$1M+/yr Local Businesses Hidden in Plain Sight

Episode 706: Sam Parr ( https://x.com/theSamParr ) and Shaan Puri ( https://x.com/ShaanVP ) talk about offline businesses that are crushing it. — Show Notes: (0:00) Be a $1M dollar business spotter (4:56) Swim lessons franchise (6:34) AWS for the Amish (17:25) At home pet euthanasia service (25:37) Take out order call center (42:35) Cheat code: Coaches (52:13) Add a performance — Links: • Steal Sam's guide to turn ChatGPT into your Executive Coach: https://clickhubspot.com/ogh • Goldfish Swim School - https://goldfishswimschool.com/ • IbyFax - http://ibyfax.com/ • Lap of Love - https://www.lapoflove.com/ • Tarro - https://www.tarro.com/ • Owner - https://www.owner.com/ — Check Out Shaan's Stuff: • Shaan's weekly email - https://www.shaanpuri.com • Visit https://www.somewhere.com/mfm to hire worldwide talent like Shaan and get $500 off for being an MFM listener. Hire developers, assistants, marketing pros, sales teams and more for 80% less than US equivalents. • Mercury - Need a bank for your company? Go check out Mercury (mercury.com). Shaan uses it for all of his companies! Mercury is a financial technology company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group, Column, N. A., and Evolve Bank & Trust, Members FDIC — Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton - https://www.joinhampton.com/ • Ideation Bootcamp - https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/ • Copy That - https://copythat.com • Hampton Wealth Survey - https://joinhampton.com/wealth • Sam’s List - http://samslist.co/ My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by HubSpot Media // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano

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

• 0:00Sam Parr?

  I have a business that no one on a podcast has ever discussed. It's literally the first time this has probably ever been talked about on YouTube or in the audio format. I'm, I'm, I'm breaking grounds here.

• 0:10Shaan Puri?

  Okay, Jackie Robinson.

• 0:24Shaan Puri?

  So this weekend I went to my daughter's spring recital and Sam, when you see this, what does this look like? This just looks like, I don't know.

• 0:35Sam Parr?

  A great ballerina typical.

• 0:37Shaan Puri?

  A program.

• 0:38Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 0:38Shaan Puri?

  Right. Yeah. Show pro program. And that's what everybody in that crowd thought. But not me. I saw a business plan, Sam. I saw a business plan. I saw information. I saw a giant information leak. Okay. So check this out. This woman has built a million dollar plus kids dance studio just down the street from us. And I think this is remarkable and I think it's a good reminder that like there's these million dollar businesses like all around you. You don't have to do something really grand or innovative to do it. You just got to provide a service that people love and you got to scale it in the right way. So check this out. On the back is a list of all the dancers in the show. Now, all the dancers in the show are all the dancers across her three locations. All the kids, basically everyone performs. Okay.

• 1:22Shaan Puri?

  So I look at this and everyone else is looking for their kid's name. I'm looking for top line revenue numbers. Okay. I'm trying to figure it out. And so I see, all right, each of these columns is about 50 names. There's six columns. Okay. We got 300 kids at this dance show.

• 1:38Sam Parr?

  How much does this cost?

• 1:40Shaan Puri?

  I know that we pay something like 250 bucks a month to be a part of the, the dance studio. And this is the spring recital. So immediately my head says, all right, we're doing at least spring and fall. Might even be doing four recitals a year. I'm not sure. I had just bought the tickets to this recital. So I know that in addition to the 250 bucks a month membership, you're going to be paying for the uniforms. You're going to be paying for tickets to the, to the, to watch the show. Of course, every single parent is going to watch their kid at the thing. In fact, we brought grandparents with us and a few, a few extras. But you look around that theater, it's totally sold out. Standing room only. I know a mom who was in our class who she did not log on to buy her tickets right away and therefore only got two tickets and got them in the back. And so she

• 2:24Shaan Puri?

  kicked her husband out of the two tickets and was like, hey, tell your mother, she got her mother-in-law to come with a walker so that they could go sit in the ADA seat. Like, that's how vicious the competition is for these, the demand is insatiable. Okay, so basically, if you do the math on this and you say, okay, we spent a hundred bucks on the tickets for this recital, then you spend 250 bucks a month, and then you're in this thing year round, you end up seeing that this is a business that's generating a little over a million dollars a year in revenue. So about 1.25 million.

• 2:56Sam Parr?

  So you said 300 names, $250, that's $75,000 a month in sales, just off that.

• 3:03Shaan Puri?

  Just off that. And then you add on the plus plus, the shows, the tickets, the photos. Oh, for the photo package, you spend a hundred bucks. You know, it's one thing after another, basically, that they sell to you. And it's great. We're happy customers. And so you get there. She basically does no marketing. The show is her marketing. And what ends up happening is that you, and then at the end of the show, she brings out the teachers to take a bow. These are the teachers. I'm like, oh, thank you. Now I see the OpEx line. We got seven teachers here? Okay, cool. Seven teachers. Got it. And so I'm trying to figure this out. Okay, so I'm pretty sure that this dance studio is netting somewhere between 500,000 and 700,000 in EBITDA every year. Okay.

• 3:44Sam Parr?

  Did she also, did she like, arrive to the class in like, an S-class? Like, what's up a car was she driving?

• 3:50Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I installed a tracking device underneath just to see where she lives now.

• 3:55Sam Parr?

  Did her Burke bag give out any hints as to how well the business was doing?

• 4:00Shaan Puri?

  Called a Birkin.

• 4:01Sam Parr?

  Birkin bag, whatever.

• 4:02Shaan Puri?

  I don't know what you just called it. Like a Middle Eastern bag that she just referenced.

• 4:06Sam Parr?

  The other day, Sarah wanted to go to like, some concert, and I was like, yeah, like, Charlie XC90. It's actually like Charlie, I forget what it is. You know, like, this new, like, hot girl, whatever.

• 4:15Shaan Puri?

  I also don't know. That's one of those where I just don't say it.

• 4:17Sam Parr?

  XC90 is a Volvo. I was like, yeah, Charlie XC90. So I kept saying like XC90. It's like XC something. All right, but go ahead.

• 4:26Shaan Puri?

  So I just thought this is inspiring that like this local, just this local service, dance shows for little kids, our dance, dance classes for little kids, scaled to three locations can be, you know, such a great business for somebody. And they're basically kind of like found that sweet spot of doing what they love. She's been doing it for like 25 years now. She's an institution locally, has a great community of people around her and, and, you know, is making people happy, making families happy. And I've just been seeing this everywhere.

• 4:54Sam Parr?

  All right, let me, can I, let me show you something interesting. I was just talking to this guy, but have you ever heard of Goldfish swimming classes?

• 5:02Shaan Puri?

  No.

• 5:04Sam Parr?

  It's a franchise that I'm pretty sure does about $600 million a year in revenue. And it's a children's swim class. And it was one of those things where he was talking to me, he was basically, I'm not gonna, I can't reveal too much, but he was like, I quit my prestigious job because I want to get into the swim class business. You know, everyone's like, probably giving this guy the same like look of like, but you're throwing it all the way. And he, I kind of like, was like, all right, tell me more. Cause I'm sure there's like, there's a story here. Cause you worked in finance, like you're not doing this to feel good. Tell me more. And he started breaking down the economics of this goldfish chain. And he was saying something like each location does like 2 million in revenue. And they have something like 300 locations.

• 5:47Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I'm on their site. They got a lot of locations. I don't know about 300, but they got a lot.

• 5:50Sam Parr?

  It was something insane like that. And it was another one of those things that was just like hidden in plain sight. But I have a hidden in plain sight business, not hidden in plain sight, but a business that like no one on earth has, no one on a podcast has ever discussed. And this is gonna be that these, the, the thing I'm about to talk about, it's literally the first time this has probably ever been talked about on YouTube or in the audio format. I'm, I'm, I'm breaking grounds here.

• 6:17Shaan Puri?

  Okay, Jackie Robinson.

• 6:23Sam Parr?

  Is there a Hall of Fame for things like these? Cause I would be in it.

• 6:28Sam Parr?

  All right, so I just slacked you a URL. Go to dysbuilders.com. So you're on this website. Let me tell you a story really quick. You know how the Amish are famous for creating amazing furniture? I wanted to buy like a bed for my kid. And I wanted like an heirloom quality bed where I was like, man, I wish I had my bed from when I was a kid, my crib from when I was a kid. How cool would it be to give my daughter a bed that I can reuse for all of our kids? And eventually, one of them can let their kids use it. So my grandkids have my bed. So I was looking up Amish furniture and I came across this website randomly because I got interested in the Amish craftsmanship.

• 7:13Sam Parr?

  Now, this website, it's a dysbuilders.com. I think they make homes. Scroll all the way to the bottom where it says contact and read to me the email address that you see.

• 7:24Shaan Puri?

  [email protected].

• 7:28Sam Parr?

  Okay, so I noticed, this is just one example because it was easy to see, but I noticed on many of these Amish websites, when I was looking at how to place an order, I had to email like [email protected]. There was all these really weird URLs that I had to email to fax. And I got really curious. So I want you to go to ibyfax.com.

• 7:55Shaan Puri?

  It says, "Send and receive emails with your fax machine."

• 7:59Sam Parr?

  So I was seeing this and I got a tip from one of our listeners, Andy Allen, and he emailed me this and it was just all coincidence that like six months prior, I was wondering what this was. So let me tell you the background of this. So if you're Amish or you're Mennonite, a lot of them are very entrepreneurial and they work with the outside world. So they make furniture that they sell to people like me. They have websites. However, according to their religion, they are not allowed to use certain technology that's considered individualistic. So looking down on your iPhone or sitting down in your home and staring at a computer screen, they think that it either brings, like things either bring them closer to God and other people, or it takes them away.

• 8:42Sam Parr?

  And they feel according to their rules that like looking at your phone and using the internet brings them away from other people. However, they have all these websites and they sell furniture. Well, how do they do it? Well, there's this small website. I think it's called iBuyFax as in internetbuyfax.com. And it's this service where you pay something like $20 a month plus like 10 cents or 50 cents per fax. But basically on the campus, I don't know what they call it, the campus of a lot of Amish towns, there is literally like a small house, like a shanty. And in that small house is a fax machine. And if you're an Amish guy running a website and you want to see how your orders are doing, or somebody emails you and they're asking a question about a bed frame and like,

• 9:26Sam Parr?

  can you do this or can you do that? They go to this fax machine and this phone they have in their small box, which I have a photo of, by the way, in our document. But it's like literally a tiny, tiny little outhouse. It's like a little outhouse where you make the call and you talk to your customer, but you have to use iBuyFax. And so the iBuyFax service, what they're going to do is they're going to collect all of your emails and they're going to fax, they're going to...

• 9:54Shaan Puri?

  This photo is outrageous.

• 9:56Sam Parr?

  It's outrageous. It's like an outhouse.

• 9:57Shaan Puri?

  It's literally, it looks like a phone booth slash porta potty. It's in the middle of the road and on the wall is just a tiny phone, like a corded, a phone with a cord.

• 10:07Sam Parr?

  Yes, and so that's because they...

• 10:08Shaan Puri?

  There's not even a fax machine. Where's the fax machine?

• 10:10Sam Parr?

  So some of them have fax machines, some of them have phones. And so iBuyFax, they'll either call you and be like the middleman and answer the questions like, hey, [email protected], she's in this place. She wants to know, can you make a bed like this? Or Dave wants a child's bed, but he wants it to be in this color. Can you do it? And they'll reply and they'll either handwrite the reply and fax it back. Or iBuyFax has people who they say that they will actually, you talk to them and they'll be your middleman. And another thing that they'll do is let's say that you need, let's say you want to buy something off eBay or you're trying to figure out what the price is of a certain farm equipment. You can ask iBuyFax, please tell me, you know, how much it would cost to buy blank on eBay?

• 10:53Sam Parr?

  And they'll reply back by fax or telephone answering your question. And so this way, the Amish can do business with the rest of the world, but aren't breaking their rules. And this website that I found... It's used on all of the website. So if you look at Amish furniture, if they're like really OG Amish, a huge percentage of them are using this website. And the Amish community, it's not tiny. It's about 400,000 people. And they are like very entrepreneurial. Like that's like part of like the religion is to be like self reliant or part of the the the community rules is to be like self reliant. And like Amish furniture is definitely like a well known thing. Amish crafts of all types are a well known thing.

• 11:35Sam Parr?

  And this guy who emailed me, he goes, I own a business that buys and sells wooden pallets. And in particular, we are based in Pennsylvania. And so we work with mostly Amish people. And whenever they communicate with us, which we work with a lot of them, they only communicate with us by ibyfax.com. And they're all using this website. And in this website, here's where it gets kind of funny. I looked on LinkedIn, I can't find too much about any of the background on it. The only, and I'm not going to blow this guy's spot up too much. So I'll only say his first name. The owner, his first name is Jamal. And so in my head, I'm like, and he lives in New York. I'm like, is there a brother who just came up with a brilliant idea

• 12:20Sam Parr?

  to create an Amish faxing website? And is this like how we share the world?

• 12:30Sam Parr?

  I swear to God, that's his first name.

• 12:32Shaan Puri?

  So is he Amish or no, when you found him?

• 12:35Sam Parr?

  No, he lives in New York. No, he lives in New York. And his first name is Jamal. I can't find a photo of him, but like, I don't, I don't, I don't think he is. Because the the Amish can't work websites. So like, you have to be like an ally. You know what I'm saying? But you can't be part of the community.

• 12:51Shaan Puri?

  This is great. That is so funny. Be like Jamal is like the new like slogan. Find the opportunity, be like Jamal. What, by the way, why don't people like, could you just basically go buy a bunch of, could you work with the Amish by fax and just be like, cool, I'm going to buy furniture from you? But you have, you run a website. So you run a website. When somebody comes, places an order with you, and your website says, "Made by the Amish. Amish-made furniture. Handcrafted Amish furniture. Finest Amish fine goods," whatever. And then when somebody places an order with you, you just fax these guys and sell? Like, could you just be a layer on top selling for them?

• 13:28Sam Parr?

  Yeah, so, uh...

• 13:29Shaan Puri?

  Or do they say no to that?

• 13:31Sam Parr?

  Well, first of all, I think that like, there is some fraud there of like, "Yeah, we're Amish." Like, you know, and they're not, you know, they're not...

• 13:38Shaan Puri?

  No, but I'm saying you really do buy it from them.

• 13:40Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I think that the way, yes, I think, and they call, so they call those people, I think the slang that they use is "English." So like, they, they have an English guy. They like, an English guy, meaning that's like their straight man, their front man, who like, can work with the world. And he's, he's, we trust him, you know? He's an outsider, but like, he's, you know, he's had our back for decades, so we trust him. I guess that's Jamal in this case. But you can have other...

• 14:02Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, you're like a dealer.

• 14:03Sam Parr?

  Yeah, you can have like, and, and they have like, a name for that, which is like, uh, they call it "English," but it's like, yeah, it's a well-known thing, that this is our person who's got our back, and we give them a cut.

• 14:13Shaan Puri?

  On this dock, it says "AWS for the Amish." What is that?

• 14:16Sam Parr?

  Do you like that? Uh, that's just a little, I was workshopping.

• 14:19Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 14:24Shaan Puri?

  That is funny.

• 14:25Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I was workshopping. What do you think about that?

• 14:29Shaan Puri?

  That's good. I like that.

• 14:32Sam Parr?

  This is a pretty nifty website, and if you go to, um, a similar web, and look at their, uh, and guess their traffic, it's not nothing.

• 14:41Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, 400,000 Amish people. Let's just assume for a second that of the entrepreneurial Amish people, a very high percentage of them are gonna need to use a service like this, right? So if you say that even 5% of Amish people are entrepreneurial, of the, of the Amish population, but maybe it's a little high. Let's say, there's 20,000 people. I think you could pretty easily get to some version where you have 5,000 customers paying this thing, 20, 20 bucks a month. That's a $1 million business. It's 1.2 million.

• 15:08Sam Parr?

  For sure. That's, that's the exact math that I had. I said 1 to 1.2 million a year. And I'm pretty sure it's just this guy.

• 15:16Shaan Puri?

  Jamal.

• 15:16Sam Parr?

  Jamal is the only guy running it. I think his name, his name could have been Jav- Javal. J-A-V-A-L. But like, it was some name.

• 15:24Shaan Puri?

  Do you think Jamal just... Does he have trouble sleeping because he just laughs himself to sleep every night? Thinking about what his career is? He's like, I just can't believe it. I just, I'm just tickled. I just can't believe that this is what I did and I'm a millionaire.

• 15:36Sam Parr?

  This is called, uh, providing value. This is it.

• 15:39Shaan Puri?

  Oh, it's for sure.

• 15:40Sam Parr?

  And the, the, I just know that these Amish guys, they're not exactly known for, you know, being open to change. So, once you get a customer, like, you're with them. Like, they measure cat, or they measure churn, not like in terms of like, you know, like percentages per year, but it's like per generation. Because this is absolutely something that is going to be passed on from generation to generation. And the website looks like it was launched like web 1.0.

• 16:04Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, there's like seven sentences on the site. All right, this is amazing. So, this episode is basically the local million dollar businesses. That's what this episode is.

• 16:14Sam Parr?

  You want me to do one more? I have one more that could, that could fit in this category. This one, it's depressing, but, well, okay, so when you have-

• 16:21Shaan Puri?

  Well, don't do it if it's depressing. I'm trying to feel good here.

• 16:23Sam Parr?

  Well, it's important. So, when you have to euthanize your pet, it's like a horrible experience, obviously. It's like the worst thing next to your children. And so, I used a service that came to my house. And it, like, was the best of the horrible situation. It couldn't have been better for the, the worst thing ever. And I, after, you know, I'm a nerd, like, after a few months, I was like, this service, like, it was like phenomenal. What was this? How did I learn about this? The Google at-home pet euthanasia, it's the first one that comes up because they crush.

• 16:54Shaan Puri?

  I'm not, I'm not Googling that.

• 16:56Sam Parr?

  Okay.

• 16:56Shaan Puri?

  Bad karma. Not doing it.

• 16:57Sam Parr?

  Okay, it's called, uh-

• 16:58Shaan Puri?

  Don't even want that in my search history.

• 17:00Sam Parr?

  Lap of Love. So, lapoflove.com is the website. And I was reading this press release by them. And here's how this business works. So, they have vets, so they contract it all out. So, they have like, uh, uh, best practices that they use, and then they are like the call center, and they dish it out to a local vet who, you know, does what they need to do. And they teach them their ways, whatever. This website, Lap of Love, they put out a press release that said that they are, uh, getting 10,000 customers a week.

• 17:30Sam Parr?

  And they charge, I think, $600. And so if you do the math, this business is making hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, of which they split with the vet. But I was like, very happy with my service with these guys. And it was amazing that I had never heard of it and how this company just owns the entire space.

• 17:52Shaan Puri?

  Wow.

• 17:53Sam Parr?

  10,000 a week. Can you believe that?

• 17:55Shaan Puri?

  How'd you even know that that was a thing? How'd you find out about it?

• 17:59Sam Parr?

  Well, it's word of mouth. You know, like your wife or me was like...

• 18:03Shaan Puri?

  Telling people, yeah.

• 18:04Sam Parr?

  Yeah, we were like, "Look, this is horrible. I don't want to do this." And they're like, "Well, I use this service." And you hear about that one-liner and you're like, "Oh, my God, that's so much better than like..."

• 18:12Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 18:13Sam Parr?

  "...than the alternative." And that's how we found it. And I was like researching it. And what they do is they... Because I was like Googling. They just own... Like, if you Google that word, you know, like, related phrases, they own the Yelp pages in every city. So it will be like at-home pets, euthanasia in New York, in Nashville, in this. And they grow entirely through local search.

• 18:37Shaan Puri?

  Wow. That's a crazy business.

• 18:40Sam Parr?

  It's a crazy business, isn't it?

• 18:41Shaan Puri?

  It's a crazy business.

• 18:42Sam Parr?

  And so, like, and they said how much...

• 18:45Shaan Puri?

  10,000 a week, you said?

• 18:46Sam Parr?

  Sorry, I got confused. 10,000 a month. So they handle 10,000 a month. And it costs anywhere from $500 to $1,000, depending on a variety of things. But isn't this wild? And it is like, this is another one of those services where it sucks, but like, it's incredibly necessary. And I was amazed at how large this was.

• 19:05Shaan Puri?

  All right, here's another one. Under-the-radar business that just crushes with local businesses. I saw this guy, Tane, on Twitter talk about this. He said...

• 19:14Sam Parr?

  Who?

• 19:16Shaan Puri?

  I don't know how you say his name exactly. Don't make me say it again.

• 19:17Sam Parr?

  Okay, sorry.

• 19:19Shaan Puri?

  All right, so...

• 19:23Shaan Puri?

  I just found out I've been calling my piano teacher Steven, and his name is Vinnie, for like the last two months.

• 19:30Shaan Puri?

  All right, I'm still reconciling that fact of what I've been doing.

• 19:35Sam Parr?

  Did he just take it?

• 19:37Shaan Puri?

  Well, I didn't say it often, and I say it fast, because I was like, I was a little unsure.

• 19:41Sam Parr?

  But dude, saying the word "Vinnie" slow does not sound like you're saying Steven. Or saying the word "Vinnie" fast does not sound like you're saying Steven at all.

• 19:49Shaan Puri?

  I'd be like, all right, say bye to Steven. I'd like tell my daughter to say bye and then she would say bye, Steven. And I'd be like, oh my God. His name's Vinny. Blame her.

• 20:05Shaan Puri?

  Listen, honey, you're gonna learn an important lesson today. It's called taking one for the team. I need you to tell him, to say out loud the following words today. All right. So there's this business called Taro and Taro, his tweet was, today I learned about Taro. A hundred million dollar company that routes phone orders from Chinese sushi and pizza restaurants in the US to call centers in the Philippines. And so what it does is, what these guys did was, these two brothers, back in 2015, they start this business and they're basically like, hey, we'll help local businesses take orders over the phone. We will be your phone staff. So your, your staff is busy. You don't want to have somebody on the phones or just constantly interrupting their workflow. We'll just take the call and then we'll put the order into your system.

• 20:48Shaan Puri?

  And so they started doing that. They've, they basically service 3,000 local restaurants in the United States with phone ordering. And they basically, they're like, cool, like, we'll do this for 10% cheaper than your labor costs if you do this yourself. And by having phone ordering, you're gonna get an extra 10 to 20% of revenue that you wouldn't otherwise get. Simple, simple proposition, right? Get more revenue and I can do it for you at a lower cost than you could do this for yourself. And by the way, nobody cares who picks up the phone to, to take this order. They, as of this year, say that they've reached a hundred million dollar run rate and. And how do you spell it? T A R R O. And it stands for technology all restaurants run on.

• 21:33Shaan Puri?

  It's the Adidas of, of online phone ordering.

• 21:40Shaan Puri?

  And is this bootstrapped? I don't think it's, I don't know if it's bootstrapped or not, but it could be because this is the type of business you could definitely bootstrapped. It's like a heavy cash flow business.

• 21:51Sam Parr?

  Well, now it says it's AI powered phone ordering. Does that mean that they don't use Filipinos anymore?

• 21:56Shaan Puri?

  I think both, right? So I think it's basically.

• 21:59Sam Parr?

  Is AI a name of one of their workers?

• 22:05Shaan Puri?

  There's Alfred Ignacio over there. Powering all your orders.

• 22:10Shaan Puri?

  It's both. So I think there's, there's funny things happening with AI and call centers. So there's like AI tools that will change the accent of the person. So they, you know, you call somebody, they're in India, but their Indian accent gets remixed on the fly using AI. So it sounds like he's Steve in Wichita. And so that's like one tool that all these guys are using now is like, the AI doesn't take the order, but they just changed the accent so that you have an American accent.

• 22:34Sam Parr?

  What's that called?

• 22:35Shaan Puri?

  Uh, I don't know. There's a few, few companies trying to do that. Um, so there's accent changers, there's AI handles. Just let's say 50 to 70% of the routine things, and then it routes to the human in the sort of 50 to 30 to 50% of, of calls that couldn't be solved with AI. So like, basically AI is the, AI makes their call center need like, you know, half as many people as it did before. And that, the rest is just profit that just falls to the bottom line for them. So there's, there's some cool stuff happening with that. It's actually kind of interesting to track call center stocks to see what the market thinks is going on. Like, are they going to be extinct? Like, is call centers just going to go away? Are they actually going to, are they going to survive but become much more profitable? Because now they're AI powered and, and they cut a lot of their human costs. It'll be interesting to see how that plays out.

• 23:21Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. What happened? Interesting, you know, to the most boring person on earth, I guess. What happened to? The NBA playoffs are on. I guess that's probably more interesting.

• 23:31Sam Parr?

  Yeah, but if you're like listening to this podcast, you definitely might be in that category of people who are a bit as boring. What's a?

• 23:37Shaan Puri?

  Like, I think Coachella was last weekend and I only was watching the live stream of the Berkshire Hathaway conference.

• 23:44Sam Parr?

  What's the name of that really big company? Was it called Task Us or something like that?

• 23:49Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 23:49Sam Parr?

  Are they publicly traded?

• 23:51Shaan Puri?

  Um, I think. I think they are.

• 23:55Sam Parr?

  Is their market cap just getting obliterated right now because of all this?

• 23:58Shaan Puri?

  1.2 billion dollar market cap. And yeah, it's down in five years, it's down like 5X.

• 24:07Shaan Puri?

  But it's been, yeah, it's been, it got nuked basically from, well, it kind of was at the peak of the 2021 range. So like, let's see. Yeah, it basically went public right at like the peak of the market, like September 2021, and then has just been down since then.

• 24:21Sam Parr?

  I have gotten, oh, yeah, you're right. So it could be, it's a bunch of stuff.

• 24:25Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. Dude, by the way, I just invested this company. I think you, you might actually be an investor. Are you an investor in owner.com?

• 24:31Sam Parr?

  Yeah, yeah, he's cool.

• 24:33Shaan Puri?

  That thing is crushing.

• 24:35Sam Parr?

  It's crushing.

• 24:36Shaan Puri?

  This, this business owner.com is kind of amazing. So what they're doing is they go to restaurants across America and they're basically like, hey, you, you need software, you hate your current software, you're using 15 different tools, use the owner's system instead. Okay, that's actually like not that new of a pitch. You know, there's other companies that have claimed to be like, oh, we're an all in one, or we have the, the best point of sale checkout system. And these guys have just got it like really, really right because they're growing incredibly fast. And so what they do is they go to a company and they're like, hey, look, today, if I Google, there's a great case study on their website. Like if your case study is good, this is when I decided to invest.

• 25:17Shaan Puri?

  I was like doing like the diligence on it and I was, I watched their case study and most case studies on business websites are awful, god awful. I watched it and I was so thoroughly convinced and I just thought to myself, if they do their case studies this well, imagine how they're doing like the other important parts of their business. Cause this is like, you know, the, the sort of like, the thing that's a kind of a throwaway for most businesses and they're pretty poor at execution. So it was this dude who was a pizza shop owner in somewhere, maybe Pennsylvania or somewhere like that. And he's basically showing, he's like, look, if you Googled my pizza shop's name, if you Googled like whatever, like Town Slice Pizza, Pennsylvania. The first result is Slice. The second result is DoorDash. The third result is like, all these other companies are stealing my, like, people are searching for me. They're not searching for DoorDash.

• 26:02Shaan Puri?

  And they make these websites that rank in SEO. I was on page two. Basically, I started working with Owner, and Owner, first of all, now I'm the first result. Because I'm the first result, when people are searching for my business, those orders come through me directly. I don't have to pay DoorDash the 15% fee. My, on my website and my online ordering works really well, because that's what Owner does. They provide that like out of the box. I don't have to know anything about tech to be able to do that. And then, you know, I get these, I get customers' emails and phone numbers, and I'm able to text them, and we have promotions and sales and deals and things like that. And basically, I'm making an extra like 10 grand a month. That's huge for me. Like, that's like, uh, that's like the difference between being on the brink of failure, or having like a margin of safety. It's the difference of like hiring an extra person or not.

• 26:45Shaan Puri?

  And, um, and I just saw like, that's, that same like business proposition, which is like, look, you're, it's 2025. You need to have a website. You need to be able to take online orders yourself. And you need to rank for your own name at the top of Google. And, um, look, you don't want to have to deal with, you know, 15 tools to be able to do that, and we should do it for you out of the box and do it really well. And this business is scaling very, very fast right now. Very impressive growth. And, uh, this guy seems like one of those founders that's kind of like, high-octane. Um, I don't know him super well yet, uh, but just seems very, very high-octane.

• 27:22Sam Parr?

  I'm pretty sure.

• 27:23Shaan Puri?

  The intro I got to him was someone said, "This is the best company I've ever invested in, and this is the best founder I've ever invested in." And I was like, "Are you just saying words, or like, do you mean these words?" And he's like, "I mean these words." So I could be wrong, but I mean them. And I was like, "Wow, that's a hell of an endorsement."

• 27:39Sam Parr?

  The way that I invested in him was way less fancy as yours. I just, Jason Lemkin was like, "He's the best." And I just said, "Okay, in." And I remember talking to him, and when I talked to him, he, this was, I think, no, maybe this was four years ago. He was 21 years old, and he was telling me a story. And once I heard like 21 years old and Jason Lemkin saying, "He's the best," I was like, "Well, okay, cool. I think, I think I'm in." And the valuation, I believe, was really, really expensive. It was like a, uh, nine-figure, something valuation. And I was like, "This has got to be huge to like really be worth it, and I think he's gonna actually make it a massive, massive business." Have you ever even talked to him?

• 28:23Shaan Puri?

  I'll do it through email. We traded like five emails in one night because I was like, "Tell me the answer to these five questions," and then he did.

• 28:30Sam Parr?

  He is the Terminator. When I had a conversation with him, I was like, "Oh, you're gonna destroy everything in your path." Like, I could sense that. He gave me that vibe, where I was like, "I don't want to be your enemy."

• 28:43Shaan Puri?

  You're on a high protein diet, huh?

• 28:47Sam Parr?

  He's on his videos for work and stuff, like his YouTube videos, or whenever they gotta do like interviews. He's like, comes off like a really sweet, nice guy. When I talked to him one-on-one, I was, he's incredibly intense. He will annihilate people.

• 29:03Sam Parr?

  In an ethical, good way, but like, he's the type of guy where I do not want to compete against this guy.

• 29:09Shaan Puri?

  It's so funny how you get a vibe off people, and very quickly. So like, I remember Joe Rogan once described somebody, he was describing somebody who he just thought was just like a, in his mind, I don't know, just like a total loser, but like, just like a spineless person. And he, but the way he was describing them, he was like, he's like, "They just had no energy." You know, meet somebody and like, "Are your veins empty?" Like, "Where's the, is there any blood in your veins?" And I just remember when he said that, immediately in my mind, I could think of three people who are like that, just like very low-energy people in my life. And then you can meet these other people that literally like, they walk at a different pace. They have like a different amount of energy. I remember like, when we were hanging out in North Carolina, and Mr. Beast took us to Walmart to like, show us the things. And I remember like,

• 29:53Shaan Puri?

  I was like, "Why is this dude walking so fast?" Like, this guy's literally like, has like a extra heartbeat or something in his cadence. He's just like, walking faster than everybody else. And literally had more energy than anybody else. And he was busier than everybody else. And I couldn't tell like, is he so busy because he's got so much energy, or did he have to raise his level of energy? Does this guy have just more ATP in his body because his schedule demanded it? And I'm not, I still don't know like, cause and effect to that, but it was very obvious to me, as I've met more and more people, that literally having more energy is a common trait of like, the most successful people. And I don't know if it's cause or effect.

• 30:28Sam Parr?

  I was, uh, so I, I've got a, uh, you know, I think we, we have a small team, maybe 15 people. And a lot of them are these like young 25 year olds. And they're animals, like they're rabid animals. And they like do crazy animal stuff. And every once in a while, I gotta correct them and I have to remind them, stay crazy. Just like, I need to direct you crazy a little bit. And they were asking what I meant and I was trying to think of like, well, how can I give you a good analogy? And I was like, have you guys ever seen, uh, curling? I was like, you know, like when they take like that big rock that like is capable of just smashing through everything if it wanted it to?

• 31:01Sam Parr?

  And they push it and then there's all those people in the front with like these brooms that are just like sweeping the area to make sure like it, everything, like the path that you need to, that, that, that big rock that's a, like a brute force, like blunt object. So you are just guiding it to in the right lanes and it's like clearing the path. I was like, I'm the broom and you're the rock. And someone's, we're gonna, we're gonna push you down this lane and I just need to be in front of you constantly like clearing the space. And, uh, if, if I'm ever not clearing the space for you, uh, or I need to reprimand you, it's just me kind of saying like, hey, I need you to go like in the, this direction, but you need to continue being like this brute force rock.

• 31:41Shaan Puri?

  Be the rock.

• 31:42Sam Parr?

  Yeah, that's just gonna like smash through stuff. And it's just our job to like change, uh, directions every once in a while, but I need you to like stay what you are. And that is when I know I've hired the, the right people is when A, I feel like that. And B, sometimes I feel like I'm intimidated by them. Like have you ever hired someone and you're like, uh, uh, I, I want to keep you happy because if you go like, like if you, if you go work for someone else, it's gonna be bad news. Or, uh, you like almost get intimidated. Have you ever had someone who you hired who you're intimidated by?

• 32:13Shaan Puri?

  I mean, I don't know if intimidated is the right word, but I think I know what it should be. Like Furcon was like this, like, uh, immediately I was like, oh, whoa, okay, so. It's there's there's no yeah, but it's like, yeah, he's super smart, but he doesn't know anything about business. Nope, actually, he does. Yeah, but he doesn't, you know, he doesn't, he doesn't work that hard. Nope, actually, he works way harder than everybody else. So it's like, wait, wait, you're, there's no buts. It's just super smart and works super hard and is like well rounded and knows, knows enough about the other stuff to get it right. It's like, holy shit, okay, you know, and, and I would say the, the biggest thing is like their self assumption. So how do they carry themselves and how do they think about themselves? You hires a lot of people that want to fit into your company or they want to defer to you or they defer to your judgment. And every once in a while, you hire somebody that doesn't want to do any of those things.

• 32:58Shaan Puri?

  They come in, they see broken stuff, they want to fix it. They don't think what you were doing was right. They just, if it's, if it's good, they think it's cool. If it's broken, they think it's broken, like that's it. They don't think that anybody else is more qualified in the company to do it. Like they think they could do it themselves. They don't think that there will be an employee forever. Like they're like, cool, I'm here right now, there's a partnership and like, you know, eventually I'm going to be doing my own thing or I'm going to be, I'll be, you know, in the leadership of this company. I'll have more equity in this company than I have today. Like there's some people who have a confidence about that, about themselves because they have a certain self assumption. And

• 33:30Sam Parr?

  And for the people listening.

• 33:30Shaan Puri?

  Prophecy, you know what I mean?

• 33:32Sam Parr?

  Furcon was guy who worked with you at Monkey Inferno, the, the incubator. And he previously helped start AppLovin, which is a hundred billion dollar company. But between him, between AppLovin becoming a hundred billion dollar company and him starting it, he worked for you. And it wasn't like a clear runaway hit for a minute, but then it like, it did and his.

• 33:55Shaan Puri?

  Lovin?

• 33:55Sam Parr?

  Right, it wasn't like a clear hit.

• 33:57Shaan Puri?

  AppLovin was already a runaway hit when he, when he left. So he, he knew it was a winner.

• 34:01Sam Parr?

  What the hell was he doing working with you? Or maybe it had not paid out yet?

• 34:07Shaan Puri?

  Believe it or not, he doesn't care.

• 34:12Sam Parr?

  I don't know if I believe, I think, I think I'm a not in that category.

• 34:16Shaan Puri?

  Because I was there when the money hit.

• 34:18Sam Parr?

  Oh, got it. Okay.

• 34:19Shaan Puri?

  He was still working on our like beta release of our app that had 400 users and he was up till 3 a.m. That night and he couldn't have carried less and nothing changed between going from, you know, whatever, you know, normal person to being worth, you know, nine figures in an instant. Nothing changed. Nothing.

• 34:38Sam Parr?

  Well, I remember.

• 34:39Shaan Puri?

  And I remember even telling him, I said, look, man, I was like prepping him like a psychologist. I was like, look, man, it'd be crazy if nothing changed. I understand. We got to figure out like how we're are you just going to want to retire? Are you going to like, is you're going to lose that edge? Is it going to be temporary? You want to take some time, just go on vacation and enjoy it like? I was like, it's hard to walk into an opium den and not get high. I was like, it's hard. It would be like, I think, kind of crazy to assume you're going to get massively, massively rich, generationally wealthy, like in the next few months and that nothing changes. And then he was like, cool analogy. Can you go out? Can you get out of my way now so I could just do what I was doing? And I was like, all right. And then he, nothing changed. It was amazing.

• 35:18Sam Parr?

  I think I like walked into the office one time, like after, or what happened? I, I think I, at this point, I knew that he was like wildly successful and I saw him like, I don't, I don't remember exactly how it was, but I had this feeling like he had his hat turned around his, on the backwards of his head and he had like a screwdriver in his teeth and he was like, behind the TV, like installing a raspberry, what was that thing called? A raspberry pi? Yeah. He was like installing this like computer chip to like the TV and I was like, Furcon, what are you doing? And he was like explaining to me like how it'd be cool because this raspberry pi thing is like a computer. So he's turning the TV into the computer. So, and it like, and then the things that he wanted to do, like there was a handful of like amazing things and then it really kind of boiled down to like, isn't this cool?

• 36:03Sam Parr?

  Like, and I was like, yes, it is cool. And I remember I was trying to justify him like, but why are you? And then he just kept going, but it's cool. It's cool. Don't you think it's cool? And I was like, right. Yeah, you're right. That's actually the best reason why you should be looking like a mechanic and like doing this. And it was like, I, we, we were doing one of our sessions. It was at like 8 p.m. At night. That sounded different than how I meant for it to sound, but we were like talking about business at like 8 p.m. At night at your office and he was like there, like installing this like pie into your TV.

• 36:31Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. Yeah. And the funny thing is when Furcon joined the company, this is a good lesson, I would say, because it could have gone either way. So Furcon builds Apple oven. I think Apple oven at the time when he left was maybe like, $100 million a year business, but it was clear it was scaling fast. And he leaves and he leaves because he's like, cool. The rest of the job is managing people. If I want to stay CTO and like, I liked the beginning when I was building stuff. So I'm going to just build stuff. So he leaves and he decides to go build. He decides to learn mobile development. So he's like, oh, I think mobile is going to be big now. And so he's like, I want to actually learn Android development. And he starts building games for fun in his bedroom alone. And he does that for a little bit. I find him there and I'm like, yo, I think you're super interesting. You should come join us. Don't be in your room alone.

• 37:16Shaan Puri?

  No fun building that way. Come build with us. So he ends up joining us and he joins us like the head of Android. And within the first few weeks, it was like extremely obvious that this guy does not fit in. First of all, he's smarter than everybody. Second of all, he works harder than everybody. He was there, like everybody would leave. Our company culture was everybody would leave around 5pm. Most people had kids, they would go home. He would come in at 11 and he would leave something like 11pm. And then he would still be on Slack at 2am and then he would come in again the next day at 11, 11:30.

• 37:46Shaan Puri?

  And he would just do that every single day. And when everybody else would quote me a timeline, like, all right, cool. They will, I'll show you the prototype at the same meeting next week. He would show me the prototype the next morning. And so I was like, okay, this guy, he's going to break our culture one way or the other.

• 38:02Shaan Puri?

  And you could tell the other engineers, they both liked him, but were also a little bit like, this guy doesn't come in till lunch. He, you know, he's pushing updates at 2am and like we, we weren't working then. So we weren't involved with it. And you know, what's his deal? This guy dropped out of college. He's not like classically trained. So like, what are we going to do with this guy? And in my head, I was like, all right, one of two things is going to happen. Either this guy is going to, it's going to be like organ rejection. He's going to have to leave because he just doesn't fit. Or it needs to be that, like the thing where the like the organ, like the host takes, the guest takes over the body. I was like, okay. So I, I went out with him one night and I remember we were at a bar and I was just like, look.

• 38:46Shaan Puri?

  I can't, this is not official, but you're gonna be running this company. And I need you to start building out the team, the way you want it to be built. And you should work the way you want to work. Don't try to fit in because we're going to change this whole company with you kind of driving that, that engineering change. I was like, this is how a startup is supposed to feel. You're doing it right. And so pretty quickly, I just told him, you hire your own people. And they don't have to interview with everybody else, or you don't need everybody's blessing to sign off on a hire. So they would interview them, but if he liked the person, he could hire them under his team. And then eventually, you know, he became CTO, he became my co-founder and, you know, he became like, you know, leader of the company. But I had to basically, like, Amazon has this phrase, bar raisers. It's like you, you, you hire somebody and then they raise your bar of what good, what good looks like.

• 39:31Shaan Puri?

  He was a clear bar raiser. And there was a part of us that like, didn't know how to deal with that. And the right way to deal with it was to totally lean into it and be like, oh, that's the new normal for us. That you're the new normal, you're the new bar, bar setter of like, what, what, uh, what our engineering team should look like.

• 39:45Sam Parr?

  Did the other people quit? Like who, who won? I mean, obviously he is still there or he was there.

• 39:51Shaan Puri?

  Well, a couple of people adapted. So they were like, cool, I'm not, my lifestyle is not that I'm gonna be up till 2am, but I'm gonna crush in my nine to five. And I will work at that pace. And like, cool, you're gonna work a crazy schedule. I'm not gonna work a crazy schedule, but like, I'm here for it. I want to work at that pace. I want to be like that effective and I want to change the expectations of what speed looks like inside the company. And so a couple of people became that. And then a couple of people, we actually had a legacy business that was making a few million dollars a year profit. And so we spun out the rest of the team onto that business. I was like, you guys work on that company in that schedule and that pace. And this team is gonna work in this pace. And we split, we basically split the company in half, like a, like a divorce and like.

• 40:30Sam Parr?

  Dude, it's like Lord of the Flies.

• 40:32Shaan Puri?

  Like a happy, merry divorce. It was like, you guys get custody of those assets, we're gonna have custody of these assets.

• 40:37Sam Parr?

  That's pretty fascinating. It's like throwing people out on the different island and just saying like, you better figure it out, survive. And you losers are gonna go to this dying thing.

• 40:46Shaan Puri?

  Well, it wasn't dying. I mean, it was like, fine. It was, it was honestly, it was what some people wanted. Some people, like, not everybody wants to, to like grind like crazy. And what this was a very good way to do was be like, there are two, two paths. You keep your same job, your salary, all that stuff. One is a certain lifestyle, one is another. This lifestyle is easy, this lifestyle is hard. Self-select and the self-selection was very helpful.

• 41:12Sam Parr?

  Dude, he's pretty badass. We should have him on again. Now he's got like his space in Fort Mason, I think it's called. He's the man. We should have him on again.

• 41:21Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, of course. Love talking to Fergon.

• 41:23Sam Parr?

  What do you think? Is that it?

• 41:24Shaan Puri?

  I don't know exactly where I want to go with this, but I just want to share this with you. So I've been trying to help certain people in my life, like either start businesses or upgrade their business.

• 41:35Sam Parr?

  Like millions of people who listen to you?

• 41:38Shaan Puri?

  No, no, no. Like my like micro, like people who I care about, you know, like my trainer, for example. My trainer, today he's got a training business where his calendar is full. He's got more clients on his roster than he can handle. But you know, he's, he's trading time for money still. So he's, he's not scalable. He can only train so many people per day, right? So he's doing five, six sessions a day. He's driving to people's locations and he's training them. But like, you can't do 12 people per day, for example. He couldn't double his money if he wanted to. He definitely couldn't do his goal, which is, you know, make twice as much money with half the time invested, like half the, you know, with double the time flexibility. And so he's been starting, he started like a drink, an energy drink company. He started like a, like apparel companies, like trying to do these side hustles.

• 42:21Shaan Puri?

  But all of them, I'm like, dude, the beverage industry is like brutal, right? It's like a brutally competitive business to be in. The apparel business is just a brutal business to be in.

• 42:30Sam Parr?

  Might be better just to like, get another trainer.

• 42:33Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. So I'm like, hey, have you thought about getting another trainer? Or like, and in this case, I was like, what would be like an appealing version? It's like, here's some ways you could scale. So I was like, you can start a studio. And he's like, oh, I would love to have my own space, my own studio. And I'm like, okay, that's a way that you could get to your goal if you started a studio. And it's been very interesting to see kind of like how he would approach it versus how I would approach it. And so I basically told him, I was like, look, the way I wanted to get in shape. And instead of just being like, I guess I'll just wing it. I guess me who's never done this will just figure it out. I was like, no, let me get a coach, somebody who's already done this before, and I hired you as my trainer. I was like, I think you should basically have me as your trainer, your business trainer. And I was like, don't pay me anything. All you gotta do is book your, what do you call your first session?

• 43:18Shaan Puri?

  An assessment? Book an assessment. And he's like, all right, tomorrow? I'm like, great, yeah, let's meet tomorrow. So we started talking and we started doing this thing where basically I would, um, we would talk and I would just give them, I was like, how do I keep this so simple? Cause at the, in prior times when I talked to him, I remember like, I was such a terrible coach. I was like a trainer who would come in and try to train all your body parts in one session and like be showing you like the beginner thing, but then couldn't resist showing you the advanced thing. And then you're gonna do that, you're gonna get hurt. You're gonna pull back muscle. So I've been trying to be a better coach. And so I was like, all right, how do I keep this super simple? And so I leave them every time with one blue sticky note with one thing. It's all right. This is the one action. Do this between now and the next session and we're good. And it's been very interesting to see how much progress we can make just doing this very simple method.

• 44:03Shaan Puri?

  I'll just share with you kind of like how this works. So the same way that at the dance studio, I was like picking up information on, I was learning about a business while I was there watching my daughter, I also learned a little bit about a business. I basically realized like, that's something I've been doing for about 15 years now. And I think most people, if you just started doing that one thing, just start like paying attention to the business around you and start doing a little bit of napkin math, right? Try to figure out how many customers a place has, times the price every customer pays, gives you a good approximation of top line. You could just Google or ask AI, what's a good profit margin for a fitness studio? Typically, are they 10%, 40%, 50%, 20%? Like,

• 44:43Shaan Puri?

  what is the net profit margins for, for these things? And so what I realized is that most people don't, as I've been helping two or three people in my life do this, most people don't approach business this way. And I think if they did, they would have a lot higher chance of success.

• 44:58Sam Parr?

  I think that hiring a fitness, like, I was reluctant to hire a fitness coach, but then it made total sense because I remember, I was like, well, I was the best at whatever sport I wanted to do in high school when I, and then college where I played for a little while. When you are basically like a professional athlete, you have someone just telling you what to do every single day. You just do what they say. And I remember being so reluctant to hire a fitness coach. And then I did. And I started seeing like my body change in like two months. And then I was like, yeah, that works. And then I was like, well, maybe should I get a nutritionist? And I remember being again, so reluctant to do it. And then I got, I use my body tutor and I was just like, doing exactly what they told me to do. So I had accountability, but I also had education. They would teach me.

• 45:41Sam Parr?

  And I just kind of hit me. I'm like, why have I always been so reluctant to pay someone money to just tell me what to do? And once I kind of let go of that, I think I realized, and I've learned this in business as well, there's a lot of creativity that you need to have, but in general, there is like a process that you can follow where in a lot of cases, you will get to be fairly successful. Like, you know, you still have to invent stuff and you still have to like stick with it for years, but in general, just like with changing your body, it's just like if you do these five things, you will get 80% to where you want to go. And just only, and you don't need to think, you just need to execute these five things. And I think what people don't understand, I think you and I understand it a bit, even though emotionally, sometimes we forget it, but a lot of listeners

• 46:26Sam Parr?

  understand this, which is, uh, business is the exact same, where there's a series of steps where you can sort of iterate your way there, just like you can with your body, with your nutrition and things like that.

• 46:37Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, totally. The way I think about it is, uh, you're gonna have some rate of learning, some learning curve, right? So it might take you six months, might take you a year, might take you two years. You could definitely get there on your own. A coach is pretty much just a guaranteed way to speed up that learning curve. And, uh, that's like the first benefit you get. And then the second benefit you get is you're much less likely to quit during plateaus. Because the coach has some accountability, a coach has also seen those plateaus many times before, and a coach can get you out of, through the plateau faster than you're gonna get through it yourself. Um, and so those two reasons, I think I have probably five active coaches right now.

• 47:12Sam Parr?

  What, what?

• 47:13Shaan Puri?

  It's kind of insane.

• 47:14Sam Parr?

  Roughly, what category are they in? So you have, uh, a fitness, I think you also use my boot body tutors, so nutrition.

• 47:20Shaan Puri?

  So I have exercise, and then I have food, um, and, uh, food coach, which is probably the one that felt the weirdest to do, and now is in retrospect, the most obvious no brainer of all of them.

• 47:32Sam Parr?

  It's almost like a therapist, too. Food's a weird thing.

• 47:34Shaan Puri?

  It's more of a therapist than it is anything else. Yeah. It's like, I think when people think food coach, oh, so they're giving you a meal plan and macros. It's like, no, no, no. She's helping me figure out why I don't stick to any food, any food plan or macros that I've ever set for myself in the last 10 years. Um, and, and slowly uprooting those and like being in my corner along the way. I started learning the piano this year, and so I got a piano teacher that I got, I ended up getting two.

• 47:58Shaan Puri?

  Like two different ones to try to do that because one of the other realizations I had is that there's a massive difference between an average coach and a great coach. So like in the same way that in tech, there's this phrase about like 10x engineers. There's for sure a 10x coach or a 100x coach.

• 48:13Speaker 02

  You're pitting your piano coaches like, you know, Ms. Linda and like, like these two, these two old ladies next to each other like, you know, Ms. Linda said we should do it this way. What do you think about that?

• 48:24Shaan Puri?

  I don't even say anything. I just show up and I'm better and they're like, wow, you've been putting in a lot of work. I'm like, well, I had a couple of great sessions, you know?

• 48:34Speaker 02

  Okay. So you got two piano coaches. That's pretty wild.

• 48:37Shaan Puri?

  Yes. Business coach, executive coach, like a, yeah.

• 48:43Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. Like, what do you, what do you call it? Executive coach?

• 48:44Speaker 02

  Yeah. An executive coach?

• 48:46Shaan Puri?

  Uh, I think those are all I have right now. I had a PT briefly for my knee rehab.

• 48:53Shaan Puri?

  But yeah, basically anything I do now, my first step is to, uh, my first step is to start the same day I have the idea. That's like my rule. Oh, you want to do X? Great. Like same day, you need to do something in that area. You need to go have your first session in some way. Drop everything and do it. Um, so I have this sort of like drop everything and do it rule. And then the next thing that I'll do is I'll try to find a coach because I know a coach is going to speed me up in the process. And it's like, obviously these things cost money. So you can't like always get coaches for everything, but you kind of can. Like there's a guy in our basketball league, this guy Alex, and he's just nasty on the court. He's so good. And I'm like, wow, Alex, what did you do? And he's, he's smaller than me. He's quicker, but he's not like, he's not, it's not his athleticism is why he's so good. This guy's just better at basketball. And growing up,

• 49:38Shaan Puri?

  I thought I was training to be good at basketball. That was like a goal of mine. It's just I never had any coaches. I never, I didn't take it seriously. I didn't know how to, I didn't know how to train properly. And he told me this story. I was like, Alex, what were you doing differently? And he, he basically was like, when I was young, he's like, I didn't have any money for a coach, but I saw, I was at the gym training myself and I saw this trainer training this other kid. So I went up to the trainer and I was like, hey, how much for a session? He's like, oh, it's like $75. He's like, oh my God, no way. My parents are gonna pay $75 for a session. And so he goes, he asked a great question, which is he was like, is there anything I could help you with that you would be willing to give me a session for? If I, if I helped you with that thing? Like, you know, for example, do you have another session coming in? Like, could I be, could I run around and just be a rebounder? Shag balls for you? Could I clean up?

• 50:23Shaan Puri?

  Could I show up early? Could I do, could I do, you know, help you with your, your text messages to your, all your people you're scheduling? Like, what can I do? And the guy was like, all right, like, that's endearing. Look, fine. And so he, he lets him basically like help him during sessions. And then that, that way he was actually like learning while teaching somebody else. And then he'd have his own session at the end. And he's like, cool, give me 30 minutes. Give me 40 minutes at the end. And he just did that and he got so good as a young kid just doing that. And then eventually built his own business training while he was getting trained. You know what I mean? Um, and, and ended up actually turning it into a, a revenue generator versus just a cost for himself.

• 51:02Sam Parr?

  Okay, so I am so bought into everything you're saying. I do this as well. I've got all types of coaches. To add to it, the second thing that I do after getting a coach is I put a date where I'm like, I must perform on this date. And one of the ways that I got that idea, so like, for example, if it's like a fitness thing, it's like, I want to achieve this body fat by this time. Or I want to run this race on this date. Or, uh, you know, I want to be able to do X, Y, and Z. Lift this amount of weight.

• 51:28Shaan Puri?

  A goal, but it's not just a goal, it's a performance. Is that what I'm hearing?

• 51:31Sam Parr?

  I tried to make it a performance. So for example, uh, if it's just like a 5K, just I want to run a 5K in, in 21 minutes. That's not particularly fast, but it was hard for me. And it was just a really nice thing to work back from. So there's an end date. So it's, it's, I find it quite motivating. Or I want to bench this amount of weight, like on this date. And do you remember that TV show on MTV called Made? Where they would teach people how to learn something in approximately 30 days? And so it was like,

• 51:57Shaan Puri?

  I love that show.

• 51:58Sam Parr?

  I love that show. And so what they would do is they would take like this young woman that she was like, I want to do a backflip on a BMX bike. And, or I want to win like, I want to be able to win a skateboard competition. Like these like kind of like crazy ideas are like, I want to be, I don't remember if the backflip one always stuck in my brain. And they like hired a BMX coach and this little girl, her whole shtick was like, she's like a prissy, cool, popular girl. There's no way she wants to do this nitty gritty BMX thing, you know, with the kids from the other side of the railroad tracks. And she ends up doing it and in a competition, she did a backflip on a bike. And I remember that show, we should do an MFM version of Maid where everyone just, it doesn't matter what the

• 52:38Shaan Puri?

  Pick a thing.

• 52:38Sam Parr?

  It doesn't matter what the thing is, you just gotta pick a thing. It could be like, I want to go, uh, uh, try to like meet a girl, but use their language like in a foreign country. Or like, you know, I want to go like ask directions in Spanish or whatever. Like, I want to go enter a chess competition. Just something where it's like, you have a very short amount of time and you have to hire help. And you have to kind of jump off the cliff a little bit to master your skill or just even learn your skill a bit. So for you, it would be a piano recital or like, I want to have friends over and I want to play a song for them.

• 53:10Shaan Puri?

  Right. Yeah, I think that's great. I love that idea. It's kind of like we did the my first muscle challenge last year. I think it's a, it's like a cousin of that. Uh, I'm totally on board for this. I did a thing once that was, that was similar. In Australia, we were, uh, it's three of us and we basically each wrote down a thing that we would love to have done, but are scared as shit to do. So for example, one's persons was to do like, uh, perform a standup comedy, uh, set, like just go on an open mic and do five minutes. One of the guys, he had been in a long-term relationship with a girl from high, his like high school girlfriend. They had just broken up like five years later or something. And he really, he was like, I've never asked anyone out.

• 53:55Shaan Puri?

  And he's like, I just want to, he's like, I want to be out somewhere, see someone who I think is using, I want to approach her. I want to ask her out. And he's like, I just want to like, like not, I just want to overcome that one thing. And like, he's like, I know that sounds stupid. We're like, no, it doesn't sound stupid. Everybody's got these things, right? Another, um, another person's was, uh, to, um,

• 54:16Shaan Puri?

  I forgot how they phrased it, but I remember it was something like, you know at parties, when like the dance circle forms?

• 54:22Sam Parr?

  Yeah, they wanted to go in one.

• 54:24Shaan Puri?

  Go in one and do a thing and then get out. And I was like, what? And so we took a hip hop dance class together with our friend, this girl who, she's a great dancer. She's like a professional dancer. And me, my buddy Trevor and her went to a hip hop dance class, just prepping for the circle. Like the whole time, by the way, when you go to that class, it's two different classes. If you just show up to a class just for whatever, or you show up thinking, um, this is me going in the circle at some point.

• 54:51Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it's the best, right? You're like, I'm gonna Julia Stiles this sum bitch and like.

• 54:56Shaan Puri?

  We got kind of addicted to it. We would start to make up new ones to do every few days. So it'd be like, I'm gonna go for a walk right now. But I'm gonna have like three, like I'm gonna have three like conversa- like I don't know if this conversation was like, on my walk, I'm not just gonna smile and nod. Like I'm gonna, I'm gonna basically give a smooth compliment to like, you know, three people along the way. If I notice something I like, I'm gonna say it and it's gonna go, well, I'm gonna have that interaction.

• 55:17Sam Parr?

  Or like, I'm not gonna answer the question, how are you today with the word good?

• 55:21Shaan Puri?

  Exactly, exactly.

• 55:24Sam Parr?

  Yeah, my friend Noah Kagan used to have this thing where he was like, every single day, he was like, I was, when I was trying to get my business going, I would ask for a discount on every single thing that I bought. He's like, I just needed to get over like the nerves and just be not afraid of confrontation and asking for things.

• 55:38Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, that's amazing. Yeah, we had a whiteboard in our, our living room called, we, we, it was corny name, it was Fear Nation. We just wrote everything we'd be afraid of and then you, you try to cross them out. You pick one each day and you try to cross it out or pick one every couple of days and try to cross it out.

• 55:50Sam Parr?

  We're gonna do MFM made. Instead of MTV made, we're gonna have MFM made.

• 55:55Shaan Puri?

  What's yours gonna be?

• 55:58Sam Parr?

  That's an interesting question. I would need to think about it. I, um, I don't think it would be a fitness related thing, cause that's too easy. But I would have to pick like an emotional thing, like the equivalent of asking a girl out.

• 56:10Shaan Puri?

  I think it'd have to be dancing.

• 56:11Sam Parr?

  Dude, that would be the worst. Maybe, that would be, yeah, I would rather, uh, like punch myself in the stomach 20 times and go and dance in the circle.

• 56:21Shaan Puri?

  You're like, nevermind, edit this out, Ari. We're not doing this episode.

• 56:25Sam Parr?

  What do you think? Is that it?

• 56:27Shaan Puri?

  That's it.

• 56:27Sam Parr?

  Amish, dying pets, fur con.

• 56:32Sam Parr?

  Very eclectic episode. Kids playing ballet.

• 56:35Shaan Puri?

  You never knew you wanted.

• 56:39Sam Parr?

  All right, that's it. That's the pod.