#78 - 10 Startup Ideas I Had This Year

@shaanvp recaps year 1 of the podcast, and breaks down his 10 Favorite Ideas from the podcast this year. Today's episode is possible because of Superside! Head to www.superside.com/mfm to hire a dedicated team of designers for your project! Joined our private FB group yet? It's a page where people share each others million dollar ideas or what they're already working on: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ourfirstmillion. 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.

• 0:01Shaan Puri?

  This episode is brought to you by Superside. They're an always on design company that delivers great design at scale, fast, affordably, and within 24 hours. Go to superside.com/mfm, MFM as in my first million. So superside.com/mfm to check them out.

• 0:25Shaan Puri?

  What's up, guys? Sean here. Sam is driving for some Memorial Day weekend thing. So it's just me flying solo today, but got some good stuff to talk about. First, it's been almost exactly a year since I had this idea for the podcast. So I'm looking at my messages right now to Sam. So 5/13/2019. So this is May 13th, a year ago. I messaged him, yo, I got a proposition for you. He says, yes. I said, I'm starting a podcast. It's like how I built this. Good quality, good guests. And I sent him a list of guests that I had in mind. And I said, I want the hustle to be the publisher. I'll do all the work, you included in the email and this new episode. If we start monetizing, let's share the economics.

• 1:09Shaan Puri?

  Sam says, okay, deal. I said, cool. I'll send you the first episode to preview at the end of this week. And then we go back and forth a little bit. And then, and then we started, you know, I, you know, the first thing I did was I went and found somebody who could edit a podcast by going on Twitter and writing podcast editor in the search and then looking for people who wrote that in their bio. And then I found Ishan, who was an editor for other people's podcasts. We made a cover art. We made, we figured out a name. It's funny, I'm looking at the messages here. The original name that I was thinking was, because I was basing it off of how I built this, so the name was How I Got Rich, which I decided was way too, you know, I don't know, crude or something. It could have been a good name.

• 1:54Shaan Puri?

  It's at least sort of, I don't know, gets your attention. But, uh, but I knew I'd have trouble getting guests on with that name. And in fact, My First Million also had trouble getting guests on because a lot of people who are successful don't want to come talk about money and they don't want to seem like a rich asshole. But it worked out anyways. My First Million got off the ground. We shifted off of interviews and started doing more casual brainstorm type episodes. And that's what people resonated with. They liked listening to something where, um, you know, it gets the wheels turning in your head. It gets you to learn about a new space or a new business model or a new product that you hadn't heard of. And, um, people like to hear two people scheming and thinking up, you know, new ideas and dreaming about what, what could be, because there's not very many podcasts to do that. And so that's what I learned along the way. I'm looking at our stats now.

• 2:39Shaan Puri?

  We have reached, uh, over 2 million downloads. We did about a million downloads in the first six months and a little more than that in the, in the, uh, the second half. And, um, dude, I could have never imagined that we would hit 2 million downloads in year one. That's kind of amazing. Uh, I'm like in shock even right now, just sort of looking at it. Cause I don't really check, you know, I don't really pay too much attention to it because I'm not doing this really for the listeners. In fact, when I started this, I told Sam, I said, he asked me, why are you doing this? And I said, well, our company's getting acquired. We're, it's, we're in the due diligence phase right now. And it's a lot of either lawyers or security people looking at our code, things like that. I was like, it's really boring. I want to do something.

• 3:22Shaan Puri?

  I can't start a company, but I can start a podcast, uh, during this time. And so I need, I had the itch to start something and this was my something. And I'd always wanted to do a podcast because I like to talk. And I figured this would just be a great little networking hack. You know, when I actually started the podcast, I didn't think anybody would listen to it. My plan was there's all these interesting people here in San Francisco. I want to meet them instead of just saying, hey, my name's Sean. I'm a founder of this company. You want to get some coffee? Which is annoying. I hate when people ask me, hey, can I have some of your time? Do you want to get a coffee? Do you want to do a call? Would love to chat. I'm like, well, what's in it for me? This is, this is awful. I don't want to, I don't even drink coffee. So fuck that. But.

• 4:06Shaan Puri?

  If somebody invites me on a podcast or invites me to speak at a conference, I'm like, okay, cool. Tell me more. And I usually say yes. And it's weird because it doesn't even matter how many people are listening to the podcast, or it could be an event that has 100 people. But still, it feels good to sort of be on stage. And I knew that other people liked that, too. So my, my goal was, this is a great way to meet interesting people and have an excuse to connect with them. And I thought, nobody will listen to this except for my mom, but I'll build a cool network of people through the podcast. That was my, my evil plan. And then I got greedy once it started growing. And now it's, now I kicked off all the guests and now it's just me and Sam talking. But yeah, my, my perspective changed. I think that's a good lesson, too, in general.

• 4:49Shaan Puri?

  So I had one decisive reason to do it, which was, this will be a great way to meet other cool people. I got that out of it. And I did, you know, 30 episodes with different guests who had built awesome companies. And then, you know, I discovered a different opportunity as I was doing it, which was, hey, a lot of people are actually listening to this. Okay, instead of making this about meeting the guests, what if I made this about giving the audience content that they like? And being, you know, being somebody that they listen to on a regular basis. And I've, you know, sort of pivoted, pivoted from there. But anyways, it's been amazing. One year, one year since having the idea. And that's, that's pretty bizarre. I think I'll probably be podcasting for like 10 years. That's my guess, because I like this a lot. And, and it's been cool.

• 5:34Shaan Puri?

  There's all these different things that have come from it. And I think, you know, if you're somebody out there who doesn't create content today, it is where I would start if I was somebody who wants to have a non-traditional career. If you don't want to just have a job. Or hell, even if you want a job, but you just want a better job. This is what I would do right off the bat. I would start creating content about a topic I like, either interviewing guests and networking that way, or talking about a subject, researching and talking about a subject that you're interested in learning more about, and just publishing, and just publishing regularly. Because you'd be surprised who listens. Pretty badass people listen to this podcast and then they reach out and then opportunities come my way or investments come my way or whatever. It builds trust in people and the

• 6:17Shaan Puri?

  beauty of it is that it's low effort, right? I record once for one hour, but each episode gets listened to for thousands and thousands of hours by other people. So, you know, my one hour yields tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of listened hours and that's amazing leverage, right? I'm getting a multiplier of, let's call it a hundred thousand to one on my effort and time, which is kind of amazing. That's why I would produce content and I would, and it also forces you to think about content as a product, right? So you gotta make content that people want. You gotta figure out how to distribute it to them. You're gonna figure out how to monetize it. So it's a great little mini business in and of itself without any cost really. You just gotta, you know, buy a microphone. That's kind of the extent of it. There's not much more beyond that. Anyways, I wanted to, because I'm flying solo today,

• 7:02Shaan Puri?

  I wanted to actually look back and look at some of the different ideas that we've brainstormed and I want to give you my top 10 half-baked business ideas that we've talked about on the podcast. So as we've been riffing and brainstorming and just kind of shooting the shit, these are my 10 favorite ideas that we've talked about on the podcast. I don't know if they're the best 10 ideas. They're my favorites, which means I find them interesting, either because I think they would work or I think there's a nugget of something interesting there. And if somebody really kind of remixed it or riffed on it or sort of built it up, fleshed it out, they could build a great business around it. So I'll give you my top 10 and this will be kind of a recap episode. We'll keep it short. All right. So number one, or I'll actually start with number 10. Number 10, first dibs. Okay, what's first

• 7:44Shaan Puri?

  dibs? Okay, so this is when we were looking at auction houses. We were breaking down, I think Heritage Auctions, which did $850 million last year in auctions, which just shocked me, right? People selling collectible coins, movie posters, comic books. I had no idea collectibles and auctions are as popular as they were. I knew they were a thing, but I didn't realize how much money was really flowing through that system. And so anytime I observe something that surprises me, I want to know more and I see that as an opportunity. I used to see something odd and be like, that's weird, move in the other direction. And now, when I see something that I'm like, that's weird, tell me everything there is to know about this. And I'll give you an example. I remember when I was in college,

• 8:26Shaan Puri?

  this guy who lived on our hall, Tofik, probably the strangest guy I've ever met. I walked into his room, his dorm room, and he was looking at his computer. And he was, uh, looked like he was playing a video game. And I was like, oh, what are you playing? And he turned and he looked at me and the game kept going like he, his character kept moving. And I was like, whoa, you're not even touching the mouse. How's this happening? He's like, oh, I'm not playing. I'm watching. I was like, you're watching a video game? This, you know, back in two thousand and, uh, what, two thousand and six, uh, two thousand and seven, something like that. And he's like, yeah, um, yeah, this is a replay of a Starcraft, you know, tournament that happened yesterday. I was like, what? I was like, you watch other people play video games? And he's like, yeah, uh, it's great. I'm like, and it wasn't even live. It was a recording

• 9:11Shaan Puri?

  uh, of a Korean match that some guy had commentated over, recorded and posted on the internet. And he was catching up. The first thing in the morning, he woke up and he was watching this. And I was like, this is so weird. You're so weird, dude. I moved on with my life. Now, fast forward, you know, 10, 15 years later, I sell my company to Twitch, which is the largest live game streaming, you know, place to go watch other people's video games, you know, who knew? Uh, but he knew and he knew it was awesome. And if at that time I had been like, whoa, this is interesting. Why do you do this? I could have learned a lot more. I could have started Twitch had I really sniffed out that opportunity. And instead, you know, now I work at Twitch and, you know, they've, they've created a multi-billion dollar company out of it. So this is kind of a learning for me. Anyways, back to first dibs. So as I was looking at these auction, uh, auction houses, you know, of course you have eBay,

• 9:56Shaan Puri?

  which is the auction site for everything. Uh, but then I saw all these niche ones. There's GOAT for sneakers, uh, you know, for sneaker heads. Bring a Trailer is an auction site for vintage cars. And it seems like, you know, on the surface that there's every, every niche is covered. There's an auction site for everything. Uh, so what do you do when there's no inventory left? There's nothing else that there's no, there's no niche left. You gotta make a new niche. You gotta make something, make new inventory that doesn't even exist yet. So the idea for first dibs is it's an auction house for things that don't exist yet. Now, what does that mean? You would partner with musicians, artists, movie studios, athletes, and you would auction off their first whatever, you know? These are the first hundred of this new line, line of LeBron sneakers that are coming out.

• 10:39Shaan Puri?

  Uh, so it's the same sneaker that's going to go for sale, but auctioning off the first hundred to be made. The first hundred Tesla Model Threes, the first hundred T-shirts, the first hundred of copies of this album from your favorite musician. I think people would pay a premium, maybe even a super premium for getting first dibs from the creators that they love, musicians, athletes, artists, movie studios, et cetera. And it's like a cool kids' version of Kickstarter, right? If you're a famous musician, you're not going to do a Kickstarter. It's sort of beneath you. But this is like a cool version of doing the same thing. You're just going to say, hey, we're going to make an album. If you want to have one of the first hundred copies, or you want to be the first thousand people to listen to the single, you could pay me right now, you know, $500 piece to get that.

• 11:21Shaan Puri?

  And you would end up raising, you know, potentially half a million dollars upfront to fund your project just through selling first dibs to your super fans. All right, that's that idea. Number nine, drone light shows. So fireworks, big industry, but there's all kinds of problems, sound pollution, air pollution, danger. So this is a new way of doing fireworks. You do it with a fleet of drones that are all synchronized and all have lights on top of them. So you've probably seen this, you know, Intel is doing a bunch of these demos for New Year's. Some people do this, but I think there's an opportunity to do this at a franchise level on a local, in local markets. So fireworks, you know, pretty big business, $2 billion a year, you know, last year.

• 12:04Shaan Puri?

  I think you can do that with drones. I think you can basically say, hey, you know, pay $1,000, you're going to have a drone light show at your corporate retreat, at your birthday party, at your city's, you know, festival or whatever it is. And so it's a business in a box. And if somebody was to create a drone light show franchise, I bet you could have franchisees in, you know, 100 cities in the next two years. If you, if you made it easy for them to push a button and have their own drone, drone light show business. All right, number, where are we at? Eight, just talking. All right, this is one of my favorite ideas. I was talking to my uncle who is divorced. He's, you know, 60 years old and he's lonely, you know, like, and he's not lonely in a depressed way, but like, that's just the reality of the situation.

• 12:48Shaan Puri?

  How would you feel if you were 60 years old and you were divorced and your kids have grown up and they moved out of the house? And a lot of people tell him, you know, you should get out there, you should go and do online dating, but. You know, that's normal for millennials, but for somebody like my uncle, that's kind of intimidating. He doesn't necessarily want to go put himself out there. And he doesn't even necessarily want to, you know, start dating and remarry somebody. That's not his goal. And so I think you can create something that is just talking. It's a way for people to connect. It's a way for sort of single people to connect, but not for dating. And so it gives, you know, the baby boomer generation a way to go online and just chat in a safe place. It's sort of like, you know, you've seen all these Netflix shows, Love is Blind, or The Circle. And, you know, I think they're tapping into something,

• 13:33Shaan Puri?

  which is that you can form a pretty strong bond with somebody just by talking. And I think you could build a subscription business around giving seniors and baby boomers a place where they can go push a button and have somebody to talk to.

• 13:47Shaan Puri?

  All right, this episode is brought to you by Superside. All right, so here's the deal. I'm incredibly impatient, like horribly, horribly impatient. And if I get an idea at midnight, by 8:00 AM the next day, I want it done. You know, but that's really hard, because if something needs to be designed, where am I going to find a designer at midnight to try to make this thing, bring it to life? So, you know, I don't think I'm alone. Other startups, even huge companies, need design help fast, and they just don't have the internal resources or expertise to get it done. So, how do you get reliable design done without dealing with expensive agencies and lots of freelancers? You use Superside. That's our sponsor for this week. Just go to superside.com/mfm and tell them what you want. They have a team of designers that can get it done fast. You know, they are 20 times faster than hiring a designer

• 14:30Shaan Puri?

  and 50% more affordable than a traditional agency. So, if you need high-quality design done fast, try Superside. Lots of fast-growing teams that are stretched are using them already. Check them out, superside.com/mfm. I've used them before. I love them. Check it out. All right. Number seven is YC for content. Okay, so first you got to know what YC is. YC is Y Combinator. It's the sort of best startup accelerator that's ever been built. They incubated, or not incubated really, but they accelerated companies like Airbnb, Dropbox, et cetera, et cetera, a bunch of billion-dollar companies. So they're super successful. What they did was they said, hey, we can take two people with an idea and we can in

• 15:11Shaan Puri?

  three months, give them a clear focus, which says, hey, at the end of these three months, you're going to be on stage in front of a group of investors who want to invest in you. And you got to have a great product and you got to have traction. You got to have something to show for yourself, something you've done in these three months that will give them the confidence to invest in your, your company. And through office hours and whatnot, they, they made that happen. And so they helped create a whole bunch more startups that otherwise wouldn't have been created. They helped get them funded. So I believe we're in the biggest boom ever for content. Content is king in a way that it hasn't been before. You have Netflix, you have Disney plus Hulu, HBO, Apple TV plus, Quibi. You have all these companies that are spending billions, that's a capital B, billions into

• 15:55Shaan Puri?

  original content. These are platforms that are hungry for content. They're walking into a Benihanas. They're looking for sizzling content on the grill. So I think you can create Y Combinator for content. It's an accelerator where you take talented people who are either directors, showrunners, producers, whatever, and they create a pitch for the show. And at the end, you have a demo day where they're going to invest in funding your pilot. And so you can create a sizzle reel, which is like a two minute trailer essentially for your show. That's what you create during the three months. And you come in and you say, hey, here's the concept. It's a group of friends that get lost on this island. But then they discover, you know, mysteries that, that start, you know, when they, when they dig up this hole. And it's like, oh, yeah, wait, is that lost?

• 16:38Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, it's kind of like lost, but it's a new age lost. So anyways, you get the idea. Y Combinator for content. I think somebody should go to LA, start this now. If you're willing to do this, I would love to be involved. Okay, I'm going to zip through a few more quickly. So Boy Scouts without the religion and sexual harassment. So this happened when me and Sam brainstormed about Boy Scouts, big business, 2 million members, $200 million plus in revenue. But they recently announced they're declaring bankruptcy due to all the lawsuits that they've been slapped with. So I think that the fundamental need here is still going to get solved. People want to have a, a sort of rite of passage style program where you learn life and nature skills. And parents want a place to put their kids, you know, as sort of a glorified, you know, daycare where, okay, I don't have to watch

• 17:22Shaan Puri?

  my kid and they're going to learn something. They're going to come back, you know, sort of. Enriched in some way. And so I think you could go direct to consumer through Facebook. You could have targeted ads to parents who basically they want their kids to stop playing Fortnite and go do something outdoors. And so I think you can create a new brand like a Boy Scouts that's just not rooted in necessarily religion and doesn't have the sort of problems that Boy Scouts has had with sexual harassment and other, other things that got them a bunch of lawsuits. Okay, great. Number five. Org charts. Okay, this idea came from Daniel Gross, who was a special guest on the podcast. Daniel was great. I should get him on again. He was like, you know, 10 ideas a minute type of guy.

• 18:07Shaan Puri?

  So he brought up that everything, something that I've noticed now that I'm at a bigger company, right? I'm at a company now of 2,000 people and every company has an internal org structure, right? There's the CEO, here's their direct reports. This person's the head of marketing. Here's their direct reports. This person does content marketing. Here's their reports. And so there should be a really easy org chart builder that can be used inside companies. So I can find, hey, who, who do I talk to if I'm trying to, who runs our social media? I could find that person. And then secondly, that should be made public. So you should be able to look at other companies. Hey, I'm looking at Stripe. Who's the head of their developer platform? And you could crowdsource all the content by pinging employees with automated emails that basically says, hey, we think you're the head of this. Is that the right thing?

• 18:51Shaan Puri?

  And you can get people to fill it in sort of Wikipedia style. And so I think you could use this and this could either be a free service that, you know, eventually pivots into more of a LinkedIn type of thing. Or it could be a SaaS tool for, for companies so that they can have this. There's actually a startup that came out of stealth that, that is doing this after we, we talked about it. Clearly stole our idea. It's called The Org. They raised $8 million from Sequoia and Founders Fund and there, it looks like they're doing exactly this. All right. Number four, Hemingway for email. Okay, I believe that now more than ever, as companies are going remote, writing is an incredibly important skill. You need to be able to communicate through email, through Slack, writing memos and Google Docs so that other people can understand your thinking and your plans.

• 19:35Shaan Puri?

  The problem is, most people suck at writing and a lot of people are self-conscious about it, which is why a company like Grammarly can be at $100 million in revenue just doing spell check, grammar check type of things. Hemingway is a cool little app that I discovered many years ago, which is, it analyzes your writing and it helps you make it more punchy. It tells you, hey, this paragraph is too wordy. Or, hey, why are you using this complicated word? There's a simpler one you could use. And so I think somebody could build a Hemingway-like tool for business and help you write better business emails. I'm very, very interested in this. I talked to the Hemingway guys and said, hey, I'd like to buy your business because I want to do something like this. So if somebody wants to build this, I'd love to help make that happen. All right, number three, TRT subscription. All right, so Sam has been taking TRT, or testosterone replacement therapy,

• 20:20Shaan Puri?

  for a while. So the average testosterone in a male decreases by 40% over the last century. That's the sort of, I don't know how they're measuring that because I don't think in 100 years they were measuring testosterone. But whatever, that's a stat. It's decreased over time. And when you have less testosterone, you feel more depressed, you feel weaker, you have increased chances of heart attack, blood pressure problems, et cetera, et cetera. In normal sports, you can't take testosterone because it sort of gives you an unfair advantage. But in real life, there's no commission that's drug testing you to say, hey, are you taking testosterone, which helps you maintain your muscularity and feel sort of greater levels of energy and whatnot. I know Joe Rogan sort of popularized this. He takes testosterone and then some other things.

• 21:02Shaan Puri?

  And so here's the idea, six letters, D to C, TRT. You can make $100 million off those six letters. And yeah, so you're a direct-to-consumer testosterone replacement therapy solution. It's a recurring business every month. I think it's very high margin, high retention, and potentially a big market. So I like that idea a lot. I think that could be very lucrative. Number two, this one's Kitchens. So

• 21:29Shaan Puri?

  This came from Stu. Stu was a guest on the podcast and he said, "Look, food delivery is booming. Grubhub, Postmates, Uber Eats, they have millions of users who open the app every day and they're trying to figure out what to eat. And so now the restaurants that are on there are just right now your local restaurants. But what they should be is, you know, there should be more diversity. There should be more special restaurants that really, they get you to click when you open up Postmates or Uber Eats. So Cloud kitchens are on the rise, which is basically, it's a central kitchen, there is no storefront, there is no in-house dining. These are kitchens designed to produce food that gets delivered through these apps. So Uber's founder, Travis Kalanick, he's raised, I don't know, hundreds of millions of dollars to fund his company Cloud kitchens,

• 22:11Shaan Puri?

  where he's buying real estate in cities, turning them into Cloud kitchens. So this one, it's Klout, spelled with a T at the end, Klout kitchens, because it's going after influencers. So you go and you get big names. In the same way that like Gordon Ramsay, Bobby Flay, Wolfgang Puck, Jimmy Buffett, they've opened up their own branded restaurant chains. You could do the same thing, but on delivery-only restaurants. So Robert Downey's Brownies, ASAP Rocky Road, the Kardashian Salad Company, you know, the possibilities are endless. So you have influencers, they partner with a Cloud kitchen to produce one type of cuisine, and then you deliver it on the top of all these different networks. Okay, I'll pick one more, one more good one here.

• 22:54Shaan Puri?

  Okay, so this one's Hooked for Romance Novels. So I didn't know this, but my friend taught me about this, my friend Ramon, he basically educated me that romance is one of the best-selling book genres there is. I believe it is the best book-selling genre. Romance fiction really appeals to older females and one-third of all mass-market fiction books are romance, and one-third of all romance readers are 45-plus. You know, the average reader who reads romance novels reads five times more books than the next genre book reader. So there's voracious readers of romance. If you like that genre, you like these books. In fact, I know because my mom used to love reading Danielle Steele. She's got this mansion here in San Francisco on Billionaires Row. That

• 23:36Shaan Puri?

  mansion was built because people love to read romance. You know, one of the most bestselling books of all time, Fifty Shades of Grey, romance fiction. So you get the idea. But most entrepreneurs don't do this. They don't read this. So they don't see this opportunity. But there's a multi-billion dollar industry of romance novels, and there's a group of devoted readers, and they have time and money to spare. So I think you could deliver that same content in a new way. So what the new way would be is like Hooked. So Hooked is this app that's short form stories that you read on your phone. And they did it for, you know, young adult fiction. And they raised $15 million. They have over 50 million readers. I think you could replicate that model. You could do Hooked for romance novels, and you

• 24:19Shaan Puri?

  could build a cash cow. You could build an absolute cash cow. You can get people to pay you seven bucks a month to subscribe for this content, to have unlimited, all-you-can-eat, great romance stories delivered to you on your phone. So I think there's a big opportunity here. You could pay a bunch of writers to write. Writers are out of work. Writers need, you know, who needs a paycheck more than a struggling author? So you could get a bunch of authors who are capable, and you could say, hey, I'll pay you whatever, 100 bucks per story, or per page, or whatever. I don't know the rates. But basically, you could get stories written for fairly cheap, and then they become your content library that you are amassing. And so I think there's a big opportunity here. But anyways, 10 ideas for

• 25:04Shaan Puri?

  you from the podcast. As you can see, we are idea machines. If you're listening to this, it's because you can become an idea machine, too. My goal is for more people to see the world as, you know, full of possibility. When you see something that's interesting, you go and want to learn more, and you try to think about how you can get involved, and you can make it bigger. Or when you see a problem, and you say, wait, why isn't there an X that solves that problem? And you can come up with ideas to solve it. You're not going to go and do all of these, but it's really great to train your brain to see the world in this way. Most people see the world as just the way it is. It's like this fixed thing. And I see it as this completely fluid thing, full of little holes where I can hook into and I could build new things. I encourage you to do that. Don't look at the world as this fixed thing

• 25:49Shaan Puri?

  and be surprised every time someone invents something new. Just see the world as full of needing inventions and maybe you or somebody you know could be the one who fills it. All right, I'm out of here. Thank you for, for listening. Sam will be back, I think, for the next episode. Enjoy.