#26 - Shopify Spy Tool, Apartment Plants & Lucrative Content Sites

The Hustle's My First Million presents: Million Dollar Brainstorm is back. 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. We're hosting a meetup on the 21st November in San Francisco, check out details here: https://bit.ly/354TQ7H. This week these two discuss: the top businesses using Shopify (Check the ranking tool here: https://myip.ms/browse/sites/1/own/376714), millennial apartment plants, science fiction workout bikes, D2C hallucinogenics and businesses that you can start with $1000 this weekend that could turn into a $100M+ revenue biz. 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?

  Okay, we're here. This is Million Dollar Brainstorm. Sean here with Sam and special guest Mike, who's not mic'd up, but he's in attendance. Hopefully he'll be a guest on the podcast soon. All right, let's jump in. What do you got for me? You told me you had some good ideas.

• 0:13Sam Parr?

  I've got a few. So what it is, is...

• 0:17Shaan Puri?

  The look on your face right now.

• 0:18Sam Parr?

  Well, it's not an idea, but it's a way to find ideas. What he did was he went to the site and he found websites that all use the same IP address. Shopify has the same IP address. And this website coincidentally has a way to rank websites on an IP address. So basically, what I'm saying is, we entered in Shopify's IP address and we found all of the...

• 0:38Shaan Puri?

  Other sites Shopify is doing.

• 0:40Sam Parr?

  And it ranks them. So, for example, we'll link to this in the notes.

• 0:45Shaan Puri?

  I was gonna say, are you gonna share the super spy tool or what?

• 0:47Sam Parr?

  Well, it's like, it's like an IP address to even get to the site. So it's like, the address is like 48355. I mean, it's like a bunch of numbers.

• 0:55Shaan Puri?

  Dark web, straight to the dark web.

• 0:56Sam Parr?

  Right. And so amongst like the top 100 most popular Shopify stores that are using Shopify's IP address, it's like all vape companies, deals, like a site like Daily Steals, which I'll talk about, clothing, but not like single branded clothing, like Outdoor Voices, like stores, things that like they sell a lot of products, and then makeup. And particularly, I saw one that was on there, and I'm gonna, I'll tell you three that stood out. Seed Beauty. Have you heard of Seed Beauty? Never heard of it. Okay, I went down the rabbit hole and I researched a lot of these sites. Seed Beauty, what they do is they're the manufacturers of a store called Color Pop, as well as...

• 1:30Shaan Puri?

  I know Color Pop.

• 1:31Sam Parr?

  As well as...

• 1:32Shaan Puri?

  They make the makeup that Kylie sells.

• 1:34Sam Parr?

  Yes. They own 50 other brands.

• 1:36Shaan Puri?

  Right. This is insane. If you go to YouTube and search for Color Pop, they have an office tour that they've made for like hiring. I watched this thing twice. It was amazing. It's like this crazy factory in LA. The story's wild. It's like, there's a brother and sister.

• 1:49Sam Parr?

  It was like a family business, and Seed Beauty is the incubator within the family business.

• 1:55Shaan Puri?

  Right. And so they were first just manufacturing other people's makeup, other companies' makeup for them and shipping it. And then they started making their own brands, and now they white label for Jenner, I don't think for Rihanna, but like, yeah, it's incredible what they have.

• 2:07Sam Parr?

  No, the Rihanna one, I think, is done with, what's the big French luxury conglomerate? I forget what it is, but it's a publicly traded company. You could actually read about their numbers there. But, so anyway, Seed Beauty.

• 2:17Shaan Puri?

  Killing it on Shopify.

• 2:18Sam Parr?

  And there's like 50 brands that they own and that was surprised. The second one was dailysteals.com. Have you heard of these? I think they're all scams.

• 2:27Shaan Puri?

  These are, is it a coupon site? What is this?

• 2:29Sam Parr?

  Like penny bidding.

• 2:30Shaan Puri?

  Oh, penny auctions.

• 2:31Sam Parr?

  Yeah, they're horrible.

• 2:33Shaan Puri?

  They're horrible for you. Like Quibids is the other one. That's really popular.

• 2:36Sam Parr?

  Okay, so if you do this hack that I just showed you, there's dozens of them in the top like.

• 2:41Shaan Puri?

  And what you're saying is these are all been made by the same person or company because they're coming from the same IP?

• 2:47Sam Parr?

  They're all, well, no, they're all on Shopify's IP.

• 2:49Shaan Puri?

  Oh, these are all Shopify. Okay.

• 2:50Sam Parr?

  So they're all built on top of Shopify, but this is a business that I would never would have thought was actually as popular as it is. I mean, this was as popular as, according to my rankings, it has as much traffic.

• 2:59Shaan Puri?

  Explain what this is for somebody who doesn't understand what you say penny auctions.

• 3:02Sam Parr?

  I think it's a scam. What you do is you buy points to a website and then you use those points to bid on products.

• 3:09Shaan Puri?

  They start at super cheap.

• 3:10Sam Parr?

  And the glam, yeah, the hope is that you can buy an iPhone for like 85 points, which is like, I don't know, $2.

• 3:17Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, exactly. And sometimes it does happen, but most of the time what happens is it's not like eBay where the highest bidder pays the price. And if you bid second place, you keep your money. With this, every time you bid, your points go into the pool. So you bid four points to see if you can get the iPhone for four points. Well, you're not going to win and those four points are gone. And so whoever wins typically gets it for a lower amount of points than the retail price. But all the bidders together have put in way more than the price of an iPhone. It's fucking genius.

• 3:43Sam Parr?

  So it is genius. I think that it's all bullshit and it's also built on Shopify, which I would never have thought.

• 3:48Shaan Puri?

  I wouldn't have thought that either.

• 3:49Sam Parr?

  Okay. And the third one, which we wrote about in trends, my prediction was that this industry is kind of like the mattress industry in 2010. It's about to change and that is the sill, the sill.com.

• 4:00Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 4:01Sam Parr?

  They sell plants, particularly cute, cute millennial plants like succulents.

• 4:07Shaan Puri?

  condo plants, apartment plants.

• 4:08Sam Parr?

  Yeah, like fancy ones.

• 4:10Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 4:10Sam Parr?

  And we wrote about them on trends. We did a report on the indoor plant industry months ago. Now the site, the sill is one of the, according to this thing.

• 4:17Shaan Puri?

  One of the most popular.

• 4:18Sam Parr?

  Is one of the most popular.

• 4:19Shaan Puri?

  And what do you think of that? When you guys put out that report? That's pretty compelling to me.

• 4:23Sam Parr?

  If I didn't have a job and I wanted to make money, that sounds awesome. I would have joined that. The hard part is shipping it and making sure it arrives without being all screwed up, but the margins are fat. I even went and found wholesaler of succulents.

• 4:34Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 4:34Sam Parr?

  The math works out wonderfully.

• 4:36Shaan Puri?

  Great. Love it.

• 4:37Sam Parr?

  Okay, so that was a cool find that I wanted to go through. All right, the second one. Mindbloom. Have you heard of Mindbloom?

• 4:44Shaan Puri?

  No.

• 4:44Sam Parr?

  I was talking to, I won't say his name. I didn't ask him for permission. He told me he invested in it. Okay, so there's this.

• 4:49Shaan Puri?

  The name seemed like it sounded with a J.

• 4:51Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 4:52Shaan Puri?

  Okay, we got that much. All right, go on.

• 4:54Sam Parr?

  Okay, so I have this like weird idea where I'm not like a Silicon Valley hype boy too much. But there's this idea that like what's popular among rich Silicon Valley people is going to be mainstream in 20 years.

• 5:03Shaan Puri?

  Right. There's another theory here that I think Chris Dixon wrote about, which is what the engineers do on the weekend. Everybody will do on the weekdays eventually.

• 5:10Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 5:10Shaan Puri?

  So it's like what the nerds and sort of Silicon Valley people do as their hobbies eventually go mainstream.

• 5:15Sam Parr?

  So what I'm about to mention is not that cutting edge, but psychedelics.

• 5:19Shaan Puri?

  Okay.

• 5:19Sam Parr?

  But Mindbloom just launched. It was started by a guy who started a company that previously I think raised a hundred million dollars. It's called Mindbloom. I think they launched within the past few months and they raised money for it. And what it does is it connects you with a therapist in New York who will do, I don't know the exact drugs. I think it's ketamine and what's in mushrooms?

• 5:38Shaan Puri?

  No idea.

• 5:39Sam Parr?

  Whatever the mushrooms one is. Super cool.

• 5:42Shaan Puri?

  And so they prescribe this to you or they?

• 5:44Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it's legal in New York. And I actually spoke to a guy today in New Zealand. How do you pronounce that? Psilocybin. That's what it is. Is that legal in New York?

• 5:53Shaan Puri?

  This is why we got Mike here, adding tons of value right away.

• 5:55Sam Parr?

  I think it's legal in New York, but this company connects you with a doctor or therapist who will give it to you. And I actually spoke to a guy today in New Zealand who we're gonna fund a little bit. And he got one of the first grants in New Zealand to do LSD testing. Totally legal.

• 6:09Shaan Puri?

  You're gonna fund the research side of it, but not.

• 6:11Sam Parr?

  Well, I want the Hustle to write about him and then we'll allow people to give money to his grant. He needs a hundred grand.

• 6:16Shaan Puri?

  I see.

• 6:16Sam Parr?

  And I'm gonna match it.

• 6:17Shaan Puri?

  Gotcha. Love it.

• 6:18Sam Parr?

  So Mindbloom.

• 6:19Shaan Puri?

  Okay, I like Mindbloom. Would you use it? Cause you've talked to him in the past about.

• 6:22Sam Parr?

  Yeah, so I'm, I'm very interested in it. I'm not in the state of mind where I'm actually, I don't want to do LSD. For the people who are listening, I don't do any drugs or drink. I am not ready yet, but I love the idea of it.

• 6:32Shaan Puri?

  And Sam wrote a great post about when he gave up alcohol. You should go look it up on the internet and read it. It's good.

• 6:36Sam Parr?

  I tried to sign up to do ecstasy therapy and I got in a fight with the therapist and she kicked me out of the group. Like in the pre meetings. So that's why I'm interested in this thing so that they can introduce me to another therapist who will do it.

• 6:47Shaan Puri?

  Okay, gotcha. Okay, I have one for you that's I just learned about last night. And I don't know if you've ever heard of it. It's called Vasper. Have you ever heard of Vasper?

• 6:56Sam Parr?

  No, I like that name though.

• 6:57Shaan Puri?

  So I think it's very new. Vasper.com.

• 6:59Sam Parr?

  Sounds like a vaping thing.

• 7:00Shaan Puri?

  I'm gonna show you this photo of it. It looks super lame, so just brace yourself. And I know it's a podcast, so you can't see this, but describe what you're looking at.

• 7:06Sam Parr?

  So it's a recumbent stationary bicycle that kinda looks like an elliptical with a vacuum behind.

• 7:12Shaan Puri?

  Basically, it looks like a seated bike with like a jet ski butt on the back of it. So, um, somebody I know, my aunt, basically posted about this and was like, this thing is amazing. Best invention of the, you know, the century. And I was like, what is this? So I looked it up. These are the claims that come with it. So it's an exercise machine. You do 21 minutes. And apparently it feels like two hours of cardio. This is testimonials on the website are like Tony Robbins says this, the guy who started Bulletproof Coffee says this. They're like, this thing is magic. And it's a low intensity workout that apparently stimulates your muscles like a high intensity workout.

• 7:45Sam Parr?

  Oh, the Bulletproof Coffee guy says that that thing's the greatest thing ever.

• 7:48Shaan Puri?

  Exactly. And it's a, it uses cooling and compression technology along with something else, blah, blah, blah. There's a whole science video. I don't know what it is, but I was like, I heard enough interesting things. I was gonna go try it. So I'm inviting you to come try it with me. They basically, they don't sell these machines to you. They have them at like certain facilities, certain gyms.

• 8:03Sam Parr?

  Yeah, they have them all over LA.

• 8:05Shaan Puri?

  USF has one in their research center. So we should go and check this thing out.

• 8:08Sam Parr?

  Yeah, we'll, we'll have to take photos along the way.

• 8:11Shaan Puri?

  It sounds too good to be true. And I like to go check those things out.

• 8:13Sam Parr?

  Yeah, the Bulletproof Coffee guy, Dave Asbury, I think his name is, he says that he does that thing, I think, every day or something.

• 8:19Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I don't know. It's, it sounds kinda magical. And it's not really a business idea necessarily. It's just some cool shit.

• 8:25Sam Parr?

  Something to be on the lookout.

• 8:26Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, something to be on the lookout for. Um, and in general, like the sort of like the promise of, hey, buy this device. It helps you get fit. That's a promise that never gets old. And it's, you know, from Jane Fonda's workout videos to Bowflex, to Ab Roller, P90X. You know, there's all these different sort of like. Hey, this device, this is the one. This was the one that will get you to do it.

• 8:47Sam Parr?

  Yeah, and there's guys like me, and you might be there as well, who just like trying the newest gadgets.

• 8:51Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I just like trying the new thing.

• 8:52Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 8:53Shaan Puri?

  I like the promise. I like to judge it once I try it. And so anyways, I found this one. Good. What else you got?

• 8:57Sam Parr?

  Okay, I've got two more categories, but I'll say the first category, then you can go. Okay. Someone posted in the trends group, what should I start this weekend? I need a project. I only want to spend less than a thousand dollars. And I am biased, but I'm gonna make an argument that media right now, particularly websites and blogs, are shockingly undervalued. A lot of them are selling for one times revenue, because some people don't think that they're great businesses. I think they're wonderful businesses if done correctly. I'm gonna tell you a few examples of them done correctly.

• 9:25Shaan Puri?

  Great.

• 9:26Sam Parr?

  NerdWallet.com, for sure, they were above a hundred million in revenue a few years ago. I think now they're probably at $200 million revenue. The business model is they write about personal finance stuff, and they make, I don't have inside information, but I think it's a hundred to $200 every time someone signs up for a credit card through their service.

• 9:41Shaan Puri?

  So I would put it a little bit differently what they do, which is, they don't just write about personal finance stuff. Yes, that's true. The way I would say it is, they answer highly Googled questions that have valuable answers, right? So people will say, which credit card should I buy? So they go work backwards. They work backwards from what are these questions? And they build this authority around all the finance questions that people ask.

• 10:00Sam Parr?

  Yeah, so their secret sauce is backlinks.

• 10:02Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 10:02Sam Parr?

  An SEO.

• 10:03Shaan Puri?

  And they develop that over a long period of time, right?

• 10:06Sam Parr?

  Yeah, but they got to close to a hundred million in revenue with zero funding.

• 10:09Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 10:09Sam Parr?

  So it's a compelling argument. Okay, so I'm gonna tell you actually four or five more big businesses in the exact same space. ThePennyhoarder.com, that bootstrapped to about 40 million.

• 10:18Shaan Puri?

  And what is that one? I've never been there.

• 10:19Sam Parr?

  It's the same thing as NerdWallet, but for mostly, I think, Midwestern women.

• 10:23Shaan Puri?

  Okay.

• 10:23Sam Parr?

  Bootstrapped to 40, 50 million in revenue. Same model. Write content, monetize a handful of the pages with credit card and insurance offers. The third one, MoneySupermarket. Bet you've never heard of that one, have you? It's a British website, very similar to NerdWallet. They're publicly traded. $500 million in revenue with something like $200 million a year in profit.

• 10:43Shaan Puri?

  And these are all the NerdWallet types, right? Writing about finance products, linking to affiliate deals of credit cards and insurance and stuff like that.

• 10:49Sam Parr?

  Yep. And then MoneySavingExpert, sold for $100 million recently. And then the Points Guy, which someone in our Facebook group said that they're at 50 million or so in revenue.

• 10:59Shaan Puri?

  And so when you hear these, I'm like, alright, those are great businesses, can't deny that. Do you think you can go start something or now is it too saturated, too many backlinks?

• 11:06Sam Parr?

  It's never too saturated. Like, for example, I wanted to bring up Notion, which is this new software that's out. That is basically like an Asana. It's a glorified to-do list for your company.

• 11:15Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, it's text edit.

• 11:16Sam Parr?

  And that is one example of the idea that there's always room for better.

• 11:21Shaan Puri?

  Sure. But when you're competing against these guys in the Google ranks, how would you compete with one of these? Or would you do it not in the financial services?

• 11:27Sam Parr?

  So I would do it in a different industry. And so two industries that I am looking at right now, two different companies that are trying to conquer industries that I think are appealing. Or I'll actually say a few. The first, the company is, well, the first industry, I've said this many times, software. So there's G2crowd.com. I think they just changed it to G2.com. Rumors are that that's a huge business. They just raised money at a 500 or 600 million dollar valuation. The second one is softwarereviews.com. That sold along with capterra.com for 200 million dollars to Gartner. And then finally, J2Global. J2Global does the same thing as all these things. J2Global, you've not even heard of that. They own Mashable, they own PCMag.com, and they own a few others. It's a publicly traded company with a $4 billion market cap.

• 12:09Sam Parr?

  So I'm incredibly fascinated by these guys that are doing the exact same thing for NerdWallet, but for technology products, specifically digital technology products. I think that all the companies that I just named are completely missing the mark on solving that problem. So I think that's an interesting one. Another interesting one is MeatEater. Have you heard of MeatEater?

• 12:28Shaan Puri?

  I've heard of it, but I don't know much about it.

• 12:29Sam Parr?

  Okay, they just raised 50 million.

• 12:31Shaan Puri?

  Is this the hunting and fishing one?

• 12:32Sam Parr?

  For hunting and fishing.

• 12:33Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 12:33Sam Parr?

  So if I wanted to make money, which I always do, but I have a job now and I'm busy.

• 12:38Shaan Puri?

  So really, if I had time?

• 12:39Sam Parr?

  If I had time, I would copy some of these models, but I think that the tech niche still has plenty of room. This guy MeatEaters, I think his name's Steve, the guy who runs it, proved that there's that for hunting. And I think that there are still plenty of spaces for something like the points guys, practically the same thing as NerdWallet, but started for like consultants who are interested in points.

• 12:59Shaan Puri?

  There's also people who do this with travel, because travel's another high-value thing. I forgot, was Scott's Cheap Flights or something like that? That's one of those. What do you think? Oil and gas? We got Mike here.

• 13:08Sam Parr?

  Oh, Mike, who's with us, owns an oil and gas company.

• 13:11Shaan Puri?

  So do you think a content site that's around either equipment or oil and gas or something around that? And then linking off to buying products is a good way to go?

• 13:19Speaker 02

  I think that oil and gas products are going to be more at the corporate level. So you wouldn't have like an individual consumer. Go in that route, but oil and gas news is one I know that run a pretty profitable and then like a brokerage house for deals.

• 13:30Sam Parr?

  I'm a subscriber to oil and gas news. Okay, and so I'm going to give you a rebuttal. There's a company that's publicly traded that is $150 million a year business. I don't know what their market cap is called Tech Target. And they do a thing where they talk about like really boring, huge company. Like if you're HP and you're going to buy something for 20,000 employees, they talk about those products. And what they do is if you click on those things, you enter their email and then the company that can buy it from them. So to your point, if you're an oil and gas company that is going to sell something for a million dollars, yeah, sure, no one will buy that online or maybe they won't, but you can sell information to the lead and you would be willing to pay $10,000 for that information of a high quality lead.

• 14:07Speaker 02

  Right. So one interesting oil and gas company in that space, I think, is EnergyNet and they actually are a brokerage house for deals. So they just rake a percentage of the of the deal fees and set up buyers and sellers like eBay, but for oil and gas.

• 14:18Sam Parr?

  Okay, so I rattled off a ton. Your turn.

• 14:21Shaan Puri?

  Those are good. I don't know if I have one. I also have to run in two minutes, so we'll see.

• 14:25Sam Parr?

  Can I just bring up one thing real quick?

• 14:26Shaan Puri?

  Do it, yeah.

• 14:27Sam Parr?

  Okay, something I'm obsessed with Notion. Okay, it's called Notion. I don't know the URL. It's Notion.

• 14:32Shaan Puri?

  Notion.s o, I think.

• 14:34Sam Parr?

  If you know Asana or?

• 14:36Shaan Puri?

  Evernote. Evernote is the closest competitor.

• 14:38Sam Parr?

  Evernote, okay. So it's a to do list, but it's used at an enterprise level. So businesses are using it, but it's like an Asana, but it's like cute. They raised recently $10 million at an $800 million valuation, which is like, when I started to heard that, I was like, that's, that's stupid, but who knows? It's a really good ass product.

• 14:59Shaan Puri?

  I don't like it. I use it, but I don't like it.

• 15:01Sam Parr?

  It's cool.

• 15:02Shaan Puri?

  I don't know what's cool about it. You got to show me.

• 15:03Sam Parr?

  How on earth can a 25 person company?

• 15:06Shaan Puri?

  So what happens is, so my friend Alex did Clearbit. I'm trying to get him on the podcast too. So he did the same thing where he just raised, I think, a $20 million round at like a $500 million or something valuation multiple hundreds of millions of dollars, a lot, a different multiple than you usually get on these rounds. And the reason why is he didn't need to raise the money. So Notion did the same where Notion charges per seat for their product. If you use it.

• 15:26Sam Parr?

  How big do you think they are?

• 15:27Shaan Puri?

  Notion?

• 15:28Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 15:28Shaan Puri?

  I don't know. I feel like they released some numbers. I haven't, I didn't look.

• 15:30Sam Parr?

  They said they had a million users. I don't know if that means how many people are paying.

• 15:33Shaan Puri?

  I don't know what that means, but I do know this. Every company is a buyer of the Office Suite. And so a lot of people are trying to unbundle Microsoft Office. They're going after PowerPoint, Excel, Word. A lot of people think this is sort of like the new frontier. Also, business apps like this, workflow apps are like very in vogue right now. You have Superhuman, which is email for business people. I don't know if you know Superhuman that well, but

• 15:54Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I think that'd be a big business.

• 15:56Shaan Puri?

  Pay thirty bucks a month if you want to have like better, faster email. And so all of these are very like hot right now. And so in general, I'm a sort of disbeliever in stuff that's hot. I think that VCs are just flocking to these apps. I don't think that Notion is like super special. I'm against it, but it is interesting for sure. I'll give you that.

• 16:12Sam Parr?

  Yeah, when I saw that number, I was like, how are these people going to make their money off this?

• 16:16Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 16:17Sam Parr?

  And I don't think they will. Mike doesn't think they will either.

• 16:19Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, because if you invest at that, you need to get a markup. So you're looking, you're thinking, okay, it's eight hundred. They're trying to get to eight billion. That's the bet you're making.

• 16:26Sam Parr?

  Yeah, so I'm like, what the? And so I saw that and I went to this in my head. I'm like, well, the people who invested are really smart. So they must know what they're doing. And then I'm like, well, this is not like every like financial crisis ever happens. Like you're like, well, Bernie Madoff, this guy is like, he's smart.

• 16:42Shaan Puri?

  Right, smart people do dumb things all the time. Okay, this was a quick episode, Million Dollar Brainstorm. Anything you want to leave to people with any other questions?

• 16:49Sam Parr?

  We're going to do a meetup on Thursday at the Hostel's office at 251 Kearney.

• 16:53Shaan Puri?

  If you're in the Bay Area or you have access to an airport, get to the meetup.

• 16:57Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I put on the Eventbrite 50 tickets available. It's free. We already have about fifty.

• 17:02Shaan Puri?

  How do they find the link to this?

• 17:03Sam Parr?

  I just posted it in the email and in the Facebook group. We have 50 people who signed up already. So I'll make it like more people. Great, 20 minute podcast, good.

• 17:09Shaan Puri?

  Boom, done.