#89 - The Man Who Gamed Uber

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. This episode includes: Abhishek Kumar Maurya, the founder of UberPro. In; the companies capitalizing on people fleeing cities; how tech is helping humans become fitter; the world of alternate data; the Freeport for baseball cards; and the million dollar challenge. 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.

• 0:00Sam Parr?

  Okay, everyone, we're gonna have a little bit of a special episode. This first segment is 20 minutes, and then after that 20 minutes is gonna be normal. But this first segment, I found this guy a couple of years ago who runs this service that frankly, I thought is kind of a scam. And we, Sean and I debated, our friend Andrew was like, hey, you shouldn't have scammers on there. And I kind of agree with him, but this guy's story is incredibly fascinating. And I don't want to tell you too much about it, just listen to it. But we found this guy in India, and he talked to us at midnight, his time in India. And frankly, I'm inspired by this guy. And I don't know if I agree with him or disagree with him, but I completely love the hustle. And I think that you guys should just give this a listen, because it's super fascinating.

• 0:45Sam Parr?

  Let us know what you think. Tweet at me, thesampar, tweet at Sean, I don't actually know Sean's handle, but search Sean Puri, S-H-A-A-N, space, P-U-R-I, and let us know what you think.

• 1:06Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, what's up?

• 1:06Speaker 02

  What's going on?

• 1:07Shaan Puri?

  We've got a guest here with us, Sam. Abhi Shek is here. How are you doing, man?

• 1:11Speaker 02

  I'm great, I'm doing good.

• 1:14Shaan Puri?

  We've been talking about something you built. We've mentioned it on the last couple of episodes, but I'm glad you're here, so you can, you can tell people about what you've built and what it does, and we can debate a little bit about it. So, Abhi Shek, can you give us the one-minute version of what it is that you built?

• 1:31Speaker 02

  So, we are using a referral system to give customers the credits which they can use to their rides or their eat orders now, now that eat orders are available, so that they'll get discount on their every order, like up to the 50% of the order value.

• 1:54Sam Parr?

  Okay, so about two years ago, or three years ago, I forget when you started. I got an email from a friend of mine who knows everything. He follows all the latest interesting stuff and he loves hackers. And he goes, there's this guy, you're in India, right?

• 2:11Speaker 02

  Yes, today.

• 2:11Sam Parr?

  He said, there's this guy in India and I don't know how it works, but somehow he's accumulated hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars of Uber credits. And you can buy credits from him and ultimately get Uber rides for half off. So you know how Uber gives people $10 off their first ride and gives the referral person another $10 in credit? This guy somehow accumulated massive amounts of $10 credits and you could buy his $10 credits for $5. Now, the thing that Sean and I debated was like, is this ethical? Is this wrong? Is this right? Who knows? And I don't, I think Sean was like, I think it's fine.

• 2:54Sam Parr?

  But regardless, I think it's incredibly interesting because, and I want to, maybe you could explain how this works. But from my perspective, it seems like you've got a crew of like hundreds or thousands of people taking rides and you're either you're buying, are you buying their credits from them? What are you doing?

• 3:11Shaan Puri?

  Explain how it works.

• 3:15Speaker 02

  It's a basic arbitrage.

• 3:17Sam Parr?

  Arbitrage.

• 3:18Speaker 02

  In India, yeah, arbitrage. In the US, they used to give like $10, $20 referral value. In India, they used to do 100 rupees, 200 rupees, 300 rupees. In rupees. And in India, one ride costs, it starts from 50 rupees also. 50 rupees or 25 rupees. If you convert it to dollars, it will be like 30 cents, 40 cents, 50 cents max. So we are taking ride using that 50 cents. And in turn, Uber is giving us $10 in US.

• 3:49Shaan Puri?

  So the US account is the referrer. So I refer an Indian rider. Indian rider takes a 30 cent ride and I get a $10 credit because I'm a US customer and I get US credit rates. That's the idea.

• 4:03Sam Parr?

  Yeah, and so for listeners, 100 rupees equals 1.4 dollars.

• 4:09Speaker 02

  Right, right.

• 4:11Sam Parr?

  But that doesn't, that's the easy part, Sean. The hard part is how are you getting all of these credits?

• 4:17Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, who are your riders?

• 4:20Speaker 02

  No, initially I was not planning for this. I started a blog just to promote the Uber service. When they came in India about six years ago, they launched in India. And I was just curious how it's working, how it's not working. So I was sharing among our friends and at the time they were giving around ten dollars in Indian value, about six hundred rupees they were giving. But my ride cost was around a hundred rupees, one fifty rupees from my flight to office.

• 4:47Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 4:49Speaker 02

  So I was using for, to use that money for myself, I started differing others. Then I started accumulating more value, more really like six thousand rupees, ten thousand, twenty thousand. Then I was not able to use all the credits for myself.

• 5:03Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 5:04Speaker 02

  And let, and. And you're doing this just by giving your link to your friends? Yeah, I started with my friends, then I started a blog and blog got little popular. And because nobody are sharing that thing, that thing was totally new. So it was popular and for blogging, I started blogging like three years back, around ten years back. So all the learning I how to make, do SEO and other things, how to make it popular a blog. I use those skills to make it popular, make this Uber thing popular and started getting referrals. Then I initially I was not selling to anyone. But I asked my friends to give me their referral code so that I can give credits them for free.

• 5:48Speaker 02

  Because I was not able to use all the credits for myself. So everybody was giving, getting credits and in like hundreds of rides, they were getting.

• 5:57Shaan Puri?

  This is basically because Uber like kind of, they quickly, in moving quickly, they just, they translated the ten dollars worth of credits to India. Even though the rides were ten times cheaper. And so that was the initial reason you were able to stack up so many credits, but.

• 6:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was very high value.

• 6:15Shaan Puri?

  When did you start selling the credits or when did you start making this a service?

• 6:20Speaker 02

  When like my all of my friend got credits, they were not able to use themselves and Uber started banning their account. Because Uber was thinking like they are getting credits like by some freak or something. So I was not able to fill their accounts also. So I was having extra credit. So I asked in my blog also if somebody wants this, then they can pay me like some twenty rupees, thirty rupees also. Like mine, then it's small thing because it was for me for free. It was coming for to me for free. So they started coming to me, then I started selling for just small thirty cents, forty cents. Then slowly I kept increasing my rate because there were more people asking me those credits.

• 7:01Speaker 02

  Then suddenly in India, they reduced that referral value to minimum to like fifty rupees. So I was selling for fifty rupees and they were getting only fifty rupees credit. So nobody was buying in India.

• 7:13Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 7:13Speaker 02

  Then I started exploring who can buy. Then I I found out that this referral works across countries. Like all over the world. So I.

• 7:22Shaan Puri?

  Do you remember the day you do you remember the day you realized that? Like was it just you're sitting in your boxers that night and you're looking at it, you're like, holy shit, this actually, I can I can get ten US dollars for this?

• 7:34Speaker 02

  I don't remember. Yeah, I don't remember. Yes, it just happened. I think three years back, something. Yeah, three years back. Yeah, I one of my friend was also working with this and there is another provider Ola here. So you were selling for that also, Ola also. And my friend was mostly into Ola and I was in Uber. So we were not competing with each other, just we are helping each other to promote this. So he also, he was also searching for some users, buyers in US, but Ola is not available in US, Uber is available. So he suggested me few friends, like few customers and I from my blog also few people came. Slowly, slowly, I got.

• 8:14Shaan Puri?

  So how do you actually sell the credits? So your account has credits. How are you actually transferring those to the buyer?

• 8:22Speaker 02

  I don't have any credits for me.

• 8:25Shaan Puri?

  You get the referral, you get the referral code from the person and you, you earn them credits.

• 8:29Speaker 02

  Yes, yes. Let's say it's your account. If you give me your code, I will, on behalf of you, I'll refer some, some people and they'll take rider, they'll take Uber, like they'll place any order and they will get.

• 8:42Sam Parr?

  But are you still doing it? Okay, so first of all, how much traffic was your blog getting? And did you, I guess, did you rank for like India Uber signup referral?

• 8:53Speaker 02

  It was coming, I won first place and a second position, I guess, for that keyword.

• 8:58Sam Parr?

  And how many people a day come to your site or were at the peak?

• 9:02Speaker 02

  Not many, I guess, but a thousand people max.

• 9:06Sam Parr?

  Okay.

• 9:06Shaan Puri?

  So you were getting these referral credits initially from your friends, but at some point you must have run out of new friends to, to bring to Uber. So at what point did you find a new way to get riders in India? How did you do that?

• 9:21Speaker 02

  Once I was getting constant purchase, like orders, then I was asked, I asked my friends, like other bloggers, how they do it? Then there is a, like in Facebook groups are there. So a few people were also, they are having similar idea of like as me. They're also selling the, I like talk to them and explore like how they are doing, how that thing. Then I said, okay, I'll give you some money if you just manage it with it among your friends, among your blogs, among your Facebook groups.

• 9:55Shaan Puri?

  So somebody had said, oh, he's got a bunch of kids who will ride Uber rides all day. Like, you know, you go to a school and you say, hey, hey, kid, you're a 12 year old kid, go ride this for one mile, please, thank you very much. Here's, here's 50 rupees. Is that what was happening or it really was?

• 10:09Sam Parr?

  That's what I thought, because I, you could see the pic, I, you guys listening, I, I bought this and a bunch of my friends did. And what happens is you get $10 credits. And by the way, and I talked to you, I talked to you about this. When you log into your site, it's super sketchy or it seems like that because English isn't your native language. And so it was, you know, it was clear that like you were.

• 10:30Shaan Puri?

  I didn't buy because I got scared. I was like, yeah, what the hell this is?

• 10:34Sam Parr?

  I was like, it's clear this guy like is, he's trying to, and so it looks quite sketchy. And I told you this. But when you and I did it and it worked, it worked wonderfully and I did it because I taught you. But when you sign up, I see all these kids, like they seem like young boys, like pop up and I'm like.

• 10:50Shaan Puri?

  Who are these kids?

• 10:51Sam Parr?

  I'm like, yeah, I'm like this guy is going to a high school or something. He's getting these kids to take rides.

• 10:57Speaker 02

  I I have few people who work for me kind of and they manage those kids. Like they they've signed up many accounts from there because in India Uber doesn't require credit cards. Anyways, they require, so India, you just need to have a number to create an account. So few people like create account so that other people, other kids, they take ride and you get referral bonus.

• 11:21Shaan Puri?

  I see. So you just need a phone number, a new phone number. Hey, it's a new rider.

• 11:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's new number is available and there are several websites that sell just number. In number, you need just OTP, just enter number, you'll get OTP and account is created. Then take a ride and referral is available.

• 11:38Sam Parr?

  So were you, so it was in fact like hand to hand combat kids, like you were getting people to sign up. It wasn't from the blog.

• 11:46Speaker 02

  Initially, it was from blog, then to compete with the orders and others, other people were there who were also selling. So the business now you need.

• 11:54Shaan Puri?

  Did you, did you have more supply or demand? So did you have more rides or more buyers?

• 12:01Speaker 02

  It depends on time to time because Uber keeps changing their policy and sometimes it stops everything, doesn't work. Then, yeah, buyers are there, but no supply is there.

• 12:09Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 12:10Speaker 02

  And then it starts supplies available, but no bad.

• 12:13Shaan Puri?

  So has Uber, did Uber ever contact you? Did they ever say, hey, what the hell's going on?

• 12:18Speaker 02

  Uh, no, I do, but didn't contact me. I contacted Uber initially. I tweeted them like, if you give me a hundred rupees per referral, I I'll give you so many accounts. So that you can show those number of accounts to someone like to get funding or something like that. But that never replied to me. Then I was not able to use myself. I started selling. No option was there. Otherwise, I was going to sell to them only like, okay, give me some money. I'll market for you. That's it.

• 12:43Sam Parr?

  So you you're you're forgetting a major part or you're not forgetting, you haven't mentioned a major part of this. And this is a huge thing that I I was a red flag to me, but I still did it was A, you offer a discount if you pay with Bitcoin. And B, you have to change, if you're in America, you, which I imagine a lot of your customers are, you have to change your account to. Where was it? What's the code? Maldives.

• 13:11Sam Parr?

  So yeah, if you're in America, you have to change, you gotta change your account to say that you are in the Maldives. Not because, I don't know why, I think, I don't know why you.

• 13:21Speaker 02

  I'll explain. Those were some tricks you can say.

• 13:25Shaan Puri?

  Workarounds.

• 13:25Speaker 02

  In US, they were, in US also, they were reducing referral value. Initially, it was twenty dollars, then ten dollars, then five dollars. Then when it came to five dollars, nobody was buying from us. So we're looking for how can, how we can increase it. So we, like, somehow, we, like, luckily, we found, like, if you change country, your referral value will go to ten dollars, maybe ten dollars is set default value in the Uber system. Like, if there is no country set, it will be set to like ten dollars.

• 13:53Shaan Puri?

  So you pick some obscure country and you just get the ten bucks as your default.

• 13:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, so somewhere where Uber is not running. So initially, we tried Sri Lanka. But after that, they are like, Uber is operating in Sri Lanka also. In Sri Lanka, the referral value is set to Sri Lankan value, like some hundred rupees or something, Sri Lankan value. Then we found Maldives and then any other country you can set where Uber is not there, Uber is not operating. Then it was setting default value to ten dollars, but ten dollars is good value for everyone to buy, so they were buying.

• 14:26Sam Parr?

  I'm giddy talking about this.

• 14:28Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, Sam's smiling like I've never seen him smile before.

• 14:31Sam Parr?

  I'll tell you why I'm giddy about this, but first, is it, I want to make sure I say your name correctly, sorry, Abhishek? Yes, right. I, I'm giddy about this because I don't, I don't know if I agree with the ethics of it. I, I don't know. I, I'll, but what I think is amazing is how hard you hustle to do something. And I think the people like you who come up with these intricate, even, even, and I'm not saying I feel this way, but let's say that a listener says, this is a scam and you're a scammer. But even the balls that it took to do this and the operation that you built around this, I find incredibly fascinating.

• 15:13Sam Parr?

  And I think the people who build amazing things often start out this way. And I think that, I just think that you're frankly inspiring. I think it's amazing.

• 15:23Shaan Puri?

  Hundred percent. I think we had Greg on yesterday and I think he was talking about like, one of his earliest businesses was he, I think it was Greg, he sold a box of air on eBay. And people just found it funny, so they bought the box of air and he made thousands. It's like, learning how to, uh, learning how to connect the dots, learning how to make money on the internet, learning how to tap into people's, um, you know, psychology and give them what they want. You know, those are sort of core, underlying business skills. And so, you know, the very first thing you said was, this is a basic arbitrage. This could have been with Uber credits, it could have been with airline miles, it could have been with any, any system that's out there. If you discover a price discrepancy or a, a sort of, um, a loophole in the way that the

• 16:05Shaan Puri?

  system is set up, you know, that, that's a, that's an opportunity that you can take advantage of. Now, some people will say, hey, this isn't right. So, you know, I, my brain goes down this checklist. First I say, is this morally or ethically wrong to me? And, you know, is anybody being harmed by this? From my understanding, nobody's being harmed by this. Was that correct? Or is that, you know, are you sort of exploiting these high school kids and then sending them on rides to the mountains and then they have to walk back or something?

• 16:33Speaker 02

  No, no, no. They're getting pocket, pocket money and a pocket expense.

• 16:36Shaan Puri?

  Right. And then the second thing is like, is this illegal? No, this is not illegal. Is this against the terms of service of Uber? Maybe, but it's on them to sort of enforce that if they're gonna, if they're gonna allow this. Sounds like you literally reached out to them. You started this with a pure intent, which was to promote the Uber service, right? If I take you at face value, um, then I, then I, I see nothing wrong with this myself personally, but we'll let other people be the judge.

• 17:00Sam Parr?

  I think I'm on board with this. I think I'm on board with this. I just think that because you're not a native English speaker, the site admittedly didn't come across wonderfully, but it, it's crazy. And I tried to help you with it. I think I told you, right? I go, hey, Ben, your site looks like you're not using the right words. And I, I even rewrote something for him.

• 17:19Speaker 02

  Yes, yes, I keep try, I keep updating it, but yeah, obviously.

• 17:23Shaan Puri?

  So, Abhishake, what are you doing now? You said that this is gonna end soon or something like that. What makes you say that? And then what's next?

• 17:31Speaker 02

  I know Uber keeps changing their policy, like two days back, they said like now referral, Uber ride referral is stopped totally all over world. June twenty nine. So it's stopped. Now I need to look for something. I'm basically a software engineer, so I'll find some other things to do.

• 17:47Sam Parr?

  Did you, how, how old are you?

• 17:49Speaker 02

  I'm thirty five.

• 17:50Sam Parr?

  Did you, um, how much does your apartment cost to rent a month? In US dollars, you know, in US dollars?

• 17:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think.

• 18:00Shaan Puri?

  Few hundred bucks?

• 18:00Speaker 02

  Something, yeah, something three hundred.

• 18:02Sam Parr?

  And in, in your service?

• 18:04Speaker 02

  Three fifty, yeah.

• 18:06Sam Parr?

  How much?

• 18:07Speaker 02

  Three fifty dollars.

• 18:08Sam Parr?

  Three hundred fifty US dollars, and you at your peak were doing twenty, twenty K a month?

• 18:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was revenue, not the all the profits.

• 18:16Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 18:16Sam Parr?

  But was it possible?

• 18:17Speaker 02

  Close to fifty percent profit, yeah.

• 18:18Sam Parr?

  Okay, so.

• 18:19Speaker 02

  Close to fifty percent profit, yeah.

• 18:20Sam Parr?

  So you're doing, um, ballpark of.

• 18:24Shaan Puri?

  Hundred twenty K a year.

• 18:25Sam Parr?

  Fifty times your monthly rent. Right?

• 18:28Speaker 02

  Kind of, yeah.

• 18:30Sam Parr?

  Uh, anyway, a lot. I, I don't know if I did that math right, but anyway, um. Why, did you grow up poor?

• 18:38Speaker 02

  Uh, well, yeah, kind of, lower middle class.

• 18:41Sam Parr?

  And do you consider, what are you, what are you now?

• 18:45Speaker 02

  It's still the same, not, I'm not spending any much. I don't have a car, I don't have apartment, like it's rented apartment.

• 18:50Shaan Puri?

  You're, you're wearing an Apple watch, I think. You, your apartment looks pretty cool, you know, I, I would say you're doing all right.

• 18:57Sam Parr?

  You just fascinate me, man. I, I would wonder, are you, are you gonna do, I'm not, I would call this illegitimate, what you did, because it is a, uh, I, I don't think it's wrong, but it is like a short term thing. Are you gonna build something? Why don't you build something, um, that's huge? Like something that can last, because you're, you're pretty, you're fucking awesome.

• 19:21Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, when, when you think about what's next for you, do you think you'll try to do something similar, or do you think you'll try to do something that's different in some way, like, um, you know, your own service, a different, uh, you know, something that has more enduring, long-term value?

• 19:34Speaker 02

  Yeah, definitely different from this because in this field it's keep getting like it's depending on someone else's business. If they're not doing good, I'm not doing good. It's depending on some that so trying to separate from them.

• 19:45Shaan Puri?

  Something with the last platform risk. Okay. All right. So Abhishek, here's what I want you to do, man. We're going to wrap this one up, but I want you to keep in touch with me and Sam. Let us know what you get working on next. We'd love to support you and help you, you know, help make that whatever that next thing is successful. And my hope is that you come back on in six months or a year and you say, hey, remember me on the Uber, Uber Pro guy? Okay, here's what I did next and it's even bigger and better than what you've already done.

• 20:09Sam Parr?

  And the website is uberpro.in, right?

• 20:13Speaker 02

  Yeah, right.

• 20:15Shaan Puri?

  Great.

• 20:16Speaker 02

  uberpro.in, yeah. People like that. It's like, yeah, it's cammy side due to the .in. It's every .com, then it's this thing like it's legitimate site kind of.

• 20:26Sam Parr?

  It, it looks a lot better. I just went to the website right now. It looks a lot better. Your, your, your translation has gotten significantly better. It, it looks great. It just, uh, you're a fascinating guy, man. You're cool.

• 20:40Shaan Puri?

  Thanks for coming on. Thanks for telling your story.

• 20:42Speaker 02

  Okay, thanks.

• 20:44Sam Parr?

  Have a good day. Thank you.

• 20:45Shaan Puri?

  All right. We gotta say goodnight. It's midnight over there.

• 20:48Sam Parr?

  Have a good night. Yeah.

• 20:49Shaan Puri?

  Sweet dreams.

• 20:50Sam Parr?

  Dude, you're awesome. I appreciate you coming.

• 20:53Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 20:54Shaan Puri?

  All right.

• 20:56Sam Parr?

  All right. That guy's crazy. I love him.

• 20:59Shaan Puri?

  Such a, such a great little story. I just enjoy hearing those. Anytime I hear something like that, I love it.

• 21:06Sam Parr?

  I have a feeling that little segment is going to be very, very popular. I would love to hear what people think. I think that that was fascinating. People can't see me, but I am smiling a lot.

• 21:15Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, it's like Sam's wedding day over there. He just needed a photographer. He's ready to go. All right. What else? What else you want to talk about today?

• 21:21Sam Parr?

  Hold on. I want to wrap this up. This guy, I, here's why this is fascinating to me. This guy, I love these guys who come from nothing and just do all types of crazy stuff to like build cool, interesting stuff. Even if it is maybe unethical, I'm like, I'm gushing over this guy. I love these types of people. Okay, you want to move on?

• 21:39Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 21:40Sam Parr?

  Okay. First thing I want to talk about.

• 21:43Sam Parr?

  People fleeing cities. I posted about this in the trends group. I posted about this on Twitter. I've gotten roughly 200 to 300 replies. I put my 30 day notice in to my apartment. And I'm located in San Francisco. People, a report was released for June numbers. San Francisco's rent is down another 11%.

• 22:06Sam Parr?

  Sean, do you think that cities are going to change, or like some of the major expensive cities? So New York, San Francisco, I don't know what else. Do you think that they're going to change forever?

• 22:19Shaan Puri?

  Um, forever is a long time. It's hard to say, but I would say that like you, you sort of have to ask, okay, what would get it to return to bigger and better heights than it was? And I think what was driving the San Francisco value sort of originally was the like kind of culture and the like, you know, the eclectic mix of people that lived in San Francisco. This was like, you know, sort of early days of San Francisco. That went away as the core reason people came to the city. And then it got replaced with tech. And it's pretty clear that the tech movement has migrated away from Silicon Valley, not just because coronavirus, but in general, you know, cost of living getting higher and higher, as well as just winners coming out of Sweden and Israel and other places.

• 23:04Shaan Puri?

  It became clear like, look, you don't have to be based out of Silicon Valley to A, raise money, or B, be successful. New York has had winners, LA has had winners, and you know, a bunch of European countries have had winners, Atlassian in Australia, you know, Canva in Australia. So I think already that was happening and this was just a turbo. This was an amplifier. So no, I don't think that San Francisco, for example, is going to be the hub for, is going to be a bigger hub than it was in the past, you know, few years. I think it'll still probably be the biggest tech hub there is. It's just, it will be smaller in size. Some of its weight will have gotten distributed out to Austin and New York and LA and other places that are benefiting from this.

• 23:45Sam Parr?

  I believe that the numbers are being underreported at the moment. And I, it's strictly, what's it, what's it called when you just hear stories anecdotal?

• 23:55Sam Parr?

  Because I posted in this group and I had James Altucher replied and he goes, "Half my building's vacant." Another person said, "Two thirds of my thing is vacant." When I try to book a moving company, they're packed. They're packed.

• 24:09Shaan Puri?

  Were you the one who posted like you called a moving company about moves from California to Florida? Was that you or was that someone else?

• 24:18Sam Parr?

  Not me.

• 24:18Shaan Puri?

  I think it was either Dave Grossblatt or you or I forgot who it was. Maybe it was my friend Kamar. Somebody posted, they had talked to somebody about, they talked to a moving company about moving from, moves from California to Florida.

• 24:32Sam Parr?

  I saw that.

• 24:32Shaan Puri?

  And you know, normal volume was let's say 50 in a month and now they're doing 500 a month and they can't keep up with it. They're turning people away because they just can't handle as many moves that are migrating, you know, to greener pastures. And so, you know, these are this leading signals that you see and it makes sense. Like I myself moved out of the city. I know tons of people that are either already moved, considering moving or not planning on planting roots in the same way that they were six months ago, which is kind of wild because that's a very short amount of time for such a big migration.

• 25:05Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it's pretty nuts. So let's talk, let me talk about a few opportunities there, which is first of all, when I'm moving, I'm now I'm trying to figure out my tax situation. Which state do I, am I going to call home? And I got to, it's all about your intent and there's a bunch of things that you can do. For example, getting a mailbox in a different state. So virtual mailboxes are kind of intriguing to me at the moment. The second thing is you have to declare to the state of California or whatever state you're leaving that you are no longer a resident. And there's a ton of manual things you have to do, like contacting the DMV.

• 25:41Sam Parr?

  There's a few more things, whatever. And that's pretty interesting and I'm curious what's going to happen with that. Did I show you this, the founder of Ship, is it Shipped? It's a, it's that thing that sold to Target for 500,000, million dollars. It was like a.

• 25:57Shaan Puri?

  I'm not familiar.

• 25:58Sam Parr?

  Okay, so it's called S H I P T. So it was basically like Instacart, but for the South. The founder's name was Bill Smith. He sold it for four or five hundred million dollars. Huge win. And he has a new company. Let me, it's called Landing. And what Landing does is they have a network of apartments across the country. And they're all pretty similar and you pay a fee and you get access to all the apartments. And so if you go to their website now, you can go to.

• 26:32Shaan Puri?

  Landing?

• 26:33Sam Parr?

  Yeah, Landing. So if I type in, let's see, I typed in Hello Landing, Hello Landing dot com.

• 26:40Shaan Puri?

  Okay.

• 26:41Sam Parr?

  So you go, it's pretty fascinating. It's super interesting. So they're clearly appealing to these twenty, thirty year old young people who have a little bit of money. You can sign up. They've got thirteen major cities. You pay two hundred dollars for a yearly membership and then you select a variety of furnished apartments. And then you get like a slight discount on staying there for a month at a time. So for example, they have a three thousand dollar two bedroom apartment that's available July second in Austin. And then you could spend a little bit more money and go to DC, things like that. Super interesting.

• 27:17Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, this is cool. So this is basically corporate housing because you're getting furnished, turnkey apartments. But it's without the corporate. It's like they just put the power in the hand of the individual who may or may not be doing this as part of a corporate relocation. They might just, this might just be a lifestyle relocation like you're, you're doing right now. So you're going to use this.

• 27:34Sam Parr?

  Well, I, at the moment, because of Corona, I don't want to be in an apartment. I only want to be in a home, a house.

• 27:40Shaan Puri?

  Yep.

• 27:40Sam Parr?

  Or an apartment with a private entrance. But like you can rent a place in LA, a one bedroom for twenty five hundred dollars a month right now on this website and it's all furnished.

• 27:51Sam Parr?

  Very fascinating. Now, there's a lot of holes in this model, but. This is something that is very attractive to me and very interesting.

• 27:59Shaan Puri?

  And Sonder is kind of similar, right?

• 28:02Sam Parr?

  Yeah, but they're not doing so hot because they were corporate travel and there's rumors, I think they laid off a ton of people. There's rumors that they're going to go out of business.

• 28:10Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, that's crazy.

• 28:11Sam Parr?

  And then there's another one called Guild, started by a friend of mine, maybe The Guild or Guild. And they do the same thing, but it's also for corporate travel, whereas this is more so for nomadic-y type of people.

• 28:24Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 28:24Sam Parr?

  Very fascinating. What do you think about this?

• 28:27Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I like the idea. I think it's kind of one of those ideas that's either going to seem obvious in retrospect or you never hear about it again. So, so, so I think that it makes sense that more people are going to be doing this. The question is, is it enough? I like the membership model, right? Like, I think that's kind of a core difference from, you know, okay, well, if I'm going to move, I'll just go and do my search, whatever. But like, once I'm in this network, then I'm just going to keep picking apartments in this network. But, and, you know, I think you're trying to move like whatever every month. Most people are probably not trying to do that.

• 28:59Sam Parr?

  I'm not going to do that for a long time.

• 29:01Shaan Puri?

  Right. So, so I think, you know, the question is like, what is the like length of stay? And are they, are they pricing these above what it would be? If I did a year-long lease and they're making more off it per month due to the flexibility? Okay, I could believe that. But then it's, you know, it's questionable if the economics are going to work, right? Because you're going to have vacancies where, you know, there's gaps of renting. And have you, you know, do the economics work based on how many people are trying to do this at all times? You know, it's one of those, it's one of those situations unlike Airbnb where for Airbnb, they don't pay to lease all the places. So when demand goes down, sure, their revenue goes down, but their cost basis also goes down. Whereas for these guys, their costs are going to be fixed essentially because they're going to be locked into all these leases.

• 29:44Shaan Puri?

  So they can't withstand kind of the normal demand fluctuations that other Airbnb-type site could do.

• 29:53Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I'm interested. I agree with everything you've said. We'll see. What do you got?

• 30:00Shaan Puri?

  Okay, let me tell you about some things that I found kind of interesting. So you wanted to talk a little bit about levels and we've mentioned it before. Tell me what's interesting about levels. So levels for for those who are either new or you don't remember, at one point in time, me and Sam did this one month weight loss challenge where we installed a continuous glucose monitor on our arm and it measured, you know, how is your glucose spiking based on what you eat? And the way this challenge was organized by this guy, Justin Mares, was if your glucose level stays below a certain level, meaning you're not eating sugary carb foods, he will essentially return a deposit. We made a deposit of like $800 at the beginning of the month. Every day that we ate right, he would send Venmo us money back. And it was a

• 30:44Shaan Puri?

  cool idea. It was a fun challenge. Wasn't super well run, but it was also, both of us walked away being like, yeah, well, this is the future. I'm going to have a device implanted on my body that tells me how my body's doing in real time. And so Levels is a company that's trying to productize that. So what did you find interesting here? Why'd you put Levels back on?

• 31:03Sam Parr?

  Yeah, this app is not in the App Store. It's a

• 31:07Shaan Puri?

  Oh, TestFlight.

• 31:09Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it's in TestFlight, LevelsHealth.com. So the background here is, so people who have diabetes have either have to prick themselves every certain amount of time, hours or days, I don't know, and test their blood glucose. And there are, there's a company, it's a, it's like the huge health company, I forget what it's called, probably Pritzker does it, I mean, whatever the the huge conglomerates are, they have this machine called the Freestyle Libre.

• 31:38Shaan Puri?

  Abbott.

• 31:39Sam Parr?

  Abbott, that's the one. It's a huge conglomerate. It's just a big thing. And It's this thing that you put into your arm and it tracks your blood glucose like with a 30 second delay.

• 31:52Shaan Puri?

  For two weeks.

• 31:54Sam Parr?

  For two weeks. And if you have diabetes, people use this all the time. Now, the problem is, is if you're just a nerd like me and you just want to test this and you don't have diabetes, you actually have to get a doctor's prescription. You can't buy this. I don't know why that's the case. I, maybe there's some great rule behind it. I'm not educated on it. But what Levels is trying to do is-

• 32:14Shaan Puri?

  To clarify, I think you can buy it. You just aren't subsidized by insurance, so it's more expensive, right?

• 32:18Sam Parr?

  Maybe you can buy it from one of those like penis enlargement pills websites or like something like that. But I, I don't think that you can go on to abit.com and buy it or freestylelibre.com or libre.com and buy it. I, I'm almost positive you can't. And I don't know why it's so hard, but it is. And so what Levels is doing is they're doing two things. One, they're giving you an app that you can make it easy to track your levels, your blood levels, and they're trying to eventually create the hardware for it. And I think this is just incredibly fascinating. Um, I, I, I'm, I, I think these guys are raising money now and I think it might be something to bet on. I don't know yet though, but it's really cool. What do you think?

• 32:59Shaan Puri?

  It reminds me of, like, if you had just told me the idea, I would have been like, oh my God, I gotta invest in this. After doing it for two weeks, uh, first of all, at the time, now maybe it was just early on, their app kinda sucked. It wasn't like the, the normal, the out of the box Freestyle Libre app was just better to use.

• 33:18Sam Parr?

  Totally.

• 33:18Shaan Puri?

  First, you had to use it because that's how the scanner works. And so this was like, first scan it in this app and then open the Levels app to like, see it in a prettier chart. Um, and I didn't find it prettier nor useful at all. Um, I think the dream for them is it's a great visualization. It gives you tips as you go. And you do your food tracking, your meal logging in it, but the meal logging was super clunky when we used it. So I never logged my meals in it because I was like, this is too cumbersome.

• 33:47Shaan Puri?

  So I was unimpressed by the actual thing at the time, but I think this idea is amazing. I think that it's going to have really high retention for the people that opt into this lifestyle. And so I'm a believer in the in the concept behind this business. I would build a business like this myself. I'm like that much of a believer in it. And it also reminds me like there's a company that just sold for 500 million yesterday, I think, called Mirror. Did you see this? Are you familiar with Mirror? So it's a

• 34:15Sam Parr?

  Very.

• 34:16Shaan Puri?

  It's this thing you put on your wall. It's an actual mirror. That's sort of like a home gym that you plant on the wall. And there's two of these that are out there that I know of. Tonal is one and Mirror is the other. So Mirror got bought by Lululemon yesterday for 500 million dollars. And, you know, on the surface, it's like one of those really hard businesses. It's like hardware, new behavior for customers, really expensive.

• 34:40Shaan Puri?

  And so you could see all these different ways that it was going to fail. And this this female founder who did it and the VCs who backed it, it paid off. And it got bought by Lululemon for a really great exit. And I think that something like Levels has the potential to be that. If they can build the really awesome consumer, kind of like the health conscious consumer, what they want. That's more than a Fitbit. That's more than an Apple Watch. It's actually tracking their glucose levels. I think they could end up getting bought right back by a company like Abbott or by one of the sort of big, you know, either health or fitness companies that are out there. So I think it's a good bet as a business. I wasn't in love with the product.

• 35:18Sam Parr?

  I agree on everything you said. I think that what the problem it's solving is twofold for me. The first thing is nutritional information and calorie information on a lot of packaged foods and normal foods. Do you realize how wildly inaccurate that is? Like, it could be like 20 or 30% off. Like, it's it's pretty off. Like, if you go, I remember Casey Neistat did this thing where he took a Big Mac. He took like five different Big Macs and he's like, all right, it says on the package that this is how much calories is in it. And then he actually, you know, a calorie is, one calorie is the amount of energy it takes to heat up. I believe a gram of water, one Celsius. And temperature.

• 35:57Shaan Puri?

  Yep.

• 35:58Sam Parr?

  And he, so they like did that test and like, oh wow, these are off by like 10 or 20%. And it was pretty interesting. I think that that's an interesting thing to look into. I also think that carbohydrates and protein and your different macros and nutrition, nutrient information, it impacts people differently. Like, and I think that that's interesting to see what fits you best.

• 36:20Shaan Puri?

  Right. What, what triggered your responses versus not?

• 36:23Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 36:24Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. And I, I think in general, anytime you can take something that has a really long feedback loop and give people an immediate feedback loop, that's, that's the foundation of a great product. Like that's, if that's the only thing your product did, you can win. And that's what this does. It gives you a really fast feedback loop on how what you eat affects your body. And I think that's both really important. And I think it'll be really compelling if it can get productized. Now, maybe these guys will do it, or maybe they'll make 30% of the way progress. But like, to me, this is inevitable. This, there will be a company like this, it will be uber successful. This will be very normal for people to have on their body at all times in some form factor, whether it's a patch on your arm, or it's a, you know, a ring, or a watch, or something like that. But, and I think specifically, the glucose monitoring,

• 37:11Shaan Puri?

  to me, is more interesting than sleep tracking, step counting, you know, temperature, you know, all that other stuff, that's, that's potential like for you to track because it's related to eating. And if you can affect the way that people eat, you can change their whole life.

• 37:24Sam Parr?

  I'm in. What do you got?

• 37:26Shaan Puri?

  So here's one thing that I found interesting. Alt data. So what is alt data? So there's this market that I didn't really know existed, but it made sense when I heard it, which is alternative data that people buy. So the alt data market is like two to three billion a year right now. And what this means is, let's say you're a trader, you're on Wall Street, or you're a hedge fund manager. You are constantly looking for an edge, you're looking for alpha, as they say. So how do you have an edge on the market so that you can get better returns than the average? Right? Because you're charging fees to your customer to manage their money. So you have to beat the sort of passive indexing that they could just get by being in the market as a whole.

• 38:08Shaan Puri?

  So turns out there's a huge market for alt data and where people are buying, you know, one of the following, it could be satellite imagery. So for example, you can look at crop yields in different countries and you can know how the commodity prices are going to be affected and how that affects Starbucks. Cause they require these beans over here. You can look at mobility data. So that's what's happening right now for people who are betting on the economy to recover. So Google and Apple have these charts that show how much people are using Google Maps, which shows how much they're moving around right now. And that's a key indicator of like commerce activity. So a lot of the people who bet on, who are betting on the economy, they're trying to figure out, all right, are we about to go into shelter in place 2.0?

• 38:51Shaan Puri?

  Or are people getting out and about and the economy is about to recover? It's really financially important to know that. So they're buying mobility data. They're buying, you know, other, other sources of data, which is like Robinhood. Their, one of their core business models is they sell the, I forget what it's called, like flow data or whatever. Basically they, they sell the transaction data of what people are trying to buy on Robinhood to these quant funds, who will then front run the market in many ways. They'll, they'll see that, okay, a bunch of retail traders are going to buy Tesla. Cool. Let's go buy Tesla faster than they can and we'll get the uplift of this retail traffic that's coming in. So there's all these different alt data sources. And I just thought this is a really interesting business to do one of two things.

• 39:32Shaan Puri?

  Either A, you could build a alt data market where a marketplace where basically people could put their source of data and buyers could come and browse the different satellite providers, the different mobility providers, like who, whatever. And you can sort of pitch what your thing does and they could pay to get in contact with you to vet your stuff. And then there could be a reputation market around it. The other thing that I thought was interesting was just what other alt data sources could exist that you could bring to market and monetize in a way that's not being monetized yet. So I think some of this is new, right? Like cell phones unlocked a whole bunch of. Passive data sources that passive data that that didn't exist before because now you have

• 40:16Shaan Puri?

  everybody with a GPS and a microphone and and other, you know, tools on them. So I'm curious what other alt data sources might exist that could could tip people off to to make better financial decisions or, you know, at least for for Wall Street. Because that's where the big bucks are.

• 40:31Sam Parr?

  That's pretty interesting. And so sometimes at the hustle, people like crazy people will email me and they're like, oh, you're selling my data. And I'm like, I'm not selling your data because I literally don't even know how to do that.

• 40:45Shaan Puri?

  Like, I'm like, if I could, I would.

• 40:47Sam Parr?

  Well, like, I'm like, maybe be like a selling data, selling data inherently isn't wrong. I mean,

• 40:51Shaan Puri?

  Like someone on your email list. Is that what you mean?

• 40:54Sam Parr?

  Well, they'll think they'll get like spam and they'll think that somehow I sold their email address, which not even a chance. I never did that, which I know how to do that. I know how to sell an email list, but I don't know how to like sell insights or data. I mean, I don't even know who would buy it. I don't even know if it's valuable. I know nothing.

• 41:13Sam Parr?

  But that's, that's cool. That's a cool idea.

• 41:16Shaan Puri?

  A great, like a great one is second measure, which basically takes credit card data. And so people know, okay, DoorDash is beating Uber Eats because they can look at the second measure data and they could see, you know, who's doing more credit card transactions out of those those different companies. So VCs are using this. You know, for example, I think one that would be awesome that's not public is cloud usage. So whose AWS bills are going up? And if you somehow knew who's, who's, who's web traffic is going up or whose bandwidth is going up or whose consumption is going up on AWS. I think that would be a really interesting signal to use to invest in companies or sectors as a whole. So I'm just trying to think of what are some different alt data sources?

• 41:58Shaan Puri?

  And I don't have a ton, you know, but, but I think that this is interesting and and the way these are used are different. Like you, you had told me your dad's in the like, kind of produce farming market, sort of.

• 42:09Sam Parr?

  Yeah, and they do. And he's, he's got like a, a, a, a, a small, medium sized business. And so they're not using significant data, but they definitely use the weather and they use some futures and things like that. But yeah.

• 42:20Shaan Puri?

  And so I think that there's a lot that's in agriculture where people are selling. Uh, what, whether specific weather data, like more specific than the sort of general weather data and, um, and also just general yield data that's that they have across, uh, the agriculture market for, uh, for, uh, individuals in the, in that, in that space. And so I think that's kind of interesting too. So I'm curious, I, I know that in, for example, in sports, there's synergy sports, which measures all the court movement of basketball players, uh, on the court. Now this is a, I think it's available or it's bought by every single NBA team because no NBA team can just afford to like not have the data when the other 29 teams are doing it. And so these guys literally just by installing

• 43:02Shaan Puri?

  cameras on the backboard in all 30 arenas, they now have something that's proprietary that they can sell for millions of dollars to NBA teams just to say, hey, here's, here's a data set that you can go and hopefully make better scouting decisions or game plan decisions based off of.

• 43:17Sam Parr?

  I'm looking at this now. This is crazy. Synergy Sports?

• 43:22Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 43:22Sam Parr?

  This is awesome. It's owned by a company called an Atrium Sports Company. What is Atrium Sports?

• 43:29Shaan Puri?

  I have no idea.

• 43:31Sam Parr?

  That's amazing. I never ever would have thought, it looks like it might be a public company. I never would have thought that this was a thing.

• 43:37Shaan Puri?

  And I love simple ideas like that where, you know, it's not rocket science. I think they get exclusive partnerships and also the teams don't want multiple cameras having to be installed in their space or whatever. And so, and then they have like tremendous pricing power over the teams, uh, once they have the data. And so I, and, and the richer their data set, like the longer they're installed, the worse the switching costs are if they ever want to use another provider, right? Because, okay, we can use this other provider, but then we lose the last 10 years of historical data that we might use to find patterns or make better decisions. And so I think a, a company like Synergy Sports is a simple company that's very well positioned, uh, in this market.

• 44:15Sam Parr?

  So Synergy Sports was either owned or co-owned by Mark Cuban and he sold it and the company sold it to, uh, Atrium Sports for $90 million.

• 44:26Shaan Puri?

  Interesting. I think it's worth a lot more now because this is sort of a more recent trend. Okay, another thing to follow up on that sort of sports related. So we had talked about Jack's idea of a, of a baseball card, sort of Fort Knox. And, you know, a place to store and trade baseball cards without ever having moved hands. And then a whole bunch of people reached out after the podcast, which is great. Love it when they do that. To be like, hey, you ever heard of Freeports? And I was like, well, no, I've never heard of that shit. What is it? And basically what Freeports are, uh, this is my like very brief Googling afterwards, but I was like, oh, I should, I should mention this. I should close the loop on this. So a Freeport is, um, is an art storage warehouse. So they, so basically people do this for art. So it does two core things.

• 45:11Shaan Puri?

  You buy a piece of art, it gets stored in a Freeport. And, um, this, they handle like sort of the whole storage process of your art doesn't get damaged, doesn't get stolen. It's like, you know, state of the art security, that sort of thing. But the main benefit, the reason people do this is because art can't be, when you buy a painting for $80 million, which people do, uh, believe it or not, they, you have to pay sales tax. You have to buy, you have to pay tax on that, on that purchase. And so that could be, you know, four or five million bucks. And so how do you avoid paying that tax? Well, you only owe tax once it's landed in your destination. So a Freeport is considered to be in transit for an indefinite amount of time. So, so what they do is you buy a piece of art, it goes to the Freeport, it's in transit for 20, 30 years.

• 45:56Shaan Puri?

  So it's a way to preserve wealth, uh, across like decades and not have to pay the tax until you sort of want the tax to be due. And then you could actually just sell it to somebody else who will keep it in the Freeport. And then you sort of move on without ever having to like use the art as, like get the art out. And so I thought this was really interesting. I had never heard about this. I bet there's either software you could build around this or marketplaces for these or, uh, you know, some kind of, you know, um, sharing economy version of Freeports. Like, I don't know enough about it, but it definitely made my ears perk up. And if somebody out there wants to go do a bunch of research on Freeports, I would love for you to come in our Facebook group and post what you found because I think this is very interesting.

• 46:38Sam Parr?

  Okay. So, uh, I'm looking up, uh, this is awesome. Love, love this.

• 46:44Sam Parr?

  So there's a one called Geneva Freeport. The Economist has a bunch of really cool articles about it. The headlines are very clickable. It's like the largest art collection for the uber-rich that you'll never see.

• 46:57Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 46:58Sam Parr?

  And it's in Geneva, Switzerland, right? Geneva, Switzerland?

• 47:03Shaan Puri?

  I think so.

• 47:04Sam Parr?

  And this Freeport company, Geneva Freeport, it had 250 employees and it had sales of 70 million. I don't know what that is. Is that a Swiss franc? I don't know what, I think that's what that is.

• 47:22Sam Parr?

  Aubrey is saying, yeah, so that's 70 million francs. I don't know what the conversion is.

• 47:27Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 47:27Sam Parr?

  And it sold recently for a lot of money.

• 47:31Sam Parr?

  Fascinating.

• 47:32Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, so, so I think there's more to be, more, more needs to be looked into, into that. Okay, one last thing I wanted to bring up, because we got five minutes left, unless you have one. If you have one, you should go.

• 47:42Sam Parr?

  No, I'm obsessed with Freeports now.

• 47:47Shaan Puri?

  Freeport Bar. All right, so the last thing is, I had this conversation yesterday. I just wanted to share this. I put this in our Facebook group, but.

• 47:54Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I wasn't sure if you were able to talk about that.

• 47:56Shaan Puri?

  It's gonna be kind of a tease, so, sorry, but whatever. But I still think there's some lessons to be learned. All right, so I was talking to somebody yesterday, a very credible person. They sold their last company for over 80 million dollars and they were talking about what's next. And, and they said something, you know, we were talking about how we're thinking about, you know, what, what the next chapter looks like. And he goes, yeah, you know, I find myself, I ask myself this question, which is, how do I build something in two weeks that's gonna make me 5 million dollars in the next two months? And literally, the other people that were there just started laughing, because they're like, what? Like, that's not a thing. And he's like, no, I think I think it is a thing.

• 48:40Shaan Puri?

  And he's like, you know, I didn't know the answer, but like, I asked myself the question, I believe that it was possible. He's like, and so I can't, I got a bunch of ideas and he started rattling off the ideas. The very first idea I was like, holy fuck, this guy's actually gonna work. Like, I would, I would actually bet that that the idea he said would work, which is crazy because like, even if that idea had a 10% chance of working, it would be totally worth doing. If it had a 1% chance, it'd be worth doing it. I think this idea has like a 50% chance of working. And after it happens, I will come back on here and I will be like, that was the idea that I was referencing. But, so I can't talk about the idea, I can't say who it was. But I will say, I think there's something very powerful to asking yourself this question. You know, one of my like, kind of Seanisms is ask a better question, get a better answer.

• 49:24Shaan Puri?

  And so instead of saying, oh, what do I want to do with my life? What should my career be? What do I want to work on? Ask a better question. And so his better question was, what can I build in two weeks? Oh, and also it was with no code. So what can I build in two weeks with only using only no code tools? That will make me $5 million in two months. And so he first started hunting down, what are examples of things that are making $5 million? You know, across a two month time span. And he found a bunch of examples and then he worked off of those to figure out what could he build? That's not that, but similar, has similar properties. Alex too, who's the guy who created Million Dollar Homepage, did the same thing. He was 18 years old and he asked himself a question. How do I make a million dollars? I think it was, I think he also said in a month. Like, how do I make them?

• 50:08Shaan Puri?

  How do I become a millionaire in a month? And the idea that he, that came to him was Million Dollar Homepage and it actually worked. He actually pulled it off in the next like two months.

• 50:18Shaan Puri?

  So what do you think of this? And do you ever ask yourself questions like this? Or am I just crazy?

• 50:23Sam Parr?

  A little bit. I, I ask myself, I, I think of like what my long-term goals are. And I'm like, how do I get this done just like this year?

• 50:30Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 50:31Sam Parr?

  I do that all the time.

• 50:32Shaan Puri?

  What's my 10-year plan? How do I do it in one?

• 50:33Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I ask myself that all the time. But I, I think that most people are shocked that.

• 50:41Sam Parr?

  These silly questions can be have true answers.

• 50:45Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 50:46Sam Parr?

  And there's many examples of this happening. So for example, the Sam Ware, the Sam Ware brothers, they own Rocket Internet. They cloned eBay, but in Germany and sold it back to eBay in 90 days for $50 million. And I think that if someone wanted to say, I'm going to abandon my family. I'm going to abandon my health. I'm going to abandon my friends and I'm only going to do something for six months. I think they'd be shocked at what can happen. Now they're gonna pay the price. You, you, you gotta pay a price for what, for what, what you get. But I think it is great. That's a great question and I'm gonna tell my company that.

• 51:23Shaan Puri?

  So we, we had done a version of this like on the podcast once, which was if you had to make a thousand dollars, like either today or like in the next 48 hours, how would you make a thousand dollars? And you can't use any like, you only have like a whatever hundred dollar budget. I think you were like, I would buy bottled waters. I would go to a place and I would sell, you know, every bottle of water that I'm buying for whatever 20 cents for $3 and I would just go in front of a hot area and I, I know I could make a thousand dollars. I've done it before. Right? That was like your answer to that?

• 51:51Sam Parr?

  Yeah. I, I, by the way, I made five grand this weekend and I didn't make five grand because I, I sold all my gym equipment.

• 51:57Shaan Puri?

  There you go.

• 51:58Sam Parr?

  And I sold a bunch of used clothing. But the, the gym equipment we sold, uh, because I bought a lot of it used and there's a huge demand. I got three or four hundred replies on Craigslist from it. So I made five, I, I profited a couple of grand gross five.

• 52:13Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. And Gary Vee's always talking about this like, okay, go, you know, go hunt free Craigslist and Facebook Marketplace and thrift shop or whatever. And then go list everything on eBay and like, you can make two, you know, $250 a day doing that and like, go show me your hustle. And he like, does this whole fucking.

• 52:29Sam Parr?

  This is hard ass work.

• 52:31Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. It's hard ass work.

• 52:31Sam Parr?

  I like the first question. Why do you get five million in 30 days?

• 52:34Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, exactly. You're probably gonna work the same, same level of difficulty just with the bigger price. So, okay. So let's, let's play the game. Let's say you need to generate, you need to make a million dollars in the next month. What do you do? And you can't use any of your existing assets to do it.

• 52:50Sam Parr?

  So if I had.

• 52:51Shaan Puri?

  I'll give you a budget of 10 grand.

• 52:53Sam Parr?

  If I had to use an existing asset, I would for sure do a course on how to start a newsletter. That would, I would bet my life that would do it.

• 53:00Shaan Puri?

  You can use your, uh, brain. Sure. But you can't use your like hustle email list, for example.

• 53:05Sam Parr?

  I would have, I would have to use that.

• 53:09Sam Parr?

  I don't know, man. That's a hard ass question. Can you answer yours first? Because you already discussed this.

• 53:13Shaan Puri?

  Uh, well, no, I just thought of it just now, but we was both brainstorming on the spot. I think that's the sort of real way to do it. So, okay, so what are some things that I would do? I think partially like this guy, I would look at things that are already generating that amount. Um, and I would see, okay, is there a riff on this that I can use to to make that happen? So for example, is there, is there something in the, you know? Oh, I like, for example, I know a guy who's making a lot of money in crypto right now, and what he's doing is sort of arbitraging between exchanges and liquidity pools to to make money there. Okay, can that scale up to get to the million bucks? Okay, maybe, maybe not.

• 53:52Sam Parr?

  Maybe, it's just that's really complicated.

• 53:54Shaan Puri?

  Is there an app that I could use? Is there an app that I could build, right? Like, you know, the the weather app, an alarm clock app, like some stupid, simple app that I could do a meditation app? That I, you know, a sleep sound app that I could build that could that could generate that type of revenue in that short amount of time? Well, I think I'd probably have to pay too much for the marketing of it. So in my 10 grand budget, I can't do it. So the constraint really is the 10 grand budget. Okay, how do I do that? I could

• 54:21Sam Parr?

  I think you have to make something that a business will buy from you, like they would buy the asset. So like

• 54:27Shaan Puri?

  As a customer, you mean, not like acquire it? Because acquisition will take too long.

• 54:32Sam Parr?

  Well, yeah, but well, what is like an immediate need? So like if someone's like, I need more customers. It's like, hey, I built this database that there's, I think there might be some customers here. But like if you had to use no code, you'd have to like, I

• 54:45Shaan Puri?

  You don't have to use no code. You just 10, $10,000. That's

• 54:47Sam Parr?

  I would have to because I can't code.

• 54:49Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 54:50Sam Parr?

  Fuck, that's hard.

• 54:51Shaan Puri?

  You can recruit someone. You can convince someone.

• 54:53Sam Parr?

  I mean, I guess you could do real estate and try to like fendagel like a contract on something, but I don't know how to do that. So I wouldn't be, I wouldn't

• 55:00Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, so that's one way. So what you could do is you can find a, you could, you could go hunt for a property that is sort of distressed in some way. You could get the right to buy it and not, you know, you you put, you get it under contract without putting your money down yet. And then you can simultaneously find a buyer for that property. That's because they're not marketing it the right way. And you could basically do the buy sell in the same day without ever putting the money into the deal.

• 55:26Sam Parr?

  Wholesaling. I brought you corrected you. It's called wholesaling.

• 55:30Shaan Puri?

  That's called wholesaling properties?

• 55:32Sam Parr?

  Yeah, wholesaling real estate. You just flip the contract. It's flipping, not doing any of the work.

• 55:38Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, exactly. So you know, you could do something like that. But that's not what I would do. What would I actually do? I would try to design something that goes viral, right? Because for $10,000, I'm not going to be able to get distribution through any paid means. So I need something that's going to spread virally. And then net me some money at the end.

• 55:56Sam Parr?

  So it's gotta be a digital good, though. It can't be, you can't be selling like deodorant.

• 56:01Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, exactly. So what could go viral? That's going to be a digital thing. You know, maybe there's a variant of the million dollar homepage type of idea that you could do. Maybe you could, actually, maybe you could do a physical product. So maybe you could do a physical product that you don't. You actually don't make it. You just pre-sell it. So that would still fit within the bounds, but you'd have, it'd have to be a viral product that would spread without you doing paid marketing. So you could do like a Kickstarter type of project and pre-sell a million bucks and use the 10 grand just to make the video of the product that you're going to make. So I'd have to have, I'd have to come up with a product like that.

• 56:37Sam Parr?

  Dude, maybe this free porting thing would get that.

• 56:41Shaan Puri?

  Okay, here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna come into the next episode and I'm gonna have my answer to this question. I'm gonna have a great answer. I'm gonna have an answer that if I listen to it, I'd be like, fuck, I should go do that. And so I'm gonna make that my homework for this thing. I'm gonna give myself the weekend, basically, to come up with my answer for it. And I think you should do it, too.

• 56:59Sam Parr?

  And it would be such a fun experiment to do. I haven't, I haven't.

• 57:03Shaan Puri?

  And then we should do it.

• 57:05Sam Parr?

  Well, yeah, I have admittedly an unfair advantage. Like, we did a course and I don't know if I want to do courses ever again, but it was like wildly profitable and people loved it, but that for sure would work.

• 57:17Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, but I think we have to do it without using the assets. I think that's the real, that's the real sort of creative test, because otherwise it doesn't really apply to most people because they don't have the unfair advantage you have to begin with, which is like whatever millions of people who read your emails. So I think you need to. To do it without it.

• 57:35Sam Parr?

  I get that, but if I were to do this, I would absolutely use that because I'm like, uh, this works.

• 57:41Shaan Puri?

  Okay, Bray, Bray you with a good idea. Okay, so you create a campaign called 1 million masks. And you are going to give away masks for free to people who need it to prevent coronavirus. And you convince the brands to put their logo on it and pay for the masks. And let's say the mask is 50 cents, you charge a dollar for the mask to the brand or a dollar 50. You pocket the dollar and you need to, you need to get a million masks, uh, paid for by brands in the meantime to do it. So you tap into something timely where brands are looking to, to put their stamp on something and be a part of them, uh, contribute to the cause.

• 58:14Sam Parr?

  This is such an interesting thing.

• 58:16Shaan Puri?

  All right. Are you down to, to come back with your answer to this? And also, Bray, are you down? That was my answer. That's a good one. All right, but I'm giving you extra time. If that's the best answer you come up with, you just come back and say it again. But if you come up with a better answer by our next recording, then you gotta put it, you gotta say it on air. All right, I got you. All right, cool. Uh, that's, that's how this podcast can go viral, by the way. We just put our money where our mouth is. We say, hey, we did this brainstorm thing. And by the way, for the next month, every episode is just a progress of doing that thing and reaching the million.

• 58:44Sam Parr?

  This is so much work, but I'm down. I'm, I'm very interested.

• 58:48Shaan Puri?

  There's a prize. You're gonna make a million dollars this month. It's not work for nothing.

• 58:53Sam Parr?

  Are you, do you consider yourself lazy?

• 58:56Shaan Puri?

  Yes.

• 58:57Sam Parr?

  Same.

• 58:58Shaan Puri?

  To the point of, uh, like it being a negative.

• 59:01Sam Parr?

  Same. I'm like, uh, so much work.

• 59:04Shaan Puri?

  I, I remember I applied when I, when I moved to Silicon Valley, I was applied to the job at Monkey Inferno for the idea lab. And I had made like a resume, like a website resume. I basically went all in for them. I made a website. It was my resume. It was about them, tailored to them. And one of the sections was, I made it like a video game where I was like, here's my attributes. Like if you're going Madden or whatever, it's like speed 99, this, whatever, 92. And so I had did it for all my business attributes. And, um, work ethic was my lowest attribute. It was like, uh, five out of 10 or whatever it was, like a, you know, 55 out of 100. And during the interview, the guy was like, this was, this whole website thing was great. Like, But why did you say your work ethic was bad? Like, I've never seen somebody come into an interview and say, "I'm not that hard of a worker."

• 59:48Sam Parr?

  But I'm honest.

• 59:49Shaan Puri?

  I was like, "Yeah, I'm honest. Like, I'm not. I'm just not." I was like, "There's other people who are, but like, you know, that's not what I do. I don't try to work the hardest. Um, I do try to work the smartest, but I definitely, I actively try not to work the hardest."

• 1:00:04Sam Parr?

  There's this, uh, like, quote where Bill Gates, he says something like, "Yeah, like, the best hackers are super lazy, and that's why they invent stuff. It's because they don't want to do the same thing over and over again."

• 1:00:13Shaan Puri?

  Right. Yeah, they find the quickest path to the solution.

• 1:00:16Sam Parr?

  Um, well, let's wrap it up. Tweet at us. Let us know what you think.

• 1:00:22Shaan Puri?

  Give me your answers. I'm coming back Monday with great answers. All right. See ya.

• 1:00:25Sam Parr?

  And let us know what you guys think about this first segment. I think that I'm inspired by this guy, to be honest. I love meeting people like that. That was inspiring to me.

• 1:00:35Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, that was a good scheme. That one almost, almost pulled it off for him.

• 1:00:39Sam Parr?

  Actually, yeah.

• 1:00:41Shaan Puri?

  Cool. Uh, all right.