#201 - Why You Should Spend 5x Your Budget on an Engagement Ring

In this episode Sam (@theSamParr) and Shaan (@ShaanVP) break down different Micro-SaaS and P2P marketplace companies. They also talk about changes we'll see in advertising, a non-profit that is an alternative to Substack/Wordpress, and IKEA Hacking. They end the episode talking about when it makes sense to have an unlimited budget for something. --------- * Want to be featured in a future episode? Drop your question/comment/criticism/love here: https://www.mfmpod.com/p/hotline/ * Support the pod by spreading the word, become a referrer here: https://refer.fm/million * Have you joined our private Facebook group yet? Go to https://www.facebook.com/groups/ourfirstmillion and join thousands of other entrepreneurs and founders scheming up ideas. --------- Show notes: * (:49) Intro * (2:00) What's going on with iOS privacy settings * (8:59) The future of advertising * (12:32) Ghost.org - Wordpress meets Substack * (17:10) IKEA Hacking * (28:39) The $400 million fitness influencer app * (32:01) Micro-SaaS tools that help you win * (37:25) BabyQuip.com - a P2P rental marketplace for parents on vacation * (41:37) Teachers paying teachers * (48:06) What regrets will you have at 90? * (57:58) The unlimited travel budget

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

• 0:00Sam Parr?

  I don't care if I only had 100,000, I'm spending 50,000 because this is the whole point of working really, really hard is spending my money on stuff that will make my family happy and they'll talk about forever.

• 0:22Sam Parr?

  All right, welcome to the episode. We actually talked about like maybe eight legitimately wonderful ideas. We talked about privacy startups. We talked about ghost.org, which is a WordPress competitor that we actually think is going to be a hundred million dollar plus company. We talked about burflow.io, which is a new business that just started like two weeks ago. That's quite interesting. What else did we talk about?

• 0:40Shaan Puri?

  We talked about IKEA hacking, which is the art of souping up and upgrading your basic furniture into something dope using IKEA parts and what, you know, that little trend that might actually be something that you could build a business around.

• 0:54Sam Parr?

  This is going to be an interesting episode because we actually rattled off a ton of stuff. It just went from thing to thing to thing to thing.

• 1:01Shaan Puri?

  Sam tells you why you should be spending three times as much on your engagement ring as you're planning to.

• 1:06Sam Parr?

  Five times as much. I spent five times as much and I don't regret it at all. And I actually think everyone should. So listen to the end. That's the, that bit's at the very end at 54 minutes, I think. Give it a listen and also go and click that subscribe button on iTunes and that follow button on Spotify because we're going to be launching some more episodes that are interesting next week.

• 1:25Shaan Puri?

  And go subscribe to the YouTube channel. We just had our first video that had 100,000 views on YouTube. So we're getting big over there. Let's do it.

• 1:33Sam Parr?

  All right, Sean, grab your iPhone for me. I'm going to talk to you about something, but first I'm going to show you. So, all right, go to your iPhone, go to settings, type in privacy and click privacy.

• 1:47Shaan Puri?

  Type in privacy, all right.

• 1:50Sam Parr?

  All right. And if you're following along on an iPhone, do this for me. This isn't like a trick. This is like a real thing. All right. Click location services and then scroll all the way to the bottom where it says system services.

• 2:01Shaan Puri?

  Yep.

• 2:02Sam Parr?

  All right. After you click that, scroll halfway down to where it says significant locations. Do you see that?

• 2:08Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 2:09Sam Parr?

  Click that. And it asks you for your password, probably.

• 2:13Shaan Puri?

  It just Face ID'd me, alright.

• 2:15Sam Parr?

  Alright, now your latest, your latest location, it might say Vegas or Nevada or something, click it.

• 2:20Shaan Puri?

  Yep.

• 2:21Sam Parr?

  So what you're gonna see is...

• 2:24Shaan Puri?

  My precise location.

• 2:25Sam Parr?

  Your precise location is tracked forever. So since you use your phone, and you could clear your history, but you, you see how it's like tracking all your stuff?

• 2:35Shaan Puri?

  By the way, I, I clicked it, it says, "Arrived via 27-minute drive." It's like, it knows exactly when I arrived and how I arrived.

• 2:41Sam Parr?

  Because it used Apple Maps, or like, it uses a bunch of stuff. It'll tell you, like, how you got there. It'll tell you what apps you were using when you were getting there. It'll tell you all types of interesting stuff. Now, the reason I'm talking about this is I want to tell you a story about privacy, and I wanted to show you, like, why this is crazy, because you, like, knew that, like, if I told you, like, intellectually, you'd be like, "Yeah, of course they're tracking me."

• 3:01Shaan Puri?

  Your iPhone tracks you, yeah, of course.

• 3:03Sam Parr?

  So I just wanted to show you.

• 3:04Shaan Puri?

  It is weird to see it like that.

• 3:05Sam Parr?

  It's weird to see it. And the reason I'm bringing this up is I read this story about this guy named Kyle McDonald. And in 2011, he basically did this story where he, well, actually, let me tell you this first. So he was interested in, in privacy, and he thought, he read this line, and it said, "Can you imagine living a life without any private information, where with no private bank statements, no private files on your computer?" It's hard to understand, right? But what if you actually asked that question a little bit differently? So, do you trust the government? Do you trust large banks? Do you trust Facebook? Do you trust Google? Do you trust these large entities with your information? Because that's kind of like the same thing, but just asked a little bit differently. And so he did this first test where he created this thing called KeyTweeter,

• 3:47Sam Parr?

  and every 140 characters on his keyboard automatically tweeted. So like, there, there was no privacy, because he wanted to see what was the world like without privacy. And he took it a step further, and so he went to an Apple Store in Brooklyn, and they had 50 computers, and he installed an app on all 50 computers that automatically took a picture every like 30 or 60 seconds. And anytime it detected a face, it would send him the pictures, and he published it as like an art exhibit, an art thing of like, "Look at what people look like when they're looking at computers at a laptop in Apple." And after publishing that, the Secret Service raided his home, and Apple, Apple contacted the Secret Service, they raided his home, they took his computers,

• 4:30Sam Parr?

  they did a thorough investigation, they declined to prosecute, but they definitely could have done something. And I thought that that was amazing. When I started thinking about that, I'm like, "Isn't that crazy?" That I am, I would be, I would be upset too. If someone took my picture, I wouldn't be upset to call the police, but I would be upset. I wouldn't like it. Isn't that crazy that I'm upset about that, but I like type in all my information throughout the web or I let someone track me. And it's quite an interesting way. And I thought, what's another way? And so I discovered this little hack. I'm like, when I see that, it actually changed my perception. And so there's this issue going on where I actually think these privacy startups are going to be huge in 10, 20, 30 years. Now, my problem that I'm having personally is I'm actually struggling to find different solutions that need to like different ways to solve or different problems that need to be solved.

• 5:16Sam Parr?

  But I agree with this general premise of like, when I just did that experiment where I showed you your tracking stuff. And when I just like read this guy's art story, I was like, yeah, I'm totally not okay with that. I don't like that.

• 5:27Shaan Puri?

  Right. You tweeted something out that was like this. You go, say, say your tweet. You go, imagine if you walked into, go ahead.

• 5:34Sam Parr?

  Yeah. So let's just say that you're walking around the street and a company walks you into their office and they go, check this out. And they give you a file cabinet. You open this file cabinet and there's 10,000 pictures of you and your family taken throughout the last five years. And you had no idea that those pictures were being taken. How would you feel about that? Of, of course you'd feel violated. Now they would say, they would say, look, you were in public. And I would say, yeah, I know. I, I was in public. I can't be too angry, but I still don't feel right about this. Now that's exactly how, what happens with your data. You know that you're opting into things. You know, you're, you're consenting. But sometimes you don't realize what you're getting into and you, if you actually truly knew what was happening, you might regret it.

• 6:15Sam Parr?

  And I think that the next generations of humans, like the guys who are five and 10 years old now, I actually think that they're not going to like this stuff. And then we're going to see a lot of products that come out that fight it because I think that like, when you think of like, oh, wow, you used to be able to smoke in a restaurant in the 1990s. I mean, I remember when I was a kid, I could smoke in a restaurant or you, there'd be smoking in a restaurant. Now we think that's asinine. I think that the privacy stuff now, we're actually going to look back in 20 years and be like, I can't believe that that was, you were able to do that. So anyway, I wanted to start it off with that, that experiment.

• 6:46Shaan Puri?

  I like that. I like that story a lot and I'm with you. We've talked about different quote unquote, privacy focused startups ranging from like privacy.com to DuckDuckGo and how that's

• 6:58Sam Parr?

  I love privacy.com by the way.

• 6:59Shaan Puri?

  Become like a real kind of like sort of competitor to Google and it obviously in a niche, but hey, it made it. It made it out after like, you know, 10 years against Google. And we've talked about different, different versions of this, whether it's browsers, phones, a lot of the crypto stuff is based on these, these same principles, right? Like you own your data and you decide you custody it yourself rather than trusting this like kind of central company to do, to, to hold it for you. And so I'm definitely with you that I think that some really big companies can be there because people really give a shit about this and you could tell people give a shit about this. Like it's ironic. You were saying, go to your Apple iPhone settings because if you walk, if you go down the street in

• 7:41Shaan Puri?

  San Francisco, you're going to see huge billboards and it just says privacy and it's just Apple and there's a phone blocking out your face like this, like somebody holding a phone and you can't see their face and that's their whole ad and that's their differentiation. That's their shtick about like what they care about. At the Superbowl, they had that ad of somebody just looking at their phone, like typing it like, kind of like a text message to somebody. They're just laughing uncontrollably, but they never explained what it is because it's like, hey, that's your information. And, and so Apple is like basically bet the farm on privacy as like their core attribute that they're going to be providing to customers, like the number one value prop now. And, but you know, here you go. You go into, you go into your phone settings and it's like, hey, we've tracked

• 8:24Shaan Puri?

  your location and you can share that. And here's, here's all the different services you've shared that with, you know, here. And they are trying to fight back. Like you've, you've probably heard the Facebook stuff that happened, but if you're not advertising on Facebook,

• 8:35Sam Parr?

  You should actually

• 8:36Shaan Puri?

  realize how big of a deal it was.

• 8:37Sam Parr?

  You should explain what's going on because even I, I don't own an advertising business anymore, but I did. Even I was a little bit under, undereducated, but it's actually an incredibly big deal. And this is an incredibly big deal for a consumer, but also as business people. Last week, we talked about this inflection with the NCAA athlete thing. This is actually a, a new inflection. It actually helps guys like me who owned an advertising business, but I don't, not anymore.

• 9:01Shaan Puri?

  Right. Yeah. So, so basically Facebook's this, you know, obviously it's the advertising juggernaut. It's Facebook and Google. And with Facebook, Facebook relied on having obviously detailed targeting information about you. People always said, oh, it's creepy.

• 9:14Shaan Puri?

  You know, your iPhone, my iPhone's listening to me. And, and by the way, do you know the explanation, the real explanation of why, of how that works? It's like, dude, I was just talking to my friend about this and then, you know, and now it's showing up in my, my Facebook ads. And like, the reason why is because your, your friend has searched for a thing or interacted with a product. And then they know that you were close to your friend, your phones were in close proximity. And so they start showing you ads that have been like your friends, that your friends have been interested in, because they know that that works and there's a chance that you had talked about it. And then, you know, out of 30 times that, that you didn't talk about it, you just saw an ad and it just went by you. And then the one time it's the thing you guys were talking about, it stands out and you remember that and you think Facebook's listening to you.

• 9:56Shaan Puri?

  But nonetheless, um, Facebook basically had the biggest targeting machine in the world, right? You could segment by state, by religion, by whatever. And then they've slowly stripped away some of those things as they got in trouble for, you know, like, privacy with the election, about what, what sorts of things you can target on. Fundamentally, Facebook knew more about you than you knew about yourself. Facebook knows before you're pregnant, right? Facebook knows you're pregnant before you know you're pregnant. And it knows based on your behaviors, it knows based on your interests, it knows based on many things, uh, you know, a lot of stuff about you. And so what happened is Apple basically stripped the one thing Facebook needed. It lets you, Facebook basically lets you opt out of data tracking.

• 10:37Shaan Puri?

  So when you update to the new iOS, or sorry, Apple did, when you update to the new iOS system, it says, hey, do you want to share all your data? So you're just like, no. And that one no took away Facebook's entire like, kind of like, knowledge about you as a customer. And so you've opted out of, of this tracking. And so now when you go visit websites, Facebook doesn't get that data back to it, where it doesn't get that, that information back. And so as a Facebook advertiser, if you're in e-commerce right now, all the numbers just sort of changed overnight. Uh, like even when you send it, you show a Facebook ad to somebody, they click it and they go buy a product from you. Facebook's only catching like 60% of those conversions. It doesn't know about the other 40% because they've opted out of tracking or it didn't work. And so, uh, Facebook, all of a sudden, it's kind of like scrambling to figure out, all right,

• 11:22Shaan Puri?

  how the heck are we going to like deliver the same value to our advertisers, which is our main business model, without the, it's like, you know, fighting with one hand tied behind your back now, uh, halfway through the fight. And so that's, that's sort of what Apple did to Facebook and Facebook tried to fight it in court. And they tried to do all this PR where they're like, you're hurting small businesses. And in reality, they are hurting small businesses.

• 11:41Sam Parr?

  You are, you are, yeah.

• 11:42Shaan Puri?

  But you know, net-net, it's good for the consumer to not have Facebook, just build this like super-rich profile of your every move and your every taste and your every tendency, just so that businesses can advertise to you better.

• 11:55Sam Parr?

  So if you're listening and you got a privacy or something like related to this idea, I would like to learn about it.

• 12:01Shaan Puri?

  Privacy startups, reach out to us.

• 12:02Sam Parr?

  I'm interested. I got a few more ideas. You want to go after one?

• 12:07Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, go for it. You do one.

• 12:09Sam Parr?

  All right. I'm going to tell you one interesting one. I'll tell you two. The first is called Ghost, ghost.org. Have you heard of ghost.org?

• 12:17Shaan Puri?

  I've used Ghost, yeah.

• 12:19Sam Parr?

  Okay, so I'm interested in this. Ghost, it's a WordPress meets Substack is the best maybe explanation. So it's a WordPress site. It's its own platform, so it's a WordPress competitor. But they offer a handful of features, like you can accept money for a paywall article. They have a few more features. I actually don't know all the features that they have and why people love it.

• 12:39Shaan Puri?

  So let's say the use case is you want to spin up a website for yourself, you can use Ghost. You want to spin up an email newsletter that's either free or paid or both, you can use Ghost instead of Substack. Or you want to spin up a community, a paid community, you can use Ghost. And so basically Ghost is this open-source version of Substack. It's this low-cost, instead of, let's say, Substack that take 10% of all your revenue, Ghost just says, hey, pay us 10 bucks a month and we're happy. And so they don't take a percentage of your revenue. So for a lot of people, that could be thousands of dollars a month that you're saving if you use Ghost.

• 13:11Sam Parr?

  And they have different tiers, so $10 a month, $30 a month, $80 to $200 a month. And so there's a few interesting things about it. But first, like, the guy behind it is intriguing. So he launched it as a nonprofit, which I actually think is stupid, but it probably was good for like PR and a lot of people actually worked on it for free to help him. I think definitely he should switch. But it's actually making three and a half million dollars a year. And he uses a ton of people, like free labor, like people who just want to contribute. And I think he actually has staff. But what he does is if you go to ghost.org/about, he actually reveals all of his revenue. And I think that's interesting because I was going through this and I'm an investor in a company called ConvertKit. Maybe you are too, I don't remember.

• 13:57Sam Parr?

  This company called ConvertKit, they do something like 30 million in recurring revenue right now. They're in the value of, like, you could say that maybe they're worth 200 to 30 million dollars based off of like, public comp. So 10 times revenue-ish. And I was looking through ghost.org's numbers. They're very similar to what ConvertKit was about four years ago when they just got started. And so my prediction, and I want to go on record by saying this, is A, I think this is awesome. And B, I actually think that this could be a multi-hundred-million-dollar company in the making. And you could watch this guy build it in public. And I think it's interesting. Also, he had one major quote. So typically, people who build these types of things are kind of like nerdy and engineer-like, which means they're sometimes like, reserved and held back. And I, which I like. But he

• 14:41Sam Parr?

  had a great quote that I read. He goes, someone goes, what's your major advice for people getting started? He goes, honestly, my single biggest piece of advice would probably be to stop looking for so much advice and shut the fuck up and go build something.

• 14:53Sam Parr?

  So what do you think about this company? Do you agree in my prediction that this could actually could be a multi-hundred-million-dollar business?

• 14:59Shaan Puri?

  Okay, kind of boring, but I agree. Right? It's more entertaining when we disagree. But I totally agree. I used Ghost for many of the reasons you talked about. A, I was intrigued. I thought their story was interesting. I liked that they're kind of like pirates. They're sort of like, just going against the grain on a bunch of stuff that they were doing. Product is good. Not super simple to use. It's kind of like, I also find, frankly, I find WordPress to be a little bit confusing, if you want to actually...

• 15:24Sam Parr?

  WordPress is incredibly confusing.

• 15:26Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, like, it's kind of like, easy to get the first thing going. And then to get it to do what you want takes like, a lot of stuff. I'm surprised this is as small as it is. So 3.7 million annual run rate. I'm surprised it's that small. Because Ghost has been around for a while.

• 15:38Sam Parr?

  Four years.

• 15:40Shaan Puri?

  So I don't think that's, I don't think it's that impressive where it is. But it's sort of like a duck that go, where I'm like, I believe, first, I believe that these guys are not going to quit. So I think that's like, you know, the first thing. These guys aren't going away. And when they don't go away, they are very differentiated and uniquely positioned, where they're going to pick up like, 10% or so of this entire wave of like, self-publishing that's going on with Substack and others. And I, like, I'm more excited about this business than I am about Substack.

• 16:09Sam Parr?

  100%. I completely agree with you. And the reason I bring this up to listeners is not necessarily this is a new idea that they can go and do. But if you want to go and watch this person build, he updates the blog every month and he reveals most all their revenue. They're also a nonprofit. So if you dig around, if you Google like Ghost Foundation 501(c), you probably can see their total financials because nonprofits disclose that. But really cool company that you could watch being built. It's still small now, but it's going to be fun to watch this being become huge over the next four years.

• 16:40Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I'm with you on that. All right, I got some ideas. So one is from Trends, actually, this IKEA hacking thing. So I saw this in y'all's Trends, like whatever, the weekly newsletter thing that you guys put out. And I thought this was pretty fascinating. So what is IKEA hacking? IKEA hacking is when you buy something that's sort of like a basic looking piece of furniture. And then because IKEA is like, what's it called, totally modular store, like any piece of, any piece of furniture, it's like, all the wheels are kind of like, they accept this one, like, one peg. So you can go swap 50 different wheels onto the same piece of furniture, or same thing with the handle, or the facade, or the like, you know, the top, the tabletop, the glass top, whatever, right?

• 17:24Shaan Puri?

  So it has like this uniform nature to it, which lets you just swap parts, almost like Minecraft or Roblox or something like that. And so IKEA hacking is the art of taking something that's sort of a simple, plain Jane look in IKEA, a piece of furniture, and then you go to the store and you just buy different little upgrades, you know, like you're souping up a car on Pimp My Ride. And then you, but you're pimping out your dresser, or your desk, or whatever it is, and you make something that looks pretty sick. And actually, it was just like, you know, $180 worth of random IKEA parts that if you assemble them correctly, they take you from this before picture to this after picture. If it's a YouTube video, put up the before and after that's in from the Trends thing. It's awesome. Like, it just looks so simple, like, very basic looking thing to like a really cool

• 18:09Shaan Puri?

  looking thing. And this was all just done using IKEA parts. So I have some ideas around this, but did I, first, did I even accurately describe it?

• 18:16Sam Parr?

  Yeah, you described it correctly. And the way that we discovered this, or I think, I mean, I used this four years ago when we first started our company. Basically, I found this subreddit called IKEA hacking. And what I did was I bought a $150 kitchen countertop. It was basically like a, a really nice... Wood block. That's all. I mean, that was like a like a countertop, but I and then I just went and got some legs from from a from like a whole totally different thing. This countertop you're actually supposed to lay on like granite or like a like a like a countertop. And I just but I just screwed legs on it and I put it in the middle of our room and that was like our kitchen table at our office. And that's and I think I started talking to Steph about IKEA hacking. It's very fascinating. I don't know what the business ideas are, though.

• 18:55Shaan Puri?

  Okay, so here's a business idea. So first, it's r/ikeihacks. It's got 78,000 members on Reddit. So back to the episode we did with Greg Eisenberg, where he talked about unbundling Reddit. This is a classic example. So shout out to Greg. Basically, I would look at a community like this and I'd say, huh. These people are pretty passionate about what's uh what they're doing here and like these photos are kind of amazing. These would make for great ads. This would make for great content, just seeing uh seeing this, right? And so I would just go to r/ reddit.com/r/ikeihacks. And then I would sort by like top, top posts, you know, for the year or something like that and just go get a sense of like what's there.

• 19:35Sam Parr?

  And I think and then click comments and read all the top comments of all the top posts.

• 19:40Shaan Puri?

  So I think you could do a few things here, right? I think you could do what you I so I would then take many of the proven business models and then I would like apply them here. So if I was getting started, what would I do to start? I would start by saying, look, I don't know the exact business model, but what I do know is that this is great content. So I would create an Instagram account right away, right? Because the first thing that you got to know is that most people don't bury their head in Reddit. They're not going to find all these new subreddit, even someone like me who uses Reddit every day. I didn't know about this subreddit. And so let alone my sister, who will never use Reddit and she'll only use Instagram. And so like the first thing I would do is I would immediately create an Instagram account. That's just posting the IKEA hacks, the best pictures from from Reddit and basically just plagiarize it and just put it there. And then just credit the username from Reddit in every photo as a photo credit.

• 20:25Sam Parr?

  Just just so you don't get in trouble.

• 20:28Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, just so I would say, what are you talking about? I was given credit right there. And it's like, dude, you're ripping this off.

• 20:34Shaan Puri?

  So that's the first thing I would do. I would try to get that to like 50 to 100,000 followers on Instagram. Cause that's now my asset. That's my audience that's interested in this thing that I can then leak out different products. So it could be a course, like a simple like $100, $200 course. That's like your guide to Ikea hacking. It could be like individual courses. It's like the bedroom course, the off, home office course, the home garage, you know, the garage gym course or whatever, right? Like maybe different modules that I would do. So I would maybe think about courses. I would think about, maybe I could sell these as kits. So like, maybe I could save you the hassle of having to go to Ikea. But like figure out, oh, I need this knob and then this little paper thing.

• 21:16Shaan Puri?

  And then this other thing, and then those three together are what you use to like make this vintage looking dresser. Maybe I would just sell the vintage looking dresser kit and it's, it might just be as simple as a recipe. Walk into Ikea, go to the section 198 point C and go pick up this item. Right? And so it might be something like that. I don't know what I would do, but I do think there's like a small bootstrap business. And this is a good business for somebody who is genuinely passionate about this. Right? So like, how do you take what I'll call your like, okay, this is not meant to be offensive, but like, there's a lot of hobbies that are like basic bitch hobbies. So what's a basic bitch hobby? Basic bitch hobby is a hobby that you think is unique to you.

• 21:52Sam Parr?

  It's like saying like, no, you're fucking disgusting. No offense.

• 21:56Shaan Puri?

  Anytime you say no offense, it's like, it would be just brace yourself for some offense.

• 22:00Sam Parr?

  Yeah, no offense. I fucking hate you. No offense.

• 22:03Shaan Puri?

  So, so, so no offense here. So like for guys, the basic bitch hobby is like sports. Oh, bro, I love, I love the NBA. Yeah. You and like 80 million other people right now, right? So it's not like a unique hobby. So you can't, how do you turn your passion into business? Well, it's not a unique passion. So you're probably going to have like a me too business unless you think of a new angle. And so another basic bitch hobby is like, oh, I love interior decorating. It's like, cool. You and like 90, 90 million other people who like to watch HGTV and just judge stuff. Or like, you're happy to scroll on Instagram, pretty looking things and push like, well, I think that's why if you, if you look at it from this angle with like Ikea hacks, you're finding a niche and you're building your own audience on that, on that, like that one kind of trend.

• 22:45Shaan Puri?

  And then maybe you can release some kind of subscription product, education product, D to C product, like something to that audience. And now you've turned your basic hobby into a business.

• 22:54Sam Parr?

  We already talked about the basic bitch version of this for us, which was the knees over toes guy. Another, another example of this.

• 23:00Shaan Puri?

  I love working out dude.

• 23:02Sam Parr?

  Another example of this is Philips Hughes. Philips Hughes light bulbs, crazy subreddit that is like, has a rabid fan base. I've actually-

• 23:11Shaan Puri?

  Like lighting or something, right? What is it?

• 23:13Sam Parr?

  Philips Hughes, it started as just a bulb that was, and you would say, Alexa, make the bulbs, or you know, make the living room purple. But then they have like 50 other products now, and people like have all these blogs, and they're actually making good money. I bet you like Apartment Therapy, or like one of these bigger brands actually owns one of these blogs. I'd have to scroll down and look at who the copyrighted, owns the copyright. But basically, it's blogs on where to put the lights, like, under the bed in order to make it feel cool.

• 23:40Shaan Puri?

  Right. An example of who did this well is House of Highlights. I don't know if you follow them on Instagram, but they're, they're big, basically, they did, they took ESPN SportsCenter, which was like this 30-minute television show, highly produced, and all it was doing was showing you the best highlights of the day. And so back in the day, you know, like spores would happen all day, and then the evening, or the morning, the next morning, you would watch SportsCenter to catch up through the best highlights, right? It's like just the sugar. And House of Highlights smartly realized, hey, you know, we could just post those as like 10-second clips on Instagram as soon as they happen, all day. And like, I can basically have like two people, two like, people who like the NBA, just run this account, and this account can grow to like a million people. So the guy like Omar created this thing.

• 24:19Sam Parr?

  I, I think Bleacher Report owns it.

• 24:22Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, so he ends up selling it to Bleacher Report and, and runs it there. They, they run it now. I bet you whatever he sold it for, he sold it for way too little. And so like, you know, overtime did kind of the same thing. But, but anyways, that's like an example of taking these, like, how do you take this content that's not your content? It's not original content. It's in this like kind of basic bitch hobby, and then you turn it into like a media, a media property that you own, and then you own that audience, and you could figure out what you want to do from there.

• 24:50Sam Parr?

  So there's this couple who, they got popular because right before the pandemic started, there was a French guy and his American girlfriend, who are now husband and wife, and they started baking croissants in their apartment. And then they brought it to work, and they like sold them to their friends or their coworkers. And then eventually they created an Instagram, and they went viral, and- The apartment that I'm staying in right now bought like pre-ordered, you have to preorder eight weeks out because they're sold out for weeks and weeks. And they're just baking this, these croissants and cookies out of their apartment. And the guy who owns my apartment got them and then ended up going out of the country and he's like, hey, you can actually have my order. It's like $90 of like these fancy croissants.

• 25:31Sam Parr?

  And so on Sunday, I'm going to get those fancy croissants and I invited Dave Nemitz, the founder of Bleacher Report and his wife to come over and eat these like, I was like, hey, you want to, these are like fancy girl croissants. Like, I don't understa- at the time, I didn't know the story, but like, for some reason, I think this is a big deal. Do you want to come over and eat these with your kids? So I'll be eating croissants with the founder of Bleacher Report on Sunday and I can ask him the story about house highlights.

• 25:54Shaan Puri?

  That's, yeah, do, please do. It's amazing by, by him. Like, mad, mad credit to them for picking this up before ESPN or anybody else. I think, by the way, he listens to the podcasts or at least he like talks to us on Twitter a bunch. And so he seems great and Bleacher Report. I saw his talk at HustleCon, very impressive. Like the way they kind of like won and they survived. I just remember this one anecdote he told, which was, he was like, yeah, we basically like, every other content site was kind of like, okay, I might butcher this just because I'm trying to remember a talk from three years ago. But here's what I remember him saying. Every other like sports news website was just talking about whatever was interesting to them. They're all kind of putting out the same content. He's like, we needed to be smarter, right?

• 26:36Shaan Puri?

  Like, we needed to say every hour a writer is going to spend. We don't have the same number of writers or budget. So they need to spend writing articles that are going to get more traffic than anybody else. And so he would just reverse engineer it. So he like, they would just study Google searches and they would say, oh, everybody's searching, what time is the NFL draft? He's like, so we would immediately like have like the number one ranking thing on Google for what time is the NFL draft? Where to watch it and how to watch it and what's going to happen in the draft? Just like this kind of filler content on a, on a website. And he's like, people really like the draft. Okay, we're going to go like all in on the draft and we're going to write 10 times more content about the draft. Cause that's what there's a big appetite for. That ESPN is like underserving. And so I thought it was pretty awesome how they took kind of like a supply, demand approach to it instead of like artsy.

• 27:21Shaan Puri?

  Right? Like an artsy approach of like, oh, you know, this is what this is, we're a journalistic publication and we should, uh, we should write the hard hitting pieces about whatever or like, you know, well, here's what I'm passionate about. It's like, no, they, they like took a science approach to it, which I liked.

• 27:35Sam Parr?

  And then the other founder went and did that. He had a non-compete after he sold Bleacher Report. So he couldn't do sports anymore, but he started a media company called Bustle, which is like women's content. So all types of articles, but like an example of his long tail search strategy, he deployed the same strategy. So like, if you Google, like, what happens when I get my period while I'm on the beach? Like Bustle will show up number one. It's like, there's only going to be like a hundred people a month or something that search for that. If I have no idea, but like that, I think I had heard through him, that was one of the examples. Or if you Google things like that, you'll come to cross Bustle and they do like over a hundred million in revenue. And so it still works.

• 28:11Shaan Puri?

  Right. And by the way, one, just pivoting off the Instagram thing, we talked about this in the past, but there's some new news. So we should bring it up. We talked about this, um, this woman who's an influencer, she's a fitness influencer on Instagram. Kayla, I think Itzenes or something. I don't know.

• 28:27Sam Parr?

  No, it's new. I think it's, it's new. Every woman listening to this is just going to be like, what the fuck, guys? I think it's, it's new.

• 28:33Shaan Puri?

  What's, uh, there was something else we, we tried to pronounce that we just like couldn't, uh, it was just like a, like, I don't know, some, some fancy luxury brand, uh, for, for purses or something that.

• 28:41Sam Parr?

  Like Hermes.

• 28:42Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. Yeah. She wears Hermes bags. Uh, so anyway, she has this app. So she basically took this Instagram following and was just posting like workout clips on Instagram and stuff. Her and her boyfriend, I think, or her husband, I don't remember who it was.

• 28:56Sam Parr?

  Well, before the app, they were just selling a PDF. Sarah, my wife bought one. She bought it for $29.

• 29:01Shaan Puri?

  My sister-in-law has the PDF and she was just using this PDF for like, is it like the, the beach body or I forgot, I forgot what it's called. It's like some, some kind of like 30 day program.

• 29:09Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 29:09Shaan Puri?

  That's our 30 minute workout. That was like, you know, from, from this girl and she was buying the PDF. Then they turned it into an app, right? So they turned it into an app, app starts doing great. Um, my wife was a subscriber. You pay a hundred bucks a year and then you open up the app and it's basically like, from what I remember, you open up the app, there was like five women who were like the trainers and it's like, one is like very muscular, one is like very just like thin, one is like half, kind of like toned or whatever. Another one has like a huge butt. It's like, which body do you want? And go follow their program. And so you would just pick it and then you would get like daily workouts, kind of like a video that was like very good. And so anyways, that app was doing like. I think they had done over a hundred million dollars of revenue. I don't know if that's annual or cumulative, but they just sold. So I don't know if you have the details in front of you,

• 29:51Shaan Puri?

  but they just sold for like $400 million or something, right? Like they just exited, exited the app this week.

• 29:59Sam Parr?

  Yeah, for $400 million, they sold to this company called iFit, which is about to go public. They said they're doing 100 million in revenue. Pretty amazing. No brainer to buy. Definitely worth it, I think.

• 30:12Shaan Puri?

  And it's pretty weird that 100 million, if you're doing 100 million in revenue, you, you know, you sold for only 400 million. So it's, it's a pretty low multiple for like a digital product, but they're probably spending a ton, probably spending a ton on, on marketing.

• 30:26Sam Parr?

  Okay. Um, yeah, I, I maybe, maybe not. I mean, she had 13 million followers and it is based on her thing, on her, on her following. Can I tell you about an idea that someone just sent to me? And I thought it was pretty amazing. Okay. Look at the thing called Birdflow in the doc. So it's called birdflow.io. Did you click on that?

• 30:46Shaan Puri?

  I saw you text me about it this morning, but I haven't checked out. So tell me about it.

• 30:50Sam Parr?

  Okay. So this guy sent it to me. He goes, hey, I had this like software company and it was trying to do all these problems and solve all like, it's called Crowdflow or something like that. And he's like, it's a, I spent three years working on it. And then I just said, fuck it. I'm just going to create a really micro, small app. I'm going to build it in two weeks. It just does one thing really well. It's called Birdflow. And if you click it, it says, marketing automation for Twitter. But basically I'll, I'll, I'll tell you like it, it does three different things, but the main thing is everyone who clicks follow on your profile, it automatically sends them a message and you could say anything in that message. Like, hey, thanks for following or hey, thanks for following. Check out my website. And I installed it. He's charging

• 31:30Sam Parr?

  $29. I installed it and it's awesome. It's awesome. It's awesome. I love these little micro SaaS tools. I think it's so neat. This is exactly how Buffer got started and that's a multi hundred million dollar business.

• 31:44Shaan Puri?

  Right, yeah, I like the the MicroSaaS tool that does one simple thing that helps you win on a platform you're already like trying to win on. That's the key, right? So like, I'm already trying to win on Twitter. I'm trying to win on Instagram, trying to win on Reddit, whatever. And if you could build the MicroSaaS tool, it's like, here's, you know, other examples of them. There's, what's it called? Jungle Scout, which is for Amazon. So let's say you're trying to win as an FBA seller on on Amazon. So you're selling a product on Amazon. Jungle Scout is this app you can use. And basically, when you're searching any Amazon like search search result, you can use, you can open up Jungle Scout and it'll basically tell you how much that product is worth, how much, how much search volume there is for it, how competitive it is to be in that niche and how much money they think that product is making so that you could find

• 32:29Shaan Puri?

  winning products that are like high demand, low competition, and then you could build a, you know, an FBA business in that niche. And so it's a simple SaaS tool. I think Jungle Scout does some stupid amount of revenue, too.

• 32:39Sam Parr?

  They were recently partially acquired by PE in the hundreds of millions of dollars of valuation. Greg Mercer is is good friends with Neville and in Austin. And he like, this is, I guess, public. I mean, he's got like a plane and shit. So whatever it was sold for, like Neville will post pictures going to like telly ride in a private jet. And I'm like, dude, who's Jeff?

• 33:03Shaan Puri?

  He's the PE guy or he's the Jungle Scout guy?

• 33:05Sam Parr?

  The guy who sold part of the company who started it.

• 33:08Shaan Puri?

  Gotcha. Yeah. So so a super simple tool that just helped you win there and they just built, they just kind of like dominate that one niche of like FBA, you know, FBA selling, or in this case, Twitter automations, right? So, oh, somebody, and so I like this a lot. I need something like this for me because I'm trying to basically grow my audience on Twitter and then, cool, the less work I can do, the better, right? Like, I love digital salespeople, a digital salesperson. That's what I think about when I think about landing pages or like this, like little like automations. That's a digital salesperson. That's somebody who's going to work 24/7 for me for zero cost or, you know, in this case, whatever it was, $29 a month. That's their salary and they're going to do exactly what I say every single time predictably. And they're just going to generate more value for me.

• 33:53Shaan Puri?

  And so I look at my landing page like a digital salesperson. I look at my automations, like ConvertKit, things like that, as digital salespeople. And yeah, this is a really cool one. I like this a lot. Now, I can see this getting really annoying. I mean, people hate getting these auto DMs, but it still will work.

• 34:09Sam Parr?

  Yeah, yeah, it it it might be annoying, but I actually just made mine. It just says, hey, exclamation point. Thanks for following. Now, here's the problem that I already found. So I, it's already sent out a couple hundred messages for me. I guess I get maybe 500 to 1,000 new followers a day. This, ah, I feel like a douche saying that this.

• 34:28Shaan Puri?

  Say it.

• 34:28Sam Parr?

  A couple of women replied.

• 34:30Shaan Puri?

  Say it.

• 34:31Sam Parr?

  Yeah, so a couple of like really attractive women replied and or replied saying like, hey, what's going on? You know, like your work.

• 34:38Shaan Puri?

  Basically, they applied, actually.

• 34:40Sam Parr?

  Yeah, so like these like attractive women replied and I was like, fuck, I don't want, like, anyone to get the wrong idea and to think that I'm hollering just at them or that I'm hollering at all, you know. And so I didn't reply to them, but I was like, oh, my gosh, like, this guy actually might be able to, this could definitely get me in trouble a little bit. I could totally see it, right? When that, when that kind of, I sent you that message, it was kind of weird, right?

• 35:03Shaan Puri?

  It was hilarious. Yeah, I could see, you know, the same thing with somebody else pointed this out too, which is like, let's say you write a thread that goes viral, you might get 5,000 followers. You're gonna send out, what, 5,000 auto DMs and then get like 2,000 random replies back. It's gonna like kind of ruin your inbox and maybe get you banned from Twitter. I don't know, because it'll just rate limit you. So so I think there's some problems with it. Maybe, maybe this guy's built in some rules. Like, for me, I would only want to do this, I would only want to DM somebody who has over X followers or that I, you know, I already follow or something like that. So then it kind of like limits the number of people this does it to.

• 35:35Sam Parr?

  I think you can.

• 35:37Shaan Puri?

  You need it to be like, hey, you know, only if it's a, you know, farmer looking white boy, then send this so I don't get in trouble with my wife, you know, like, I need this to be like, this guy needs to have like, you know, Patel or Gupta as last name if it's gonna send this auto DM so my Indian fanboys can can get these messages from me, but not everybody else.

• 35:55Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I could see it get me in trouble. All right, you want to do another one?

• 36:00Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, let's do one. Okay, little idea that I think is kind of interesting. I don't have a ton to say about the business, but it's more like this is a cool way to get ideas. So this is my first time traveling with with babies. And traveling babies is like, you know, all the things you would expect, like on the plane. You know, kid pooped through his clothes, had to change, you know, like on a tray table. Because we couldn't stand up because the fast and see field sign, the person next to us looking at us like we're gross. And what are we supposed to do? That is disgusting. I mean, you are gross. Exactly. I know. I know. I agree. But there's a bunch of problems. So like, we had to take our car seats, right? Because you can't just like, be like, oh, I'll get there. You know, I used to pack light. I used to be like, cool, I'll get there. I just have my phone. I'll call an Uber, get to my hotel.

• 36:44Shaan Puri?

  If I'm missing something, I'll just buy it there. And with this, with kids, it's like the opposite. It's like, can't even get in an Uber because you have to like, have a car seat, all that stuff. So I saw this business called Babyquip that I thought was kind of cool. It's again, one of our like telltale signs is any business that shows up at the top of a Google, a popular Google search. But the website looks like it was last updated in like 1996. Those are businesses that print money. And so it's like, congratulations, you have identified a money printer. And so I don't know how successful Babyquip is, but I would suspect it's pretty good as a bootstrap business. And what it does is it's basically a marketplace. So I could say, hey, I just landed in Las Vegas. I need two car seats. I don't want to lug two car seats, check them in, you know, like on the fly, like, you know,

• 37:27Shaan Puri?

  drag them to the airport, check them in, take them home, like, just meet me at the airport with a car seat that I could just install into a rental car, or I can install into to an Uber or whatever. And then like, let me rent it for four days. And then when I'm leaving, come pick it back up from the airport. And so that's what Babyquip is. It's a baby equipment, but it's a marketplace where people will bring you what you need. You need a stroller? I got a stroller for you. Don't lug that heavy thing around. Just use mine when I'm here. And so people are making a lot of money. Just Google searching. I was like, I was Google searching. And again, it's a very good content play. I was Google searching baby travel packing list. So I was like, ah, what do I even, what am I forgetting here? And so they had a blog post. I was like, here's all the things you need to pack for your baby. And then at the bottom, it's like, by the way,

• 38:09Shaan Puri?

  If you don't want to pack your stroller in car seats because they're heavy as hell, like, you know, you could just use Babyquip and just get it when you're there. And I was like, click through and I was like, this is cool. And so I just thought this is like a very clever business that is a look for problems, look for annoyances, look for inconveniences, and then those become your opportunities if you can design a solution around them. So I just thought it was a clever little business.

• 38:31Sam Parr?

  This is awesome. So Babyquip is actually, it's a peer-to-peer marketplace. So I don't think you actually said that. I thought it was the company that would give you stuff.

• 38:38Shaan Puri?

  No, it's just like Jane whose kid outgrew her car seat and she realizes she can make, you know, $200 a month just renting it out to people as long as she's willing to go drop it off and pick it up from the airport.

• 38:50Sam Parr?

  I have these guys raised money?

• 38:53Shaan Puri?

  They've been around for a while. They haven't, it doesn't look like they've raised money. But yeah, they, you know, they are basically like, just kind of like a, looks like a bootstrap business from everything I could tell. It launched in 2016. They've had over 30,000 orders. I think they did a crowdfunding campaign at some point. So maybe there's.

• 39:11Sam Parr?

  And they're on Shark Tank. This is kind of interesting. Now, I'm not convinced that this is, this can be a huge, huge thing. But what is actually, what is actually interesting is let's go to New York. It tells you how many reservations someone has ever had. I bet you that there could be like some mom who's just dominated like a LA or a New York scene. Like could just rank really high on all the, all the big cities and lend out all their stuff. And so what it does is it tells you how much it, so what basically what happens is you land in New York, you, but before you land, you tell Babyquip, you hire Camila Shannon, who's the top in New York. She's rented it, her stuff out seven, 73 times and she'll bring you any gear that you need. And you could see all the gear that she has and she costs $40 to $60

• 39:54Sam Parr?

  to deliver the stuff to you. Plus there's gear for, there's a, a car seat for $10 a day. There's a playpen for $40 a day. There's 15 pound dumbbells for $5 a day. There's a. This is crazy. This is awesome. This is awesome. This is a great find.

• 40:10Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. So, so another example of this, by the way, have you used or probably not used, but you're, you're familiar with them, I'm assuming. Teachers pay teachers?

• 40:20Sam Parr?

  No, what's that?

• 40:21Shaan Puri?

  You've never heard of teachers pay teachers?

• 40:23Sam Parr?

  No. What? Dude, I don't have kids.

• 40:27Shaan Puri?

  It doesn't, doesn't matter. This is just like one of those things that you know about because it's just awesome. And so Google teachers pay teachers. So what this is, is

• 40:35Sam Parr?

  Oh, my God.

• 40:36Shaan Puri?

  If you, if you remember, like, a teacher spends a huge amount of time, every teacher spends a huge amount of time, like, creating their lesson plans and quizzes and tests. And they have to, like, keep recreating, like, content, basically, for their little classroom of 30 people. It's pretty inefficient, right? So you go, you, you teach kids all day, already kind of an exhausting thing. Now you go home and you, you have to grade papers, you have to come up with tomorrow's lesson plan, and then you have to design the quiz for Thursday's quiz, then you have next Friday's test. So you have all this stuff. You're just constantly this content treadmill. And what teachers pay teachers did that was genius was they said, look, that's a lot of effort. And you may not be the best person at coming up with a lesson plan or the quiz for this science topic. So why don't we just create a marketplace where any teacher can list their lesson plans,

• 41:21Shaan Puri?

  their quizzes, their tests, and you could just find, go, instead of just making your own, go on here for 10 bucks and go buy the best science thing for a fourth grader trying to learn about, you know, geology right now. And you just go buy the thing for 10 bucks and you've saved four hours of time. And so it was like a great trade. So teachers pay teachers is a marketplace doing this. Some teachers were making millions of dollars just creating their, putting their content up for sale here. The business itself does, I think, 300 plus million dollars a year in revenue.

• 41:49Sam Parr?

  And gross. And gross revenue, yeah?

• 41:53Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, but it was bought by a private equity firm. And like, just look at their traffic on this thing. And it's like over 20 million hits a month or something. Yeah.

• 41:59Sam Parr?

  Holy fuck.

• 42:00Shaan Puri?

  So it's insane business. Beautiful business, too, because it's like, wow, you turned some teachers who created amazing lessons and amazing tests and quizzes, you turned them into stars and millionaires, which is fantastic. I think the best teachers should be millionaires in the age of the internet. This is There's no reason not that they shouldn't be. On the other side, you saved a bunch of money and a bunch of, sorry, you saved a bunch of time for all the other teachers so that they're more rested and can go into class and perform instead of being, you know, like, kind of falling behind constantly on the content treadmill. And so I thought this is like, you know, an amazing idea. Same, it reminds me of the Babyquip thing. Obviously, this is much bigger, much more successful, but it's like these niche, kind of like pain points turned into, you know, marketplaces, solutions.

• 42:43Sam Parr?

  This is badass. Maybe you could also do this for speeches. I, I remember doing, my brother John gave a really good.

• 42:51Shaan Puri?

  Oh, like wedding speeches?

• 42:52Sam Parr?

  He gave a great best man's speech and three people.

• 42:54Shaan Puri?

  Dude, that's a great idea.

• 42:56Sam Parr?

  Three people paid him money to write their speech. And I think that you could do that for, I think you could start with just wedding speeches, but eventually do all other types of speeches.

• 43:07Shaan Puri?

  Dude, that is hilarious. Somebody should absolutely do that because there's a ton of Googling, right? Like when you have to give your speech, you're like, oh God, pressure, super high. Like, how many reps have I had doing this? Zero. Okay, let me go to Google. Let me try to get some inspiration. Let me try to get the ball rolling. People go to YouTube and they try to watch like, you know, best, best man's speech ever, right? Best bridesmaid's speech ever. And then you're like, okay, like, what am I going to do? Copy this? Not quite. But if somebody created these templates, that could be pretty good. I like that.

• 43:38Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I actually think you could do that. There's this company called Book in a Box, started by Tucker Max, who was one of my investors. Before it was, when they did Book in a Box, they would, you'd pay them any number from 20 to a hundred thousand dollars on a bunch of different options. And they would write a book about your life. So you could like get speaking gigs, or you could give to your kids, or like whatever, for any different reasons. So you could look like an expert, be a thought leader. And then a lot of their authors started getting speech offers. You know, they would, someone would pay 10, 20, 30,000 dollars to have someone come and talk about like best practices in meetings because some guy had wrote a book on how meetings suck and how to make them better. And then they created a new subsidiary that would write your, do your PowerPoint and presentation for you and you'd pay more money for that. And I was like, that's cool. That should probably be the business more so than just the book thing.

• 44:22Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 44:23Sam Parr?

  And so I think that actually teachers paying teachers, you could also do speakers paying speakers. I mean, you could do the same thing.

• 44:28Shaan Puri?

  There's another angle to this, which is I think that teachers are sort of this extremely, teachers and nurses, they're these are two workforces that are very, very large. They have a unique set of problems. They're extremely like kind of word of mouth heavy. And I don't think that the existing solutions were great for them. So on the podcast, a long time ago, we had a founder of like incredible health come on, which is basically like a, kind of like a job marketplace thingy, like a kind of LinkedIn ish thing for nurses.

• 44:54Sam Parr?

  That was right before COVID. How'd that do?

• 44:57Shaan Puri?

  They raised a bunch of money. I don't know if they're doing well or not, but I can't really say. But, but they've raised a bunch of money because the opportunity is large, meaning there are so many nurses and there's a shortage of nurses and there's a high demand for nurses. So there's nurses. So there's a lot of fees paid for placements. So nurses want great jobs and then hospitals and clinics basically are happy to pay to place nurses. And so there's a lot of money to be made if you can build the right network there, if you can build a vertical LinkedIn for just nurses. And I think there's a similar opportunity for teachers, not in terms of placing teachers, because it's not the same level of demand for like hiring teachers.

• 45:33Sam Parr?

  Or pay.

• 45:34Shaan Puri?

  But I do think that, I do think that if you built like a professional networking thing for teachers, that's better. They don't necessarily want or need to use LinkedIn. I think you could build a custom solution that is for teachers. It's like, how do teachers, how are teachers going to engage with like, kind of like their peers? All right, what do, what do they need to do? Are they gonna, do they need to share tips? Do they, are there job opportunities? Is it content like teachers pay teachers? I think if you did a brainstorm, if you were in, if that's, that's the niche you were in, I think there's a lot of opportunities for teachers, just because there's such a huge workforce. And the generic solution like LinkedIn is not going to be tailored to them.

• 46:08Sam Parr?

  How much do you think teachers paying teachers got acquired for?

• 46:13Shaan Puri?

  I would say, if I was going to put a guess, I would say $500 million.

• 46:17Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I would, I would guess that as well.

• 46:20Shaan Puri?

  Because it is kind of a monopoly in its niche.

• 46:23Sam Parr?

  Or more, or more even if, or rather, if you said it's worth more than that now, I wouldn't be surprised.

• 46:29Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, we can research. I didn't research. I didn't plan to bring it up, but, but we can look it up. It might be, it might be out there publicly.

• 46:34Sam Parr?

  No.

• 46:35Shaan Puri?

  You want to do one or two more?

• 46:37Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I don't have much more. What do you have? I blew my load early.

• 46:42Shaan Puri?

  I have one. Okay, so we can, we can end on kind of like this life wisdom thing. So, so last night, we're hanging out, we're talking, you know, I'm, I'm hanging out with, with some other folks who are traveling with us and.

• 46:54Sam Parr?

  Who's family?

• 46:56Shaan Puri?

  Uh, yeah, family members. And so I, I was, I asked this question. I said, all right. Um, I said, what do you think? I said, let's take, fast forward your, so I don't, how old are you? Thirty one, something like that? You're thirty one. I said, all right, fast forward, you're ninety years old. And, um, let's say your life, like you, you have your life as it's gone so far. And then let's just kind of like project forward. Like it just keeps going the way that things have been going, like the, the track you're on. Let's say you continue on the track, you end up at ninety. Um, what do you think, if you look back, you're going to be most happy with the way you lived your life? And then what do you think you're going to regret the most about the way you lived your life so far?

• 47:33Shaan Puri?

  And so I was curious, I, after I asked that question, I got some answers from the group. I was curious. I was like, I'm going to ask Sam this because I don't know what he would say. I think it's a hard question, to be fair, but I'm curious what comes to mind, uh, for you.

• 47:45Sam Parr?

  Um, I would say that I let my temper control things. You know, I, I lose my temper easily sometimes. You know, you've seen it sometimes when I get mad at you or when I get mad at Dan or someone else. And it's like, it's sometimes they've actually done something that is warranted. Oftentimes it's like, it's not that big a deal. And so I get super fucking frustrated and I'll hold grudges over like a relatively small frustration and I let my emotions control some of my decisions. And, uh, I've lost a lot of money and a lot of friends because of it. So that's what I regret is that, and I work quite hard to fix it, but I, I wish I would have been even more aware of that early on. What else do I, do I regret?

• 48:22Shaan Puri?

  That's a great answer.

• 48:24Sam Parr?

  Do I think that I'll regret? Um, I, I, I wish I didn't spend years neglecting my health, thinking like, oh, I can get to it in a, uh, later on, like I, I should have fun now. I wish that when I was a kid, my parents instilled, uh, healthy eating habits because I think that like, that's still kind of fucked with me.

• 48:40Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 48:41Sam Parr?

  Like eating a lot of bad sugar. What else?

• 48:45Shaan Puri?

  What about the, what about the, what about the flip side? What's the one thing you're gonna look back and you'll be like, you know, glad, glad that you, you, you, you lived that way, or you did that thing, or you, you made those choices?

• 48:55Sam Parr?

  Starting at age 20, I wrote this down. I said, by 30, I wanna, I wanna have started and started something that will make enough money that when I have children, I won't ever have to worry about how to give them what they need. And also, I'll be able to spend time with my family. Even though I didn't have a family or anything like that, I was like, that's what I think I'm gonna want by the time I'm 30, so I'm gonna work against that. And I achieved that. And so I'm most proud that I now can, can only worry about the emotional aspects of the family, even though I don't even have a family.

• 49:28Shaan Puri?

  Right, okay.

• 49:29Sam Parr?

  I'm most proud I got that problem out of the way. The, the, the financial problem.

• 49:33Shaan Puri?

  What do you think of that question? Is this a, is a good question, or is it kind of like?

• 49:36Sam Parr?

  It's a really good question. I, I actually changed it around. I ask myself this all the time. Well, it's quite similar. I go, I, I think like, how, what can I do today that will make my future self proud and not regretful?

• 49:48Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 49:48Sam Parr?

  And so.

• 49:49Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, what will I thank myself for?

• 49:51Sam Parr?

  And, and, and I say 10 years, but I would actually change it to six months. Because oftentimes, how many times? And, and the other question I ask myself is, in six months, will you wish that you have done this, or wish that you had started trying to do blank? So it's like, losing weight, exercising is a really good one. In six months, will you look back at yourself and be like, fuck, I wish I already had started learning how to speak Spanish. I wish I already would have read these books. I wish I already would have done this. So just fucking do it. Make your future self proud. So that's the question I asked. I think it's a great question. And what, what was your answer? What, what do you regret and what are you proud of?

• 50:28Shaan Puri?

  So I had trouble with the regret side. I was thinking about it and I was like, okay. And I went through some, I said, okay, I couldn't think of an easy answer. So I said, okay, what happens when you can't think of the answer right away? You. You just start throwing out, what might it be? Right? So that it doesn't have to be this, but what even comes to mind? And so I was like, oh, will I regret kind of like spending too much time working? Okay, it's possible.

• 50:50Sam Parr?

  No, I don't think so. I mean, I think you got, you're, you're pretty healthy with that. You worked really hard when you were single or not married.

• 50:57Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I worked like three times harder than I work now. So something that made that shift well, I was like, will I regret like working on the wrong things? Like, oh, you just worked on this, like, like right now, I'm building this D to C business. It's like, oh, well, like, yo, this, this is frankly, this is a business that's meant to make money. It's not like the joy of my life. Like this podcast is more like the joy, right? This is the fun and it's building up into something that's big. But like the, the business I'm doing is I'm doing it as a business. So maybe I'll say, oh, why didn't I go try to like change the world in some bigger way? Maybe I'll say that I started brainstorming these and what I realized was that the only things I think I'm going to regret are either going to be health related. But even then, when I, by the time I'm 90, I don't know how much I'm going to care about that. If I, you know, if I got to 90, so it didn't quite work.

• 51:41Shaan Puri?

  But I think if I asked that question for like 50 or 60, I would say definitely one of the top answers would be taking care of my health better. You know, just, just prioritizing that number one. Number two was like any, when you're, I think when you're 90, you're short on time. So you'll probably, I'll probably look back and think, fuck, I pissed away a bunch of time on the wrong stuff. And so I, that's what I, that's the second category is like, where am I pissing away time? That when I look back, I'm going to say, oh, I can't believe I wasted those precious years on, on the wrong stuff or on the wrong things, caring about the wrong things. Or even in the moment, focusing on the wrong things. The last one is relationships is like, I think ultimately, so my answer that I came, came to in the end was

• 52:21Shaan Puri?

  I'll probably regret not having more kids because I think the older I get, the more joy I'm going to have, like the most, the, the most value and joy in my life is just going to come from my kids. And I know right now it feels like, oh my God, I can't, I couldn't, I have two, I couldn't possibly have another because

• 52:37Sam Parr?

  Why, why not?

• 52:37Shaan Puri?

  It's already so hard with two.

• 52:38Sam Parr?

  How, how's your wife? She's young, she's thirty.

• 52:41Shaan Puri?

  It's not the, it's not the biological clock. It's like the workload. It's like, oh my God, like how am I, how do I have another kid with these two kids with the business stuff, with the podcast, with the ten things that I do, you know?

• 52:53Sam Parr?

  And in two years, you can.

• 52:56Shaan Puri?

  Sure, I'm not saying I don't. I guess what I'm saying is, I think that's the one thing, if I look back, I'm probably gonna wish I had more kids, because it's probably gonna be from age 65 to 90, it's probably gonna be the number one thing, number one source of fun in my life is gonna be my kids slash grandkids.

• 53:10Sam Parr?

  I think you should, you should address that. I told Sarah I want five. And so, we froze our embryos, listen to this, we froze our embryos, and I've got six kids. The reason, I don't want, Sarah's got this, Sarah's got this thing, Sarah's got this thing, there's just a genetic component that we made sure we didn't want to pass on, so the kids were healthy. And I got five kids, all girls. And so, I'm asking her if we can go and do it, do it again, because I would like to have two boys, two girls. And so, I've got five kids waiting for me, but they're all girls. So anyway, I actually think that, that's a good one. I asked my Twitter following, how many of you, how do you feel about kids

• 53:51Sam Parr?

  and age? And you, almost unanimously, the people who had, so this is like a bias survey, right?

• 53:57Shaan Puri?

  What do you mean, how do you think about kids and age? What does that mean?

• 53:59Sam Parr?

  I forget, well, I forget the exact way that I asked it, but I said, do you wish that you'd had kids sooner or later in life?

• 54:05Shaan Puri?

  Okay, gotcha.

• 54:05Sam Parr?

  And, and of course, like, there's like, a bias here of like, people who are already bought into one category will likely answer and support that category, or support that decision. But almost unanimously, I feel like the answer was, I wish I had my kids sooner in life. And that actually shocked me, because particularly in New York, Silicon Valley, LA, the coastal, bigger cities, it's actually, versus like Missouri, where I'm from, it's actually more normal to get married and have kids at 21, 22, 23, whereas on the coast, it's like 31, 32, 33. And you're constantly told, you know, just wait, just wait. Even like Andrew Wilkinson told me, a couple of my friends told me, and I guess you're, you have kids now, you could actually give your opinion, most everyone said, I wish I had kids sooner. And one guy actually changed my perspective on everything. I go, why, why

• 54:49Sam Parr?

  do you think that? He goes, because now I'm just gonna die sooner, and I wish I could have spent more time with them.

• 54:54Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. I don't, I don't know the answer. I think whatever, I think it works either way. It's not really, I don't really, I don't really think there's a right answer there. But

• 55:04Shaan Puri?

  But I kids are great. They kids are really great. Um, so, so, so I like that question. I like the one you had too. So I guess like if I was gonna do, I recommend people do this after the podcast. If you've listened this far, I would basically write down both. I would say, what's the thing I'm gonna thank myself for? And what's the thing I'm gonna regret when I'm 90 about the way I'm living my life right now? And if I just project it forward? And then there's the one you said, which is six months from now. What's the thing I'm gonna wish I had started doing now or stopped doing now?

• 55:32Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 55:33Shaan Puri?

  Because I'm still gonna wish I'd done it then.

• 55:35Sam Parr?

  There's a lot you could do in six months. And now you're not gonna maybe have a life changing thing, but like you can lose 60 pounds in six months, maybe you can learn a little bit of a language enough to like go and speak maybe at it in a different country. And you could read a bunch of books. You can learn a new, you could learn how to play the piano in six months. I mean, you could do a lot of like interesting stuff. So.

• 55:55Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, you could go, you know, repair the shitty relationship you have with your dad or whatever. You know, you could do, you could do many, many things. Uh, I guess that's the other one I thought about for, for, for the regret is like,

• 56:07Shaan Puri?

  not having maybe spent more time or being kind of like, just like nicer to my parents. Like, I know I'm gonna miss them a lot when they're gone and they're gonna go like, it's gonna happen. And

• 56:18Shaan Puri?

  once they do, I'm just gonna, I think that's probably gonna be one of the things I'm gonna wish. Why didn't I, why didn't I, you know, talk to him more or spend more time or, you know, tell him, you know, thanks, you know, something like that is probably gonna be one of my answers for that.

• 56:32Sam Parr?

  So I'll wrap this, I'll wrap this up with a quick story that hopefully will change people's, change people's perspective. So do you know who Ramit Sethi is? Sethi? He's got this business book, business slash book, huge brand called I'll Teach You To Be Rich. He's a good friend of mine. And whenever I have money, like doubts or questions, I call him and he kind of like, so for example, and he always like thinks about everything like very thoughtfully. And I was talking to him about buying a ring for my wife years ago. And I go, how much should I spend? And he goes, Uh, like I told him I wanted to spend $5,000 and he was like, no, no, no, no, no. And he like told me a budget way higher. He goes, trust me. And he explained his reasoning and I, and I listened to him.

• 57:13Sam Parr?

  I went and bought a, a ring that was, I, I spent $27,000 on the ring and I didn't have that much money at the time.

• 57:19Shaan Puri?

  What was his reasoning though?

• 57:20Sam Parr?

  His reasoning was like, first of all, it's your wife. Like whatever she wants, like what's the point of working hard? It's to make someone like your wife proud and happy and she's gonna wanna show this off. So just make her happy. Second, if you're gonna be married to her for potentially 80 years, who gives a fuck over 20 grand divided by 80 grand? Or 80 years?

• 57:38Shaan Puri?

  Eight years.

• 57:39Sam Parr?

  Um, and he goes, just don't be cheap on the stuff that actually matters. This probably really matters to her. Now, some people it doesn't matter. But then the second thing was I called Rameet and I go, hey, Rameet, you took your family to Europe one time, to Italy. He goes, yeah, uh, you want me to plan yours for you? And I go, well, yeah, but what do you mean? He goes, well, like I love doing this and I'll plan yours for you, but I only have one rule. I said, what? He goes, I'll plan it for you, but you have to have an unlimited budget. I was like, what the hell? He goes, dude, the whole point of traveling with your family, like you're very, so I'm taking my mom and dad and my wife to Italy. They, my parents have really never been out of the country other than one time to visit me in Australia. And he goes, I'm gonna get, you gotta give them on a limited budget. I was like, dude, I was gonna spend like 15,000 maybe. And he goes, no, no, no, no, no, we're gonna spend 50 at least. And I was like, that's so much money.

• 58:24Sam Parr?

  He goes, dude, you're never gonna go out of the country again with your family. And I've done it before, like one time. It's the one thing that they will never stop talking about it. And I don't care if I only had a hundred thousand, I'm spending 50,000 because this is the whole point of working really, really hard. Is spending my money on stuff that will make my family happy and they'll talk about forever. And I was like, you're right, I need to quit being a cheapskate. I'm gonna, so I, I bought my mom and dad first class. They've never been first class, first class tickets to Europe. We're gonna like have a great time and it kinda changed my perspective on spending and, and being tight. So that's my quick little story.

• 58:58Shaan Puri?

  That's amazing. I love it. All right, we should, we should end on that. Uh, all right, good episode. Dan, what do you think? This was good. I give you guys a nine and a half. No. Okay, good.

• 59:06Sam Parr?

  I'll take that. Last one was an eight, but, or an eight and a half. All right, that's the episode.