#19 - Drone Light Shows, No Code Movement & Plugin Empires

The Hustle's My First Million presents: Million Dollar Brainstorm. Host Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) and The Hustle CEO Sam Parr (@theSamParr) sit down and discuss what side hustles, trends and big business ideas that's keeping them up at night. This week they shoot the sh*t about the no code movement, reinventing fireworks through drone light shows, creating a brand around miniature things, putting tiny houses in your backyard, the huge business of website plugins and social agencies. If you enjoy this and would like a weekly briefing on super in-depth research in these trends, Sam has offered a discount on The Hustle's Trends newsletter, go to https://trends.co/million. 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.

• 0:00Shaan Puri?

  Million Dollar Brainstorm. We're back, episode three. It's been fun so far. Like, we had a guy, the guy who texted us about the TRT thing.

• 0:07Sam Parr?

  I gotta call him back.

• 0:08Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, we gotta call that guy.

• 0:09Sam Parr?

  So the guy who reached out to us.

• 0:10Shaan Puri?

  Jason.

• 0:11Sam Parr?

  Jason?

• 0:11Shaan Puri?

  Yes.

• 0:12Sam Parr?

  We talked about the TRT businesses. He has owned, apparently, a few, sold it for what he said was seven figures. Is interested in expanding. I'm not gonna start that, but.

• 0:22Shaan Puri?

  Somehow he got both of our numbers. I don't know how.

• 0:25Sam Parr?

  I thought he was a friend of yours when he texted us.

• 0:27Shaan Puri?

  I thought he was a friend of yours.

• 0:28Sam Parr?

  He texted us like, like he had known us forever.

• 0:30Shaan Puri?

  Well played, Jason. So he somehow got both of our numbers and was like, hey, guys, you're talking about this TRT thing. Trust me, I know way more about this than you do. I started a TRT business, brick and mortar, sold it for seven figures. I can help you guys do this thing you guys are doing. I'm gonna do it and you guys can sort of be involved in some way. And I was like, wow, that's cool. Like, this is luck coming to us.

• 0:50Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 0:51Shaan Puri?

  Love that.

• 0:51Sam Parr?

  You're right. Well, let's create more luck. And where we left off last week, I had brought up the idea of Zapier. Are you familiar with that?

• 0:59Shaan Puri?

  I am familiar with it, but if you need to give the basics.

• 1:02Sam Parr?

  Wade, the guy, his name's Wade. He's a young guy. I don't know him, but I've chatted with him on Twitter. So the story is, is that he was, went to college at University of Missouri. They raised a million dollars in funding from YC or something like that, and they're fully distributed. I've got a friend who works there, so no office. And what they've done is they've built a really easy system to, allows you to connect to programs via API. So for us, we run our whole business off of this. So like, if there's a new entry form onto Google Sheets, it will tell Slack you have a new entry form. And you could do that with probably a thousand different apps that they have already uploaded.

• 1:37Shaan Puri?

  It's like plumbing or piping between all your different programs.

• 1:40Sam Parr?

  Yeah. I think that this is the very early stages of that. And this whole idea of connecting different apps through a way that does not involve coding. It's this whole thing right now that I've heard people refer as the no-code movement. Have you heard of node code?

• 1:54Shaan Puri?

  I've heard of this a lot lately. I think this is, this is trending.

• 1:58Sam Parr?

  Yes, and it is going to get much bigger. So first of all, Zapier, they've built this company now. I've heard, they're speaking at HustleCon, so we'll learn, but I've heard that it's a 50 or 60 million recurring business. They've only raised a million dollars in funding. So like, on the really high end, this company could be worth half a billion dollars. On the lower end, maybe like a few hundred million dollars. So very valuable. And so, why? Why is this growing so fast? And I think it's because of this whole no-code thing. And I'm incredibly fascinated by companies in that space. So another one's Webflow. Webflow has been around for six years. They actually started right before I started HustleCon. I talked to Brian right before he launched it. I thought it was not going to be a big thing. It is going to be a big thing. And then there's a handful of other things. Have you seen any other no-code ones?

• 2:42Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, there's a couple of good ones. So Webflow and Zapier are the two sort of most successful ones now. I have one on my phone. People are trying to do this where can you make a mobile app without coding, right?

• 2:52Sam Parr?

  Yeah. And I don't think this is not going to be a fad. I believe this is going to be a thing. So much so that a friend of mine, his name's Andrew Wilkinson, he owns this agency called MetaLab, which is, I think they're like 200-person agency. They create user interfaces like Slack, or they created that for Slack. He is opening up an agency only around no-code. So the goal is how do we hire just like designers and marketers and have them actually build the stuff?

• 3:18Shaan Puri?

  No-code experts.

• 3:19Sam Parr?

  No-code experts. That's amazing. So if I was trying to make money right now, I would, I would create an entire community around this.

• 3:25Shaan Puri?

  So I had a guy reach out. The last one said, hey, I heard you guys mentioned no-code. By the way, I've created the largest directory of no-code tools and reviews. And here, check this out, I think it's called Codeless. And he sent me an invite and was like, you know, let me know what you think.

• 3:37Sam Parr?

  Was it awesome?

• 3:38Shaan Puri?

  It wasn't super awesome yet, but I was like, look, here's three things I would do with this if I was you, right? Like, I don't think you need a directory of everything. I think you need to be able to say, here, you're trying to do X. Here's the best no-code tool, and here's a course on how to use that no-code tool. And just be like, curating the best no-code tools and then training people on how to use them, kind of like what you're talking about.

• 3:58Sam Parr?

  So I want to use that as a segue into something similar, but...

• 4:01Shaan Puri?

  Wait, I have one no-code tool. We should know.

• 4:02Sam Parr?

  I want to hear what you have to say.

• 4:03Shaan Puri?

  Retool is the name of the no-code tool. Have you heard of this?

• 4:06Sam Parr?

  No.

• 4:07Shaan Puri?

  All right, Retool. I think, you know, I saw the founder of Stripe tweet about this. He's like, this is awesome. And I saw it and I was like, this is actually amazing. So what these guys did was every company has like internal dashboards. So you create some-

• 4:18Sam Parr?

  So we use Periscope data.

• 4:19Shaan Puri?

  So everybody creates some, and it's not just about data, but like you create some like admin interface. It's like, oh, I need to be able to, you know, for you guys, you might need to be able to go in and change something in the email for tomorrow, or go in and give the advertiser some permission or something like that. So most software companies have some admin panels, admin dashboards that you need to do. Dashboard, not for data, but for doing things like running your business. And so what Retool did was they were like, look, developers, like smart developers hate building these things. And typically people do a poor job of building them because there's like, oh, this is internal anyways.

• 4:52Sam Parr?

  It's just like task work.

• 4:54Shaan Puri?

  It's just task work. You kind of need it to run your business and UX always sucks because the designers never touch it because it's not facing customers.

• 5:01Sam Parr?

  And it'll break and you're like, oh, I'm working on this huge project. I know, but come on, I need to do my job.

• 5:05Shaan Puri?

  Admin tool, it's like, oh, there's all this like internal knowledge is like jerry-rigged, right? It's like, oh, you need to click that button twice for a torque. It's like, what? How would I know that? It's like, yeah, yeah, it's broken. We haven't gotten around to fixing it. So what Retool did was they made internal admin dashboards as a service for any company and they are taking off. And so-

• 5:21Sam Parr?

  Retool?

• 5:22Shaan Puri?

  We used them, yeah, we used them with our esports platform because sometimes we needed to go in and manually update the scores of the tournaments if our scoring system was wrong and we needed to be able to go look up if someone was cheating or not. And so we use them for our dashboard. So for, you still need to be a developer, but it makes the developer's job like way easier and you also don't need to be like a deep, full stack developer. You could be like, you know, very, very sort of a light engineer and use Retool and set it up for your company.

• 5:45Sam Parr?

  So are these guys, how big is the company?

• 5:47Shaan Puri?

  So they went through Y Combinator recently. I don't know how big they are in terms of revenue or people, but I do know that, you know, for the first six months, eight months, they were kind of floundering. It wasn't really working. And then all of a sudden it started taking off. This past year has just been like, they're in that mode where you're just trying to keep up with growth. And so-

• 6:03Sam Parr?

  Like 30 people, 10 people?

• 6:04Shaan Puri?

  I haven't, I haven't met them. I haven't, I don't know how many people in the company. Probably something like 15 to 20 people.

• 6:09Sam Parr?

  So let me tell you what I would do right now. This, I am all in on this. I think this is going to be huge. The first thing that I would do, which would be hard, but worth it, is you start one of these companies, like all around no code, that- That is not going to happen overnight. You're gonna have to get a team together, maybe raise money. You're gonna have to get people together to build this. 100%, I would pick a niche and go after this. But the second thing, which is, oh, and by the way, those things can be huge. So you do know Tableau?

• 6:32Shaan Puri?

  Yep.

• 6:32Sam Parr?

  So, I mean, these are multi 100 million dollar a year companies, publicly traded some of them at billions of dollars valuation. The sky's the limit for anyone in this space. The second thing that I would do, and this is more labor intensive, but you could crush it right off the bat, is I would create a business that goes into companies like The Hustle or Twitch, and charges $10,000 to $30,000 for a two or three day seminar and says, on the promise of this, "Hey, head of growth marketing, or marketing, or hey, head of this department, I'm gonna make it so your team can move two times faster by teaching them just how to make their own stuff. You're not gonna need any dev time."

• 7:07Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 7:07Sam Parr?

  Would that interest you?

• 7:08Shaan Puri?

  Of course.

• 7:09Sam Parr?

  Of course. "Let me come in and teach your team how to use this suite of tools, and they'll never have to ask a dev for help again." That, I would do that. I would pay, my company, which is a small company, I would pay someone $3,000 to $5,000 to come and do that.

• 7:21Shaan Puri?

  Right. So, trend here is the no-code movement, the availability of all these no-code tools. What you're saying is, couple companies to keep an eye on, Webflow, Zapier, Retool, and then now you're saying, new opportunity, you can actually like, serve that industry either through workshops, through building a no-code company, connecting a bunch of different tools, building a directory, whatever it may be.

• 7:41Sam Parr?

  Do you have budget where you're at now to make that call?

• 7:44Shaan Puri?

  Like, to hire people to come in and train?

• 7:45Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 7:46Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, yeah, we have like a training budget.

• 7:47Sam Parr?

  A few thousand dollars?

• 7:48Shaan Puri?

  I wouldn't, because my team is all engineers, but what I would do, I also work with this other group called Partnerships, where they literally would beg for engineering time, and can never get it in the company. And so if I told them, "Hey, look, here's three tools out here that could make job a lot easier, and these guys are gonna come in and do this?" Yeah, I would pay for that.

• 8:05Sam Parr?

  There it is.

• 8:05Shaan Puri?

  Alright, I got a different idea. Drone light shows.

• 8:08Sam Parr?

  Oh my god, those are awesome.

• 8:10Shaan Puri?

  Have you seen this?

• 8:11Sam Parr?

  They're awesome.

• 8:11Shaan Puri?

  Okay, so-

• 8:12Sam Parr?

  Totally awesome.

• 8:12Shaan Puri?

  If you're sitting in front of a computer, Google this right now, drone light show, think fireworks, but modernized.

• 8:19Sam Parr?

  How big do you think the firework industry is?

• 8:21Shaan Puri?

  I've not done the research.

• 8:22Sam Parr?

  Definitely seasonal.

• 8:23Shaan Puri?

  Who's the person in the back here doing trends research? Look at, look up fireworks and look up drone light show. So basically what these guys do is they get a fleet of drones, like, I don't know, 50 drones, small, little, cheap drones.

• 8:34Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 8:34Shaan Puri?

  And they put lights on them.

• 8:35Sam Parr?

  Cards.

• 8:36Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, like tiny little drones. They put lights on them. They use software to synchronize the patterns. So they can go and they can dance. They can go into different shapes. It can be a flower and then a rainbow and then whatever. And they do this at, you know, music festivals, birthday parties, conventions, whatever. It's, it is the new fireworks. And it looks so cool and the product sells itself because if you see it at one event, you will like someone in that thousand person event will want to use it at their own event. And so I think that drone light shows are going to be really big.

• 9:03Sam Parr?

  So your wife does things at conferences where she draws.

• 9:06Shaan Puri?

  Correct.

• 9:06Sam Parr?

  And she draws what the conference speaker is speaking about.

• 9:10Shaan Puri?

  Exactly. You might've seen this. Someone's talking and live in real time on a giant whiteboard that's as big as a wall. She's drawing like an infographic story of what the person's saying live. And this is like a magic trick.

• 9:19Sam Parr?

  And she makes a wonderful living doing this.

• 9:21Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, she makes great money. She has no website, no business card, has never had one, has been doing this for 10 years. And is basically booked year round if she wants it. She just turns down gigs. And I'm like, because the product is viral, because people see it at the conference and they want it for their company.

• 9:36Sam Parr?

  Have that.

• 9:36Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 9:36Sam Parr?

  And do this for the drone fireworks. I love that. I would want to Google drone fireworks or drone light show right now and.

• 9:43Shaan Puri?

  I will invest in a drone light show company right now because I believe as soon as I saw.

• 9:47Sam Parr?

  That would just be a cash flow thing. That would make cash from the first couple of weeks.

• 9:51Shaan Puri?

  Yes.

• 9:51Sam Parr?

  After you start getting bookings.

• 9:53Shaan Puri?

  Right. Exactly. And drones are kind of like commodities now. Like you can buy very cheap drones. The programming of drones is very, very simple now. And then the last piece is, and by the way, there's, somebody could make a no code type of tool to program drones. People are doing no code type tools to program, you know, like Amazon Alexa, like voice apps. I can make a voice, I can make an Alexa skill. Without knowing how to code now, somebody's going to do the same for programming drones as drones get more and more popular.

• 10:18Sam Parr?

  I love it.

• 10:19Shaan Puri?

  So two ideas right there. Okay, go. What's the next?

• 10:21Sam Parr?

  Okay, so you were talking about someone who had a directory that would tell you the best no-code tools. Okay, so my company, The Hustle Trends, we're a small business of about thirty employees. We make, let's just say, eight figures in revenue. So a small business, but big enough that we are spending money on stuff. So the way our costs work are we spend, the three top tiers are advertising to get new customers, people, employees. And the third one is software. I was doing our accounting the other day, looking at our numbers. So our company, like I said, is small. We might spend twenty to thirty thousand dollars a month in software.

• 10:54Shaan Puri?

  Yep. These are things like, you guys may not use this, but MailChimp and then Slack and then other tools.

• 10:59Sam Parr?

  But then also payroll. I just paid fifteen thousand dollars for a year's to switch to Rippling, or close to fifteen thousand dollars. Kaiser Healthcare, like, just like, all these like platforms, like, stuff that you just have to have, including payroll, HR stuff, performance review stuff.

• 11:16Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 11:16Sam Parr?

  Anyway, I bet you have wasted at least a hundred thousand dollars in the lifetime of our company by selecting software that I didn't know why. I did it because I thought it was a thing. And then I realized like, oh, wait a minute, this is like already packaged into this other thing. And I'm like, shit, I gotta like, I'll just, I'll just let the, so like, right now, we're paying two grand a month for something. And I'm like, damn, this other thing already like is going to offer this. I just gotta let this expire, I guess.

• 11:40Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 11:40Sam Parr?

  I just, I'm out of the money. And so, but here's the thing is that most, all early-stage companies have like, it's like an eighty-twenty thing, like eighty percent of us all just need the same problem solved.

• 11:50Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 11:50Sam Parr?

  And so I've been thinking a lot about this, how this could be solved, almost like a business backend in a box, which is what like Gusto or Zenefits or something is trying to offer. But what I'm interested in is content sites, like a wire cutter. In my head, I'm like, why is there someone not blogging and just telling me like, alright, you need your basics? This will do the job. Just install this suite of tools, you're good.

• 12:12Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 12:13Sam Parr?

  That would have saved me so much money. And here's why it's lucrative for the content owner is because, so let's say, I don't know this for a fact, but it is generally true with a lot of companies. Something like a MailChimp, if I tell you to sign up to Mailchimp and you use my link and you pay a hundred dollars a month for Mailchimp. Mailchimp will pay me, the affiliate, thirty dollars a month for life. Right.

• 12:32Shaan Puri?

  Amazing.

• 12:32Sam Parr?

  For life.

• 12:33Shaan Puri?

  Huge affiliate fees.

• 12:34Sam Parr?

  And that makes sense. So trends in subscription business, I will gladly pay someone like a thirty percent percentage for a new customer for life.

• 12:42Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 12:42Sam Parr?

  Well, we do actually. And in my head, I'm like, someone save me money and just tell me, like, do the, be the wire cutter of business software and just tell me exactly what to do. I don't want to read this article, like this really long thing. Just tell me, you know what I mean?

• 12:54Shaan Puri?

  Yes, I have an idea that's similar to this in the same space, but there's this company called Vendor. I'm looking them up right now so I make sure that I get it right. V E N D R is their company. And I think what they're doing, I might be wrong, but I think what they're doing is you pay for, you know, these same seven pieces of software. What they do is they realize that you can, all these are negotiable, all the prices are negotiable, Mailchimp's price is negotiable, Slack's price is negotiable.

• 13:18Sam Parr?

  They do group buying?

• 13:19Shaan Puri?

  They do basically group buying and they do negotiation on your behalf.

• 13:22Sam Parr?

  That's cool.

• 13:23Shaan Puri?

  And whatever they save you, they keep a cut of whatever they saved you. And because companies spend so much on software, and especially big companies, they spend so much on software. These guys will manage your contracts, so they show you what cycle everything's on, when it expires, all that stuff, and they save you money on the.

• 13:40Sam Parr?

  I love that. I was just telling someone the other day, I'm like, man, I just looked at our expenses and we had two or three different people paying for Photoshop and two or three people paying for like the Wall Street Journal. I'm like, God, we should have just shared this. What are you guys doing? Like, I just want to sign up for something and they just find out where all the duplicates are or things that we're not using and they automatically cancel it for me and I'll give them a cut of the revenue that they saved me.

• 13:59Shaan Puri?

  Like, I looked up this company and I have one template email that I send to like a few companies a year, which is just, hey, founder's name, hey, Ryan. I love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love, love this idea. Let me know if I can help or invest.

• 14:12Sam Parr?

  And you sent it to them?

• 14:13Shaan Puri?

  I sent it to them and then we got in touch, but like. This is one of those ideas that I love, love, love, love, love, love.

• 14:19Sam Parr?

  Great. We're on the same page.

• 14:20Shaan Puri?

  Okay, I got another one for you. So this is kind of a follow up on last week's. So we talked about miniature cookware and I was like, oh, of course people love mini stuff. This week, what I like what you guys did, which was you followed up. There's a presentation that you guys made. I don't know if you saw this deck. That was like

• 14:35Sam Parr?

  Steph Smith made it.

• 14:36Shaan Puri?

  Mini everything. Yeah. Shout out to Steph. So mini everything. It was like miniature cookware is on the rise. Guess what? Tiny homes is also on the rise. Guess what? Here's this other thing. Also, here's how they're doing it. They're leveraging YouTube because tiny stuff is really entertaining to like vlog about. So people are vlogging. Hey, I live in this hundred square foot tiny home.

• 14:54Sam Parr?

  Dude, those tiny

• 14:55Shaan Puri?

  Millions of subscribers.

• 14:56Sam Parr?

  This whole tiny home thing is the greatest.

• 14:58Shaan Puri?

  And so there's something to this mini thing. And I just liked the follow up deck because it actually shows that you could build a brand around the lifestyle of tiny, of minimalism. And if you look at like Marie Kondo and kind of minimalism, I think is a growing trend. And I think that tiny stuff and miniature versions of things is related there. And so you could build a brand that does the cookware, that does the homes. You could do everything just with one powerful overarching brand.

• 15:24Sam Parr?

  Yeah, that was a good deck. I love that. I had no idea that miniature was such a thing. But when you actually think about it, getting distribution, getting eyeballs on a business that sells these miniature things. So easy. Just because like you already can see what the Instagram ad is going to look like in your head.

• 15:37Shaan Puri?

  Right. It's so novel.

• 15:38Sam Parr?

  There's like 10 or 20 different combinations of an Instagram ad where you're like, oh, like click the on that's going to be stupidly high.

• 15:44Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, exactly. You know, I was scrolling through Instagram and I saw one of those tasty videos and tasty videos, if you haven't seen it, it's those videos on your feed that are like, it starts with like a really juicy burger. And then you see somebody putting some sauce on it. And like all of a sudden you've watched 30 seconds. It's a 30 second recipe. And I like this general premise of working backwards from what would work on the Instagram feed.

• 16:04Sam Parr?

  That's how I think about things, by the way.

• 16:05Shaan Puri?

  What's really visual. What's really novel and would catch my eye on Instagram and then work back with and build a business?

• 16:11Sam Parr?

  That's how I think about it, which is I like the Ada principle.

• 16:13Shaan Puri?

  What is that?

• 16:14Sam Parr?

  Attention, interest, desire, action. Okay.

• 16:16Shaan Puri?

  Attention, interest, desire.

• 16:18Sam Parr?

  Yeah, that's my framework when I do copywriting. So when I think of a business, I go, ooh, does this have a really fast attention grabbing headline or attention grabbing video? And then like, can I make anyone stop in their tracks? Okay. And then can I interest them as to like, get them to fall down the cliff a little bit further to watch my video? And then can I make them desire it by actually showing them the value? And then can I easily collect their money by getting them to take action?

• 16:39Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 16:40Sam Parr?

  So like a tiny home would be a little bit difficult if you have to do financing, but like a miniature set of something, let's 50 bucks, just take your credit card. That's easy.

• 16:49Shaan Puri?

  So another one that came to me on Twitter today related to tiny homes is rent the backyard. It's a new startup that's basically doing tiny homes, but it puts it in your backyard as a guest house that you can Airbnb. And so a lot of people don't want to move into a tiny home because that's a pretty radical life shift. But what if I could put a tiny home in your backyard, you could use it to Airbnb and then you have it whenever it's not Airbnb as like a novelty thing.

• 17:09Sam Parr?

  I can't have it in San Francisco, but one day when I move, I will be in a heartbeat.

• 17:14Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. And so I thought, oh, this is another one of those, hey, guys, I love, love, love, love this idea. This is brilliant.

• 17:19Sam Parr?

  Get back to you?

• 17:20Shaan Puri?

  Um, well, we'll see. I got an intro from a friend and so, so we'll see. But like my parents have a tiny backyard. I have a tiny backyard. If I could put a little tiny home in the tiny backyard, I would do that.

• 17:29Sam Parr?

  Is that, what's it, is it considered a structure? Do you have to get permits?

• 17:32Shaan Puri?

  So all the big cities, because they don't let you build, the compromise that they're doing on the regulatory level is they're saying, okay, these in-law homes, which is what these are called, like your in-law guest house or whatever, these are now allowed. So if you have this much space, you're allowed to put an additional structure because they think, oh, that kind of eases the burden on the housing problem in a lot of these cities. And so they actually are encouraged, whereas before it was outlawed for a very long time.

• 17:56Sam Parr?

  That's awesome. Love this. Love this. I love anything that makes it really easy for someone to make side income. Right. Easy. Okay, I think I have one more on my list. Okay, so I'm sick of talking about direct to consumer stuff. Okay. Like hard goods. The reason why is I don't, I don't think it's very intellectually challenging. It's just like the same crap, but you just smack on lowercase letter logo. And like a pastel color and then you triple or quadruple the price and call it premium. Easy. Right. Do it, but it's easy. But I do like the ancillary things around it. So there's this guy who I know, I'm not close with him, but I've hung out with him a couple of times. His name's Syed. S Y E D. He owns this blog called WP Beginner. Okay, it's a eight-figure a year blog and all he does is he blogs about the best WordPress themes and plugins.

• 18:41Sam Parr?

  And over the years, I've gotten to know him and I've read about him. What Syed has done is built an empire, WordPress empire. So he owns WP Forms, which is installed probably by a million people. And if you want the premium version, it's like 50 bucks a month. He owns OptinMonster. He owns, like, I'm almost positive he owns 40 or 50 more plugins. And if I had to guess, I would say he makes $50 million a year doing this. And what he's done is he's, this blog that he has, WP Beginner, he's been able to see what's the most clicked on affiliates or themes, and then he just goes and buys them or starts them. And it got me really interested in this. And so there's this company called Envato. I wrote about it on Trends a while ago. And Envato, all they are, they probably wouldn't like my oversimplification, but it's basically a marketplace for WordPress themes and plugins.

• 19:26Sam Parr?

  And since 2008, this thing has grossed $300 million in sales. And in 2017, they did $94 million in revenue with something like $33 million in profit. Right. And I'm amazed at that. And so I asked myself, well, what's the next thing? Well, it's, it's not even the next thing. It's already here. It's called Shopify. A friend of mine, I, I mentioned him earlier, Andrew Wilkinson, last week or two weeks ago, he announced that they raised $25 million or $30 million. And their whole purpose of raising this money is to go out and buy Shopify plugins. And I think that it's not like early, early, but it's still early enough that there's a lot of.

• 20:01Shaan Puri?

  There's still opportunity left.

• 20:03Sam Parr?

  And so I think that people, I think Chrome plugins are like this as well. I'm going to be incredibly fascinated to see all the Shopify plugins and a holding company exists that will buy all of these.

• 20:13Shaan Puri?

  And so the reason the WordPress thing works is because WordPress powers like 22% of all websites.

• 20:19Sam Parr?

  Yep.

• 20:19Shaan Puri?

  So if 22% of all the websites are using WordPress, there's going to be this economy around making your WordPress site better. And these guys have capitalized.

• 20:27Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I just bought an Envato theme yesterday on a whim for a hundred dollars.

• 20:29Shaan Puri?

  I've bought one as well. Shopify is very similar where I don't know what the percentage is of percentage of online stores that use Shopify. But I guess it's, I would guess it's probably also like 22% or 50%, you know, something like that. Therefore, and also these people are all making money or have the dream of making money on their shop. So it might be even the plugins marketplace might be even better for something like this.

• 20:49Sam Parr?

  Might be even better. Yes. And so if you Google We Commerce, which is the name of Andrew's new company, you'll see they go, we've just raised $33 million or 30 or some number like that. And all we're going to do is buy Shopify partners, which means plugins and things like that.

• 21:03Shaan Puri?

  Right. Not the shops themselves.

• 21:04Sam Parr?

  No, these guys would never do that. No, it's picks and axes, not gold.

• 21:08Shaan Puri?

  Gotcha. And so I like this theme and I like what you said there too, which is that part of that empire is the content sites that say, hey, we recommend this. Here's a tutorial about how to do this.

• 21:17Sam Parr?

  Well, you need insider knowledge.

• 21:18Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 21:19Sam Parr?

  And so these guys have insider knowledge because they own an agency that would build Shopify stores for people. And so they started like, oh man, everyone's installing like this commenting software for their Shopify site.

• 21:31Shaan Puri?

  Right. That's that third type of luck, the keen eye that's able to see opportunities before others.

• 21:36Sam Parr?

  Yeah. And that luck's really easy to get. You just get in the mix.

• 21:39Shaan Puri?

  Right. Okay. I have another one that's similar to this. So my buddy Zach has sleep apnea. And I think I also have sleep apnea. I just haven't gone and done the sleep test because I don't want to get diagnosed because A, the diagnosis is really annoying. You have to go sleep overnight at this lab or whatever. And then B, if you have sleep apnea, which a lot of people do, you get put on this like breather machine when you sleep and it's supposed to help. But it's like, you feel like, you know, a dying patient, given the way that the treatment works. And so Zach went through this process. He's going through this process where he is like, all right, I've had this my whole life. I've been snoring and nobody wants to sleep in the same room as me. And I think I have the sleep apnea thing, but this whole system seems busted. Here's what I'm going to do. So he created a YouTube channel called Sleeping With Zach.

• 22:21Shaan Puri?

  And so for 30 days, he's basically going to document his journey of. Figuring out, do I have it? How do I get tested? Trying out all the different products in this industry to be like, what actually works and what's bullshit? And then getting to the bottom of like, can I actually cure my sleep apnea in a way that I want? And I think this is a really, really smart way to start this business. I think it's a catchy name. I think doing the YouTube videos will be fun. I think other people want to see it and not be sold something, but say, oh yeah, this guy's like me. He's had problems snoring his whole life and he's trying to solve it. He's trying to try all the different stuff.

• 22:51Sam Parr?

  What's Zach's last name?

• 22:51Shaan Puri?

  Hargraves.

• 22:52Sam Parr?

  I think I know him.

• 22:53Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, he's, yeah, he's in our kind of circle.

• 22:55Sam Parr?

  Here's my prediction. If he executes on this well, he will be able to sell this, this for at least a million dollars.

• 23:00Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 23:00Sam Parr?

  To a sleep apnea company or make a million dollars in sponsorship.

• 23:04Shaan Puri?

  So there's the content side of things. And then if that starts to pick up steam and you know, there's the potential also to even start a sleep apnea company where you know, he, he actually devises a better product for either the diagnosis or the like, could you not diagnose this with a phone listening to you while you sleep? Could you have a wearable or is there on the treatment side, is there something?

• 23:24Sam Parr?

  Well, so long as he has this sleep apnea audience.

• 23:26Shaan Puri?

  Exactly.

• 23:26Sam Parr?

  The sky's the limit.

• 23:27Shaan Puri?

  Exactly. That's why I like that he started with the YouTube channel. Normally I would just be like, just cut straight to the chase. But in this case, I like the idea of starting with the audience and seeing if you can build that.

• 23:36Sam Parr?

  Sleep with Zach.

• 23:36Shaan Puri?

  Group of people. Yeah. And I called this approach, the curious beginner. So I believe in content. There's like two major routes you can go. You're either the generous expert. I know something. I'm going to tell you guys about it and I can get famous for that. The other one is I know nothing, but I'm going to go do all the work and research and I'll share with you guys what I'm learning. I'm just as clueless as you. That's the curious beginner. And so I like that he's taking the.

• 23:58Sam Parr?

  I say the same thing. I go, when you want to find good social content, just learn and post what you learned the week before.

• 24:05Shaan Puri?

  Right. Exactly.

• 24:07Sam Parr?

  It, it works.

• 24:08Shaan Puri?

  And this, the way I do this podcast is, is both. So the, the, when I interview guests, that's my curious beginner. I'm saying, hey, how'd you do this? Can you tell me what you learned? And I'm just sharing it in real time. What I'm learning from these successful people, I'm just sharing. And then this episode is a little bit different where it's like, hey, we have some expert knowledge about some different opportunities, different spaces because. Trends is doing all this research. We have friends that are doing interesting things. We're thinking about stuff and we're just giving away these ideas for free essentially.

• 24:34Sam Parr?

  Okay. Can I wrap it up with one idea?

• 24:36Shaan Puri?

  Yes, please.

• 24:36Sam Parr?

  Okay. This is not a trend. It's like a case study type of thing. So there's this company that you're friends with the guy Steve. We will have to talk about it too much because he's going to be on your.

• 24:45Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, he's coming on the pod at some point.

• 24:47Sam Parr?

  So I read an article, this company called Social Chain. I think I'm going to dumb it down about what I think it is, is that they own loads of different Twitter handles, which I actually follow a ton. And one of them is called like failures or one of them is called like shit men do or something. And it's just like funny Twitter videos.

• 25:03Shaan Puri?

  They call them theme pages.

• 25:05Sam Parr?

  Theme pages. I love them. I follow a lot of them. They're like this day in history and it's an agency, basically.

• 25:10Shaan Puri?

  So I'll, I'll give you the brief story because it's kind of amazing. Uh, Steve's 18, 19 years old, starts a company and he's targeting college students. It's like a Craigslist for college students. He wants to market, but he has no money because he's 19 years old. He's broke. And so he's like, oh, you know what? Me and all my friends, we all follow these two Twitter accounts. One was like, shit freshmen say. And then the other one was like overheard in the library or something like that. And uh, the student theme meme accounts. And they had millions of followers. And so he reached out to him and was like, hey, can I get you to shout out my product? And it turns out it was owned by like another student at the school. Like all of these meme pages were created by like a 17 year old kid just having some fun. And then, you know, fast forward six months and now they have two million followers and they didn't kind of realize they were sitting on a gold mine.

• 25:54Shaan Puri?

  But Steve was pretty smart. He did realize that. And so he started to accumulate these. He started buying them when he could, like, hey, I'll give you 500 bucks for your page. People were like, all right, cool. And then when he couldn't buy them, he would partner with them and say, hey, can I add you to my network of theme pages? And when we get some advertising money, I'll give you, uh, you know, I'll pay you to post. And so he built up this agency. They had about 25 employees. All of them were under 23 years old. So it was like the upstart ad agency. He would go on stage and he would start a talk and he would be like, hey, we control the internet. And people were like, okay, what are you talking about? And he's like, watch, uh, give me a word and I'm going to make it trend on Twitter by the end of this talk. And somebody would throw out a word from the audience and then the theme pages would all start like,

• 26:35Shaan Puri?

  dropping like memes about that, that word. And sure enough, by the end of the talk, it'd be like the number one trend on Twitter. And so, and so he harnessed this and then did the same thing with Instagram and he built the biggest collection of these theme pages. And it's like influencers, but you don't have to deal with the personalities because it's a. It's a theme. It's not a human being that's behind it. And so you can actually control all of the influence. And you can own the influence instead of being like the manager to a Logan Paul.

• 27:00Sam Parr?

  So the idea of this sounds amazing to me.

• 27:03Shaan Puri?

  Yes.

• 27:03Sam Parr?

  When I hear you describe this, I'm like, if that is as good as you're saying it is, I think that's amazing. My prediction is that it is a horrible business. And let me explain why, and we'll find the truth. I would definitely want to be wrong. Maybe a month ago, I did a breakdown of what I think Gary Vaynerchuk's VaynerMedia, what his revenue is and what his employee headcount is. And so I've tracked it for nine years. And so this is all based off of public data. So it could be wrong, but this is straight out of his mouth. So I got it from year one to nine, and it basically ranges from, or it starts at 500,000, 1.3 million, 4.7 million, 14 million, 30 million, 54 million, 76 million, 100 million, 125 million. So that's super fast growth. But in order for that to grow, his headcount has grown from 5, 20, 30,

• 27:48Sam Parr?

  125, 300, 525, 600, 800, 800. So the rev per headcount is like under a hundred thousand dollars.

• 27:56Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 27:56Sam Parr?

  That's what I think will be when I hear this company in an article I read about the social chain thing. And I have no insider information, and so you'll have that soon. I'd like to know the truth. It said something like 800 employees and like not a lot of revenue.

• 28:09Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I think that's wrong. So I think they have a lot of revenue, but we'll have Steve clear the air. So before speculating, I would say this, agencies are bad businesses in general.

• 28:19Sam Parr?

  Maybe bad's not the right word. Pain in the ass is the right word.

• 28:21Shaan Puri?

  And they're pain in the ass because you're dealing with clients, which are typically a pain in the ass, and a lot of headcount, which is also a pain in the ass. But the reason I say that is because they're not very defensible, right? Like you don't accrue a whole bunch of value. You kind of have to keep fighting for clients and you have to, and the channels you're advertising on always change. And it's not like you're building one product. You're constantly having to be the most creative kid on the block, coming up with a thing that's going to give the clients a performance. So I don't love agencies. What I did like that they did was they started launching their own products to their own audience. So

• 28:50Sam Parr?

  So that's the twist.

• 28:51Shaan Puri?

  They use their data to say, oh, look, we have these five pages about food. The audience is all female. Let's create cookware. They did another one with women's athleisure and they created an athleisure brand. And I'd have to look it up. It's in my DMs somewhere.

• 29:03Sam Parr?

  Yeah. And I think you should have an entire episode around this because, and I wrote about this. If you sign up for trends, you'll see this, or if you're already part of trends, I'll share it in the group actually right now. Or I already have. Basically, if my numbers are right, which they could be wrong, but I think they are. I think that having an agency like this looks cool on the outside is hell on the inside. Because like at my company, we're growing and we're profitable, but if I want to be more profitable, I'm just not going to spend on advertising and I'll just make millions of dollars in profit. And I could do that with a click of a button. When you have an agency, it doesn't work like that.

• 29:36Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 29:36Sam Parr?

  And I see these numbers and I'm like, oh my God, this sounds like hell.

• 29:40Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I don't know. We'll see. We'll find out.

• 29:42Sam Parr?

  Well, I guess we will. So if you own an agency, tweet at us and let me, you could tell me if I'm right or wrong, but it seems like a grind. It seems really hard.

• 29:50Shaan Puri?

  We should give a shout out to the guy who did the airplane cocktail kit.

• 29:53Sam Parr?

  Yeah. So last week, Trends wrote about airplane cocktail kits and how people are searching like that like crazy.

• 29:59Shaan Puri?

  So explain what this is. What is an airplane cocktail kit?

• 30:02Sam Parr?

  So it's not, I'm not the target demo because I don't drink, but apparently I guess when they serve alcohol on a plane, they don't really give you a lot of accessories. And so this, it comes with, I think it comes with sugar.

• 30:13Shaan Puri?

  It comes with all the mixers. So let's say you want to have a Moscow Mule, a great drink. When the air host is coming down the aisle, she's not going to stop and make you a Moscow Mule and mix the bitters and do this thing and shake it up.

• 30:24Sam Parr?

  But this looks like a little sewing kit.

• 30:26Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 30:26Sam Parr?

  And it has all you need. I think it's like you could charge $20 for it.

• 30:29Shaan Puri?

  It's $24, I think $25 to buy one of these. It's nicely designed. I looked at the packaging. It looks cool. That's for sure. I'm also not the target demo. I would never buy some, I barely drink.

• 30:38Sam Parr?

  But I get it. It's like, it's like a, I would buy that for someone as a cute gift. And so this guy, we wrote about it and then an hour later he comes back and he goes, hey everyone, I just bought airline, what was it?

• 30:49Shaan Puri?

  It's like airline cocktail kits.com.

• 30:51Sam Parr?

  Yeah. Yeah. He like, he goes, I'm going to start selling them.

• 30:53Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 30:54Sam Parr?

  And I was like.

• 30:55Shaan Puri?

  I don't know what he's going to do with it, but I appreciate the like bias for action of like, you know what?

• 31:00Sam Parr?

  It doesn't matter what he does with it because if he creates a Shopify store and then runs some of these Instagram ads where like the, the theme behind the ad is like, do you like make it look like you're in like a, a smoke jacket? And like, and you're like den with mahogany wood and you zoom out and you're really on the airport.

• 31:15Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 31:15Sam Parr?

  Or you know what I mean? And you're like, make that ad. It's gonna, you could, you will sell $10,000 a month in products.

• 31:21Shaan Puri?

  Right. Yeah, so shout out to, I think his name's Ankur, who bought the domain and took some action right away. Okay, cool. If you like this, let us know. You can email me. It's [email protected]. If you are doing one of these ideas, let us know. We want to track it and hear what happens.

• 31:34Sam Parr?

  And we'll be doing these for a while longer. And this is my pitch that I will always be giving is if you want to be part of Trends and get these reports that my team is doing all day, trends.co/million, you'll get like a special deal if you sign up there.

• 31:48Shaan Puri?

  Trends is so good right now that I don't know if it's because you guys launched a new product and you really care about it. So you're making it really fricking good every week. So I'm like, is this sustainable? Like, can they continually, like, a year from now? I'm curious. Is it gonna be as good?

• 32:02Sam Parr?

  Here's what I think is gonna happen. I think Trends is gonna turn into like Bloomberg or Wall Street Journal, or like the Hustle is gonna turn into like the Wall Street Journal, and Trends is like our real estate section. And I think our goal, I think-

• 32:11Shaan Puri?

  It's like your high value-

• 32:13Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I think we're gonna have multiple sections. So right now Trends is like a general interest thing. Soon, we're gonna have Trends just for software. Then it'll be just for D to C stuff. And I think you'll pay one fee and you can get access to all of it.

• 32:24Shaan Puri?

  It's really interesting right now. So I like it. Whoever's behind it, great job. Okay, cool. We're done.