#156 - David Segal Talks Building a 9-Figure Tea Business, Decommoditizing Boring Products & The Future of Retail

Sam Parr (@TheSamParr), Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) and David Segal (@_davidsegal) discuss: David’s background - At 26, David teams up with his 70-something-year-old cousin, Herschel Segal, to start DAVIDsTEA. - Herschel had made his fortune in Canada’s fashion industry. Previously Davis was helping his Herschel make small investments. Together they saw an opportunity to grow a tea brand, where David led and Herschel invested - He made his first million when a Boston PE firm (Highland Capital) made an investment in DAVIDsTEA. - When the company went public it was doing $30m in EBITDA. He didn't want to sell shares at the time, but needed to in order to make the IPO big enough. He eventually left the business and sold his shares because of management issues. He sold at an average of $14 a share. - Today he runs a few businesses. One of which is a restaurant where he is trying to mix the best of ghost kitchens with a sitdown restaurant - David is currently trying to get back in the tea game. He sees an opportunity to make tea good, and cool again. Tea penetration is tiny in NA, so there is a lot of room to grow. - With his new brand he wants to do DTC business by keeping tea simple, but widening its appeal. - Previous to DAVIDsTEA, he ran a software business. It was essentially an abandoned cart business but for real life. Brainstorm - Idea: good video for online meetings is like what a nice Italian suit was in the 80s. It shows professionalism and class. Sam mentions he is willing to pay thousands to have someone create a turnkey video conference setup for him. He thinks this could be a great business opportunity. - Made Renovation (https://www.maderenovation.com/ founded by Roger Dickey) offers turnkey bathrooms. The idea is clients can select from a limited amount of pre-selected styles. Shaan suggests applying this same idea to video conferencing setups. - Idea: Uber for contractors. David suggests it’s hard finding reliable contractors, and there may be space for a company that can help organize the market better. - Modsy: For $500 per room, Modsy provides an on-demand interior designer. They will create a layout and make suggestions for furniture to use. - The guys discuss several “experts on-demand” companies. Companies like Intro.co, GLGinsights.com, Clarity.fm & Officehours.com all do similar things in different ways: connect users with experts on a variety of topics. - Idea: Decommoditizing everyday stuff. By taking an everyday item and adding a unique element to it, you can charge more and differentiate an otherwise commodity. David brings up Duraflame. Duraflame is a fast lighting fire log. The company does 9 figures in revenue but hasn’t been innovated upon in years. Homesick Candles successfully innovated on candles by adding regional scents and creating a differentiated product. Eric Ryan built his career doing this with Method, Olly, and Welly. - Idea: Firelogs with scents. Decommoditizing a boring product like fire logs with a viral and catchy twist. - Idea: “... For dummies 2.0”. The “... For Dummies” were a popular series of books educating anyone on any topic. Both David and Shaan are bullish on doing the same for complex modern topics like blockchain or NFT. But doing so through viral videos. - Idea: Using stores as showrooms. David nearly started a company just like this. It’s a massive opportunity for whoever can figure out how to make use of retail space in a way that makes sense in the ecom age. A company doing this is b8ta. - Smart Center: David mentions Smart Center and other REITS have been big winners during the pandemic, by converting abandoned retail space into apartments, senior living etc. - WGSN (https://www.wgsn.com/en/): A subscription service that helps businesses understand the biggest trends in just about every sector. See

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

• 0:22Shaan Puri?

  Alright, so we got a special guest, got referred in through Harley from Shopify, David Segal. Segal or Seagull? How do you say it?

• 0:30Speaker 01

  Seagull, but Segal sounds a lot cooler, so.

• 0:32Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I was gonna say, related to one and only. Actually, the guy who started the company with you, is that a relative of yours? He also has the same last name?

• 0:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, he's a distant cousin of mine. He's 50 years my senior.

• 0:44Shaan Puri?

  That's the great, like, starting pitch. It's like, me and my 90-year-old cousin are gonna start a tea company.

• 0:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, totally.

• 0:50Shaan Puri?

  So, uh, so can people, like, I don't know, explain what is David's teas, uh, for somebody who's never heard of it before, has never been inside one?

• 0:57Speaker 01

  Sure. So, uh, I mean, you think about tea, so we started it in 2007, and if you go back to that time, you either bought it in a grocery store where it was a commodity, right? You picked what you wanted based on the picture on the box and the price point. And you had the usual suspects, Earl Grey, Camomile, Mint. And then you had 10 brands of Earl Grey and 10 brands of Mint, etc. Or you somehow found a tea shop that was either very Asian or very British and quiet, and you felt like you had to whisper. And even just to walk in the store, you felt like you had to know something about tea. We had the idea because nobody's really doing tea in a fun way on the main streets of the country. And tea was, had this stodgy vibe to it, and really, there was an opportunity to make it a lot younger.

• 1:41Speaker 01

  And when you think about tea, it's actually a specific plant. It's the Camellia sinensis plant, but how you process it makes it different. But in North America, we call any herb spice fruit that you put in hot or cold water that's not coffee, we call it tea.

• 1:53Shaan Puri?

  Tea, right.

• 1:53Speaker 01

  Uh, yeah, so I had the idea. I turned to my now 90-year-old cousin and said we should...

• 1:59Sam Parr?

  And why did you... So you're not joking?

• 2:01Speaker 01

  No.

• 2:02Sam Parr?

  I thought the 90-year-old thing was a, you're...

• 2:04Shaan Puri?

  Like, hyperbole?

• 2:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, no, I mean, he's ninety now. He wasn't ninety then, right? He was in his seventies then. Uh, I was a young entrepreneur. I had been a hustler, you know, most of my life. Uh, I'd had different businesses that didn't work, some that did to some degree, and then came across this idea. I was actually working for him at the time, uh, to help him make investments in small companies. Had this idea for tea, turned to him, we looked at a few to invest in, realized the market was pretty wide open. He said, you do it, uh, and I'll back you. And I was like, great. Uh, we got to work and built a brand, grew it. And anyway, at its height, it was billion dollar market cap on the NASDAQ, two hundred million sales. I sold my stake in two thousand sixteen. I moved on and I've been doing other things. I started a restaurant brand and added two other restaurant brands and turned it into a virtual kitchen.

• 2:50Speaker 01

  And I'm looking to get back into tea, to be honest with you. I think there's still a huge opportunity in tea, but yeah.

• 2:54Shaan Puri?

  So your cousin who you started, he had done something cool before this, right?

• 2:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:58Shaan Puri?

  Like something like that?

• 2:59Speaker 01

  No, clothing business. So we had a company called Le Chateau, which, yeah, was at one time very big in Canada and even had a go at the US market as well. He started in nineteen fifty-nine. He was selling in the sixties to like John Lennon and like, there were some pretty interesting characters. And what he did was he brought the Carnaby Street look in the sixties to Montreal. And it was really successful and he stepped back from it in the mid two thousands. I was looking to make these investments and yeah, I mean, it was a great combination of, you know, at the time I was twenty-six years old and, and full of piss and vinegar and I still am.

• 3:32Shaan Puri?

  I've never heard that phrase. What does that phrase mean? Just like?

• 3:34Speaker 01

  I guess, I guess piss and vinegar is like an explosive combination. I don't know. It's a good question. I never actually thought about what it meant. It's just one of these things you hear and you're like, alright.

• 3:42Sam Parr?

  Did this make you incredibly wealthy?

• 3:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, I did well. I, I scored. Yeah.

• 3:46Sam Parr?

  Oh, great. So what I was gonna ask you, and I think you've just answered it. Do you regret taking the company public? Because taking the company public seems pretty, besides, alright, so you generated, you created a lot of wealth for yourself. That's awesome. Besides that, which is like a huge besides, but besides that, do you regret it?

• 4:03Speaker 01

  I don't regret it, but I wouldn't do it again. I think I was in a very difficult situation at the time. We had done a deal. So my first million actually came when we did a deal with a private equity group. And the business got complicated. We did a deal with a group out of Boston, Highland Capital, this guy named Tom Stenberg, who's the founder of Staples, actually. And my original partner, my cousin and Tom, it was a difficult combination. My original partner wanted to bring in various family members. I wanted to run a meritocracy professional outfit. And there was a bit too much. It just wasn't a good situation. And when your management team and your board are fighting with each other, you're not focused on creating value for your customers.

• 4:44Speaker 01

  And I just want to get out of there. There were too many bullets flying. You could see there wasn't a lot of focus on the actual business. And so for me, it was great. And I was the third largest partner, third largest shareholder, but I didn't really have the power. The sort of peace was made in that they would go public for the private equity group to be able to exit. And the CEO at the time would get fired and the family member that my cousin, his daughter, that he wanted back in the business would come back in. And then I was able to leave at that time as well and say, you know what? This is a bad combination and I'm out of here.

• 5:16Shaan Puri?

  And so you, because I always wonder this, when you take a company public, you know, there's a lockup period, just like a technical lockup period. I don't know how it works on, actually you're a NASDAQ. So there's like, what is it, six months or something like that you can't sell?

• 5:27Speaker 01

  Six months, although on this IPO, we were, I mean, we were making like $30 million EBITDA. We didn't really need the money. And so on the IPO, to make the IPO big enough, we were selling shares. Like I myself and Highland Capital sold shares. My original partner didn't want to sell any. And I was like, yeah, I'll sell. I mean, it was a great price. I ended up selling it at average price of 14 bucks a share. And you know, the stock today trades at 4.

• 5:50Shaan Puri?

  How do you decide how much you're going to sell? What's your psychology around that? Like you're like, all right, am I going to sell 100%, 60%? And then there's the optics of it. So like, how do you think about that part?

• 6:00Speaker 01

  I think in this situation, I love tea and I think there's a huge opportunity in tea and I want to get back into tea. When management is fighting with each other, you want to get out. I mean, at the end of the day, you want to get out. Like, the future of the business does not look bright in those types of situations. So, under normal circumstances, I wouldn't have sold at all. I mean, I think there's an opportunity to just continue to grow. And you look at tea, I mean, it's one of the best hacks, productivity hacks, that nobody knows about in North America. It doesn't give you the jitters like coffee does. It doesn't give you the big spike and the crash. It's a better high, man, it just is. And, you know, in Canada, I mean, it's less than 2% of Starbucks' sales. We don't drink it. And we have these, we're missing out, frankly. Uh, there's so many amazing flavors to it.

• 6:44Speaker 01

  So I, I still think there's a massive opportunity. It's just, it wasn't going to happen with David's Tea. They took their eye off the ball and, and I didn't want to be part of a team that wasn't aligned.

• 6:53Sam Parr?

  So, what do you, I guess, what are you scheming on now?

• 6:57Speaker 01

  Well, I got this restaurant concept. We have three stores in Ottawa, which is where I live, and three in Toronto. We're going to open more. We added two brands to it during the pandemic. So, we had this concept called Mad Radish. It's bowls and salads with big international flavors. We added a burrito brand, which is a healthier take on a burrito. And then we added a Neapolitan pizza company. Uh, so Luis's Burritos and Bowls and Revival Pizza. And we're operating them out of one space with one app. So we're trying to kind of combine the best elements of Ghost Kitchen with the best elements of a restaurant. So we're still building out restaurants with some seating, but we're dedicating more space to kitchen space. And we're taking perhaps slightly less prominent real estate and being able to service one customer with different types of cuisine.

• 7:39Speaker 01

  So, you can, if you have three people, one of you can get an amazing burrito, another one can get a salad, another one can get a pizza all in one order. So I'm still doing that, and I have an incredible operator there and an amazing marketing lead and just a great team all around. And then I'm also actually working with Harley on a tea business. I think there's a massive opportunity to make tea cool. You know, David's Tea made tea fun, but people don't understand how incredible. This plant is and how many amazing ingredients there are. So we're going to do it without any flavoring. So all tea companies use lab flavoring. So they call it either natural or artificial flavoring. And they just basically develop a liquid flavoring that they splash on and it coats the tea or the ingredients. But you don't really need to do that.

• 8:20Speaker 01

  If you get really high quality, high oil content ginger or cinnamon from the best places in the world. You can make these amazing blends. Not to mention all these varietals of tea that people just don't understand. I mean.

• 8:32Shaan Puri?

  What's the model this time? So last time it was brick and mortar stores, right? You opened up 100, 200 something locations and like Tivana, you would go in and you'd be able to buy teas there. And I don't know how well that worked. Tivana got acquired by Starbucks. How much did they get bought for?

• 8:45Speaker 01

  600 million.

• 8:46Shaan Puri?

  600 million. And, uh, and I think they shut down their stores and now it's just sold out of Starbucks or something like that. Is that right?

• 8:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, Starbucks didn't do great on that acquisition. Starbucks does a history of so-so acquisitions.

• 8:57Shaan Puri?

  And why is that? Cause that seems like you're like, what you're saying is dude, tea is massively underrated and compared to like America's heavy, heavy coffee. Tea gives you, you know, all of the spunk with none of the funk. This is the best. It's huge internationally. And then with Starbucks distribution, you would think, look, if tea was going to pick up in a bigger way, like Tivana getting plugged into the Starbucks engine. Sounds like a good idea. Why is that a so, why was it so-so as an outcome?

• 9:24Speaker 01

  I don't think the tea was that good. And I think that matters. I think that there's a market for people. Look, there's, it's like wine. There's three types of customers here, if I was to summarize it. There's the customer that just wants to get drunk, wants the high, right? And doesn't care. They're, they're picking it because it's cheap and because they like the picture on the bottle. Then there's the customer on the other end of the spectrum, that is the connoisseur. They want to become a tea hobbyist. They want to be able to tell you about the terroir. And then there's everybody else, which frankly wants to really good wine or tea in this case. They want quality. They can tell when they taste it, they're like, wow, that's good. But they don't need a PhD in tea. And I think that there's an opportunity to simplify this. There's an opportunity to curate it better. You don't need a hundred different blends.

• 10:08Speaker 01

  Like, we're gonna have twenty. And these are the twenty, like, you know, look, I know my stuff. I've been doing this for a while. These are the twenty you wanna drink. We've tasted thousands for you. You don't need to think about that. And I just think there's a way to talk about it in a language that people can understand. You know, tea is not just when you're sick, or for hippies, or, you know, because you romanticize travel, or because you're an old granny who eats cucumber sandwiches. I mean, it's a better drug than coffee. I mean, you know, you think about one of the big themes in the world today is like centralized versus decentralized. Like, coffee is centralized. It's centralized our culture in many ways. Like, no matter what you do with coffee, it still tastes like coffee. Whereas tea, you can get all these different flavors. There's no dominant brand in tea today.

• 10:50Speaker 01

  It's in many ways the decentralized product. And I just think there's an opportunity in direct-to-consumer. You know, would I do some pop-up shops, maybe? Would I do some really cool restaurant applications, like an espresso-type store model, maybe, down the road? But we're gonna start as a direct-to-consumer business and see if we can, you know, go after coffee drinkers and say, listen, you're missing out. Try this out. Like, coffee is like the PC and tea is like the Mac, and you should try this.

• 11:13Sam Parr?

  So at your, it looks like the biggest year in revenue you guys did was close to three hundred million. Is that right?

• 11:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, we were getting up there.

• 11:20Sam Parr?

  Two eighty-five, two eighty-four. And prior to this, you had a software company, right?

• 11:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, didn't work.

• 11:27Sam Parr?

  Didn't work.

• 11:28Shaan Puri?

  I think it's a cool, little funky concept. From what I read, you basically went to department stores and you said, "I'll, I have software that will give you some data or analytics around what people are taking into the fitting room versus buying," right? They're like, they're getting to the try-it-out step, but they're not buying, or they are buying.

• 11:43Sam Parr?

  It's like, uh, it's like abandoned cart software.

• 11:47Shaan Puri?

  For real life, yeah, abandoned fitting room.

• 11:50Speaker 01

  Totally, yeah.

• 11:51Shaan Puri?

  It kinda seems like a good idea, to be honest with you. What happened?

• 11:53Speaker 01

  There's a big difference between a good idea and a good business. You know, I kept hearing the word interesting. It's, it's, it's very academic. It's like, you know, yeah, sure, when you buy clothing, you do it in two steps. You evaluate the look on the rack, then you evaluate the fit on your body. And then when the buyers go and analyze whether the item, you know, they test up and then order larger quantities. And when they go and analyze that, all they know is whether it's sold or not. They have very little insight as to why. And so the idea was to give them more insight into the why, but... It was ahead of its time in the sense that it was complicated. Like, these are companies, you know, this is 2005, right? Like, they barely had functioning point-of-sale systems. So you go in and you're trying to give them information, they gotta do something with it. I kept getting them saying to me, like, interesting, interesting. And I thought I was on to something,

• 12:37Speaker 01

  but you know, the sales cycle keeps going. And all of a sudden, Sue from marketing wants to talk to Bob from IT, who wants to talk to Michael from purchasing. And like, we got nowhere. We got into Macy's, though, like, you know, in those days, I was writing handwritten letters to every CEO and every clothing company you can think of, like, you know, getting Les Wexner, the founder of limited brands, Victoria's Secret, to respond and stuff like that. But I get a lot of meetings, and we even got it piloted at Macy's on 34th and 7th. But I realized quickly that it long, complex sales cycle, a nice-to-have product, not a need-to-have product, and I moved on.

• 13:11Sam Parr?

  But my question is this. So you, you're friends with Harley, you probably have invested in and have great insight into a lot of different style of businesses, like software. And I just sold my company to a software company, and I'm getting exposed to it for the first time. Your company, its revenue is definitely a little bit bumpier as opposed, like, versus a really good software company. It's like, even if it might be growth slow, but it's kind of stable. But you're getting back into a, I don't know, what's the word, consumer?

• 13:38Shaan Puri?

  Right, right. You're doing e-commerce instead of software. It's kind of what I was trying to say. Why, why are you doing, why are you doing e-commerce when software exists?

• 13:46Speaker 01

  I'm a merchant, man. Like, I love the product. I like to put together great collections. I like to sell, I like selling product.

• 13:52Sam Parr?

  And I'm not criticizing you, by the way. I'm not shitting on you. You're way more successful than I am, and you're badass. I'm just saying, like, a lot of my friends in this industry, they complain constantly about supply chain issues, and about this, and about that. And software has its own issues as well. But if you could do anything you want, I just want insight into why you chose this, or why you're doing it again.

• 14:10Speaker 01

  I mean, the main reason why I'm doing, I'm, to your point, like, like, I don't need to do it. I mean, I could go play shuffleboard in Florida. But I love business, and I love entrepreneurship. I love creating. Something from nothing and I have a passion for tea like I look I'm drinking an amazing green tea right now right before this podcast, you know, so I love the product first and foremost. It's also a great business. I mean, the margins are good. You're selling a product that does that is a drug effectively. The biggest drug dealer in the world is actually Howard Schultz. It's a great business. There's no size, no color like there is on shoes or clothing. So the amount of items you're managing is much lower. You know, you can operate out of small spaces if you do decide to go into retail, although we are going to do this direct to consumer. I think there's

• 14:53Speaker 01

  space in the market. I think that this is a product that is not well understood by the North American customer and they're really missing out on something incredible here. I'm excited to bring it to people. I think it's just a lot of fun. Like software businesses are great, but it's not what I love. I love it as a customer, but I don't want to go and create them and I want to sell tea, man. I like tea.

• 15:13Shaan Puri?

  You love tea like Sam loves trucks.

• 15:15Speaker 01

  There you go.

• 15:16Sam Parr?

  I talk about truck, the trucking business all the time, but I want to ask you another question as well. So unless we post this video, you can't see, but your audio and visual setup is like really, really good. Is it DSLR?

• 15:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's a Sony. Yeah, exactly. Yeah.

• 15:31Sam Parr?

  Like an A six or what's it called? Like an A seven or?

• 15:34Speaker 01

  M something or other.

• 15:35Sam Parr?

  It looks great. I tweeted out the other day. I go, someone, I'm setting myself, my stuff up like this. I couldn't do it. Did you do it on your own?

• 15:43Speaker 01

  No, God, no.

• 15:44Sam Parr?

  So I tweeted out, somebody come and let me pay you money and do. I can't find anyone like there's no great turnkey solution just to come and do this for me. It's pretty amazing.

• 15:53Speaker 01

  There's a business right there, right? If you sold amazing suits in the eighties or nineties, you got all these business people buying your product. Nobody's buying suits right now, but I tell you, there's a lot of business people that want to buy a killer video and audio setups.

• 16:08Shaan Puri?

  They need ads. The ads will look great because it'll be someone in a room like yours with the camera quality of yours and all that. And it'll be like, you know, it's the men's warehouse guy saying you're going to like the way you look.

• 16:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, bingo.

• 16:18Shaan Puri?

  Right? That's what I want. You know, it should be the same tagline, but for a zoom call, basically.

• 16:23Speaker 01

  Totally. Totally. And you get, you can get like, you know, the startup package, the pro, like, I mean, you'll have the $5,000 package, this $3,000 package, the $10,000. I think that's an incredible business.

• 16:34Sam Parr?

  Have you, the person who set up your camera and mic also set up like the aesthetics of the background?

• 16:39Speaker 01

  No, the background's me.

• 16:41Shaan Puri?

  That's his house, dude.

• 16:42Speaker 01

  It's my house.

• 16:45Sam Parr?

  I'm in my office. Like, what I've been thinking about this, I'm like, alright, we need, because right now, my walls are white. And that's, white is not good when you're doing this. You actually want, but I'm having to hire two different people, like, a set designer's style person, and then like a technologist. And I've been thinking about this a lot. I've just, I'm like, man, I would pay like two grand just to have this done for me.

• 17:06Speaker 01

  That should be part of the package, right?

• 17:08Shaan Puri?

  So have you guys seen, we talked about this a long time ago. Actually, when we very first started the podcast, I go, hey, I saw this ad for this company, and I don't know, I've never heard anyone talk about it, but I think it's a dope idea. And it turned out there was like a super legit entrepreneur, Roger Dickey, behind it. He started Jinxster and some other things. And so it's called Made Renovation. And what they do is they, all they do is bathroom renovations, direct to consumer through Facebook ads, basically. So what they do is, the ad is just a before and after of a bathroom, or just the after, just a sick-looking bathroom. And they know that, like, in the home renovation space, which is this probably huge, multi-billion, trillion, may make up your number, space, Christians, the bathrooms are like, I don't know, 75% of it. And so they just started with bathrooms, and they basically have three turnkey bathroom styles.

• 17:53Shaan Puri?

  It's like, you can have this kind of cool Victorian, this cool modern, and this like, kind of simple classic. And they have three bathrooms, so all their parts and supplies, it's already like, there's no like, planning step. You just say, I want that one, that one, or that one. And then they have all these installers who just know how to install this one fucking bathroom type. And they're like, cool, we're dispatching the guy who's gonna go give you this bathroom.

• 18:14Speaker 01

  Brilliant.

• 18:14Shaan Puri?

  And it's a genius idea. I'm sure, I don't know what the price is, but it's, you know, in the thousands of dollars per customer, be it 10,000, 15,000.

• 18:20Speaker 01

  Because the worst part is the contractor, right? You don't want to find the contractor, deal with the contractor, like, it's a whole shitshow.

• 18:27Shaan Puri?

  And then the contractors today don't do any marketing, right? So you have, you're going up against a player who's got both hands tied behind their back, because they're literally not even out there selling. So I love taking, you know, world-class internet marketing, pairing it with a high-ticket, you know, high-value thing that everybody, you know, sort of considers at some point in their homeownership, and then going after. So I love this, and I think you could do that idea for what we're talking about in the home office space. I think you could do made renovation for home office now, because that's become top of mind for, you know, I don't know how many tens of millions of people, and I think you could do the same playbook for that.

• 19:02Speaker 01

  Totally. And it's even more, there's even more value add, because you're dealing with, with audio/video setup, and it's not just. Brick and mortar, right?

• 19:10Shaan Puri?

  Exactly, yeah, it's more of a technical thing and less of like plumbing issue.

• 19:15Sam Parr?

  You know what I'm doing is I sold this from a friend, my friend Noah and Neville did it. They found a YouTuber in Austin and they just said, hey, can I pay you like 50 bucks an hour? And you spend eight hours and just make this really cool and just beforehand buy everything you need, ship it to my house and then just set it up and make the lighting and everything neat. It's pretty sick and I've been trying to find people who can do that for me. And I don't know if someone's taking me for a ride. I don't know, you know, like I don't know who to trust. It's kind of an interesting idea.

• 19:42Shaan Puri?

  You know what I also think, just like the YouTuber thing? So let's say you didn't want to start a business in a crazy way, but you want to be a YouTuber. And you see guys like Mr. Beast build their channel on these like kind of stunts and like giveaways and surprises. And you know, just random acts of kindness and money thrown at people. So you could do the pimp my ride playbook as a YouTube channel. You could be exhibit, you could go knock on someone's door and basically be like, dude, it's your room, your room, we're tricking out. And you trick out their room to like, like I should be, you know, my chair should be an aquarium. And there's fish floating underneath my butt while I sit here like that's what the crazy level. And then I think people would watch these videos and you could build a huge, you know, tens of millions of subscriber channel and have all of the like kind of renovations paid for by,

• 20:26Shaan Puri?

  you know, maybe peripheral companies or whoever, like some sponsors, just like Mr. Beast did where paid him 50 grand per video so that he would go give $50,000 away. And he's like, cool, you're paying for my growth.

• 20:37Speaker 01

  That's brilliant. Even on the contractor side, it's interesting, I'm listening to you talk about contractors. Like there is no way, uh, there's no Uber reviews for contractors.

• 20:46Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 20:46Speaker 01

  Like, how do you find contractors nowadays? You either know it's all referral based, right? It's all word of mouth. You look around, there's been a lot of businesses that have been word of mouth businesses that have platforms have been created around to be able to facilitate finding a good one.

• 20:59Sam Parr?

  Have you guys heard of MODSY?

• 21:01Speaker 01

  No, what's MODSY?

• 21:02Sam Parr?

  Okay, it's M O D S Y, MODSY. And what it does is, let me pull it up so I can explain exactly. But I've used, I've spent two or $3,000 with them because I've done it for all my houses and apartments. So basically, the interesting part is the technology. And so you take pictures of your house. Every time I've done it, my home was empty.

• 21:21Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:21Sam Parr?

  But I've done it a couple of times with furniture in there already. But you take pictures of it and like a video and they patch it together to make like a 3D image of what your room looks like. And then you go through a quiz and tell them what furniture interests you and like what styles interest you. And then they have people who are mostly like design students. So like college people who are good enough, but you know, don't make a lot of money. And they have like a massive group of them on staff and they send you like eight or 10 different designs of what your room could look like. And then you say, I like this, I like this, I like this, I don't like this, I don't like this. And then they fix it and then they give you a final one. And then they have a buy now button where you can just buy all the products that they've listed.

• 22:02Speaker 01

  It's a virtual designer.

• 22:04Sam Parr?

  It's sick. Yeah, it's pretty cool. It's like $500 a room.

• 22:07Speaker 01

  I'm looking at it right now.

• 22:09Sam Parr?

  I've got eight rooms maybe done over the course of the last four or five years.

• 22:12Speaker 01

  If I'm Crate Barrel, I'm buying these guys now where they're small.

• 22:15Sam Parr?

  Right. It's really fascinating. I, I've really enjoyed seeing this business kind of take off. It's super interesting, but they don't do like audio visual stuff.

• 22:24Speaker 01

  I mean, but in many ways, this is a feature, not a business, right? Like I'm surprised they haven't already been scooped up.

• 22:29Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it's a, you pay $500 a room and then I think they make a lot of money off the affiliate fees, which is a pretty stupid business model because I don't buy any of the stuff they tell me to buy. I just go out and buy stuff that looks exactly like it.

• 22:42Sam Parr?

  You know what I mean? Like, because a lot of the stuff they pimp out is like brands I haven't heard of. And if they list a leather couch, I'm like, I've never heard of this brand. I'm going to go to Restoration Hardware and buy one just that looks exactly like it.

• 22:50Shaan Puri?

  There's an idea that's along these same lines. I'll talk about it real quick. If you go to intro.co. The guy behind this is, we're not super close friends, but he's a good guy. I've met him before. He had sold one company to Intuit. So he sold like a kind of a bookkeeping software to Intuit. Made good money, moved to LA, blah, blah, blah. And now he started this thing called Intro. And what Intro is, is like, uh, you know, like these businesses like Clarity FM or whatever, where it's like, Clarity started in the tech space and they were like, "Hey, you can pay forty five dollars and you could talk to a head of growth at Airbnb to talk about growth." And it's like,

• 23:22Speaker 01

  Right.

• 23:23Shaan Puri?

  Dude, this is like this nerds feeding nerds. It's like, I don't know. It was just not like the coolest way to go about this idea of connecting people who want expertise with experts. And so at the premium end, you guys know about like GLG? Have you guys heard of GLG?

• 23:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:37Sam Parr?

  No. You're gonna get, you're gonna like this. It's crazy.

• 23:39Shaan Puri?

  It's an insane business. Basically, GLG is an expert network that hedge funds and big financial players use.

• 23:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 23:45Shaan Puri?

  Let's say I want to decide if I'm going to buy Tesla, right? What I'll do is I'll go to GLG and I'll say, "I want to talk to every like world-class battery expert or AI expert to talk about is Tesla, is what they're talking about for batteries and self-driving cars? Is this like a reality? How close are they? Are they better than what Waymo is doing and whatever?" So you pay like thousands of dollars.

• 24:07Sam Parr?

  I'm a, I'm a GLG expert, Sean. So like I put on my profile, I know a lot about email marketing. And I'll have like, I've had Morgan Stanley call me and this, they can't tell you what they're doing. I have a feeling they were talking, they, uh, it was about SendGrid's IPO.

• 24:21Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 24:21Sam Parr?

  And they wanted to say like, "Do you use SendGrid?" And I was like, "Ah, it's okay. It's kind of complicated. I prefer Mailchimp." You know, and, and I charged, I put like what I thought was a wild number, like two thousand dollars an hour and I started getting bids.

• 24:34Speaker 01

  So I went on Clarity. The issue I had with it, it's not curated. Like, how do you really know who's a hack and who's for real?

• 24:40Shaan Puri?

  Right. So that's what, so GLG does that a little bit better where they're like premium. So, uh, you know, like because they're charging thousands of dollars,

• 24:47Speaker 01

  They vet it.

• 24:47Shaan Puri?

  They can afford to vet people and like use the reviews to like curate the marketplace a little bit. Although, to be fair, I don't know how much they, they really do it, but in theory, because the ticket price is so high, they can afford those additional services. And so hedge fund guys need it because they're trying to make big decisions. And then on the low end, nobody's really been able to do it. The guy who started Mint.com, he tried to create something called Fountain, which was like, You need a repair or you want to redo your lawn or your bathroom?

• 25:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:13Shaan Puri?

  Call a expert contractor and it didn't really work. So there's been tried a bunch, but I think this approach that intro is doing is somewhat interesting because they chose a better market, I think. And they went for like, they got the stylist of like Justin Bieber and Kim Kardashian stylist and the person who did the Kardashians like home decor renovation or interior decoration, whatever you call it. And so you could pay, you know, 50 bucks and you could do a video, like a FaceTime call with Justin Bieber stylist and you can ask them about style stuff.

• 25:38Speaker 01

  Right. Or so and so's trainer for your workout routine or I could get the rocks to.

• 25:44Shaan Puri?

  Right. Yeah, exactly. The bragging rights of I talked to the rocks trainer for 30 minutes. So now I, I too will look like this. So I don't think this is going to work necessarily. I think it's a really hard business, but people keep trying this and eventually somebody is going to crack it. Somebody's going to figure out how to get the dynamics right, pick the right vertical. Like one interesting thing about this business is the astrology vertical started taking off because people were just like, there's all these like celebrity kind of like astrologists on Instagram. And so they're like, they would just promote like, hey, you can book me and I'll do a reading for you. And people are like, oh yeah, I want, you know, you to do a reading, you know, astrology reading for me. And they're just making tons of money, thousands and thousands of dollars a month because that vertical works. And so.

• 26:26Speaker 01

  You would think it would be the more mainstream, larger verticals, like working out, clothing, eating diet, right? It ends up being astrology. Go for it.

• 26:34Sam Parr?

  I actually, no, I, I, I buy that. David, do they have Miss Cleo in Canada?

• 26:39Speaker 01

  No.

• 26:40Sam Parr?

  Okay. So there's this woman, I don't know if it went to the 2000s, but it was in the nineties and she was Jamaican. I don't even know if she actually was that, but she was this character that would play on infomercials and she had a Jamaican sounding accent.

• 26:53Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 26:53Sam Parr?

  Like, hey darling, how are you? And she's like, let me read your palm, like.

• 26:57Shaan Puri?

  Call 1-800.

• 26:59Sam Parr?

  It was like tarot cards or psychic reading. They had a phone bank in a warehouse full of these types of people. Who knows what their credentials were? I mean, nothing, right? It's like agreeing, but they did.

• 27:11Speaker 01

  The night comes.

• 27:13Sam Parr?

  In only a short amount of time, this company did a billion dollars in sales.

• 27:17Speaker 01

  Wow.

• 27:18Sam Parr?

  So I think that the psychic thing.

• 27:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, man, people want predictability. But I mean, do you really want to be doing that? You're selling snake oil, right?

• 27:24Sam Parr?

  No, but it's interesting.

• 27:26Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I think in some ways it gives people this weird peace of mind. It's like religion, right? Like if you feel like, you know, something about your fate is being told to you and you get either comfort that, you know, everything's gonna be all right, or, you know, that it is what it is and it's, and I don't have to like stress about it anymore. I don't know. There's something that's deeply like there's something that just is deep in this that works for people. I obviously I agree with you. You know, the person who's on the other end, who's just got a call center of, you know, Jamaicans who are fake Miss Cleo is like, you know, there's a question of do you want to be that person? But there's no doubt that there's demand for this kind of thing, which is, which is wild. You could just reboot Miss Cleo today on Facebook. And Facebook is your new infomercial and probably do extremely well.

• 28:07Sam Parr?

  What businesses are interesting you right now, David, besides the things that you're directly involved in?

• 28:13Speaker 01

  So I mean, I think it's never been easier to uncommoditize niche products. So I give you, I'll give you an example. I was, it was in Turks and Caicos with Harley, actually, and we were lighting fires on the beach. Like we would get someone to set this up like a bonfire, right? And they have this special wood in Turks that for whatever reason burns, lights up faster and burns longer than anything I've ever seen. And I'm Canadian. We light a lot of fires. It's frigging cold up here. So we started having this idea and we started talking about the experience around starting fires, right? And when you start a fire, I don't know if you guys start a lot of fires, but you.

• 28:47Sam Parr?

  I do.

• 28:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, okay. So you tear up newspaper, you put it in the fireplace, or you buy these little pucks that you buy on the back out. It's like the back shelf of Walmart or the back shelf of Home Depot. And you gotta light them and you're in like, usually there's fire ash already there from the last fire you lit. The whole thing kind of sucks. You're down there, you're blowing on the fire, ashes going everywhere. It's messy. It's not that great. So our idea was to create a fire starter, not one of those logs that are full of wax and feel very chemical, like the Dura Logs or whatever, but more something that it helps you get a bed of coals. And it also ideally would have some scent that it gives off. So kind of merging the idea of candle with fire starter. And then, of course, you could go further, right? It leads to this idea. Well, what about the, like I'm looking here, in this room, I'm actually have a fireplace on my left here.

• 29:29Speaker 01

  What about like the shovel that you get and the little broom thing and the fire poker, right? Like. There's a lot of products on the back shelves of Walmart or Home Depot that have been bought haphazardly by some mid-level buyer at the company at a trade show that are complete commodities that you could uncommoditize, create, put a little bit more thought into, create a better experience around, and have these niche million-dollar businesses. And I think, I think there's a lot of opportunity there. That's the first place I would start is I would literally go down to one of these big box stores and walk the aisles and be like, what product do these guys clearly not care about but feel they have to have? There's where I would go direct to consumer and create something a little bit better.

• 30:10Sam Parr?

  So DuraFlame, I'm looking it up now, crazy fascinating. I believe it was sold to Clorox, but it sells something like five or 600 million dollars a year in these logs.

• 30:21Speaker 01

  There's been no innovation there since I was a kid. It's the exact same log when I was five years old. They were lighting Dura logs.

• 30:28Sam Parr?

  That's super fascinating. Fire, I do buy a lot of that stuff, but I only buy it in store. I don't ever own it, order it online, but I think I would. I think I'd be able to.

• 30:37Shaan Puri?

  I mean, everything fucking online, right?

• 30:38Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. I mean, once upon a time, you bought everything in store.

• 30:41Sam Parr?

  It's just a little bit more of an, like, I need it right now, but I would do it as well. This is.

• 30:45Speaker 01

  It's also giftable, right? It's a nice thing, like, you want to.

• 30:48Shaan Puri?

  It's cool. A great example of your thesis there about differentiating a commodity product. The guy who spoke at HustleCon, Eric Bryan, is that his name, Sam?

• 30:58Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 30:59Shaan Puri?

  He's basically built his career off this. So his first thing was Method Soap. So he's like, oh, okay. You know, he's like, you could just, he goes, I walk down the aisle in a grocery store. He goes, anywhere I see a sea of sameness, like an ocean of the same thing. And he showed a picture of the soap aisle and it's like 55 green bottles of liquid that are all shaped the same and all look exactly the same. He's like, cool, I'm gonna make a new bottle shape. It's gonna be a different color. I'm gonna market this in a kind of risque way. You know, if you turn the back of these bottles, they all have these chemicals you can't pronounce, so I'm gonna make it where it's chemical-free cleaners. And Method became like a big hit. And now he's doing the same thing with Welly, which is Band-Aids. Go down an aisle in a.

• 31:39Sam Parr?

  Well, he already did it with vitamins, called Ollie, and then he did Band-Aids.

• 31:42Shaan Puri?

  So Welly is the. Probably the best example of the thing you're talking about. Band-aids are the most like commodity. Who cares? Literally, the thing is meant to blend into your skin color, although nobody is the color of a Band-Aid. But like, that's the, the idea is for it to be like totally a nothing product. And then he tried to put some personality into it and sell it in a kind of unique way and boom, you have another winner.

• 32:03Speaker 01

  There's still so many of these niche areas that are outstanding where you can put more thought into it. I mean, your competition is some buyer at a big box store. Who's going to the trade show and saying, okay, we need something in this category. We'll take that. And they're buying off the shelf. Walmart's not designing fire starters or fire pokers or, or right? Like, it's not a big enough category for them. But you have enough of these. I mean, like you just said, Duralog does what? $500 million in sales?

• 32:30Sam Parr?

  Man, I'm looking this up now and they don't have that many employees. What an interesting company.

• 32:35Speaker 01

  And you guys want a piece of it? We'll do it together. Let's do it.

• 32:39Sam Parr?

  No, what I would do, you know what I would do is I would actually copy, um, there's this guy named Ricky Van, what's his name? Ricky Van Neen. He started, um, College Humor and Vimeo. And he sold that to IAC and then he went and worked at Facebook and he was married to Alison Williams. So he was like this, like, pretty cool dude. And he started this thing called, I forget what it was called, Home, Homesick Candles. And they have a different candle flavor for every state. So if you're from Washington, maybe it would be like evergreen flavored and it's really interesting. And I would do that, but for fire logs and have like state flavored or some, yeah, I would do something like that.

• 33:16Speaker 01

  Or different kinds of wood, depending on what area you're living in. And yeah, yeah. No, that's cool, man.

• 33:22Shaan Puri?

  We should just open source this idea. So if a hustler from the pod listeners wants to go run with this idea, you could DM me or Sam, you're hustling credentials. Have you done anything before? Are you going to make this shit happen? And then run with this idea and just carve out, you know, 10% for your boys and then we're good.

• 33:38Speaker 01

  We'll back you.

• 33:39Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, exactly. We will give you the initial capital and get going if you're legit.

• 33:43Sam Parr?

  That's kind of interesting. That's a pretty cool idea. I'm going to explore that.

• 33:45Shaan Puri?

  You know what I was thinking about when I was doing a little bit of research? I did very little research, but just enough on David's teeth to get like familiar with it. And I was just looking and it was like, I don't know, you know, there's always these metrics that I don't really fully believe, but directionally they're correct, which is like the tea market is a $50 billion market, expected to grow to an $80 billion market. It doesn't matter what the number is. That's a big number of how much tea is sold every year because when they say a number for these, that's the annual sales volume, you know, the market for AI is X and it's just like a, you know, like a valuation based thing.

• 34:16Speaker 01

  Right. These are real dollars being, these are real dollars that are trading hands.

• 34:19Shaan Puri?

  And we, on the last episode, we talked about NFTs, which are like these kind of like crypto trading things, right? I've been looking at like, how big is the trading card market? And, you know, for a lot of these things, it's like, oh, it's a $2 billion, $3 billion market. You have to know blockchain, you have to get into this market. It's super hard. And then you have tea that's $50 billion and you have candles. That's like probably $80 billion or something like that. Like these spaces that are, you know, just commodities that are already adopted and un-innovated. And I think that there's so much, it's so much easier to win there than it is to try to go to the new cutting edge frontier against.

• 34:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, you can win really big on the cutting edge frontier. So, so another one, two other ideas I really think are bigger ideas now. One is you're talking about NFTs and of course crypto and all that stuff. I think people don't realize, those people that are talking about and thinking about these big innovations that are happening now and these major disruption to our financial system, to our legal system, our legal profession. There's going to be a lot of people that need education around that. They're going to have a really hard time grasping these things, these concepts, right? And I think there's a big opportunity to, I don't remember those books, remember the four dummies books?

• 35:29Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, dummies, exactly.

• 35:30Speaker 01

  You know, I think there's a dummies 2.0 version that someone should really go after to try and explain some of these concepts that are, are hard to grasp. They're not easy.

• 35:40Shaan Puri?

  So I'm actually doing this one. I just brought on a guy, a YouTube animator guy, and I'm doing, the first one is. Bitcoin for normal people. I'm going to try to create the thing that like a normal person who's heard about it. You might have even bought some or considered buying some. You've looked into it once or twice and come up very unsatisfactory solution where everybody's so technical, it's so complicated.

• 36:00Speaker 01

  My dad called me, my dad called me the other day and like my dad's 75. Like when we FaceTime, he picks up the phone and puts it to his ear and I have to remind him dad, this FaceTime like, you know.

• 36:09Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 36:10Speaker 01

  And so, I mean, this is the least tech savvy person. He called me the other day, he's like, what's Bitcoin? You know, so you're going to have this huge audience of people that as this goes into the mainstream, they're going to want to understand it and they're going to, and they can't, you have to talk to them in a different language than you would the people that listen to your podcast.

• 36:25Shaan Puri?

  I'm trying to make the video that you would forward to your dad in this case.

• 36:28Speaker 01

  Right.

• 36:28Shaan Puri?

  Like, I think this is the best explanation of what you need to know and not anything more. And broken down in simple English. And for me, I'm like, there's not, not really a business here. I wouldn't want to do it as a business. I just really want to do it. And I'd like, okay, if I take some of the earnings I made on Bitcoin, if I just took like half a percent and I said, all right, I'm just going to like, it's a charitable donation of like content creation for people to learn about this stuff in simple terms. It's a good trade. It's been good to me. I can be good back to, and that can be my contribution.

• 36:58Speaker 01

  It's going to end up being a big business. That's my call. It's usually the ones you're doing because you don't expect them to be a business that end up being a business. You said the two other, we just said one.

• 37:06Shaan Puri?

  Yep.

• 37:06Speaker 01

  What's the, the other? I think there's this big opportunity around discovery. So commerce has been decentralized in a way very quickly. We were kids, if you wanted to buy a pair of running shoes, you went to the mall and all the running shoes you could possibly buy were in the mall. And now there's so many different amazing shoe brands that how do you find them? Right? Like when I Google shoes, I still see Nordstrom's come up and I don't really read past the first page. I don't see Albers, I don't see Swims. You know, there's all these incredible brands out there. How do you discover them? I think, you know, at one time, pre-pandemic, I wrote a deck for a pop-up shop mall. The idea that malls of the future would be all these online brands that you that you would operate. Basically, brick and mortar becomes about discovery, not distribution.

• 37:51Speaker 01

  It's where you go to learn about cool brands and products. And then you replenish and order online. Could you create a mall experience around that?

• 37:59Sam Parr?

  Sean didn't like geeken out over something similar about like live commerce.

• 38:04Shaan Puri?

  So I have two on that. One is exactly what you said. Have you ever heard of Beta, David?

• 38:08Speaker 01

  No.

• 38:09Shaan Puri?

  It's it's almost exactly what you're describing. I'm gonna send you a link right here. It's B, it's B and then the letter, no, sorry, the number eight, TA.com.

• 38:16Sam Parr?

  I love Beta.

• 38:17Shaan Puri?

  They did exactly what you're talking about, which is this insight. And I think this insight is spot on. And one insight like this can change, you know, that's a hundred million dollar, five hundred million dollar insight, which is that malls are now gonna be for discovery, not distribution. Boom. That's the insight. You can build a career off that. You can build a huge business off that. And that's what they're doing, which was, I think COVID kinda fucked everybody who's trying to do brick and mortar, but like, they were creating these pop-ups. And I, as a D to C brand, can just rent it for seven days. And I basically send product and I send some education curals, or I send one of my own people there, I think.

• 38:49Speaker 01

  Right, and they operate it.

• 38:50Shaan Puri?

  And they're sampling it, they're operating it, and I got this this footprint. I don't need to go, because all these D to C brands open up frickin' like showrooms. And it's like, dude, that's such a pain in the ass for like, it's such an expensive, time-consuming thing for really just trying to do marketing to get your product in front of people. And so this beta, if it works, it's like what AWS did, where they were said, AWS said, hey, you don't need to install servers and buy hardware, just rent some off us. And what Beta's doing is saying, you don't need to build stores, just rent 10 square feet off us. And I think that was a great idea.

• 39:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a huge problem right now. The cost of advertising gets higher and higher. And how do you find these places? You don't, like, you know, you ask your friends, but, you know, what if your friends aren't that cool?

• 39:30Shaan Puri?

  By the way, this beta idea, if anybody thinks is a good idea, you can just keep doing this in every, because you need one in many different geo locations, right? So a college student could create beta on campuses. I'd be like, cool. For any brand that wants to get in front of college students, I have created the network of pop-ups on every major campus, and D to C brands pay me $50,000 for an activation, $150,000 for a one-month activation, and we put product on every campus for them to get seen.

• 39:55Speaker 01

  Are they running it as a platform where land, like, existing property owners can run the program and then get reviewed? Or are they running it as they are the operators?

• 40:04Shaan Puri?

  I don't know. That's a good question. When they started, they were definitely the operator, but I haven't, and they've been out for a few years now.

• 40:09Speaker 01

  Because what you're talking about is interesting. Rather than rolling out 10,000 of these things, where you're running this big staff and this, and you're essentially being a landlord that operates stores. Can you outsource the model, almost like a franchise, to these operators? Where these, and then these operators get reviewed, right?

• 40:26Shaan Puri?

  Because all you want to hold is the most valuable part, which is the relationship with the brands. One click deploy, you know, every month or, you know, for three months, whenever they do a new product or whatever. You just want to own that relationship and offer them a bunch of reach. And ideally, you're not paying for or managing the reach, which is what you're talking about. I like that.

• 40:43Sam Parr?

  What did you say? You said I wrote out a deck for it?

• 40:46Speaker 01

  Yeah. When I left David's T, it was the first idea I had and I made a pitch deck. I, I toyed with the idea a little bit because at the time, I mean, you were starting to see the writing on the walls from malls, especially department stores who had all this square footage. I mean, they're dying.

• 41:02Sam Parr?

  Yeah, turn them all into nursing homes, man. Every mall should be a nursing home.

• 41:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, that's what's happening effectively. Although some of these real estate companies are going to make a fortune in the next 10 years. You know, there's this one in Canada called Smart Centers. These guys, they have all the Walmart anchored stores. And of course, when the pandemic hit, the stock got killed because all the crappy shitty clothing brands from the 1990s are getting wiped out. But all these guys are doing, they have the best real estate in the suburbs. So they're taking this pad where they had, you know, some crappy JCPenney type brand, and they're building a multi-unit residential apartment building or a seniors home. And they're, they're getting enormous value out of the land and even bigger returns. And not only that, they're building it at a time with rock bottom interest rates right before, you know, where we're likely to see a lot of inflation. I think these, there's a lot of opportunity to repurpose.

• 41:50Shaan Puri?

  Sounds like a stock to buy. What stock is that?

• 41:52Speaker 01

  That's Smart Centers. But you know, there's tons of these REITs in the States too. Like you gotta find the ones that still are gonna have a decent anchor. Like Walmart stores aren't going anywhere. Even if e-commerce becomes everything to them, they still need that last mile. They need the real estate to operate their e-commerce. And that, and I don't know if you've been in a Walmart parking lot recently, but they're still full. People are still going to the stores. It's, it's those clothing brands that were hot 10, 20 years ago that are gone.

• 42:18Sam Parr?

  Right. How big? When you were making this deck, how big did you project that it would be? And what did it need to become in order to interest you?

• 42:25Shaan Puri?

  Dude, a deck is fiction. You're all for sure.

• 42:27Speaker 01

  I mean, yeah, exactly.

• 42:29Sam Parr?

  I know, but like a deck, I imagine a deck oftentimes is not necessarily what you're making to present to people, but a way to get yourself excited and organize your thoughts.

• 42:38Speaker 01

  So I saw it centered around clothing and I saw one of the issues with e-commerce as returns, where you don't know your fit. So I even looked at like, could I get a fit machine? Like they have these, it actually have this, these machines that like you can scan and give you your body fit and you can keep it on file. So I was like, can I keep a database of everybody's body shape and be able to recommend brands based off that as well? I didn't really think about how big could this be? To me, it could be enormous. I think this is a monster. I mean, this is a multi-billion dollar idea, I believe.

• 43:10Sam Parr?

  That's pretty exciting. That's cool.

• 43:11Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, think about it. You've shifted everybody.

• 43:14Shaan Puri?

  You can do it. So.

• 43:16Speaker 01

  No, I didn't. What helped me up? It's, it's a big complicated idea. You know, it's a major commitment.

• 43:22Shaan Puri?

  Plus maybe some scar tissue from the first fitting room business.

• 43:25Speaker 01

  That's right. Exactly. I really want fit machines. Exactly. Exactly.

• 43:29Shaan Puri?

  So I want to ask you a question, you know, with, with David's, you guys did all these different flavors. Like you would have like luscious watermelon or like caramel corn or whatever. And it's like, yeah, cool. You're, you're coming up a new product to get people excited. Great. I had heard, and tell me if this is bullshit, I'll just half relay what I remember. I had heard there's some agency, brand annual report that comes out. And Sam, you might've been the one to tell me or Steph Smith from the Hustle Baby was the one who mentioned this. So tell me if you remember the name, but they come out with a report every year and it's like this giant report. And it's just like colors, smells.

• 44:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, WGSN.

• 44:03Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 44:04Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 44:04Sam Parr?

  We've talked about them a lot. It's like, uh, they do about 90 million in sales and about like 40 million in profit.

• 44:09Shaan Puri?

  So is that, did you guys use something like that?

• 44:11Speaker 01

  Oh, totally. Yeah. Absolutely. Actually, funny you mention them. I was just griping about them earlier today. I've been trying to get signed up again for my food business and for new tea brand and like they won't, they're not answering the emails. I know these guys don't want sales, I guess.

• 44:27Shaan Puri?

  So it's WGSN.

• 44:29Sam Parr?

  They're owned by a company called Essentia, I believe, which is a publicly traded company in England that owned cans, like the festival, and they own a bunch of trade shows. So I don't know if they're like doing that well, but the WGSN was like their anchor asset because it just, I don't think, it doesn't really grow, but it just does the same every single year.

• 44:46Shaan Puri?

  So how do they do this? And are they right? And is it like surprising the stuff?

• 44:50Sam Parr?

  Yeah, they're right. Like they predicted like millennial pink. You know, millennial pink, that word, millennial pink. I think they were talking about millennial pink a couple of years before that.

• 44:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, sometimes they're, you know, like they're right, they're wrong, right? I mean, sometimes they're way out there on some of the trends.

• 45:04Sam Parr?

  It's just a guess.

• 45:05Speaker 01

  It's just a guess. Exactly. And, and sometimes you don't want to be the first. Some ideas, we definitely got inspiration from there. We got inspiration from adjacent industries, from the culinary world, from the fashion world. Absolutely.

• 45:15Sam Parr?

  They'll, they'll like tell Starbucks, like, um, this shade red is kind of interesting. So like, maybe make your name tags that during Christmas.

• 45:21Speaker 01

  Right. Or meringue is a hot ingredient out of Sri Lanka. You might want to do a blend with it.

• 45:27Shaan Puri?

  Is it based on data? Is this, do they just have tastemakers? How are they doing this?

• 45:31Speaker 01

  Both. I think they do have in-house tastemakers, people that their entire job is to go around and, and look at what's new, what's hot, what's cool. You know, they're trying to find the next coconut water, right?

• 45:43Sam Parr?

  And it's expensive. It might cost 25 or 35K a year.

• 45:46Speaker 01

  Yeah, right. Depends how big you are. They scale it up depending on the size of your company.

• 45:50Sam Parr?

  It's a pretty interesting business and it's publicly traded. So you can go in and look at it. Really fascinating. Cause David, I own this company, we just sold it, but this thing called Trends and I modeled it after, a little bit after that company. Of course, we only charged $300 a year and Norden make a lot of money. We should have charged $30,000 a year, but it's.

• 46:08Shaan Puri?

  You could have just charged $3,000. You could have bought their report for 30, distilled it down and offered.

• 46:14Speaker 01

  That's right. Charge three. I like your mother better, Sam. I'm going to sign up after this for 300 bucks. That, that sounds like a way better value proposition.

• 46:21Sam Parr?

  Well, that's all we, we, except ours isn't like niche specific. We look at like all types of interesting, it's, it's basically like this podcast, but way more thought out. And like, we have a team of researchers who like just comb through all the data. And then we have a community where it's a pretty sick community where people discuss it. And it was heavily inspired by WGSN and that it's a big business, WGSN.

• 46:40Speaker 01

  Absolutely. I mean, most people in the product business use WGSN. All the fashion guys use it. Most of the food guys.

• 46:47Shaan Puri?

  Awesome. Well, we hit the hour, David. We said that we were gonna do 20 minutes. So I appreciate you staying with us. It's sort of our like first date thing. We're like, oh, I gotta meet a friend in 30. In case the guest sucks, we can, we have the excuse to wrap it up. But you were awesome.

• 47:01Speaker 01

  Oh dude, this was a ton of fun. I really appreciate you guys having me. I really enjoyed it.

• 47:05Sam Parr?

  What's your contact or your social presence?

• 47:09Shaan Puri?

  How should people get more?

• 47:10Speaker 01

  Instagram, at David Segal T, the letter T. And on Twitter, it is.

• 47:16Sam Parr?

  You don't even know your Twitter handle.

• 47:17Shaan Puri?

  Never, never.

• 47:18Speaker 01

  You know, this is, this is the biggest thing that I should have done. Underscore David Segal, S E G A L, at underscore David Segal. And I'll start posting a lot more content as more followers come in.

• 47:30Sam Parr?

  Did you, uh, all right, I'm on it now. Yeah, yeah, my friend. You changed your profile picture too. I think you're better looking than this profile picture. I think like right now, the way you look right now, you look like a cool guy. I think you could show that off better.

• 47:43Shaan Puri?

  Take a screenshot.

• 47:44Speaker 01

  Lose, I gotta lose the collar. It's a little too serious.

• 47:46Sam Parr?

  No, like you and Harley kind of have similar vibes where you like, you give off this serious.

• 47:51Shaan Puri?

  Still fun and playful.

• 47:53Sam Parr?

  Yeah, like you're gonna kick ass, but you're like fun to be around.

• 47:56Speaker 01

  Uh, listen, I mean, it's, it's amazing to kick ass and to try and just get better and better and try and become world class. But, you know, you gotta have fun. You only live once.

• 48:05Sam Parr?

  Yeah. So anyway, just some feedback.

• 48:07Speaker 01

  Thanks, man. No, I think it's good feedback. I'm, I'll take a shot. Actually, I'll take this shot from this podcast.

• 48:12Sam Parr?

  That was a classic, like, left-handed, uh, Sam Parr compliment, which I, I'm telling you, you look better looking than your picture.

• 48:21Speaker 01

  All right, cool.

• 48:23Shaan Puri?

  All right, sounds good. All right, thanks, man.

• 48:24Speaker 01

  Thanks for having me. Take care, guys.

• 48:26Shaan Puri?

  Bye.