shaan Puri?

  Okay, no, no, now I went to the right side. I don't know where I was before. I was on.

• 1:02:48Sam Parr?

  HealthierPatriot.com buys 1% of Outbrain ads. Dude, I'm telling you, there's a lot going on in the world that like we just don't even think about.

• 1:02:59Shaan Puri?

  I can't even, I can't even get to the website of Healthier Patriot. I don't know what.

• 1:03:02Sam Parr?

  If you, if you Google it, the first thing that comes up with, this is a scam.

• 1:03:06Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. I can't find the actual website. Oh, I saw it was a scam alert. Okay, weird.

• 1:03:12Sam Parr?

  We'll.

• 1:03:12Shaan Puri?

  I need to, I need to spend more time on this.

• 1:03:14Sam Parr?

  It's crazy. Like, there's a lot of stuff going on.

• 1:03:19Shaan Puri?

  Dude, this is turning into a true crime serial type of podcast where we get to the bottom of these businesses.

• 1:03:25Sam Parr?

  Maggie Q. Have you heard of Maggie Q?

• 1:03:28Shaan Puri?

  No.

• 1:03:29Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I think that's another one they have. So Maggie.

• 1:03:32Shaan Puri?

  That's an actress?

• 1:03:33Sam Parr?

  ActivatedU.com.

• 1:03:37Sam Parr?

  And like the personality type is this woman named Maggie Q. And they sell probiotics. And this website is one, I think, Golden Hippo's website. So much so that when, they sell so much stuff that I Googled them. They opened up a massive, I think, 20 or 30,000 or 40,000, something huge, square foot warehouse in Memphis.

• 1:03:56Shaan Puri?

  But where are you seeing, okay, so they're hiring a bunch of copywriters. What are you seeing that they need all these copywriters? Well, so I see some blog posts, sure.

• 1:04:03Sam Parr?

  Because.

• 1:04:03Shaan Puri?

  But they're not like doing sales pages, like.

• 1:04:06Sam Parr?

  You just don't, it's always, you always, you always go to the side door. The sales pages are for where you send, you send paid media to the side doors. And those side doors that work best are long form copywriting. So if you go to Outbrain, but go to Breitbart.com with your ad blocker off and scroll to the bottom. And you will 100% see an ad bought by Agora, which does long form sales pages to get you to buy a $5 book or give you their email.

• 1:04:35Shaan Puri?

  Oh, my God, Sam. Now I got a whole bunch of stuff I gotta do today just to, just to get my head around this. Okay. So we, you've given me my homework.

• 1:04:44Sam Parr?

  Crazy, right? It's freaking crazy. We'll come back to it on, well, we have Andrew Wilkinson coming on Thursday. So maybe, maybe we can bring this up to him and get his opinion. I, it's weird, man. It's weird. I just love having my frame broken and this will break anyone's, most anyone's frame.

• 1:05:03Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, for sure. Okay, cool. I'm excited for the rest of the week. Andrew Wilkens, we also have the CEO of Barstool coming on, so that's gonna be exciting.

• 1:05:11Sam Parr?

  Yeah, we're recording that on Wednesday, right?

• 1:05:14Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, that'll come out, I think, next week.

• 1:05:17Sam Parr?

  All right, well, uh, we good?

• 1:05:19Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, we're good. Let's go. Oh, hold on, hold on, hold on. So Bray just linked this tweet thread that we gotta read. So 10 things we've learned at Golden Hippo after spending over $1 billion, parentheses, of our own money on online media.

• 1:05:34Sam Parr?

  That's Craig. I've talked to Craig. Yeah, he seems like a nice guy. I've hung out with him at a conference. He's, he, I don't know if he still owns it, but he owned it.

• 1:05:43Shaan Puri?

  Okay, so this is interesting.

• 1:05:46Shaan Puri?

  He says, "The, the, the idea that you, they must see your ads seven times before they buy is the biggest line of BS in advertising history. No matter how long you've been doing this, what you think will work is often wrong. Great, great ad ideas come from anyone. Influencer marketing is for companies that like burning money. Your customer cares literally zero about your company, your story, your brand, or even your product. What they do care is what it can do for them. Don't fight this, embrace this." Okay, so this guy Craig, is he a cool guy or what? Let's have him on.

• 1:06:14Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I'll message him right now. I'm texting him right now. All right, so on the podcast, we've talked about this million dollar idea thing. What did we say, Sean?

• 1:06:27Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, thought exercise. Something you could build in two weeks that can drive over $3 million of revenue within, I don't know, three months, let's call it, and you can't spend like $3 million to get it, right? So you can't like spend on ads like that much. So the budget restraint was, so it's two weeks to build, $3 million is your goal within three months, let's say, and $10,000 initial investment. That was the, that was the thought exercise. And we are gonna bring our ideas to the table for that. I have a couple of thoughts on this, but I want to hear what you think, what you've been thinking for, not, not ideas yet, but just about this thought experiment.

• 1:07:00Sam Parr?

  Sounds like a ton of work. I'll do it for fun. So maybe in the next couple of weeks, we'll actually address this and do this. If you want to participate in this, tweet at Sean or I and let us know. If this gets like a ton of interest, we'll actually follow through with this.

• 1:07:14Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, it turned out to be harder than I thought to think about this stuff, and I'm a professional thinker about stuff for, for, for a living. So I was like, okay, I actually need to sit down and do this. I can't do it off the top of my head. And I wanted to come to the table with something interesting that's actually relevant and not like, you know, a total knee jerk, half baked answer, but. I'm actually going to break it down into three groups. The first one is the exact thing that we just said. Two weeks to build $3 million in three months of revenue and $10,000 initial investment. The other part of that first one is you can't use your personal assets. So I can't say like, oh, I just invest in this company or I would. You can't use the hustle to like, you know, do some crazy shit. It's like just you as an individual person without using your other resources.

• 1:07:57Shaan Puri?

  So the second thought experiment is if I had to make a million dollars in the next two months using my existing resources, how would I do it? Which is less relatable to a listener, but more related, more relevant to us. Cause we like, why would we take the hard path? We would actually take the easier path, which would be to use our, our actual assets. So that would be the next thing. That, that's the second thought experiment. And then the third one that I'm thinking about is the same, like sort of overall criteria, but with a larger budget for the initial spend. So if I knew I was going to make $3 million, you know, I would actually be willing to put up up to, you know, let's say half a million or a million dollars as my marketing budget behind something. And so that's the, that's the third one.

• 1:08:40Shaan Puri?

  Now I'm going to come to the table with answers for all three of those buckets, but I need time to think about it.

• 1:08:45Sam Parr?

  Same in all categories. And if you guys are like truly into this, we, we're, me and Sean are men of the people. So if, we got to see what your, your response is.

• 1:08:56Shaan Puri?

  Right, right on. Okay, cool. We've addressed the elephant in the room. Awesome. Okay, cool. I'm going to go swim, but this is fun.

• 1:09:05Sam Parr?

  All right. Tough life. Bye bye.