Pod Insights My First Million #17 - Keto Ceral, Specialized Job Boards, Digital AA Meetings About this episode The Hustle's My First Million presents: Million Dollar Brainstorm. Host Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) and The Hustle CEO Sam Parr (@theSamParr) sit down and discuss what side hustles, trends and big business ideas that's keeping them up at night. This week they shoot the sh*t about hyper-focused job boards, digital AA meetings, D2C hunting & fishing brands, GaaS (Ghostbusters-as-a-Service), keto ceral, miniature cooking sets, payroll software and a live unboxing of Sam's sperm... If you enjoy this and would like a weekly briefing on super in-depth research in these trends, Sam has offered a discount on The Hustle's Trends newsletter, go to https://trends.co/million.
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Transcript Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Shaan Puri? Oh, really?
0:00 Sam Parr? Yeah.
0:04 Shaan Puri? Uh, we are here. It is, I don't know what the name we're gonna choose for this, but right now it's called Million Dollar Brainstorm.
0:11 Sam Parr? Uh, I had people tweet at me.
0:13 Shaan Puri? Yeah, what'd you get?
0:13 Sam Parr? Using that name.
0:14 Shaan Puri? That name, okay, good. I think the expectations are a little high. I want these to be ideas that may or may not be million dollar ideas, but we're back. We got good feedback last week, so we said, let's do it again. The idea with this is every Friday morning, me and Sam get together, and instead of getting breakfast, we sort of shoot the shit on different ideas, different trends, different businesses that are cooking in your brain.
0:35 Sam Parr? And so you and I have access to a lot of people that quote "normal" people don't have access to, just because we, and so, let's just use the stories that we're hearing, and we can kind of put two and two together and tell everyone else who doesn't have the same access.
0:48 Shaan Puri? Yeah, before this one, I was like asking for permission from a bunch of people. I was like, hey, can I talk about that idea you said? Or this week, I'm not gonna do those, but by next week, hopefully I have.
0:55 Sam Parr? But we have friends who run or own multi-billion dollar companies, or companies that have sold for...
1:01 Shaan Puri? No big deal.
1:02 Sam Parr? Yeah, like these like huge, they're either friends or acquaintances, enough that we like, are really like, oh, I heard this guy is trying this thing.
1:08 Shaan Puri? Those guys that I call friends and they like half-remember my name?
1:11 Sam Parr? Yeah, well, but we definitely have insider information that we can kind of, uh...
1:15 Shaan Puri? Okay, so what is this box you just put on the desk?
1:18 Sam Parr? Yeah, I just put a box on Sean's desk. It's my sperm. Uh, so last week, last week, we talked about sperm banks. It's all clean.
1:24 Shaan Puri? Okay, so...
1:25 Sam Parr? You can open that box up. It's clean. Everything's, everything's good. It's called Daddy.
1:29 Shaan Puri? Is this real?
1:30 Sam Parr? Yeah, so take that white bit off.
1:32 Shaan Puri? Okay.
1:33 Sam Parr? And then you can open the box.
1:34 Shaan Puri? Oh, man, this is a total unboxing. This is great. Okay.
1:37 Sam Parr? Open the box. Okay, now don't touch that thing.
1:41 Shaan Puri? Okay, I reached the final boss.
1:43 Sam Parr? Yeah, so I went and tried it. It's gonna be a hundred dollars a year.
1:46 Shaan Puri? A hundred dollars a year. Called, this is a service called Daddy, D-A-D-I-S-E.
1:50 Sam Parr? Yeah.
1:50 Shaan Puri? And, uh, this looks good. This looks like an Apple product here. Looks like a pair of headphones or something.
1:54 Sam Parr? Yeah.
1:55 Shaan Puri? And so, inside is your sperm, and you're gonna freeze this for how long?
2:00 Sam Parr? I don't know yet. I just, we talked about it last week and I think it's a really good idea, so I'm gonna try it.
2:05 Shaan Puri? Okay.
2:05 Sam Parr? So we'll see. I'll know maybe in two weeks.
2:08 Shaan Puri? What did you see in there? Did you see a bunch of other people? Were they all people of different ages? Like, did you notice anything else while you were there, or?
2:14 Sam Parr? Oh, no.
2:14 Shaan Puri? Oh, they mailed this to you?
2:15 Sam Parr? They just mailed it to me.
2:16 Shaan Puri? Oh, okay. Even better.
2:17 Sam Parr? Yeah, and I actually talked to loads of men who are my age or even younger, and a lot of them are doing it. So I think that this whole sperm bank thing is actually way bigger than I actually anticipated. I'm gonna pay a hundred dollars a year for it. I went into it thinking to pay for 20 years.
2:30 Shaan Puri? Right. Okay, wow. Alright, awesome. Okay, so that's one. That's a, that's a follow-up from last week, really.
2:35 Sam Parr? Yeah, and I have one more follow-up from last week. So, we talked about looking at competitors. So there's this woman on Twitter, her name is Jane Wong, but her handle is Wong MJane. So W O N G M J A N E. All she does is she reverse engineers apps.
2:54 Shaan Puri? Yes. She's like Facebook's kryptonite, right? She always finds the new Facebook features before Facebook rolls them out.
3:00 Sam Parr? Yeah, she's great. So that's a good follow. My friend Patrick texted me and showed me that. And then, another great tweet that I found, there was a study, I found it again through Patrick and this guy named Cameron tweeted it out. So they did a study, I think tens of thousands of men. Most men above age 50 claim they felt masculine. Most men below age 35 said they do not feel masculine. And we were talking about TRT stuff, and I was like, I think this stuff's gonna get more popular. And I think that's one data point that shows that it might be bigger than we had said.
3:32 Shaan Puri? Yeah, you know, not all the ideas that we say on this are like, great ideas. That's like, you know, it's a brainstorm. But unless the sperm bank for me, the TRT one, I'm like, oh my god, that, that is a great idea. There's another name that I wanna find, so I'm gonna try to half Google while I'm doing this. There's somebody on Twitter who is, you were talking about competitors? There's a woman on Twitter who talks a lot about ecommerce stuff. And there's a lot of accounts on Twitter that are sort of like, I make six figures doing, doing dropshipping, you should too. She's kinda like that, like she sells guides, but she puts out a lot of free content on her Twitter that she tries to sell more of on the, on the guide. And her free content's actually pretty good. So she was talking about like, how do you find who supplies the brands that you buy? What she was showing was- You know, they all get manufactured outside of the US usually, so they have to come in through
4:13 Shaan Puri? customs. So you actually go to these two customs registries, you search the company's brand name, and you can see who they're receiving shipments from. You go look those companies up and oh, what do you know, these tend to be the manufacturers of that product.
4:27 Sam Parr? I would love to see that.
4:28 Shaan Puri? And so you can go work back, because you could find those exact suppliers, and it's pretty clever. So.
4:31 Sam Parr? And a lot of times I've noticed you can do that when you, so I'll like want to know who a supplier is and I'll buy the product. And if you look inside the box.
4:37 Shaan Puri? Right, you read the label, you try to find it.
4:39 Sam Parr? Yeah, if you look in the box, like in the cardboard box, a lot of times, or you can reverse search the sender mailing address. Anyway, there's a bunch of really cool things that you could do. We should actually talk about that.
4:49 Shaan Puri? Okay.
4:49 Sam Parr? Another time.
4:50 Shaan Puri? Yeah, cool. All right, what else you got? We got, because we got to go quick today. We only have 20 minutes left.
4:54 Sam Parr? Okay, so some new ideas here. You want to talk about that?
4:57 Shaan Puri? Yes.
4:58 Sam Parr? Okay. Oh, first of all, we had a ton of people sign up for trends after this, and I got in trouble for giving out a code when I shouldn't have.
5:04 Shaan Puri? Okay.
5:05 Sam Parr? So if you use that code, you better hurry up and use it now, otherwise.
5:08 Shaan Puri? It's gonna go away.
5:09 Sam Parr? It's gonna go away. And if you want to sign up, we put a special offer at trends.co/million.
5:15 Shaan Puri? Okay.
5:15 Sam Parr? And so we'll be in there, or I'll be in there, I think you are too, and we'll be talking. But that's like a special discount code for people. Otherwise, use the other one, but I'll get in trouble, that we said last time. Okay, so two things happened over the last week that we had written about in trends. The first thing, or like a follow-up, the first thing, rig up.
5:33 Shaan Puri? Yes.
5:34 Sam Parr? Okay, so I've had this hypothesis for a few months now, that I think hyper-focused job boards, there's a huge opportunity. The reason why is in 2011 or '09, Fred Wilson wrote a post saying that Indeed.com was one of the best companies he ever invested in. I think he said it was the best.
5:52 Shaan Puri? Indeed, yeah, okay.
5:53 Sam Parr? Indeed. And he was explaining the mechanics behind job boards, and it was pretty amazing. And so.
5:58 Shaan Puri? And what's the mechanics? It's just, here's a bunch of job postings.
6:01 Sam Parr? So the way a job, a lot of people don't actually understand how a job posting works, but basically there's like two or three models behind it, but they're all great. The first one is, so as the job board, you have to attract traffic.
6:11 Shaan Puri? Yes.
6:12 Sam Parr? So you need people who are looking for that job to come to your website. Okay, to make money, what you have to do is you do a couple of things. The first thing, which is what Indeed does, I think they mostly do this, is an employer will sign up, and for every click or email that they get from a high-intent job seeker, they'll pay Indeed a certain amount of money.
6:31 Shaan Puri? Right, for every lead, basically.
6:32 Sam Parr? For every lead. It's a lead gen site, and a lot of people don't even know how that works, like lead gen site, but that's basically how it works. So. As a business owner, I own a business, I'm more than happy to pay money to get people to my careers page or to send me their email of highly interested people. And then if they send me 50 people, I can pay them $50 an email and then I can go and try and close a handful of them.
6:49 Shaan Puri? Right.
6:50 Sam Parr? The second way it works is, and I think this is how it works in Behance, is they pay a subscription.
6:53 Shaan Puri? The company itself pays a membership, basically.
6:56 Sam Parr? Yeah, so you pay $500 a month to have your job posting on there and they promise a minimum number of email sends to an email list.
7:04 Shaan Puri? Right. Okay, so job boards are good, been around forever, but RigUp it seems like is a, like it's a job board just for one niche. I believe it's in the oil and gas industry.
7:12 Sam Parr? Oil and gas industry, and here's why that's interesting. I think that the formula for finding a job board that would work, you gotta do an equation. This is how you'd rank what's interesting, which is how many openings there are available in the field. Okay, so how many openings there are in a field, multiplied by the salary of that job, multiplied by the amount of friction it takes to get that job, okay? So, for example, self-driving car engineers.
7:37 Shaan Puri? Right.
7:37 Sam Parr? They might make, on average, $500,000 a year. That's probably on the high end, but let's just say that that's true. Okay, so if they make $500,000 a year, what's the supply of those folks? How many of those people are there in the world? Probably not a lot.
7:50 Shaan Puri? Right.
7:50 Sam Parr? A person hiring a self-driving car engineer would probably be willing to pay $100 or $200 just to get an introduction to someone who is open.
7:57 Shaan Puri? Yeah, much more than that.
7:59 Sam Parr? Much more than that.
8:00 Shaan Puri? Right, thousands of, thousands of dollars. A company who's, Google, when they hire a self-driving car person, you know, the base recruiter fee is like 30 grand if they place the person. And I think for niche jobs like this, it can go upwards of 50, 100 grand.
8:13 Sam Parr? So maybe they would pay $1,000 a lead.
8:15 Shaan Puri? Yeah.
8:15 Sam Parr? So if you can create, the idea here now is if you can build this audience of high-intent self-driving car job seekers, if you can build that audience, you can earn, for this argument, and it might be true, $1,000 per applicant that you send. And they're not, they don't have to land the job, they just have to show that they're interested in the job.
8:32 Shaan Puri? Right.
8:33 Sam Parr? And so you have to do this math to figure out what's interesting. One thing that's incredibly interesting, and I said this was interesting a few months ago, was the oil field industry. The reason why that's interesting is you can have minimal education. I don't think you need a bachelor's degree. There's a whole bunch of Those jobs available and the salary is like a hundred grand. That's amazing. So high amount of supply, huge demand, pretty good salary. And so Rig Up came along and they created us a whole bunch of tools to attract these job seekers. And now they're charging the companies on the back end and they just raised maybe three or four, like hundreds of millions of dollars from Andreessen Horowitz at like a multi-billion dollar valuation.
9:10 Shaan Puri? Yeah. Shout out Jeff Lewis, the original investor in Rig Up is one of the best unknown investors or underrated.
9:17 Sam Parr? Is that your buddy?
9:17 Shaan Puri? Out there. We're not really buddies. He wrote a term sheet to us. He was the first guy. You know, we did a, it was Christmas Eve or something like that, which everyone says investors, you know, they go away for Christmas. Yeah, they do. But if they're interested, they'll hunt you down. I was in Argentina, you know, we did a Skype call and 24 hours later, he put a term sheet down. Like this guy moves quick. He was at Founder's Fund at the time and now he's got his own fund. We didn't end up taking it because we had a cheaper source of capital, but I remember being very impressed with him. And he's built a badass portfolio. He's got Wish, Lyft, Tilray, which is like this company in Canada that's, it was a weed company that went public already, unless I'm mixing up the names.
9:50 Sam Parr? Jeff Lewis?
9:51 Shaan Puri? Yeah. Lambda School, Rig Up, like this guy's got a killer portfolio. Anyways, so Rig Up's good. Also Incredible Health, which was, Iman was on the podcast. That's a vertical, that's a niche job board like you're talking about where nurses is her field where.
10:04 Sam Parr? That's another great one. Nurses is a great one.
10:06 Shaan Puri? Huge demand and.
10:08 Sam Parr? And so a lot, well, but the thing is, is that a lot of people will see these companies and they won't actually understand what they're doing. They're like Rig Up or Incredible Health. They're just offering all this free stuff. How the heck do they make money?
10:17 Shaan Puri? Right.
10:18 Sam Parr? It's on the jobs. Like that is on the job. So let's talk about other jobs that are interesting.
10:23 Shaan Puri? Okay.
10:23 Sam Parr? Airline pilots. I was doing research. I think there's a nice sized shortage of airline pilots. They're going to exist for a long time. There's not that many of them, but, and I don't think there's a significant amount of people studying them as well as the job boards that I looked at seem pretty antiquated.
10:38 Shaan Puri? Right. And this is like one of those things like a dating site where if you built the tool, the platform, you could actually like white label it. You could just rinse and repeat it with other verticals. Let's say you did it with pilots. You probably don't need too much different functionality to try this again with whatever consultants or whatever the next vertical you want to try. So either.
10:55 Sam Parr? Oh, yeah.
10:56 Shaan Puri? So you could just, you could just clone your product, the technology you built.
10:59 Sam Parr? And that's exactly.
11:00 Shaan Puri? If you go to.
11:01 Sam Parr? You can go to tinyboards. So tinyboards.co. It's my friend Andrew. He has done this for designers. He's done it for like four or five different verticals. I don't remember all the verticals. I think AI engineers. And he says it's doing wonderful.
11:14 Shaan Puri? Excellent.
11:15 Sam Parr? It's doing great.
11:15 Shaan Puri? Okay.
11:16 Sam Parr? Okay, so pilots are interesting. Construction workers I think are interesting because the average pay I would imagine for a construction worker is at least $25 an hour. You need a lot of construction workers to get a project done. I imagine RigUp would actually go down that route.
11:28 Shaan Puri? Yes.
11:29 Sam Parr? And then finally, something that I've actually tested is truck drivers.
11:33 Shaan Puri? What do you mean you've tested? You've actually tried this?
11:35 Sam Parr? I built a website and I drove paid traffic to it. And then I spoke with someone to buy the leads and I've actually researched it. So there's a handful of companies out there that do a hundred million dollars in revenue and their main business is lead gen for trucking companies.
11:48 Shaan Puri? And how did your experiment go?
11:50 Sam Parr? It made money. So I do all these experiments all the time. I rarely do I actually like.
11:53 Shaan Puri? Follow through.
11:54 Sam Parr? Follow, like make them big.
11:55 Shaan Puri? Right.
11:55 Sam Parr? Because I already have a job and I'm happy, but I like to do these things for fun and sometimes maybe we'll hire some people to run them. But anyway, so I went and contacted people who could buy the leads and I go, okay, how much would you buy leads for? They said we'd buy this type of lead for $10, this type of lead for $100. So I got a range of $10 to $100 for truck drivers that have a commercial licenses. If you read about, there's a huge truck shortage right now, truck driver shortage. There's a reason, the reason why there's a truck driver shortage is they're not making a ton of money and it's a really hard job and young people aren't doing it. So that definitely puts a kink in that idea. But if you think about what America does, one of our biggest things is logistics. We have a huge country and as commerce goes up, that's going to just grow with it.
12:35 Shaan Puri? Right.
12:35 Sam Parr? And my father owns a company that works with truckers. I have a lot of insight to this. So trucking is incredibly interesting to me.
12:40 Shaan Puri? Okay, so, all right. So we're going to put a pin in this one. Specialty job boards. Interesting idea, number one. Give me another idea.
12:45 Sam Parr? Did we talk about paywall software last time?
12:47 Shaan Puri? No.
12:47 Sam Parr? Okay, I'll reveal some stuff. Okay, so at The Hustle, I think we're paying three grand a month for a paywall software. It is awful.
12:54 Shaan Puri? What does this do?
12:55 Sam Parr? Okay.
12:56 Shaan Puri? How does this work?
12:56 Sam Parr? So there's Substack out there. Substack is cool. They just raised money. They are a paywall software for newsletters. So you can really easily collect money and send people exclusive newsletters for a monthly fee.
13:06 Shaan Puri? Right.
13:07 Sam Parr? Great. I talked to the founder. I go, hey, are you going to open this up to web-based stuff? Because that's what I need. He said, no. And so the idea here is if you go to the New York Times and you'll see how some stuff's paywalled and some isn't. They built that software from scratch. I think they built it from scratch, probably because they were using the provider that we're using now and they realized how horrible it was. I went and spoke to Business of Fashion. You know Business of Fashion?
13:27 Shaan Puri? No.
13:27 Sam Parr? It's a great website. They just raised money from FinancialTimes.com. They had to build their own. Wall Street Journal built their own. The Economist built their own. Like, so many people are building their own. TechCrunch, I've heard, is spending north of six figures in software fees in order to use this vendor that we're using as well.
13:44 Shaan Puri? Wow.
13:44 Sam Parr? It's a pain in the butt. And so...
13:46 Shaan Puri? So it's asking for a challenger.
13:47 Sam Parr? Oh, my God. It's so, like, I will give someone right now $5,000 a month if they made this.
13:52 Shaan Puri? To try to start this?
13:53 Sam Parr? Yes.
13:54 Shaan Puri? Right. Okay. Love it. What else you got?
13:55 Sam Parr? AA. We wrote about this a while ago. Okay, there's something like 20 million people in AA. I gotta go look at the exact stats, but we wrote about this idea of AA. There's so many, Alcohol's Anonymous.
14:05 Shaan Puri? Of course.
14:07 Sam Parr? The amount of people that have a drinking problem in America is huge. AA is the biggest one. They have tens of millions of members. If you've ever gone to an AA meeting, it's intimidating and it's old school. I mean, it's just a bunch of people who come from various walks of life who are all screwed up and they're just sitting in a room, a circle of 10 people, explaining why they're screwed up and helping each other. It's pretty effective, but we wrote about this company called Tempest that is creating an online version of this that costs a fee.
14:35 Shaan Puri? So it's like an app?
14:35 Sam Parr? Yeah. And they just actually raised a round of funding, I think, in the last few days. I'm quite interested in this whole addiction thing and how we can help people get through that. The problem is, is if you have an addiction, there's like a huge barrier to entry in order to try to fix your addiction.
14:50 Shaan Puri? Right.
14:50 Sam Parr? And that barrier to entry is mostly embarrassment or having to go to like the sperm bay, because that's like weird, right?
14:56 Shaan Puri? Right.
14:56 Sam Parr? And so what I'm interested in is how will that be solved for digital?
15:00 Shaan Puri? Right. Can you do it more personal, more intimate, more sort of frictionless, more conveniently?
15:05 Sam Parr? Yes. I think that's going to be interesting and I didn't realize how big the demand was.
15:09 Shaan Puri? Yeah, either as a replacement or a supplement to the in-person stuff.
15:13 Sam Parr? Yeah, and what you can do is you can go to AA's website and you could see, I'm almost positive they might have like 50 million members. That when I think of ideas, one of the ways that I think of ideas is I look at where's demand?
15:23 Shaan Puri? And work backwards.
15:24 Sam Parr? And work backwards. There's a ton of demand there.
15:26 Shaan Puri? Okay, I got an idea for you. Came from the Trends Facebook group, so shout out to Ben Curtis and Alan Tucker. Alright, so they brought up this idea of a hunting and fishing D to C brand. So you posted about-
15:38 Sam Parr? Meat eater.
15:39 Shaan Puri? Meat eater. I had never heard of this.
15:40 Sam Parr? Huge.
15:41 Shaan Puri? Of course, because I'm like, you know, snowflake in California that doesn't know anything about any of this. My testosterone's low, I don't, I don't go hunting-
15:48 Sam Parr? But dude, I looked at their traffic. Their traffic's not big. I have to figure out where the revenue's coming from.
15:52 Shaan Puri? But they have a lot of revenue, you're saying?
15:53 Sam Parr? They raised money at a huge valuation and I talked to people who were investors and they said the revenue was big.
15:57 Shaan Puri? Okay, so that was kind of interesting. Didn't know about it. And then these guys brought up in the group, they were like, hey, hunting and fishing is this underserved category, asking essentially for a D to C brand. So go back and listen to the podcast with Mois, who started Native Deodorant, and, and basically think about, okay, that appealed to a certain set, you know, Native is mostly for women who are, you know, health conscious and don't want to have aluminum in the deodorant. The hunting and fishing vertical, which is very much brick and mortar today, can you create a digital brand that sells either accessories?
16:26 Sam Parr? And Yeti did it.
16:27 Shaan Puri? Yeti did it.
16:28 Sam Parr? Yeti built a-
16:28 Shaan Puri? Phenomenal success.
16:29 Sam Parr? They built a $3 billion company for a hunting cooler.
16:32 Shaan Puri? Right, coolers, exactly.
16:34 Sam Parr? Specifically like a hunting and fishing one.
16:35 Shaan Puri? And what these guys were pointing out was that you could first just make content, and so this is kind of like, you know, our buddy Ramon, who does this with, you know, Facebook, how he did it with Facebook pages before he, uh, he's got an episode two, I think, where he talks about how he built fan pages about soap operas, then built a blog about soap operas and then sold that for nine million bucks. Same sort of thing you could do here. You could build fan pages around the hunting and fishing lifestyle and then start to sell products into that group. And this is very much a middle America-
16:59 Sam Parr? So which categories?
17:00 Shaan Puri? I don't know enough about hunting and fishing to know what is the, what is the product, but I would just, you know, go in what you were saying. Go from the demand and work backwards.
17:08 Sam Parr? Well, do you-
17:08 Shaan Puri? That's what I would do.
17:09 Sam Parr? Do you know, guess how many Americans consider themselves hunter or fishers?
17:12 Shaan Puri? How many? Okay, I'm going to say 15 million.
17:15 Sam Parr? Okay, according to some preliminary research that I've done, a third of the country.
17:19 Shaan Puri? Like a hundred million?
17:20 Sam Parr? A hundred and five million.
17:21 Shaan Puri? Wow.
17:22 Sam Parr? Yeah, we were talking about this at our company and some people who are hunters and fishers said, I said, I can't believe this is such a.
17:28 Shaan Puri? Same number of people that drink water every day. What's going on?
17:32 Sam Parr? I was like, this is such a small niche. I can't believe they'd, and they're like, no, it's not small. And I'm like, well, it doesn't seem big because I live in San Francisco, of course. They go, and they were, did some research right there and some studies said a hundred and five million Americans.
17:45 Shaan Puri? Yeah, this is a, it's like a mega niche. It's like, I work at Twitch right now and Twitch is, uh, it's this niche product, live streaming for video games and gamers.
17:52 Sam Parr? It's a mega niche.
17:53 Shaan Puri? But it's a mega niche because there's so many gamers that you can do hundreds of millions of monthly users off of just gamers.
17:59 Sam Parr? Yeah. And if you want to learn more about this, there is this guy named Ryan Dice, who I know, this isn't the same category, but there's a lot of survivalists. Like people who, A.
18:09 Shaan Puri? That's the niche within hunting.
18:10 Sam Parr? Yeah, like this survivalist category, they think that the world's gonna end, or they just don't want to rely on the government. And so they want to like prepare for apocalyptic like type of things. And anyway, he built this blog for survivalists and it crushed it. If you don't believe in that type of stuff, I personally don't believe it. I respect you. If you do believe in it, I don't. And so I would never want to like make that stuff.
18:29 Shaan Puri? Okay, I wrote down another pseudoscience, sort of one like this that you guys wrote about, which is this Ghostbusters thing. Did you read the story?
18:37 Sam Parr? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
18:37 Shaan Puri? So the story was basically, there's a service, there's like, I think it's an insurance service. And one of their sub offerings is a Ghostbuster service. If you believe that there's, your house is haunted or there's a ghost, they will come to your house.
18:49 Sam Parr? Yeah, that's stupid.
18:50 Shaan Puri? And they will check and they will do the methods that don't, you know, don't mean anything. And people are paying for this because a lot of people are spooked. A lot of people believe in ghosts. And I just had to like.
19:00 Sam Parr? Believe in ghosts?
19:01 Shaan Puri? Dude, I think it's the same. I think it's like a third of people believe in ghosts. I don't think they're all afraid of ghosts or think their house is haunted. But I think a third of people believe in ghosts. It's, uh.
19:09 Sam Parr? That's crazy. I don't. I'm not part of that category. I believe in aliens, but not ghosts.
19:12 Shaan Puri? Okay, tweet at me if you believe in ghosts. That's what I want to know at the end of this.
19:16 Sam Parr? Or if you'd be willing to pay money for someone to come and get rid of ghosts.
19:20 Shaan Puri? But I just had to like pay respects to the person who was like, you know what? Let's do it. Let's sell Ghostbusters.
19:25 Sam Parr? Well, and you know, that's actually true is because one of the most popular shows on TV for a long time was the paranormal activity shows on TLC.
19:32 Shaan Puri? Yeah, exactly. It's entertaining. It's a very entertaining thing. Okay. And the people who do believe they're gonna pay, right? The people who believe that their house is haunted, they're gonna pay because it's like this, you know, incredibly like tense and stressful thing.
19:44 Sam Parr? You just gotta get in that televangelist like shit. It's like, ugh.
19:48 Shaan Puri? Okay, give me another idea. We got, we got four minutes left.
19:51 Sam Parr? Okay.
19:51 Shaan Puri? Let's get two more ideas on the book.
19:53 Sam Parr? A company just launched two months ago and we covered it on Trends. We, I think we actually wrote about keto cereal before it launched. We looked at the search traffic and keto cereal was climbing like crazy. Magic Spoon. Have you heard of Magic Spoon?
20:05 Shaan Puri? I've heard of this because I've tried keto three times.
20:07 Sam Parr? Magic Spoon. It's a cereal. I have a friend who, like a friend of a friend, and they told me their stats booming. So I looked on LinkedIn. This is, this is not insider information. Anyone can do this. I looked on LinkedIn, looked at what the founders were doing before. It was something like a D to C thing that from the outside, it seemed like it failed. And then they like pivoted and I have seen the traffic for keto cereal surge, like the amount of people who search it as well as the amount of posts on Reddit. Super fascinating. If you go and read P and G Procter and Gamble, or who, all the other, Callog, all the other cereal makers, cereal accounts for like.
20:42 Shaan Puri? Huge.
20:42 Sam Parr? I mean, I imagine like, like it could be like $50 billion a year.
20:45 Shaan Puri? Yeah. And it's like soda where the actual thing costs so little that all the money, the cost is all just marketing.
20:50 Sam Parr? Yeah.
20:51 Shaan Puri? And so they marketed it through TV, TV ads and everything else. And so the modern day version of TV commercials is Facebook ads.
20:58 Sam Parr? And I know people who have done this. So someone who spoke at HustleCon, which a lot, actually a lot of these people who we're talking about are gonna be at HustleCon. You should come. Like for example, we're having the guys who started Method Soap and Ollie Supplement. And so we'll talk about this stuff. But anyway, this magic cereal, I went to their website. Super basic, slick, but basic website. I think that thing's gonna, that's gonna crush.
21:18 Shaan Puri? Right.
21:19 Sam Parr? So Hail Top only raised a million dollars. I think they're gonna do.
21:21 Shaan Puri? Is that right? Wow.
21:22 Sam Parr? I think they're gonna do north of a billion dollars in sales this year. They, they paid off dividends to their angel investors.
21:27 Shaan Puri? Wow.
21:27 Sam Parr? One of my guys who I'm buds with told me that he like made a living off that dividend.
21:32 Shaan Puri? Yeah, Halo Top is huge.
21:33 Sam Parr? Um, I think this keto cereal thing will be in the same category.
21:36 Shaan Puri? Yeah, and it might be that there's other things like this, like, uh, my wife is vegan and so we buy all this like, there's this candy company called Unreal, that's all vegan candy. So it's like, you want Reese's, but you're vegan now. Well, guess what? We made the closest taste to Reese's. That's vegan and same thing with M and M's and same thing with other candies. And so vegan candy, keto cereals.
21:55 Sam Parr? M and M even has dairy in it?
21:57 Shaan Puri? Chocolate, milk chocolate, right?
21:58 Sam Parr? I know, but that's what.
21:59 Shaan Puri? I don't know if it's real chocolate, but it's not considered vegan, uh, from what I understand. And so even if it is technically vegan, it's sort of a person who's vegan says something about their lifestyle. They usually don't want to be holding a bag of M and M's.
22:10 Sam Parr? Even if it is vegan.
22:11 Shaan Puri? Even if it, even if it technically is, and they would prefer to have the sort of more organic, the more made of real ingredients version of it.
22:18 Sam Parr? Got it.
22:18 Shaan Puri? And willing to actually pay three times as much as M and M's for it. And so I wonder, you know, paleo, keto, vegan, I wonder which lifestyle you can piggyback off of and, and make one of those products that they repeat purchase all the time, like cereal.
22:31 Sam Parr? I think this magic spoon thing, like my early results show, I think this thing is going to go to the moon.
22:36 Shaan Puri? Cool. I like, all right, I have one more from trends that I like, and then you're going to finish this up. So miniature cooking set. I saw this on trends. It made a lot of sense to me because people love the miniature version of anything. There's something to seeing something that's, you know, you normally see at full size, many pots and pans. And I think that as more people live in apartments and condos that are smaller and smaller, especially in cities and people want to cook. And as the, you know, I think Tasty came out with their own skillet to pair with their recipe book or whatever.
23:02 Sam Parr? And we wrote about that, yeah.
23:03 Shaan Puri? And that was a clever idea, but I really like this idea of miniature, modern cookware. I think something can be quite big there. It's not the business I would start, but it's one where if I see that product, if I see a good product that fits in that, I'm going to, I would invest in that because I believe in the premise. And I believe that anybody who does something innovative in cookware will be, will stand out from the pack because everything is so bland.
23:23 Sam Parr? That's a big business, I think, too. It's just creating really high quality cast iron skillets and things like that.
23:28 Shaan Puri? Absolutely. All right, last one.
23:29 Sam Parr? Can I say one more?
23:30 Shaan Puri? Yeah.
23:30 Sam Parr? Okay, we have Wade Foster speaking at HustleCon. Wade started this company called Zapier. I call it Zapier, Zapier.
23:36 Shaan Puri? Something like that, yeah.
23:37 Sam Parr? Million dollars raised. I think they're in the $60 million ARR.
23:41 Shaan Puri? Yes.
23:41 Sam Parr? Which means they could be worth a lot, like 500 million bucks.
23:45 Shaan Puri? Correct.
23:45 Sam Parr? It's only four years old, but this whole connecting APIs and this no code economy thing. This whole no-code economy thing.
23:54 Shaan Puri? No-code's huge.
23:55 Sam Parr? If we want to call it no-code economy, whatever, that's going to be bigger than the sharing, this whole sharing economy stuff. There's Webflow, Zapier, If This Then That, all these things. It's.
24:05 Shaan Puri? All right, we should, we should do, we should do a whole, a whole section on no-code next time, next Friday, we'll do it.
24:10 Sam Parr? I think it is just the coolest thing I've ever seen, and no-code websites still suck.
24:16 Shaan Puri? And shout out to Cindy, big listener of the podcast and original investor in Zapier, and talks about it all the time because that company's kicking ass.
24:22 Sam Parr? I love it. We, we just give them more money every month.
24:25 Shaan Puri? Yeah, great. All right, Sam, we gotta run. Let's get back to life. Hopefully you guys like this. And also, we're going to do a Q and A episode. So if you made it to the end of this, you're probably hardcore. We're doing a Q and A episode, so I want you to email me your questions. It's puri.shawn, P U R I dot Shawn at gmail dot com. Send in your listener questions. We're going to do a full Q and A on those. All right, we gotta go.
24:45 Sam Parr? See you. Thank you.
Previous #16 - TRT Subscriptions, Cord Blood Banking, Digital Museums Next #18 - The Big Business of Wacky Domains Page updated October 25, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
