#48 - NSFW Tech, HQ Trivia & Auctions

Sam (@thesamparr) and Shaan (@shaanvp) are back talking news, trends, interesting products and businesses. Topics for today: Playboy for Snapchat generation & Patreon for Porn (1:49), Seven sin investing (6:44), Fast loading porn GIFS (8:26), Back to building NSFW brands (12:56), HQ Trivia and why it died (14:07), Limited edition food launches (17:12), Back to HQ Trivia and repurposing it for education (22:21), Children allowance apps and cards (24:51), Sleep products (25:52), DIY perfume (29:34), Auctions & Marketplaces (32:19), Shaan's career advice on which company to work for (41:00), Where would Sam and Shaan work at today if they were 21 again (47:29). Please if you can leave us a 5 star review on Apple Podcasts and show your friends the pod! See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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

• 0:10Sam Parr?

  All right, we're good.

• 0:11Shaan Puri?

  This is a podcast. You know, Chris Delia, he starts, he always calls his audience babies.

• 0:16Sam Parr?

  Babies?

• 0:17Shaan Puri?

  Okay, babies, let's talk.

• 0:20Shaan Puri?

  It's hilarious.

• 0:20Sam Parr?

  I only watch his clips. Make sure to subscribe from this, to this podcast and then unsubscribe and subscribe again so we climb up the charts.

• 0:29Shaan Puri?

  Yes, we're climbing. I think we were top 50 a few days ago when I checked. Top, we were 65 and then we were creeping to 55. So I saw some good movement there.

• 0:40Sam Parr?

  It's like the movies where there, it's like a band is like climbing up the billboard charts and they show like.

• 0:45Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 0:46Sam Parr?

  On its way to number one. The clips that we're posting on our social, they're not getting as much traction as I wish.

• 0:53Shaan Puri?

  Traction, like what do you, views or comments?

• 0:56Sam Parr?

  Well, I only care about views and comments in order to get more podcasts.

• 1:01Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 1:02Sam Parr?

  Listeners.

• 1:02Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, so I guess there you would need people essentially tagging their friends or you'd need to start showing up and discover.

• 1:08Sam Parr?

  Yeah, and it's still just starting. I also have noticed that when I, I have a smaller following than our branded channels, but when I share something, it gets way more engagement than a brand. So.

• 1:17Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, people like following people and listening to people more. I also don't ever share it, so I should share it to that big 9,000 Twitter followers I got and.

• 1:27Sam Parr?

  You have 500 more than me. You have 500 more than me, but I'm gonna beat you in the next four days, I think.

• 1:32Shaan Puri?

  I also bought 5,000 a long time ago.

• 1:35Sam Parr?

  Me too.

• 1:35Shaan Puri?

  They degraded. They like go away because Twitter like bans the accounts, but when I bought the 5,000, I got way more followers per day.

• 1:42Sam Parr?

  Same.

• 1:42Shaan Puri?

  Because people wanted to follow somebody who already has a lot.

• 1:44Sam Parr?

  So I'm averaging 200 new people a day.

• 1:47Shaan Puri?

  I don't even check. I don't even check. All right, what do we got? I want to talk about, talk about this idea. It's not even an idea. It's a company, Arsenic.

• 1:55Sam Parr?

  Yeah, they've been around for about four years now.

• 1:57Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I know. I don't know how they're doing. Do you know if they're doing well?

• 1:59Sam Parr?

  They were doing okay. Basically, the way that I knew some like media people who talked about them and knew them, and I'm almost positive that it's run. Like it looks like it's run, which is a bunch of kids who are good looking and rent a mansion and they just do

• 2:15Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 2:16Sam Parr?

  Like debauchery and shit.

• 2:17Shaan Puri?

  So the idea is arsenic is essentially Playboy for the Snapchat generation. And so they have a Snapchat channel because you know, the idea is like, okay, Playboy is a big deal. What would Playboy be like today? It would not be a magazine. It would be, you know, a Snapchat channel. And so they created this Snapchat channel, which is perfect because it's like, if you follow it, you get it. If not, it's not in your face. So it's not like, like Facebook would be a little weird. Instagram would be a little weird.

• 2:41Sam Parr?

  And they have email too.

• 2:42Shaan Puri?

  And they just have this mansion and they have all these models and it's not porn, but it's definitely models who are good looking. And they just have one model like sort of take over the channel. At least is what it was three years ago. I just think this is a great idea. They raised three million bucks. I don't know how they're doing.

• 2:55Sam Parr?

  So they've got books. They do like tours. I think that it could be doing a, the idea is cool.

• 3:00Shaan Puri?

  I bet it's a cash cow.

• 3:01Sam Parr?

  I think, hmm. Well, I

• 3:05Shaan Puri?

  Because they were getting millions of views back then on their videos. I can only assume it's grown unless Snapchat blocked them, but they're not outside the bounds of what Snapchat allows.

• 3:13Sam Parr?

  Snapchat allows porn, right?

• 3:15Shaan Puri?

  No, they don't allow porn, but they don't see a lot of porn.

• 3:17Sam Parr?

  They allow nudity?

• 3:18Shaan Puri?

  They don't, if you're putting on your stories, you'll get banned eventually if you're doing nudity.

• 3:21Sam Parr?

  What if you have a private account?

• 3:22Shaan Puri?

  They don't do nudity. What's that?

• 3:25Sam Parr?

  For a private account, you can

• 3:26Shaan Puri?

  Eventually if it gets flagged, they'll take it down. Like it's not in the rules to do nudity.

• 3:29Sam Parr?

  Well, that's why, have you heard of OnlyFans?

• 3:31Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 3:32Sam Parr?

  Love it.

• 3:33Shaan Puri?

  So explain OnlyFans.

• 3:34Sam Parr?

  OnlyFans. So basically what happened is on Snapchat, all these porn stars were putting up like

• 3:39Shaan Puri?

  Porn?

• 3:39Sam Parr?

  Yeah, like, well, softcore porn. I don't think it was like sex, but uh, like pay me $10 and I'll let you follow me.

• 3:46Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 3:47Sam Parr?

  And

• 3:47Shaan Puri?

  You'll follow my account where I post nudes.

• 3:49Sam Parr?

  And OnlyFans launched and what they did was it was a platform where they, I don't think they started with porn, but now it is that.

• 3:56Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 3:57Sam Parr?

  Uh, so just embrace it. But basically if you, I don't even think it's porn. I think it's like web girls, like webcam girls. And you pay $20, however much they want you to, and you get access to their private video feeds.

• 4:10Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. It's like Patreon, but porn basically. So you pay, you, you become a contributor and then you get their private photos and videos.

• 4:16Sam Parr?

  It's taken off.

• 4:17Shaan Puri?

  Has it?

• 4:18Sam Parr?

  Yeah. And the reason, yeah, because I was doing like, who cares if I consume it or not from a business point of view? That's just how I know about it.

• 4:25Shaan Puri?

  Well, we all care if you consume it or not.

• 4:27Sam Parr?

  And, uh, and, uh,

• 4:30Shaan Puri?

  I mean, no surprise.

• 4:31Sam Parr?

  So I did research on it. I did research on it.

• 4:33Shaan Puri?

  Of course this takes off.

• 4:34Sam Parr?

  Yeah, but so here's, you know, why I think these things take off is the people who don't take take care of the creators. They, they, they, for these types of things, they, they go away.

• 4:43Shaan Puri?

  Yes.

• 4:44Sam Parr?

  Um, and so.

• 4:45Shaan Puri?

  There's always demand. So the demand is always there. The question is, does the platform allow the supply to do what they want to do? And the big platforms don't do it because it's not worth their brand and risk and all the stuff.

• 4:55Sam Parr?

  But OnlyFans, I for sure bet, I would bet you for sure they're in north of a hundred million in subscription revenue and then they take their cut.

• 5:05Shaan Puri?

  That's insane. At one point in time where we had a, we had Blab, like live streaming product and it wasn't working, we had to pivot and we pivoted eventually to video gaming. But I definitely laid out a case to the company that's an investor. I was like, look, um, porn is the porn is where.

• 5:20Sam Parr?

  Dude, it's not porn.

• 5:21Shaan Puri?

  This would be the best.

• 5:21Sam Parr?

  Like these, they're not fucking on camera, I don't think.

• 5:25Shaan Puri?

  Okay, well, whatever you want to call it, like softcore porn or whatever, but like, um, going after the sort of the cam girl market, um, is a pretty, it's a big market and the websites that are there really, really suck. And so.

• 5:35Sam Parr?

  So why don't you do that?

• 5:36Shaan Puri?

  OnlyFans did well. We had kind of a heart to heart. We're like, is this what we want to build? And, uh, my co-founder felt a certain way, the investors felt a certain way.

• 5:43Sam Parr?

  What did Furcon want to do?

• 5:45Shaan Puri?

  Um, he was like, not down to that.

• 5:47Sam Parr?

  I'm so down with that.

• 5:48Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. So I think it's, you gotta make a personal choice.

• 5:50Sam Parr?

  Are you?

• 5:51Shaan Puri?

  And since then, I've had a bunch of entrepreneurs reach out being like, hey, we saw you did Blab. We read your postmortem. You guys got to four million users, but it didn't work. I have a very similar concept. I think it's going to work. Can you give me some advice? And I tell them from the bat, jump, I'm like, this version's not going to work. Consider porn. I think it could work. Consider the cam girl angle because, you know, that's the one stone we didn't turn when we were considering, you know, where to pivot this thing to make it work.

• 6:14Sam Parr?

  Dude, I would for sure do that because think all these like Patreon, all the shit. They're like, we're going to empower creators. Okay, I'm behind that, but even though a lot of times I think they don't, but if you're going to empower a creator, imagine this like woman who can just crush it by not breaking the law and just using her own body. I'm philosophically, I'm so in favor of that.

• 6:34Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I think as a business person, I'm definitely in favor of it. I think it's just a personal

• 6:38Sam Parr?

  As a business person, I love it. As just like a human being, I'm like, yeah.

• 6:41Shaan Puri?

  So there's two little ideas or trends off this. So one, there's this fund called Vice Ventures that is basically investing in things-

• 6:49Sam Parr?

  We've covered it on trends.

• 6:51Shaan Puri?

  That other investors won't invest in. Cause like investors typically, if you're a VC, your investors, they're called LPs. They are typically not just like rich individuals, they're institutions. So it'll be like a pension fund for firefighters in New York, or this, you know, the school endowment will give you $20 million.

• 7:10Sam Parr?

  Right, and so you can't-

• 7:10Shaan Puri?

  So they won't want their money going into certain types of companies. This is why cannabis investments started to take off because only alternative investors, investors who had a little more freedom, were able to go into them. Big investors knew they were good spaces, but they weren't able to move on it as quickly because they had to worry about their LPs. So Vice Ventures came out and they were like, "Look, you know, sex, drugs, alcohol, whatever, right?" Like they're basically like taking sort of the seven sins. And they were like, "We specifically look for companies that are doing businesses in this, in these areas and we'll invest in them." And I think it's a very, I think it's A, if you're gonna do a venture fund, you could either just make another cookie cutter, "Hey, we're a seed fund. Come to us instead of all these other guys," or you take a focus and

• 7:52Shaan Puri?

  build a brand around being different. And I think it was a very, very smart approach.

• 7:56Sam Parr?

  I like it. I've, I invested in this company called Lucy.

• 7:59Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 7:59Sam Parr?

  It's a nicotine replacement, or it's basically Nicorette gum.

• 8:04Shaan Puri?

  We gotta get, what's his name, Dave?

• 8:05Sam Parr?

  Dave.

• 8:06Shaan Puri?

  We have to get him on because when I met him for the first time through you after HustleCon, he spit off seven ideas and when we were just standing there talking, and I was like, I'd ask for one, and then he gave me like a dope idea. And I was like, "You got more of those?" He goes, "Yeah, I got a list." And he started reading off his ideas and they were fantastic.

• 8:24Sam Parr?

  He might be listening.

• 8:25Shaan Puri?

  We gotta get him on the, on the couch.

• 8:26Sam Parr?

  You wanna hear a quick porn story?

• 8:28Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 8:28Sam Parr?

  Okay, so I worked out of this-

• 8:31Sam Parr?

  I worked.

• 8:32Shaan Puri?

  Have you gave a nod of approval?

• 8:33Sam Parr?

  I worked out of this office called The Founder's Dojo.

• 8:36Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 8:36Sam Parr?

  And it was the greatest thing ever. I'll tell another story about it. But basically, it was, if you've seen the TV show Silicon Valley, it was, we had Ehrlich Bachmann. It was an Ehrlich Bachmann type of guy named Dave, who was a great guy, but totally inappropriate and disgusting in a good way. And the office was filthy. And there was this guy, I forget his name, Rattish and Chris.

• 8:58Shaan Puri?

  Oh, yeah.

• 8:58Sam Parr?

  And.

• 8:59Shaan Puri?

  I remember that.

• 8:59Sam Parr?

  And it was this little skinny Indian guy. And he was crazy and awesome. And he was like the stereotypical Silicon Valley hacker, where he could get a job at any big company and make $200,000 a year. But he was like, no, fuck that. I'm like, fuck the corporate pigs.

• 9:16Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 9:16Sam Parr?

  And so he would sleep at that office and Dave would buy him pizza all the time. Because he was like, wanted to be poor and do this thing. And so he created a app, or no, a site.

• 9:27Shaan Puri?

  Website, yeah.

• 9:28Sam Parr?

  A website that would crawl.

• 9:30Shaan Puri?

  Tumblr.

• 9:31Sam Parr?

  No, I think all of the internet.

• 9:33Shaan Puri?

  Okay.

• 9:34Sam Parr?

  For the fastest, for the GIFs that had the highest velocity of growth. And so if a GIF launched.

• 9:40Shaan Puri?

  Popular GIFs.

• 9:41Sam Parr?

  He would tell you right away which one's going to be the most popular. And then you would see it on the screen. And it was called The Worst Drug, theworstrug.tv. It's not there anymore. And that sounds like a silly thing, but that's not why he did it. He did it because what he was trying to do was, A, find the fastest, like technology that could find the fastest growing stuff. And if you would go to theworstrug.com, you could type in something like dog and the search feature would autofill like wicked fast, like way faster. And then you would click enter and it would be bam, a high def GIF.

• 10:09Shaan Puri?

  It was high def, it was full screen. And it was like.

• 10:12Sam Parr?

  Full screen.

• 10:12Shaan Puri?

  It was laser fast.

• 10:13Sam Parr?

  So the technology is very like Podpiper like. The technology wasn't like whatever Podpiper did. It was the fact that it was all behind the scenes. Like it was a bunch of nerds being like, yeah, our GIFs load the fastest. And like, look, it's like HD and it happened in nanoseconds. And he would spend nights and I would come back and it would be just as tiny improvement, but we'd all gather around it. Well, so here's the point of the story. Turns out the most popular GIFs on the internet, 99% of them are super hardcore raunchy porn, like real raunchy porn. And so.

• 10:45Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, because when I went to the site, it was all porn. There wasn't like porn and then some basketball jizz.

• 10:48Sam Parr?

  No, it's all porn.

• 10:50Shaan Puri?

  It was only porn. So I was like, this is a porn site.

• 10:51Sam Parr?

  And so at the office at the, at the dojo, we would have these huge screens of like his workstation and the way that he sat was everyone could see it. And we kind of got immune to it, but it was like the raunchiest shit ever. And we would, he'd be like, guys, check this out. Early in the morning, we would come in 11:00 AM, which was early and he'd be rubbing his eyes and shit. And he'd be like, check this out. And all eight of us would gather around this high def screen and be like, and he would type in the word like, like facial and like, he's like, watch how fast this flows. And we were just so immune. We were like,

• 11:22Shaan Puri?

  You're not even looking at the content?

• 11:24Sam Parr?

  We're not even looking at the content. We're like, oh yeah, wow. You could like see the shine in the liquid. Like it was like, it was so funny. And we would have like these like lawyers come into the office and people who were actually are like investors who would try to raise money for the other companies. And we would forget that this was on the big screen.

• 11:39Shaan Puri?

  So what happened? So this sounds like, what's the end of this? What is this guy doing now? What happened to the site?

• 11:44Sam Parr?

  The site, the worst drug got millions and millions and millions of visitors. The, the engagement was stupidly like good. He couldn't monetize it. They couldn't use it. So there were so many restrictions, no ad network where it allowed him to use it. And so even though the site, I think it was getting at least for sure millions, I think maybe tens of millions of monthly uniques. And it made zero money. It only cost him a lot of money. And the story ends with like, um, someone in Bulgaria or Latvia, like this like communist, ex-communist country wanted to buy the site and it was all weird. And they flew him out there and he's like, wait, these guys are like mobsters. And they ended up like bailing and they just shut it down because it was got too deep.

• 12:25Shaan Puri?

  So what does he do now? Now he works at Facebook? No.

• 12:26Sam Parr?

  He bailed. I've never seen him. He stole my skateboard. I had a skateboard. I left at the office. He stole it and I've never seen him since.

• 12:32Shaan Puri?

  He had to get away, dude.

• 12:33Sam Parr?

  I've never seen him.

• 12:34Shaan Puri?

  He needed to transfer.

• 12:35Sam Parr?

  Raj, that's his name, Raj. I've never seen Raj from.

• 12:38Shaan Puri?

  I'm gonna hunt this guy down. Uh, cause that guy is gonna build something amazing or it's gonna be a very sad ending, but either way it's gonna be not, uh, average, not the usual.

• 12:46Sam Parr?

  Yeah. He was, he was like, if you think of like this idea of what Silicon Valley is, that was that.

• 12:51Shaan Puri?

  Right. Wow. Uh, okay. That's incredible. I like that story. Okay. We were talking about arsenic real quick. Quick idea. So what they're doing is the Playboy on Snapchat, if that's working, and I don't know if it's working, so go look into it. But if it is working in a big way, I don't think that there's just gonna be one of those. So like in the same way that there's all these porn brands, right? There's like Girls Gone Wild, it focuses on college age things. Somebody out there could create arsenic for college or for different, like whatever genre. And so I just

• 13:21Sam Parr?

  But just to clarify, arsenic is not porn.

• 13:25Shaan Puri?

  Modeling, scanty modeling, more like Playboy.

• 13:28Sam Parr?

  Maxim, current Playboy.

• 13:31Shaan Puri?

  Exactly. So you could build Playboy, but of other genres and just, or you could just literally clone them. And I think it would be very low cost. And I think you would be able to do a lot of, you'd be able to drive a lot of views and ultimately get a lot of sponsorships in the same way that Maxim and Playboy were able to make pretty big businesses out of what they do. Now, they had subscriptions, so I don't know if you would do subscriptions, maybe you use OnlyFans, I'm not sure, but um, we should figure it out.

• 13:55Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I

• 13:56Shaan Puri?

  I'm gonna look up the OnlyFans.

• 13:57Sam Parr?

  I'm interested in this. Uh, I, I, I have a lot of ideas. I'm gonna, I'll come back a little more prepared on this because I think there is something there.

• 14:07Shaan Puri?

  What else you got?

• 14:07Sam Parr?

  Okay, so you have HQ, so HQ died, obviously.

• 14:12Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 14:12Sam Parr?

  Um, I thought like it could have been cool. I'm like, they could be like Jeopardy. Jeopardy's huge.

• 14:17Shaan Puri?

  So if you don't know what HQ was, it was a mobile app. It was a game show, like Wheel of Fortune, Jeopardy, whatever, but that was all done on a mobile app, which was, when I saw this product, so our friend Eric, um, who does Tribe Socks, he showed me this app and he was like, dude, my friend went to go work at this company. It's really interesting. Check this out. And he pulls it up. So at 6pm every day, they would do the game show. So you get a notification at 6, you open the app, there's a host, live guy, you know, live, live game show host on live streaming. And he would ask trivia questions that you would push the button, or you have 10 seconds to answer, you'd push the button real quick to answer. And if you got all 10 or 12 questions right, you'd win the prize at the end.

• 14:55Sam Parr?

  Which

• 14:55Shaan Puri?

  At that time, it was, there was 400 players and the prize was like $500. This thing grew like crazy. They had Had games with over a million concurrent players.

• 15:05Sam Parr?

  I feel like sometimes like a million and a half.

• 15:06Shaan Puri?

  And exactly over a million players and I believe they had over a million dollars in prize money over time. And so this thing had this run and they got tons of funding, founders fund funded them.

• 15:16Sam Parr?

  Ten million dollars of funding at a hundred million dollar valuation.

• 15:18Shaan Puri?

  And then they had big time brands launch stuff on there. So they were like, you know, this game is sponsored by Nike. It's all trivia about athletes. And we're going to drop this shoe, the new shoe release is happening live on HQ and that's the prize. They were doing some interesting stuff. But it was kind of a fad and.

• 15:34Sam Parr?

  Which everyone knew.

• 15:35Shaan Puri?

  Which everyone knew because it was like, games all have this hype cycle and then this decline over time. The games aren't super, super sticky, most of them. And this was definitely that. So this big novelty grew like crazy viral product. In many ways, as somebody makes products, it was very inspiring because it was like so simple, yet so awesome.

• 15:53Sam Parr?

  And I actually felt like there, I'm not trying to be hyperbolic, but I felt like there was some revolutionary things.

• 15:58Shaan Puri?

  For sure. It was like, oh, I'm looking at the future. This is, this is what the future looks like. I still think that's what the future looks like. HQ died for many reasons.

• 16:07Sam Parr?

  The founders are fucking crazy.

• 16:08Shaan Puri?

  Literally one founder died. He overdosed on drugs. The other founders, they were sort of always infighting. They were both sort of like, kind of come across, at least from the outside, as sort of like moody artists. One of them, I believe, started Vine also.

• 16:22Sam Parr?

  Russ, yeah.

• 16:22Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, or both of them. They are both the founders of Vine. So definitely sort of brilliant guys in a way.

• 16:27Sam Parr?

  But everyone says that Russ is a dick.

• 16:30Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. And he had, he got removed as CEO because he had some problems. He was, you know, he was a dick or whatever. The other guy got removed also. Never figured it out. And the, the, the game show host Scott became this kind of like cult sensation because he was the host. Everyone saw him every day. And he tweeted out when it shut down recently, he was just like, this company died for one reason alone. And that's the sort of incompetence and arrogance of the founders. And I was like.

• 16:54Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 16:54Shaan Puri?

  Damn, that is like, you don't usually hear that. Like, everybody's so PC and always just worried about their career.

• 17:01Sam Parr?

  Well, he's a comedian. He didn't give a fuck.

• 17:02Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, he definitely did not give a fuck because that was, that was pretty brutal on the day that it shut down.

• 17:07Sam Parr?

  Let's say, can I tell you what I would do?

• 17:09Shaan Puri?

  Yes.

• 17:10Sam Parr?

  Okay, so I would, I have no idea if they did this or not. I would have built this knowing that it's gonna die. And so it's like, it's my thing is I'm gonna be a hit machine.

• 17:19Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 17:20Sam Parr?

  And I'm gonna use this formula. And I always thought about this with, remember like Cronut?

• 17:25Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 17:26Sam Parr?

  Okay, you know how like these viral food things, like these food things go viral? I like, one day I sat down, I'm like, what makes them go viral? So it's, and I've like broke it down to a handful of categories, which is like, it's either of, it's gotta be a food that's typically a side, but you're gonna eat it in excess. So for example, only cookie dough instead of, so ice cream, that's just cookie dough.

• 17:45Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 17:46Sam Parr?

  Or-

• 17:46Shaan Puri?

  You make the, you make the topping the main.

• 17:48Sam Parr?

  Yep. So like-

• 17:49Shaan Puri?

  One formula you could use.

• 17:51Sam Parr?

  Yep. Another like, or like fondue. So like fondue is typically an appetizer, fondue only.

• 17:56Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 17:56Sam Parr?

  Another thing is you take the shape of it and you make it a ridiculous shape.

• 18:00Shaan Puri?

  Yes.

• 18:01Sam Parr?

  Easy.

• 18:01Shaan Puri?

  Including small to big, like there's Bob's Donuts here.

• 18:04Sam Parr?

  And that's my next one, which is sizing. So you make something small, big, a big, small.

• 18:08Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 18:08Sam Parr?

  The, the fifth or fourth thing is color. Rainbow bagels. So you just take the color, green ketchup.

• 18:14Shaan Puri?

  Instagrammable, yes.

• 18:15Sam Parr?

  Yes. And then I had a fifth one, which was, um-

• 18:18Shaan Puri?

  So mashups, which is Cronut, right?

• 18:21Sam Parr?

  Oh yeah. And then, and then that was the fifth one. You take-

• 18:23Shaan Puri?

  They're Doritos Locos Taco, one of the, the most successful fast food thing in like the last 10 years was this Doritos Locos Taco. And then every fast food chain hired these agencies to be like, find me the next Doritos Loco Taco.

• 18:36Sam Parr?

  Right. And so those are the five like categories that I discovered. And then it's like, okay, so you just make it go viral by, you, you have to have distribution via Thrillist, BuzzFeed. And then eventually it's like, well, you just have your own handle and then you're just gonna make these go. And then you're gonna have a small shop outside, uh, outside in Brooklyn or in Manhattan. And you're just gonna-

• 18:55Shaan Puri?

  You're always putting out bangers.

• 18:56Sam Parr?

  Yeah. You're just gonna fucking knock it out the park and you're gonna have a line all the time. And then three months later, boom, that one shut down, switch. Now we're doing cookie dough ice cream.

• 19:04Shaan Puri?

  So every season you come out with a new one viral sensation.

• 19:08Sam Parr?

  Yeah. It's like, all right, now we're doing-

• 19:09Shaan Puri?

  I love this.

• 19:10Sam Parr?

  We're doing rainbow cake now, or green ketchup and hot dogs. Like, you're just like, you're just like, okay. And so if I was, I, I've always thought about, like, man, that's the way to go. You just have a small, you just- So banging these, you're banging these out. And then for the ones that last that are hits like Corona, it might be a hit. I mean, that's kind of like its own category now.

• 19:27Shaan Puri?

  Yep.

• 19:27Sam Parr?

  Um, then you've, that's like one of your temple franchises.

• 19:30Shaan Puri?

  Right. It's always available.

• 19:31Sam Parr?

  Yeah, that's what I would do. And then so with HQ trivia, I would have done the same thing.

• 19:35Shaan Puri?

  So this is like supreme for food. It's like you have this, um, limited scarce, kind of like, uh, out there thing. What you're doing is you're making these, these sort of wild concoctions on the food side, using these five different.

• 19:47Sam Parr?

  Yeah, but it's all formulaic.

• 19:49Shaan Puri?

  Yes.

• 19:49Sam Parr?

  It's just like.

• 19:49Shaan Puri?

  Following one of these five formulas.

• 19:51Sam Parr?

  Singa.

• 19:51Shaan Puri?

  And then you, you do a limited edition drop. You basically say, you know, you tweet out at 1am, it's live. You get a huge line. People cover the fact that there's a line and then it becomes a thing in a hipster town.

• 20:02Sam Parr?

  Yeah, this is so easy, like bagel bites, like pizza and bagel.

• 20:04Shaan Puri?

  So this is back when you were doing your hot dog stand. If you knew everything you know now, but you still needed to do a hot dog stand, you would end up doing something more like this.

• 20:11Sam Parr?

  Like green ketchup, like that are my shtick. The ketchup would only be green.

• 20:14Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 20:16Sam Parr?

  And what I did back then was I had, uh, what I did was like, you just have a little shtick, like, um, mine was my onions. I would boil them in Coca-Cola, which a lot of people do. I would just tell everyone I did that.

• 20:27Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 20:27Sam Parr?

  And so there's, this is actually a famous copywriting trick, which is, have you ever heard of, um, oh, a time, like a watch, like a, like a wristwatch being described as like with quartz movement?

• 20:37Shaan Puri?

  Yes.

• 20:38Sam Parr?

  They all have fucking quartz movement.

• 20:39Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 20:39Sam Parr?

  They all do. All of them do. Or like space age aluminum. They all, that's not even a thing. First of all, like.

• 20:46Shaan Puri?

  What's that Mad Men line? Um, it's like our filters are rolled or something like.

• 20:50Sam Parr?

  Yeah. And they're like, well, everyone's is. And they're like, well, they don't know it.

• 20:52Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 20:53Sam Parr?

  So space age aluminum, that, that, that means nothing. First of all, all aluminum.

• 20:58Shaan Puri?

  First of all, nonsense.

• 20:59Sam Parr?

  Yeah. And second of all, quartz movement. Every single watch has that.

• 21:03Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 21:04Sam Parr?

  And so the idea here is you just take something that they don't know, even though all the insiders know, you just tell them.

• 21:09Shaan Puri?

  Right. We did this experiment when we were doing the sushi restaurant where we took the descriptions of our food. So it'd be like, you know, you take a, a Philadelphia roll, which is like this Americanized, it's salmon, it's cream cheese and it's cucumber in a sushi roll. And then we would just, uh, so Dan Ariely was one of our advisors and he's the guy who wrote Predictably Rational. And so he would, he told us like, hey, One of the reasons wine charges this premium is because they created a whole language around what they do. You need to create a language around sushi so that people who start to learn about it feel like they know more and they want to pay more so they can have the better thing. Just teach them what is the better thing. And so we would, you know, we started just adding words. As one experiment, we would have one version of our website where it was all online ordering.

• 21:50Shaan Puri?

  So it's one version of our website would be the normal website. Then our A B test was the other variation was our Philadelphia roll would be called like, it'd be called the Philadelphia roll and then the description would be like Atlantic fresh, you know, never frozen salmon with, you know, Philadelphia, authentic Philadelphia cream cheese and a finely sliced cucumber. And we would raise the price and we would get like more orders even despite the higher price.

• 22:14Sam Parr?

  That's crazy.

• 22:14Shaan Puri?

  And, and so it's just like a psychological thing around.

• 22:18Sam Parr?

  Yeah, that shit works.

• 22:18Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, around the descriptions around things. Okay, back to HQ for a second. So they did try to release other games. They came out with like a word scramble type game. I think they kind of ran out of time and also they had built the hype too much and lesson to be learned. When you build this much hype, if you start to fail, you death spiral way faster because the hype, the pressure of your expectations and hype will crush you.

• 22:40Sam Parr?

  Well, so that's what I mean is I would have built this company expecting that. Like we discussed that Clog game and they're like, well, they're building it. So they're going to just capture all the value upfront and then let it die.

• 22:50Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 22:51Sam Parr?

  So if you would have built that right, like built that into it, it would have been, it could have been a company kind of like, I imagine Zingit does this, which is they just have like, they're like, all right, this game is only going to last 80 days, maybe.

• 23:00Shaan Puri?

  Right. So two quick ideas on this HQ thing. So HQ died. Okay. You know, rest in peace. But two things I, you could do if you wanted to make, make use of this, of the insights that were found in this. I think you can do this on top of Twitch or YouTube or any live streaming platform that already has audience. So you don't need to be your own app. You should just host, create a channel that's hosting a show and give away the prize money and promote it in the same way. And so I think somebody could build this on top of one of the existing platforms. Not have to build your own tech and not have to acquire downloads of your app, which is really expensive. And I think if you just did this every day at 7:00 PM on Twitch, I think a bunch of people would tune in. Second idea around this is.

• 23:41Shaan Puri?

  Maybe the HQ format, which is this live video streaming with this charismatic host and question and answer could be used in education. And so I would love to see somebody create an after-school game that parents actually pay $3 a week to subscribe to, where your kid learns science through some Bill Nye the Science Guy type of host, and it's trivia, it's interactive, and they get sort of points as they answer it. I thought about starting that company, but I really think that that could work. I think it might also have the sort of fade in interest. But I remember as a kid, I loved Brain Quest, and I played all these like learning games, and they were great. And so I think this is a modern day version of that.

• 24:15Sam Parr?

  That's interesting. That is quite sticky. I think that as we get older, I mean, your kid's not old enough, so you'll, I imagine you'll learn this once she gets old enough. But these things that we use as we are kids were just huge.

• 24:28Shaan Puri?

  Yes.

• 24:28Sam Parr?

  Huge. I'm into that.

• 24:31Shaan Puri?

  And you wouldn't need tens of millions of people because you're not advertising. You'd be on subscription because parents would be like, oh, I don't have to go drop my kid off at tutoring, and I don't have to like, learn this myself. My kid already wants to sit in front of the iPad all day. So, okay, here's an iPad game that I feel good about because you're learning. It's kind of cool because it's live and interactive, and I could play with you, and I'll pay $3 a week for that.

• 24:51Sam Parr?

  Do you want to hear what I've, in that same category, that I'll come back with some more research, but I was just surfing around and saw is that but for allowance?

• 25:03Shaan Puri?

  Okay, tell me more.

• 25:03Sam Parr?

  So, a friend, Ramon's kid, I was like, I was like, hey Victor, does your dad give you allowance? Like, he better be giving you some money, right? And he goes, yeah, but it's all in this app. And I was like, what do you mean? He's like, well, it is automated, and I get $10 a week if I do everything, and I have a list of everything I gotta do. And then it just sends me this $10, but it sends it into an account, and I could use those on the, the places that he's already approved that I could spend it on. Or if he wants, I can get this debit card that only works at a handful of places.

• 25:34Shaan Puri?

  That's a great idea.

• 25:35Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I was like, oh.

• 25:36Shaan Puri?

  Of course. That's a of course idea. I get mad at myself for not thinking of it.

• 25:40Sam Parr?

  So I'm gonna go, I haven't thought, I haven't seen their financials or any, I've done, I'm going to.

• 25:45Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 25:47Sam Parr?

  When he told me that, I was like, oh, okay, obviously, great.

• 25:50Shaan Puri?

  Right. What else we got?

• 25:52Sam Parr?

  So on trends, we released this on Tuesday. Two things were interesting that our guys found, or Steph and our guy, so men and women found, which we only have two people, so.

• 26:05Shaan Puri?

  So your guy and gal found that.

• 26:09Sam Parr?

  Two things. I'm like thinking about all of it. First, everyone talks about meditation being like the most popular, like being a huge trend right now. People searching for sleep is actually significantly more, like, like sleep products. And not, and this makes total sense because Calm, I'm a subscriber to Calm.

• 26:29Shaan Puri?

  Sleep Stories.

• 26:30Sam Parr?

  They're pushing sleep like crazy.

• 26:32Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, Sleep Stories, I think, was the breakout product for, the breakout feature for.

• 26:36Sam Parr?

  That's crazy. And so I didn't realize this until they like pointed it out. And I'm like, oh, yeah, that does make sense. Sleep is way bigger than meditation. And meditation is huge.

• 26:45Shaan Puri?

  Sleep is also, a lot of people search for it because, so for meditation, you're trying to teach a new habit. Sleep, everybody does. Also for sleep, a lot of people have problems sleeping. So they will actively search for and pay for solutions that will help them sleep.

• 27:01Sam Parr?

  I pay for a bunch of them. I pay for.

• 27:03Shaan Puri?

  What's your sleep?

• 27:03Sam Parr?

  An Alexa app called Nature Sounds. And they have like 26 sounds and I pay extra money to combine them. So my, the one I sleep to is Winter Railroad. And so.

• 27:14Shaan Puri?

  What does that sound like?

• 27:14Sam Parr?

  It's a train, it's a train going through the mountains in winter.

• 27:18Shaan Puri?

  What's the winter part? What is the sound of winter?

• 27:20Sam Parr?

  You hear like wind.

• 27:21Shaan Puri?

  Okay.

• 27:23Sam Parr?

  I love it.

• 27:24Shaan Puri?

  I feel you shared something very personal there. I love it.

• 27:26Sam Parr?

  It's great. I go, Alexa, play nature sounds. Or sometimes I'll do ship in winter because it sounds like an icebreaker. And then Alexa, turn off in 20 minutes.

• 27:36Shaan Puri?

  Dude, this is also like one of these, you know, hackathon projects where some developers like, okay, watch this, just say two words. And I go search the internet for sounds and I smash them together and it makes an audio thing. Like this is Furcon's next hackathon, they should build this.

• 27:49Sam Parr?

  Like, I don't even know what it could be like chickens in China street.

• 27:53Shaan Puri?

  Exactly.

• 27:57Shaan Puri?

  What happens to Sarah? She doesn't like, does she like the same sounds?

• 27:59Sam Parr?

  Yeah, she's down with it. She's down with it.

• 28:01Shaan Puri?

  So do you take any sleep aids, like, like, like a vitamin or supplement or CBD or something?

• 28:07Sam Parr?

  Melatonin.

• 28:08Shaan Puri?

  Melatonin?

• 28:09Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 28:09Shaan Puri?

  Does that work, help her?

• 28:10Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it does. If I really can't sleep, I'll take one of those Unih, did my computer die? I think it died. One of my Unih, Unigel, is that what it's called? Unisoft? It's a, it's basically like a mild dosage of NyQuil without the medicine part.

• 28:29Shaan Puri?

  Oh, that's good. So, okay. So it's the way some people take NyQuil. Just asleep. And so this is the just asleep part.

• 28:36Sam Parr?

  It's just.

• 28:36Shaan Puri?

  I don't have a cough.

• 28:37Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it's just a light version. You don't take that stuff?

• 28:39Shaan Puri?

  Uh, I, I heard this phrase today. I could sleep in a ditch. Uh, so I just, when I would decide to go to sleep, I instantly fall asleep and I do not wake up at night, um, ever. And so I'm blessed.

• 28:49Sam Parr?

  You, I am typically like that as well, but not as bad. Um, there's this guy that we should profile. He, um, he, uh, he's a Japanese billionaire or sorry, uh, Chinese billionaire. And he started a, uh, uh, so he, he's a, he's a big shot now and he owns like half a bank and all this other shit. And he got rich by creating a melatonin. He just took melatonin and rebranded it and made it sexy and called it a sleep aid and whatever. It got huge. And then he launched the Zynga of China. Um, and he ended up buying like the building that they lived in, just like Zynga. And, or that they worked in and it became this huge thing. We'll have to do, I'll have to bring him up because I love him because he's reckless and he's built a fortune and lost it all like three times.

• 29:31Shaan Puri?

  Right. Yeah. You love that.

• 29:32Sam Parr?

  I love those guys. Um, okay. And then we also talked about, uh, do it yourself perfume. Uh, so apparently that's a huge community is do it yourself perfume. And there's not a ton of companies in the space.

• 29:43Shaan Puri?

  So what's, what's happening? What are these people trying to do? They, they don't want to buy perfume. They want to mix their own at home?

• 29:48Sam Parr?

  Yeah. So basically perfume is a huge business. Um, Paris Hilton, a lot of people forget about her. She has sold roughly $5 billion of her perfume.

• 29:58Shaan Puri?

  Cycling back to the porn conversation earlier. Okay. Paris Hilton. Yes.

• 30:00Sam Parr?

  Yes. And let's say her stuff costs a hundred dollars, which it doesn't. It, it's typically 90% margin.

• 30:07Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. Incredible.

• 30:08Sam Parr?

  So huge fat margins and everyone now knows this. Um, and so the idea here is that people are trying to make their own perfume at home. And it's got, there's a lot of sub, uh, subreddits around it. A lot of communities who discuss different. Perfume, like how to create your own perfume, but there aren't too many companies that are making it easy to make your own perfume and formulas and things like that.

• 30:32Shaan Puri?

  Dude, that makes a lot of sense. This is like one of those industries where when you hear about the winner later, you're like, oh, okay, it was set up for success. So for example, Warby Parker, you know, one of the reasons Warby Parker worked so well was that the existing eyewear, eyeglass, you know, industry was all owned by this one conglomerate-

• 30:51Sam Parr?

  Luxottica.

• 30:51Shaan Puri?

  That had price, pricing power and was marking shit up like crazy. So they didn't have to like, invent something to lower the price. They just had to not be greedy and be like, okay, yeah, we can offer this at a fair price and still have margin. And so-

• 31:05Sam Parr?

  Do you own Cologne?

• 31:07Shaan Puri?

  I own Cologne. And so what you're saying is basically Cologne vastly marked up in the same way razors are super marked up and Dollar Shave Club came in. But instead of somebody just making a Dollar Shave Club version of Cologne, they're giving you a DIY kit and then there's like probably Reddit communities of home brewers for perfume.

• 31:25Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it's actually pretty great.

• 31:26Shaan Puri?

  And there's an infinite number of recipes and scents, so you're gonna-

• 31:29Sam Parr?

  Yeah, and what would be interesting-

• 31:29Shaan Puri?

  You're gonna try a bunch.

• 31:30Sam Parr?

  Is if you took it a step further, an interesting scents could be sold already.

• 31:35Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, so you could create a marketplace where you could sell yours.

• 31:37Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 31:37Shaan Puri?

  You too, just even to your own friends and family. You could create a kit for people to do this and make a better kit. I'm sure there's one that exists. Another idea, you know, we were talking about kid stuff earlier, like my niece would love to mix her own perfume. She would, that would be like a great afternoon. And my, my sister would buy her, you know, this little kid friendly perfume making kit. It's like one of the arts and crafts things that she gets, gets to do. And she makes it. Then everyone who comes over, she gets to show him, show her, show them their-

• 32:03Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I'm into that.

• 32:04Shaan Puri?

  I think you could do this for kids and it would be a big deal.

• 32:06Sam Parr?

  Here's another angle that we found in trends is soap. Do it yourself soap. Big thing. People want to make their own soap. And what was the third one?

• 32:16Sam Parr?

  Juice. But we already know that's-

• 32:18Shaan Puri?

  Right, juicing. Yeah, okay.

• 32:20Sam Parr?

  Okay, so a topic that we talked about yesterday that you wanted me to look into more was auctions.

• 32:24Shaan Puri?

  Auctions, yes.

• 32:25Sam Parr?

  I had never heard of this company that you showed me, Heritage Auctions.

• 32:29Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 32:30Sam Parr?

  I think that auctions, particularly marketplaces-

• 32:34Sam Parr?

  I would love someone to criticize this because I want to hear the downsides. I think that they are potentially one of the top like two or three business models.

• 32:43Shaan Puri?

  Auctions?

• 32:44Sam Parr?

  Or well auctions and marketplaces.

• 32:45Shaan Puri?

  Marketplaces for sure. Yeah.

• 32:47Sam Parr?

  But auction style marketplaces.

• 32:49Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 32:50Sam Parr?

  I think they're the one of the best.

• 32:51Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, you've seen a bunch of them. Yeah.

• 32:53Sam Parr?

  I think they're.

• 32:53Shaan Puri?

  Ebay being the sort of classic.

• 32:55Sam Parr?

  Yeah, and I think Ebay sucks, by the way. There's someone's totally gonna crush them. I mean, they're gonna be dead. Not dead, but.

• 33:01Shaan Puri?

  Somebody told me, this is half, half, half information. Somebody told me Ebay has had like a revival and they don't do the auction stuff as much anymore. They're all like, it's basically Amazon-ish.

• 33:11Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I fucking hate it. I hate it.

• 33:13Shaan Puri?

  But somebody said that their numbers have turned around. I don't know if that's true.

• 33:15Sam Parr?

  Well, they're a behemoth. They're not going anywhere anytime soon. I mean, they're like Google, like you're like, oh, well, they're sucking like, okay. I mean, they're gonna last for another 50 years at least.

• 33:23Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 33:23Sam Parr?

  So anyway, I love auctions. I like, and I love niche auctions. And Heritage, which you pointed out, they do that. You got the, you got that pulled up, Henry? And you could pull it up on your phone. So they did $800 million in sales. So.

• 33:43Sam Parr?

  It's not on the screen. So let's look at their top categories. Do you have it on your phone?

• 33:48Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, so I have it. So coins, I think was their top, right?

• 33:51Sam Parr?

  Yeah, so they do, I think, $300 million in currency.

• 33:54Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 33:55Sam Parr?

  Okay, but look at some of the more interesting ones. Movie posters, 10 million, $10 million in sales. What was comics? Comics is on there.

• 34:03Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, let me just pull it up.

• 34:05Sam Parr?

  What's it say for comics, Henry?

• 34:07Speaker 02

  50 million.

• 34:08Sam Parr?

  Comics, 50.

• 34:10Speaker 02

  Sports, 60 million.

• 34:11Sam Parr?

  Sports, 60 million.

• 34:12Shaan Puri?

  Export collectibles, basically.

• 34:14Sam Parr?

  Mm-hmm.

• 34:15Speaker 02

  300 million.

• 34:16Shaan Puri?

  Luxury real estate, 19 million. Wine, 10 million.

• 34:20Sam Parr?

  Crazy, right?

• 34:21Shaan Puri?

  Tons.

• 34:22Sam Parr?

  Crazy. And here's what I like about it.

• 34:25Shaan Puri?

  Dude, this is a big idea. We talk a lot, in fact, I have a pet peeve. We talk a lot about these like small little business arbitrages, hacks, little businesses. This would be a big, big company if you could get this right.

• 34:35Sam Parr?

  And so what, so I love, I love marketplaces and I love auctions. I love auctions because there's a time component to it.

• 34:42Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 34:42Sam Parr?

  And that urgency makes you buy more. And what I think is even better, and so for Heritage Auctions, I think roughly half of their sales of $800 million sales are online and the other half are in person. You want to know another in-person auction that's doing wonderfully? Barrett Jackson. Have you heard of Barrett Jackson?

• 35:01Shaan Puri?

  No.

• 35:02Sam Parr?

  So Barrett Jackson is based in Arizona, bootstrapped, owned by one guy.

• 35:06Shaan Puri?

  Is that his name?

• 35:08Sam Parr?

  Barrett.

• 35:09Shaan Puri?

  Maybe.

• 35:10Sam Parr?

  Barrett is dead, Jackson is alive.

• 35:12Shaan Puri?

  Okay.

• 35:12Sam Parr?

  Or it could be the other way around. One of them is dead. But what they do is they actually have a, they, they put this on TV all the time. I watch it all the time.

• 35:22Sam Parr?

  What they do is sell cars, so classic cars.

• 35:25Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 35:25Sam Parr?

  Not all classic cars, but just like rare or like interesting cars. You could buy like a $10,000 car there, but so they'll have a car on and they'll say like this Ferrari, there was only 500 of them. This, it sells for $200,000 and they showed it and you're like, oh, awesome. That sale just happened in three minutes. That was great. And so they'll, they do, I believe 68 shows a year and they make hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.

• 35:46Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 35:47Sam Parr?

  It's a huge business and I love that. And so another one is Bring a Trailer. They do cars as well. And the guy who started Bring a Trailer also started Mailbox, Gentry Underwood. So he's like, which he sold to Dropbox.

• 35:58Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 35:58Sam Parr?

  And so I like these auction places and first of all, I like niche auctions. So I like watches, anything that's niche, but tell, but what do you, what is another, and I have one idea, idea, what's a current marketplace that's very illiquid and hard to sell and you wish that could go way faster?

• 36:16Shaan Puri?

  Hmm. Houses is one, luxury houses, which they put on here because it takes a while to sell a house in general. And so Open Door is trying to make that instant as a market, as a, a real estate company, not, not as much as an auction.

• 36:32Shaan Puri?

  I have a friend who did this with sneakers. He.

• 36:34Sam Parr?

  People are doing that now. I think it's working well.

• 36:36Shaan Puri?

  He did it as a 90 minute auction. So he would say, the sneaker goes live, it's 90 minutes and we're going to get you your guaranteed price.

• 36:44Shaan Puri?

  Or we, they basically offer the seller, they're like, we will buy it at this price if the auction doesn't go higher. So if you agree to that, you start the process and it's 90 minutes.

• 36:52Sam Parr?

  What else?

• 36:54Shaan Puri?

  I don't know. What else you got?

• 36:55Sam Parr?

  Small businesses.

• 36:56Shaan Puri?

  Okay, just flip my business?

• 36:58Sam Parr?

  And this is a, maybe would just fall flat. This is one of those, it could be amazing, or it would just be horrible the idea. But if I were Quiet Light Brokerage, who sponsors this, or if I were another brokerage, I would 100% have an event and try to gather 1,000 people. And we're gonna auction off these businesses.

• 37:18Shaan Puri?

  Uh, my idea from yesterday, the first dibs, where you're auctioning future, the future first, uh, future first, whatever you're gonna create. I think that would work really well with this, um, as well. But businesses, the hard part is you have, um,

• 37:29Sam Parr?

  There's so many hard parts about it.

• 37:30Shaan Puri?

  There's a lot of hard parts, but one is just the diligence, right? So like, when I buy the, um, the movie poster, whatever, if it has sort of the certification and the, the person who's, you know, selling it sort of says this is authentic. I don't need to look too much more into it, whereas with a business, you really have to sort of understand all these different components. I think that's hard.

• 37:47Sam Parr?

  I agree, it's hard, but I think it's interesting. Because like, if someone just, like, if I knew Shopify apps or something, and there was this gathering, and they're just auctioning off a shit ton of them. And it's kind of like a storage war, where it's like, which, you're not sure what you're gonna get, but let's just find out. Like, it could be fun to gamble tens of thousands of dollars.

• 38:05Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, just storage units. That would be interesting. Like, a mystery box, basically, that you're buying?

• 38:10Sam Parr?

  Well, fuck yeah, actually.

• 38:12Shaan Puri?

  That would be really fun and, uh, and interesting. It'd have to be cheap enough.

• 38:16Sam Parr?

  That's interesting. Is someone doing stor- a storage unit?

• 38:20Shaan Puri?

  Like, blind auctions?

• 38:22Sam Parr?

  Yeah, yeah, surely. They have to be, right?

• 38:24Shaan Puri?

  I don't know, but you could tie some of these ideas together, right? So like, what HQ showed, where they did, basically, uh, they took a traditional TV show and turned it into a live streaming mobile app, um, where the game show's on, on your phone. This is the future of TV. Like, you can do a QVC, or I don't know what show you talked about, you watched the auctions on, but like,

• 38:40Sam Parr?

  Well, that's Barrett Jackson, but there's another one called, um,

• 38:42Shaan Puri?

  Turn these into mobile livestreamed shows, and you could essentially sell these all through, through, um, you know, you could take, So one way to look at this is,

• 38:50Sam Parr?

  Antiques Roadshow, that's what I was thinking about.

• 38:51Shaan Puri?

  Right, so one way to look at this is you, you start selling some item that's not currently sold on these auction places. Might be hard, because a lot of time has passed and sort of like, you know, the law of supply and demand has pulled things that want to be sold this way into the market, but maybe you can find a new niche. Or you just take the existing platforms and you make them smaller, more lightweight and mobile focused. You just win that way. And so like, I don't know, do you know Top Hatter?

• 39:16Sam Parr?

  Uh, yeah. What do they do?

• 39:17Shaan Puri?

  Top Hatter, incredible company. It's Wish. So it's a mobile app where you see a bunch of really cheap stuff from China, uh, random stuff. It can be like a back brace and a ring and a, um, you know, whatever, a poster, a shoe.

• 39:29Sam Parr?

  Dollar store crap.

• 39:30Shaan Puri?

  Dollar store. Well, it's like the, it's like the Wish crap, which is like random electronics and memorabilia and items. Yeah. Laser pointers and class rings and like, you know, whatever. But what they do is, which is interesting is it's a, um, they, the item starts. So you open up the app and you see all these things and like, you've never seen your adrenaline spike like this in a mobile app before. All the prices are starting at like, whatever $50 and they just start dropping and then somebody just hits buy and then they buy it. And so you kind of want to wait to get it lower, but you don't want to wait too long because somebody else is going to buy it. So Top Hatter is a startup here in San Francisco and they do hundreds of millions of dollars of revenue. Very good, very interesting business. I don't know how profitable it is, how sticky it is, blah, blah, blah. But when you go into the app, it's like

• 40:15Shaan Puri?

  a, it's like being in like this high stakes Chinese market.

• 40:18Sam Parr?

  Is it like those dollar auction, like those penny auctions things? Cause those are all like fucking scams.

• 40:22Shaan Puri?

  A little bit like that, but they, but you don't have to buy credits and stuff like that. It's more like Wish, but instead of, what they tap into is instead of browsing and picking, they pick, they, they like inject into your FOMO, you know, part of your brain. And so you're like, okay, this item, do I want it? Do I want it for six bucks, five bucks, four bucks, three, I'll take it. And you end up buying a whole bunch of shit. And, uh, it's just a bunch of moms who are bored at home that are just shopping on this thing. And they feel like, hey, we're getting tons of value, but like this is stuff you didn't even know you wanted. You don't even want.

• 40:51Sam Parr?

  It's just shit.

• 40:52Shaan Puri?

  It's just shit.

• 40:52Sam Parr?

  And I'm going to download it and buy some stuff. I buy shit all the time.

• 40:55Shaan Puri?

  Top Hatter's cool.

• 40:57Sam Parr?

  You want to do one more or end it there?

• 41:00Shaan Puri?

  Uh, let's do one quick one. So, uh, I have this career advice. So there's this great line, I think Sheryl Sandberg said a while back, which was, um, if you're offered a seat on a rocket ship, you don't ask which chair, you just sit down and buckle up, something like that. That's her quote. And, um, I see people get this wrong all the time. And so you're making, let's say you're listening to this and you're making career choices. So we talk a lot about businesses, business ideas, but a lot of people who are listening to this are not yet, they haven't, you know, they have a job and they haven't yet, you know, started their own company necessarily. So when it comes to job selection. If you think about the companies you're thinking about joining, I want you to classify them into cars, rocket ships, or Titanic's.

• 41:43Shaan Puri?

  And basically, the goal in your career advice is not to look at the role, you know, like, what does the job description say? It's not even really to look at the compensation package, although, you know, there should be a minimum there. But you want to optimize for getting onto rocket ships. And so a rocket ship is a company that's growing really, really fast. They've figured out what they're doing, and there's still a whole bunch of problems to be solved, and they're the right type of problems. A bad problem is, nobody wants our product. We have to figure out how to get them to want it. A good type of problem is, too many people want our product. We have to make sure we can keep up with this demand. And so you want to, you want to find a rocket ship, and you want to take whatever roles you can get on that rocket ship. You want to sit down, you want to buckle up, because what ends up happening in these fast-growing companies is, if you're good, and you kill it for even two months, you'll get moved

• 42:28Shaan Puri?

  and promoted to a better spot, because they'll be like, oh, this person can actually do something. We have so many fires to put out. Okay, we thought you were a junior, but like, hey, junior, you're now working on this thing, because you're the best we got, and we, I've seen you problem solve so far. And so what a mistake people make is, they try to pick a role that's a higher ranking role initially, or better compensation initially, but they join either a slow-moving company where they're not going to learn, it's not going to grow, or they join a Titanic, which is just, you know, about to sink. But hey, I got the best seat on the Titanic. You don't want that either. And so my advice is, find the rocket ship companies, take whatever seat they'll give you, crush it, and then they'll move you up.

• 43:08Sam Parr?

  Great. I think that, to add to that analogy, a lot of people shouldn't join that fast-growing thing, or do they want that fast-growing thing, but they want something that's mildly growing? Is that what that car is?

• 43:22Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I think that's, that's where, yeah, I'm speaking to the people that-

• 43:26Sam Parr?

  Like, someone that is-

• 43:27Shaan Puri?

  They're trying to max out, but they're currently in the job track. So if you're trying to max out, and you're not starting your own business, this is the next best thing, in my opinion.

• 43:34Sam Parr?

  Yes, like, not a lot, some people-

• 43:36Shaan Puri?

  A lot of people don't want to max out.

• 43:37Sam Parr?

  They have kids, and they're like- I want a nice life.

• 43:40Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 43:41Sam Parr?

  I don't want a high risk, high reward life.

• 43:43Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 43:43Sam Parr?

  And to those people, that advice doesn't apply.

• 43:46Shaan Puri?

  Right. And I'm just guessing a lot of those people don't listen to the podcast because if you're that person, you probably listen to like, I don't know, Bon Jovi on your way to work. You don't listen to like a podcast about business and ideas and all that stuff.

• 43:55Sam Parr?

  Sure.

• 43:55Shaan Puri?

  I think we've self-selected at least.

• 43:57Sam Parr?

  I think that's good advice.

• 43:59Shaan Puri?

  And by the way, when you, so have you had a job, have you been employed, let's say, not like, kind of like college age, but like since then, or have you just done businesses of your own?

• 44:07Sam Parr?

  Uh, we had like an acquisition and I was kind of employed there, but I.

• 44:12Shaan Puri?

  But you haven't gone and just interviewed for jobs?

• 44:14Sam Parr?

  I interviewed once, a couple of times and I never got them.

• 44:17Shaan Puri?

  What'd you interview for?

• 44:18Sam Parr?

  For Vungle, for Jack Smith, my best friend. I interviewed for his job and I didn't get it.

• 44:23Shaan Puri?

  What happened?

• 44:24Sam Parr?

  They just didn't call me back. I started.

• 44:26Shaan Puri?

  They didn't call you back? Jack didn't tell you?

• 44:28Sam Parr?

  The guy who's like my best friend now, I didn't know him. I interviewed at his job.

• 44:32Shaan Puri?

  Oh, you didn't know him at the time?

• 44:33Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I didn't know him.

• 44:34Shaan Puri?

  Okay.

• 44:34Sam Parr?

  They interviewed me and they didn't hire me. And then two years later, we became best friends.

• 44:38Shaan Puri?

  And you were trying to be a salesperson or what?

• 44:40Sam Parr?

  I don't even remember. I think so.

• 44:42Shaan Puri?

  By the way, I have a similar story. I applied to Stripe. I think I might've told this story already. So apologies if I did, but 2012, I applied to, I was going to apply for a job for the first time in my life. I had started two companies before that. I was like, I'm moving to Silicon Valley. I'm going to get a job. I'm going to learn from other people rather than start my own thing. And I only applied to two jobs. One was Stripe and I got to the phone screen. And I really had it made because the guy who was interviewing me, his mentor in life was one of my former advisors in my startup and had written a blog post being like, this guy Sean is like, he said specifically, he has the highest bias for action of any entrepreneur I've ever met. He made a warm intro to this guy and was like, trust me, this guy's legit. You should hire this kid.

• 45:25Sam Parr?

  How the fuck did you not get that job?

• 45:26Shaan Puri?

  And so I thought I was cruising too, and maybe that's why I didn't get it. But I get to the part of the interview where he was like, all right, you know, this job has a lot of sort of sales and persuasion stuff. So, you know, we're a piece of software. So I want you to, you know, we're going to do a little role play. You're going to sell me a piece of software. And he's like, you can pick any software you like, whatever you're familiar with.

• 45:46Sam Parr?

  Oh, you probably got creative or something.

• 45:47Shaan Puri?

  And I was just like, um, I was like, okay, so I, here's what I would do. I would talk to you about this. He said, no, no, no, don't tell me what you would do, like. I'm the customer. Hello, I just picked up the phone. Go. And I was like, fuck. And so I, I was like, hey, uh, you know, I'm telling you about, I picked Basecamp uh as my software. Big mistake because I don't even know Basecamp very well. And so I just like, I just.

• 46:11Sam Parr?

  So they didn't call you back for that reason?

• 46:13Shaan Puri?

  By the, by the end of that role play, he was just like, yeah, I don't think this is for you. I'm just being honest with you. Um, like, I just don't think you're, you know, uh,

• 46:21Sam Parr?

  How old were you?

• 46:22Shaan Puri?

  For this.

• 46:22Sam Parr?

  That was eight years ago?

• 46:23Shaan Puri?

  Some, yeah, I was like probably twenty, twenty-three or twenty-four at the time.

• 46:26Sam Parr?

  How, ah, fuck, how early?

• 46:29Shaan Puri?

  I'm like, I, I blew it. Like, it wasn't their bad. Like, I definitely blew that interview.

• 46:33Sam Parr?

  How early of an employee would you have been?

• 46:34Shaan Puri?

  So I think they were at like fif- maybe fifty people or less, or a hundred people or less.

• 46:38Sam Parr?

  Cost you five million dollars.

• 46:40Shaan Puri?

  Well, yeah, I don't know how much equity I would have. I would have had to do the rocket ship thing. I would have had to start in a crappy seat, crush it, and then get into a good seat to get equity, but like.

• 46:48Sam Parr?

  I did that with Uber and Airbnb. I had job interviews at Airbnb and Uber.

• 46:54Shaan Puri?

  Early-ish.

• 46:54Sam Parr?

  First hundred people and uh, one of them I got, one of them I got the offer, but then they rescinded it because I lied about my resume. And the other one I didn't get past the.

• 47:02Shaan Puri?

  What did you lie about?

• 47:03Sam Parr?

  I had a criminal record and I told them I didn't.

• 47:05Shaan Puri?

  Okay.

• 47:07Sam Parr?

  So I, I moved all the way out here.

• 47:09Shaan Puri?

  My bluff, fair play.

• 47:10Sam Parr?

  I moved all the way out here. They're like, oh, all right, uh, don't come to work on Monday.

• 47:14Shaan Puri?

  Dude, that's hilarious. Um, at least you had good eye for picking these companies.

• 47:19Sam Parr?

  And then I applied at Vungle and they sold for eight hundred million dollars. So I always tell people, find out where I want to work at, who will also deny me, and then invest there.

• 47:29Shaan Puri?

  Okay, let's start with, where would you want to work at today? If you were you back then, where would you be applying today?

• 47:35Sam Parr?

  Great question. Do you have an answer? Do you want to go first?

• 47:38Shaan Puri?

  Couple of years ago, I, I answered this. I was like, the only place I would be really interested in working was Angel List at the time.

• 47:43Sam Parr?

  No, that'd be a horrible place to work.

• 47:45Shaan Puri?

  And so I thought, uh, Angel List was doing really interesting shit, and I think it's gonna be big. And it, it did end up becoming big. And um, this was like seven years ago, so this was a while ago.

• 47:53Sam Parr?

  Yeah, no, that would be a horrible place to work though, because that, of all guys, fucking crazy.

• 47:57Shaan Puri?

  Really? I love the ball. Well, I don't know, but.

• 47:59Sam Parr?

  He seems like a brilliant genius. So a great person to listen to, but a horrible person to manage you. If, okay, if I had to work somewhere, I probably.

• 48:08Sam Parr?

  Hmm. Probably just somewhere with really good managers. Most startups have horrible managers and

• 48:15Shaan Puri?

  Like when you were looking at Uber, Airbnb, you didn't know the managers. So you weren't using that criteria then.

• 48:20Sam Parr?

  No, but and I don't know if it would have been successful. Sarah, my wife works at Airbnb and she loves her managers. And you know how everyone's like, so what are you going to do next? They always say that. And she's like, what do you mean? Why would I ever do anything next? This is awesome. I'll be here for a really long time.

• 48:31Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 48:32Sam Parr?

  And I would love to have that feeling.

• 48:34Shaan Puri?

  I would probably now look for a company that's I would go find all the most interesting biotech based companies. So anybody doing something with genetics, genomics, modification, anything like that. I think that's a big wave that's coming. I'd go try to be early there. Self-driving cars, if there's someone who's awesome there, I'd do something in that.

• 48:50Sam Parr?

  If.

• 48:51Shaan Puri?

  Or um.

• 48:54Shaan Puri?

  It's hard, though. It's really hard.

• 48:55Sam Parr?

  If I wanted to make a lot of money, let's say I wanted to like, all right, I'm going to try and save hundreds of thousands of dollars in the next three years of work.

• 49:03Shaan Puri?

  Just go work at Facebook or what?

• 49:04Sam Parr?

  Facebook, Google, or an enterprise sales role at a super boring B to B enterprise software company.

• 49:13Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 49:14Sam Parr?

  Where the where the average deal is like three or $400,000 a year.

• 49:18Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 49:19Sam Parr?

  That's what I would do.

• 49:19Shaan Puri?

  So if I took my own advice, I would look for who's a rocket ship. So I would try to maybe like Lambda School, I think is interesting. I would just basically try to go find who's the fastest growing startup right now that's at maybe 50 people or 20 people or

• 49:32Sam Parr?

  What are the?

• 49:32Shaan Puri?

  10 people, whatever they are. I would go try to find them and then I would be like, hey, I'll come solve any problem you got. Like, we'll figure it out.

• 49:39Sam Parr?

  I went to the Substack office the other day. They just raised $16 million in funding. You know how many employees they have? Five.

• 49:45Shaan Puri?

  Five.

• 49:46Sam Parr?

  I would, that would be an interesting place to work.

• 49:48Shaan Puri?

  Okay, who does better in the long term, OnlyFans or Substack?

• 49:52Sam Parr?

  Ooh.

• 49:55Sam Parr?

  Ooh. Uh.

• 50:01Sam Parr?

  Okay, so for creating the owner's wealth, OnlyFans. For creating a valuable company that could potentially sell for more, Substack by far.

• 50:12Shaan Puri?

  So take both paths, right? Substack is gonna either have to sell or go public. And OnlyFans might just spit off cash.

• 50:19Sam Parr?

  If I had to work, so where would I work?

• 50:20Shaan Puri?

  No, no, which business do you think nets more money in the end? Which business succeeds?

• 50:24Sam Parr?

  OnlyFans.

• 50:25Shaan Puri?

  OnlyFans, yeah.

• 50:26Sam Parr?

  Because the likelihood that Substack is gonna succeed is low.

• 50:29Shaan Puri?

  Very low.

• 50:29Sam Parr?

  But if they do it right, I think it could be really big.

• 50:31Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. I was talking to that guy, Hamish, I think is.

• 50:34Sam Parr?

  He came to here the other day.

• 50:35Shaan Puri?

  Okay, cool. I was trying to get him on this podcast.

• 50:38Sam Parr?

  I already asked him. He said no.

• 50:39Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, he was like, oh, you know, my first million, I don't wanna.

• 50:42Sam Parr?

  That's what he told me too. I was like, dude, shut up. Just go do it.

• 50:44Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I was like, you're overthinking this, dude. You're just doing interesting things. We just wanna talk about your shit in front of a bunch of people who are interested. And he was like, overthinking it a little bit. Nice guy, but.

• 50:52Sam Parr?

  I went and met with him and their old CEO. We could probably get him on. They're just engineering dorks. They're cool.

• 50:59Shaan Puri?

  Right. And then I think they're gonna have the same problem Patreon has, which is they're gonna build an awesome product that supports a lot of people and people. It's a really valuable tool, but they're taking a very small cut of a very small amount of money.

• 51:11Sam Parr?

  Yeah. And so what I'm trying to do is tell them to pivot. I'm like, guys, we'll pay you a fuck ton of money if you create paywalls for bigger companies.

• 51:17Shaan Puri?

  Right. They're not gonna pivot. They raised their money and they have their dream.

• 51:21Sam Parr?

  We're a few meetings in. We'll see. I think it's a 10% chance.

• 51:24Shaan Puri?

  10%. Alright, that's pretty good. Okay, cool. What else we got? Anything else?

• 51:28Sam Parr?

  Nope. We're, we'll end it now.

• 51:32Shaan Puri?

  Alright, thank you for listening.