#55 - Lead Gen Businesses, Islamic Finance & COVID-19 Virality

Sam (@thesamparr) and Shaan (@shaanvp) talk ideas, news, trends and businesses. Why aren't you in our Facebook group yet? www.facebook.com/groups/ourfirstmillion. For detailed show notes: https://bit.ly/3aOxEBz. Topics for today: Sequoia Memo (5:00), Virality in startups and viruses (8:51), Lead Gen Businesses (14:39), Islamic Finance (30:06) & Rebranding actions & lifestyles (42:18). 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.

• 0:10Shaan Puri?

  Boom, we're here coronavirus and all.

• 0:13Sam Parr?

  Yeah, the streets of San Francisco are empty. You could have walked down in the middle of the street and it would have been fine.

• 0:18Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, and we're in this studio and Sam's just coughing up a storm, which has got me concerned.

• 0:23Sam Parr?

  Allergies.

• 0:24Shaan Puri?

  So this may be my last podcast, you don't know.

• 0:26Sam Parr?

  Allergies, the type of allergies that you can catch and kill you, but allergies.

• 0:30Shaan Puri?

  So this is for all the students of Stanford, Harvard, Syracuse that have been shut down. They're at home, certainly just listening to the podcast in quarantine. This is for you. This one goes out to you.

• 0:42Sam Parr?

  Uh, yeah, good luck.

• 0:43Shaan Puri?

  All right, what do we want to talk about? We got a bunch of words on the screen. They all look interesting. Where do you want to start? Pick one.

• 0:48Sam Parr?

  Can we talk about, I read every review for the podcast. Um, we have 600 reviews, maybe.

• 0:54Shaan Puri?

  794, just checked this morning.

• 0:55Sam Parr?

  Cool, seven, so 800, let's say 800. Um, I, they're all five stars, except for like five.

• 1:01Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 1:02Sam Parr?

  And that's cool. I like reading the positive reviews.

• 1:04Shaan Puri?

  And those five were from early on when you weren't even on the pod? So really, I take those, I take those L's.

• 1:08Sam Parr?

  No, there were two not five star reviews and I like listening to negative feedback and I don't like following all of it, but some of it I follow. The first was that the sound for the guests were bad.

• 1:19Shaan Puri?

  Agreed.

• 1:20Sam Parr?

  Fair. Uh, we will listen to that. And the second one, and I hate this. I don't hate it in that it bothers me, but I, I just don't, like, I don't think it's bad feedback, which is we were called bros.

• 1:31Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 1:32Sam Parr?

  And I don't really care about that because I, what's that mean? How is that supposed to be? Like, people use that as an insult. I don't understand why that's an insult.

• 1:40Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, it's an insult, uh, for sure, to be clear. It used to not be an insult, but being called a bro is an insult. And, um, yeah, I don't know. Is it the way we talk? Is it what we talk about? Is it, are we using the wrong words? I'm not, I'm not exactly sure.

• 1:55Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I don't take offense to that, even though people mean it to be offensive. Um, so I don't care if people say that.

• 2:02Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I'm not a bro. I'm a lover, not a fighter, you know?

• 2:05Sam Parr?

  I am a bro.

• 2:05Shaan Puri?

  I got multiple angles. I got gears.

• 2:08Sam Parr?

  What does a bro mean?

• 2:10Shaan Puri?

  Uh, I don't know, Henry, what's a bro? We, we need the, get, get, get. You gotta go into the mic.

• 2:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think you can hear me. Uh, I don't think it's a.

• 2:18Shaan Puri?

  Come on, bro.

• 2:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, come on, bro. Um, it's definitely not a good thing, especially if you're like over the age of 20.

• 2:26Shaan Puri?

  Maybe we have to replace Henry with a female and then we'll get more credit for not being just a bro down.

• 2:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's fair.

• 2:31Sam Parr?

  No, I don't care about being called a bro.

• 2:33Speaker 02

  Friends, like you're bros, you just go back and forth.

• 2:36Sam Parr?

  So then it's a compliment.

• 2:37Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, kind of. I don't know, whatever. I'm not trying to be liked. I'm just trying to be me.

• 2:41Sam Parr?

  No, well, here's what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to be me and I'm trying to create stuff that people want. And if it's predominantly people think it's bro-y, but they love it, I'm okay with that.

• 2:50Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, like, for example, I listen to the Joe Rogan podcast. Joe Rogan talks about his carnival, all, all meat diet, you know, uh, working out, UFC fighting, cage fighting, uh, hunting. You know, these are cars, like, these are his topics, because that's what he's genuinely interested in.

• 3:05Sam Parr?

  And he talks about.

• 3:06Shaan Puri?

  And he talks about other things too.

• 3:07Sam Parr?

  Everything else.

• 3:08Shaan Puri?

  Um, and I like when people, I like listening to stuff where people are interesting and they're interested in certain stuff. And so for me, the test with this podcast is, would I want to listen to this? And so at the end of the episode, I just sort of think, would I be interested in listening to that podcast? And if it's appealing to me, then I'm sure it's appealing to other people. It's not going to be appealing to everybody for sure.

• 3:27Sam Parr?

  And then the last bit of negative feedback we got, which is we focus too much on the San Francisco Silicon Valley scene.

• 3:34Sam Parr?

  And I'm from Missouri by way of Tennessee. You're from everywhere, including Colorado. I love San Francisco and I hate it at the same time. I'll be the first to make fun of it. But also I love all types of cool shit going on throughout the country. So.

• 3:48Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 3:49Sam Parr?

  That's probably fair criticism.

• 3:50Shaan Puri?

  If it's interesting, let's talk about it. In fact, I actually think personally, I think we skew a little too far in the kind of like low tech ideas. And I think there's a lot of interesting high tech ideas that don't require a high tech entrepreneur. For example, I don't know how to code, but I've started tech startups in Silicon Valley, taken venture capital money and worked with an engineering team where I'm the only guy in the room who doesn't know anything about engineering. You can do that. So I actually think that there's plenty of cool stuff that we're not talking about that I'm going to be bringing more of. So if you don't like the Silicon Valley stuff, I'm sorry. I'm going to try to bring more. Interesting technology to the table because there's a lot of it out there and I feel like we haven't been talking about it as much.

• 4:27Sam Parr?

  The way that I describe San Francisco and Silicon Valley is, to me, it's kind of like Hollywood. But it's only, only if you're trying to make like a, like a big blockbuster hit.

• 4:35Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 4:36Sam Parr?

  I believe that you can make those anywhere. It might be a little bit more helpful if you are physically in Hollywood because you'll, not because the chances are necessarily higher, but because you'll be around other people who have similar wants and dreams and your baseline becomes a certain thing.

• 4:52Shaan Puri?

  For sure.

• 4:53Sam Parr?

  But you can certainly make it from anywhere.

• 4:55Shaan Puri?

  Absolutely. It's been proven. Alright, let's talk about some of these things. Um, let's start with, let's start with the Sequoia memo.

• 5:02Sam Parr?

  Okay.

• 5:02Shaan Puri?

  Did you read this?

• 5:03Sam Parr?

  No, I avoided it on purpose.

• 5:06Shaan Puri?

  Thanks. Denial, the best, the best approach.

• 5:09Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I, uh, we haven't raised venture capital, so it's a little bit different.

• 5:14Shaan Puri?

  Not as applicable. Okay, so let's explain what it is. So Sequoia is one of the biggest venture capital firms here in Silicon Valley. They're famous for back in 2008, I want to say, they released this presentation called, "RIP Good Times." And they basically, they called an emergency meeting of all their portfolio companies, invited them to this dinner, locked them in a room, put this presentation up on the screen that was basically like, "Hey, the good times we've all been experiencing are about to end. Here's why. Most of you entrepreneurs, you have not been a part of these cycles. We've been investors through the dot com boom and the bust and then this new boom." And this was right before the sort of financial crisis of 2008. And they told them, "Look, money is about to become hard to come by. Um, we are going

• 5:57Shaan Puri?

  to have, um, a giant financial crisis that will have ripple down effects to you guys, to your customers, to your clients, to your investors. And so you need to start tightening up. Anything you're wasting money on, you need to stop wasting it. Anything, uh, if you haven't raised money, if you don't have 12 months in the bank, you need to go raise money right now to sort of, uh, be able to endure a downturn." And they just released another one, which is the new Sequoia memo. So that was 2008. Now they've released a new one and they basically were like, "Look, this coronavirus stuff is a, this is a once in a hundred year virus." And there's this, it's happened in China, which is like, when you shock China, you shock the global supply chain. And also now that travel is going to stop, a whole bunch of

• 6:40Shaan Puri?

  businesses is going to come to a halt, the stock market's going to go into a panic because we've been in a 10-year bull run and that's about to sort of end anyways. So they they told him the same thing. Change your spending habits. You need to tighten up. Raise money if you if you have an offer out there, take it. Don't worry about valuation. Just take it and get the money in the bank. And and you know, you need to go into sort of survival mode. You need to change gears. And that's what just came out, which I think is very interesting. Have you made any adjustments to your business?

• 7:09Sam Parr?

  Not yet, but I live like this anyway. I'm kind of a cockroach in the first place. And and I actually think that me living this way has kind of been a

• 7:20Shaan Puri?

  consequence.

• 7:20Sam Parr?

  It has been is hurt me more than it's helped me, actually. I think it it made it so I wouldn't spend enough money, which if you have a machine that turns a dollar into more than one dollar, dump the dump the truck, your money truck.

• 7:33Shaan Puri?

  Like what? Ad spend or what do you mean?

• 7:34Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I mean, look, if you have a funnel where you or a product where if you just spend more on marketing or spend more on engineers or spend more on content creators and it turns that new customer into more than what you acquired them for.

• 7:45Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 7:46Sam Parr?

  Then if anyone had a little machine that turned one dollar into one dollar and one penny, the name of the game is throw as much money on into that machine as you possibly can.

• 7:55Shaan Puri?

  As fast as you can.

• 7:56Sam Parr?

  And I've had those machines and I didn't capitalize on it. And so I've lived this way all the time and I think it's actually hurt me a lot. But in times like these, bring it on.

• 8:05Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, you don't need to adjust.

• 8:06Sam Parr?

  We haven't changed how we've done things just because we're always tight.

• 8:09Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, and your company's in a good position. Like just now before this, we were looking at a company's P and L. And it was like cash in the bank,

• 8:18Shaan Puri?

  220 grand or something like that. It's like, dude, you're a couple of months away from insolvency, you know, if that was the case. Whereas you guys are in a much better position.

• 8:26Sam Parr?

  Yes, I do. I am. I do have a little fear. I don't know how I feel about this Corona thing when it means what it means for business. I do think that I'm on the side of

• 8:38Sam Parr?

  I think it's bad, but I don't think it will be as bad as I think or as I originally thought.

• 8:44Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 8:45Sam Parr?

  I guess I just have faith. I have a lot of blind faith that it will work out, which.

• 8:51Shaan Puri?

  So I've been on the other side of the, so, so when we were doing our idea lab, I worked with this guy, Michael Birch. Michael Birch was, is known as, if you just Google, he's like one of the top growth guys in the world. He sort of was doing and invented viral marketing before viral marketing was a word. Uh, he did it because he didn't have money back in the day. So he built one of the first address book importers where, uh, for this company called Birthday Alarm, he had, he was like.

• 9:16Sam Parr?

  And I think he did it before that at, um, Rick Marini's company. I forget what that was called.

• 9:20Shaan Puri?

  Birthday Alarm was before that. So, so Birthday Alarm was the first one where he was like, hey, I want people to send this to their friends. What if I just imported all the addresses from their Hotmail and then I made it easy, push this button to send it? And he's like, he, he literally told me at his house, he was like, I thought that 10 days later, like, I thought there's no way they let this go for more than 10 days. And he's like, it's now been 15 years and this thing still works. And he's like, um, so he was working on viral marketing because he just didn't have a budget. So he's like, I gotta use my customers to get me more customers.

• 9:49Sam Parr?

  And to explain that, you didn't explain it totally clear, but someone signs up for your thing and says, do you want to invite your friends? Here's your Gmail contacts. Click, select all and send an email to all of them.

• 9:58Shaan Puri?

  And so in this case for Birthday Alarm, it was, I make a calendar where I'm, and I'll invite you. I'll say, hey, Sam, can you add your birthday to my calendar? I don't want to forget your birthday. This is before Facebook existed, by the way. And so you would add your birthday to my calendar and they would say, hey, Sam, don't you want to remember Sean's birthday? That'd be nice. Like reciprocate. And you'd be like, yeah, sure. And then it would say, hey, Sam, you've got one birthday on the calendar, but you surely got more friends than one. So why don't you invite some other friends? Here, let me make it easy for you. Would you like to import all your friends from Hotmail? And you're like, yes. And then, and he added one thing at a time to make it more viral. So he, he would add, um, a pre-filled message. Cause he's like, oh, there, people are stopping because they can't think of what to say.

• 10:36Sam Parr?

  Right.

• 10:36Shaan Puri?

  So here's a pre-filled message that I know works. And then I just say, send. And so then, uh, he got this thing super viral. So, you know, Birthday Alarm grew to 50 million members with zero paid marketing. 50 million. And, um, and then he's done this again and again since then with his social network, Bebo and others. So when I worked with them. The name of the game was viral growth. And so we did a charity campaign. They're trying to raise money for charity water. Well, we made a story, a website that was just telling a story of this boy, Jean Bosco with no water. And then we said, can we get this to go viral? And so we did the same thing. Import, import emails, get people to send the story to their friends. And raise money for the cause. And we got it to go viral. So I've literally been, been it where like, nothing, nothing, nothing. You'd come into work, nothing, no growth, no growth, no growth.

• 11:18Shaan Puri?

  And you would just tweak the right thing. And then all of a sudden, you know, between overnight, something would have doubled. And the next morning doubled again, next morning doubled again. And I remember it just going from zero to five million people. Uh, signing up for this charity thing within like, you know, two weeks. It was insane. And so I've seen viral growth and how counterintuitive it is. Like you don't think, you know, well, yesterday we had 4,000 people. So today we're going to have, I don't know, 5,000, 6,000. It's like, no, you're going to have 16,000. Then you have 32,000 and it's going to, you know, it's going to go up to the millions within a few days. And so I've seen viral growth when you're talking about it in the good sense from a product perspective.

• 11:58Shaan Puri?

  Now it's viral growth of an actual fucking virus. And so, uh, and you could see actually in the US, somebody did a great graph where they mapped Italy, where everything's on lockdown because Italy has started spreading like crazy. And they showed Italy day one, US day one, Italy day two, US day two, number of cases. And the bar graphs are like identical. And the thing is, we're just in like, whatever, day six. And you can see by day 21 where this thing gets to, if you don't like lock everything down right away. So I am very fearful because I've seen viral growth. I've seen viral spread. And I know that it doesn't work the way, it breaks our brains. Our brains think things go linearly. But this goes exponentially and it's really hard to just comprehend an exponential spread.

• 12:40Sam Parr?

  And to take the story a different way than coronavirus, which is that stuff that you're describing, that Michael Birch thing. You can actually still get all these cool plugins that auto, uh, automatically like allow people to share a pre-populated message to all their Gmail contacts. We used it and people still share.

• 12:58Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, and the the math works out where, you know, um, because you would think I would never do that. I wouldn't email all my contacts.

• 13:04Sam Parr?

  We had a lot of people doing it.

• 13:05Shaan Puri?

  But people do it. And what happens is, you know, 1% or less will do it. But you look at the math, 1% of people do it. On an average, they have 326 contacts. So for every 100 people that come in, you get 326 people blasted out.

• 13:18Sam Parr?

  It doesn't work as good as that time because the email open rates are much higher than.

• 13:22Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, but now people are like, oh, I don't know. I never talked to Sam, so if he's sending me this, this is junk, this is spam. Uh, now people filter it. But in certain countries, it works like we were growing like we could do this like clockwork in India. In India, people still open it like they did in the US 10 years ago, and they forward even higher rates. They don't care. They'll forward everything to everybody. And so India, Turkey, all these little countries where we would see this crazy growth that you couldn't get in the US or UK anymore. They kind of suck because the monetary value ends up, you know, the value per user is lower there. But it does still feel good to get like.

• 13:57Sam Parr?

  And it definitely works, and people are shocked by that.

• 13:59Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, we did one through SMS, I remember, and over the weekend it went viral. And like, you know, during the week, Monday through Friday, everything looks fine, is growing, but like not at a crazy pace. We didn't realize the viral coefficient was two. And so over the weekend, it took off, um, and started compounding on a big number. And we racked up 120,000 in SMS, $120,000 bill in SMSs.

• 14:20Sam Parr?

  Holy crap.

• 14:21Shaan Puri?

  Going through, um, uh, Kazakhstan. It's like, we didn't even know we're growing, we're gonna grow in Kazakhstan, and it went crazy. And texting in Kazakhstan is super expensive. And so $120,000 in two days, we had to pay off.

• 14:33Sam Parr?

  That's crazy.

• 14:34Shaan Puri?

  It sucked.

• 14:34Sam Parr?

  Well, I need it. We need the texting stuff, um, which we haven't. Uh, you want to talk about Zumper?

• 14:40Shaan Puri?

  Mm hmm.

• 14:40Sam Parr?

  They just raised, uh, was it $40 million today at a $400 million valuation total? They've raised $150 million in valuation. Uh, it's a cool, it's a cool service.

• 14:50Shaan Puri?

  If you're a consumer, how does it work?

• 14:51Sam Parr?

  Yeah, so have you ever used Zumper?

• 14:54Shaan Puri?

  If you're trying to find an apartment, you'll probably run into Zumper because you're like, it's a search engine to find apartments to rent.

• 15:00Sam Parr?

  Yeah, and typically for these new guys, San Francisco isn't the major market. It's typically more middle of more places where they have high-rise buildings, which we don't have a lot here. But basically, if you Google "Chicago apartments" or "moving to Chicago" or something like that, Zumper or Apartmentless, Mile, the place where I used to work, or a bunch of other things like that will come up and it'll be like, "Here's 843 apartments available in Chicago. Click here to get information and submit your information." Okay, great. Here's how they work, which a lot of people have no idea how they work. Henry, I'm going to explain to you how they work and you tell me if you've ever heard this. Okay, so they're lead gen companies. You know what a lead gen company is? Okay, the way it works is, and a lot of people are shocked by this, and it's actually way easier to start than most people would realize.

• 15:42Sam Parr?

  So the way it works is, there's, I don't know how many there are who do this, but I know that there are for sure four or five that do this that are big names. And so-

• 15:53Shaan Puri?

  Just in the apartment space.

• 15:54Sam Parr?

  Just in the apartment space. So there's apartments.com, I believe there's rent.com, and there's maybe two others that are quite large. And then there's dozens that you don't even realize exist. You'd have to Google them and find them. But what they do is, they work with all the big apartment buildings. So there's Greystar, which has probably millions of apartments. Then there's CoStar, which has a bunch. And then there's every apartment building that you have-

• 16:19Shaan Puri?

  WorldStar.

• 16:21Sam Parr?

  What are the other ones? Greystar, and then there's Avalon, Avalon Bay, I think they're called. There's a bunch of them, and they have millions of units. And what they do is, they go to rent.com and they go, or apartments.com, and they go, "For every person who signs a lease with us or who calls our phone, we're going to give you $100." And so what Zumper can do, or probably how they started out, or what anyone can do, is they go, "Hey, apartments.com, you guys are getting $100 per call. Will you give us $10 per email we give you of people who are qualified leads?" So what Zumper did, I imagine they did this when they launched, and I'll explain why I say "when they launched", is what they did was, they go to these places and they go, "All right, give us a cut of the revenue per email." And so the math works out-

• 17:03Sam Parr?

  That if we send you five emails, basically people who said, here's my email address, here's my phone number. I'm interested in a two-bedroom at this particular building. Apartments will be like, alright, we'll give you $10 for that because we're pretty confident that for every five of these we collect, one of them will become a lead. And so now we make 50 bucks in profit. And so what Zupper does is they create a different funnel where they learn how to rank really high on moving to Chicago, find an apartment, or they are able to have really good Facebook ads and they get all these leads. And that's what their margin is. And so the margins for these businesses, I know this firsthand, could be 60 to 70% gross margin, which means, um, let's see, what's the math behind that?

• 17:45Shaan Puri?

  A million bucks comes through the door, you paid, you know, 250K on search engine marketing.

• 17:51Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 17:51Shaan Puri?

  But, you know, the rest is, because there's no cogs, there's no, there's no physical product you're selling. So you have a very high margin product, 67% margin, plus whatever content staff you have internally, that's your other cost.

• 18:01Sam Parr?

  So it's just a lead gen company?

• 18:03Shaan Puri?

  Yep.

• 18:04Sam Parr?

  And the interesting thing, I've known a lot of people who have these lead gen companies. I knew a guy who had a lead gen company for swimming pools. So if you wanted to buy a swimming pool, you'd Google, um, swimming pool repairman, or indoor ground pool, indoor, uh, in-ground pool setup California.

• 18:22Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 18:22Sam Parr?

  Or something like that.

• 18:23Shaan Puri?

  He's number one.

• 18:23Sam Parr?

  And he would, he would be number one. You submit your information and he would sell it to these people who go and service that.

• 18:28Shaan Puri?

  Who actually do the thing.

• 18:29Sam Parr?

  Who actually do the work. You're a middleman when you're a lead. Now, there's pros and cons to this business. The first pro is you could set these up really cheaply and you could start making cash flow very quick. Like if you were able to spend one month just building the site and creating the relationship with this person, you could, next day, go out and start making cash, so long as you would profitably acquire a customer.

• 18:50Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 18:51Sam Parr?

  So that's great. The second great thing is you could do this for most anything. The best way, I think, to figure out how to do this is you figure out what has the largest total market size, with also the largest possible cost per lead, um, with also the least amount of competition. And you do like a, uh,

• 19:07Shaan Puri?

  A grid.

• 19:07Sam Parr?

  Yeah, like a grid. And so, for example, I've been bullish on truck drivers. Um, the reason why is I think That there's a whole lot of truck drivers in America. The average truck driver makes a good salary, let's say fifty thousand dollars a year. Therefore recruiters would be willing to pay like a hundred bucks per lead. So I was like, can I send leads there? Or you could do it for local services. So I need a landscaper or I need irrigation work done at my home.

• 19:36Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 19:36Sam Parr?

  My home and someone will buy those leads for, I don't know, fifty bucks. So you can do this for anything.

• 19:41Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 19:41Sam Parr?

  You just have to optimize for what?

• 19:43Shaan Puri?

  So my father-in-law is in the senior living business. He owns a couple of facilities and the biggest thing for them, like his business looks great. When he has high occupancy rates and it looks terrible if he gets high vacancy. So low occupancy. And so there's companies out there that do this for seniors. If you start Googling like, you know, you know, memory care and Alameda, California. There's a company that will pop up right in the top of search and say, hey, we've reviewed the top fifteen. You know, facilities here and come read about them. Or, hey, are you looking for this? Talk to our consultant, just put in your email address here and we'll, we'll help you get, land in a spot. And so then they'll pay these lead gen services a high amount because, you know, somebody who goes into a senior, senior facility. They're paying eight thousand dollars per month and they're usually there till end of life.

• 20:28Shaan Puri?

  And so you get, you know, the very high lifetime value of that customer. So you're willing to pay a thousand dollars per qualified lead who's looking in your area.

• 20:37Sam Parr?

  Yes.

• 20:37Shaan Puri?

  I don't know if that's the exact number, but high, high price.

• 20:39Sam Parr?

  And I have firsthand knowledge. I know someone personally and I know the financials of a senior home living or senior living lead gen business. It made hundreds of thousands of dollars a month in revenue and a very good profit. I know someone who did it for rent to own properties. I know people who have done it for, like I said, swimming pools. I know people who have done it for apartments. I know a guy who did it for local home services and did about sixty to seventy million dollars a year in sales.

• 21:04Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 21:05Sam Parr?

  And so that's the name of the game. I also know people who have done it for jobs. Jobs is another good one. Now, like Rig Up has done this. They've raised money at a two or three billion dollar valuation and they've done it for oil workers. And the way the math works is there's actually way more oil workers in America than you think. Hundreds of thousands or can be hundreds of thousands. And those oil workers, the barrier to entry is relatively low. You don't have to have like a master's degree in something, so anyone can do it or a lot of people can do it. And the salary is quite high, a hundred grand a year in some cases. So they're willing to spend a lot of money. And so it's a really interesting company or a business rather. And a lot of people don't know that's how it works. Now here's the downside. The downside is lead gen companies can be very transactional, which means as a business, you only capture value and make money the more leads you're coming in through there.

• 21:50Sam Parr?

  And often that means you only make money when you're spending money. A lot of times you, they suck at building brands. So like I said, you could spin something up really fast. That means it can likely go away just as fast because let's say that like if you create a URL that's like home, senior home living California.com. That is not like maybe, maybe someone was just going to Google that and they're going to see it one time.

• 22:14Shaan Puri?

  Right, they don't think of you.

• 22:15Sam Parr?

  Yeah, and then they're going to get there and they're done. They're never going to think about you ever again.

• 22:19Shaan Puri?

  You have to pay for them again.

• 22:20Sam Parr?

  And so if you want more customers, you got to pay again.

• 22:22Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 22:22Sam Parr?

  And so that's quite hard. So if you can build a brand around it, then that's where it's really interesting. And the second thing is that you are dependent on the person buying the lead. So in my case, I worked for a person who was doing lead gen and they go, all right, there's a cap on this. Like we can only make a certain amount of money giving leads. The way that we become a huge business is we get, we make a relationship directly with the apartment buildings and go straight there, go straight to them. Now, the reason why that sucked is because the person buying the leads was like, oh, you're our competition now.

• 22:53Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 22:54Sam Parr?

  You're out. And they cut it off and their revenue goes away immediately.

• 22:57Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 22:57Sam Parr?

  And so what Thumbtack did, I like Thumbtack, what they've done is they've built a direct relationship with the people. So if you Google San Francisco wedding photographer and you see a wedding photographer on Thumbtack, they've built that relationship with them and that wedding photographer will pay Thumbtack directly for a lead. That's great because there's no middleman to cut out. Now, the downside with that is it costs a ton of money to do. This is like a really big problem.

• 23:19Shaan Puri?

  To build a marketplace.

• 23:20Sam Parr?

  And so you likely have to raise money or figure out some scrappy way to get it done.

• 23:24Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 23:24Sam Parr?

  But that's my rant on Zumper.

• 23:27Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, and the big version of these, if you take it to its absolute max is like Expedia or Booking.com, right? So what they're doing is they're saying, okay, cool, you want to book a flight? I will become the best at ranking for how to search for flights, find a good flight, here's some recommended trips. And then we just, the airlines pay us a commission and affiliate fee for every lead we're sending them.

• 23:46Sam Parr?

  And that is a notoriously difficult niche.

• 23:48Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, they've done well, but they're hyper competitive and they're, you know, it's always contentious.

• 23:54Sam Parr?

  And then hotels is another one that's quite challenging. If I wanted to make money really fast, I would find a relatively boring one like trucking jobs. Which I find interesting, but most people do not, so they want to enter that. But flights and travel is a lot sexier and so it's can be a lot harder.

• 24:11Shaan Puri?

  I'll give you another niche one. I have a friend who created this business called ApplyBoard and what he was doing was international students, people, you know, I went to high school in China. And when I, when I was graduating in China, everybody wanted to come to the US to study. Everyone wants to come to US colleges. So internationally, India, China, Indonesia, Malaysia, the best students all want to come to the US if they can. So they want to come to the US, but they don't know where the hell to start. They don't know what the schools are. They don't know how to apply, they don't know how to translate their, their scoring on all these like, you know, aptitude tests in Malaysia to like what the US schools want, etc. So there's a, there's a barrier there. And the US schools love foreign students because they pay more. Like I think a foreign student who, international student who's going to school at Berkeley will pay double the tuition as a local student.

• 24:56Shaan Puri?

  Not just an in-state student, like a US out of state student versus international, the international student pays double. And Alan, that was you, you paid double?

• 25:05Speaker 03

  So I paid more than double, so I went to school in Australia. I think the average per semester is like five to six thousand for like a local student. I paid like forty-five a semester.

• 25:16Shaan Puri?

  Okay, so yeah, all right, great. So you paid like nine times as much going, going to school, that's insane. So basically what he was doing, so he went to colleges and, and you have all these small colleges that just need applicants because they don't have a brand name. So yeah, a lot of Stanford and Harvard, they don't really care because they're getting so many applicants anyways, doesn't matter. But like San Jose State, you know, they were like, hey, we will pay you a thousand dollars per admitted student. Three thousand dollars per admitted student. So he was getting three grand per admission. In contract with all these different schools and then he just had to do lead gen on the other side for students who want to go to school in America, which is actually a big market of people who are searching for them.

• 25:52Sam Parr?

  And what happened to it?

• 25:53Shaan Puri?

  He's still going, I don't know, I haven't checked in with him lately, but I hope you're doing good. Martin, I hope you're doing alright.

• 25:58Speaker 03

  I used to work at University of Sydney as a part-time job and I remember getting an email one time where they were describing the strategy for the year and how they're trying to pivot away from attracting so many national students, but that was, they couldn't do it because that was their main source of revenue. Like they were making so much money from international students, they couldn't stay afloat if they didn't target.

• 26:16Shaan Puri?

  Yep.

• 26:16Speaker 03

  So if you go to campus right now, it's literally just like.

• 26:19Shaan Puri?

  International students everywhere.

• 26:20Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I went to University of Sydney as well for a little while. It was, it was crazy.

• 26:23Shaan Puri?

  So did I.

• 26:23Sam Parr?

  We should, we should actually talk about that on another time because that's, there's an interesting thing there. But to get back to this lead thing, to wrap this up, there's actually a lot, and this is way bigger than people think. And one of the biggest ones is credit cards. Credit Karma, I don't know what they do in revenue, but they just sold for $8 billion. I bet they did one, I bet they did a billion in sales. And what their hook was, we're going to get you to sign up for a report, a credit, a free credit report, and we're going to recommend credit cards for you to use and they'll make $100 per credit card affiliate we get, they get. Now, thinking about credit cards, huge market, huge referral fees, very competitive. Nerd Wallet does the same thing. They're, they bootstrap, I think, I don't know.

• 27:03Shaan Puri?

  Multi-hundred million in revenue.

• 27:04Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I mean, but I think they bootstrap to like 50 or 60 million in sales, then raise money. So it's quite good. Now, here's another company and here's one more interesting thing. You know the Pennyholder?

• 27:12Shaan Puri?

  No, I don't actually, I don't know why.

• 27:14Sam Parr?

  Have you guys heard of the Pennyholder? Thepennyholder.com. Kyle spoke at HustleCon. He's a cool guy. He, he was a great success story, still is, but he started the Pennyholder and what it did was, he would write about, when he was poor, he didn't have any money, he would say, "I didn't have any money, I was, I was trying to pay my bills." And so I would do things like drive Uber or I would do coupon clipping. And he would blog about it and anytime someone saw an article that he wrote about driving for Uber, he would make two grand per Uber driver. And so he was like, "Oh, this is cool. I should, I'm going to blog about all the ways in which I can save money or make extra money." And so he did that, like through, like there's websites where you can fill out surveys and make dollars, and make a few bucks. And he would blog about it and mostly middle America moms would. See and be like, that's great. I'll make money on the side and I'll sign up and he would get an affiliate fee.

• 27:59Sam Parr?

  And he scaled this thing from zero to 60 million in sales, completely bootstrapped in like six years. I love this. And but here's the problem. There's this other company called Fluent Media. Fluent, I think it's called Fluent. Fluent is a publicly traded company. And they are performance marketers, which means they do what I'm describing, but across tons of niches. So someone will say like, DirecTV will come to them and be like, hey, uh, we'll give you $80 for every customer you send us. And they go, great. And they spin up these landing pages and Fluent Media does this with trucking as well. They do a bunch of stuff. It's a big business, publicly traded. They saw Kyle's website and how much he was killing it because he talked about it a lot for PR, which I mean, it's Good and bad. Good and bad. And they just, and, and, and they, they ripped him off completely.

• 28:43Sam Parr?

  They created like the dollar saver or like something like very similar like the penny hoarder. They just copied the website, copied the articles, and then they threw it on Facebook and they drove traffic to an article that said, here are the 100 best ways to save money. And they did the math to they could get a click for a penny or they could get a click for a dime. And each person who came, they would make 20 cents because that's the conversion rate of which people would sign up. And so Kyle at Pennyhoarder, this is all public, you can Google it, sued them. And what they found out was Fluent Media, according to the lawsuit, hired one of the Pennyhoarder's employees. And they said, yeah, here's how we did it. And so they just spun this up and it made a ton of money right off the bat. Yeah. And so these are the pros. Did he win the suit?

• 29:27Sam Parr?

  Uh, I think it's ongoing. It's ongoing, but uh, For Kyle. But this is why this is interesting. Um, because I, and, and the Pennyhoarder amongst its crew, amongst its audience, I think has a great brand and, um, and Nerdwall actually at this point has a great brand. At first Nerdwall was simply a, you're just going to Google. Pass through. You're just going to Google best credit card and we're going to show up one and you're not, never going to remember us. But at this point, they're doing all this advertising and commercials and people like turn to the nerds, like it's working. That's their commercial. So really interesting business model. I, I like Legion, um, but a lot of people didn't realize how that worked. Henry, was that interesting? Did you learn how it worked?

• 30:03Speaker 02

  That was great. Yeah.

• 30:06Shaan Puri?

  All right, I got another one for you, Manziel. So this is cool. This is one of my favorite reasons to do the podcast is that interesting people just reach out and tell me about their business. So Manziel is this, so this guy Sam reached out. He listens to the podcast.

• 30:20Sam Parr?

  What's his last name?

• 30:21Shaan Puri?

  Sam Malaco, Malaco, something like that.

• 30:24Sam Parr?

  Tweeting at me too.

• 30:25Shaan Puri?

  And so he was like, hey, I got this business, you know, would love some help with it, or just would love to chat. And so I said, okay, let's chat. So I get on the phone. And I end up blown away by what these guys are doing. So they teach me about something I've never heard of and is now very finance, very, very fascinating to me. So what they do is Manziel does Islamic financing.

• 30:49Sam Parr?

  Oh, we've talked about that.

• 30:50Shaan Puri?

  What's that mean? We talked about it on the podcast, but we talked about it offline because I was pretty interested in it. So Henry, do you know what Islamic financing is?

• 30:59Speaker 02

  If you didn't know Legion, I don't think you'll know this one. Definitely not.

• 31:02Shaan Puri?

  So

• 31:02Sam Parr?

  Are you, are you Muslim?

• 31:03Shaan Puri?

  I'm not. I'm Hindu. Well, I'm neither, but like my, my family is Hindu. So I didn't know about this, but basically in the Muslim faith, there's actually sort of, the advice is against traditional loans. So interest, which is known as like Riba, I think in the, in their faith, is frowned upon in these, so a traditional mortgage where you go to the bank, you have your down payment, you take out a loan and you're paying interest is actually not compliant with, with their, with their faith and their law. And

• 31:39Sam Parr?

  Which is actually common in a lot of other different religions.

• 31:42Shaan Puri?

  Is that true?

• 31:43Sam Parr?

  Yeah. So I'm Catholic, Christian, and was raised that way. And there's definitely rules regarding handling money and interest and things like that.

• 31:51Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. And I think the fundamental basis, I'm going to kind of butcher this, so I apologize, but I'll, I'm just trying to explain as best as I understand it. So so apparently, you know, money, sort of fiat currency, which is just not pegged in anything. It's just a made up concept. The, the belief system is that money has no value, inherent value in itself. And so you should not be charged interest for borrowing money, which is this sort of abstract concept. So they have loans or they have sort of agreements which can work as long as both sides are taking shared risk and getting sort of shared, shared upside, shared return in some way.

• 32:28Shaan Puri?

  So there's

• 32:28Sam Parr?

  Is Sam Islamic?

• 32:30Shaan Puri?

  I believe so, yeah. And his partner Mohammed is also. And so they were explaining to me that, "Hey, there's this big thing called Islamic financing, and there's Islamic challenger banks." And so if you've ever heard the word challenger bank, check this out. It's pretty, pretty cool. We know that banking's been around forever. There's these big bank brands that are, you know, in every country, there's, there's big banks that are worth billions of dollars. And recently, over the last, let's say, five to seven years, there's these things called challenger banks, or neo-banks they're called. And so in Brazil, there's a bank called Nubank, N-U-Bank. And Nubank is worth $10 billion. It's one of the most valuable startups in Brazil. In the UK, there's challenger banks. Oh my God, I'm gonna forget the name of that.

• 33:08Sam Parr?

  But challenger just means a new one?

• 33:10Shaan Puri?

  It's a startup bank. And they're, they offer different things. So what, what these guys did was better digital access, so mobile apps, quicker ability to get sort of credit cards and debit cards spun up. And so there's, you know, there's a couple of them that are huge now. Few different multi-billion dollar startups done this. What these guys have done is they've done this for a faith-based bank, which is basically saying, "There's a set of customers out there," in this case Muslims, "who are not being served well by the generic banks, and we can make a bank that serves them better. And the way we're gonna do it is, you wanna take a mortgage out, you can either take a sort of mortgage out, a traditional mortgage, which is not compliant, or you can take one out that's compliant with your faith." We've come up with a mechanism that is blessed by sort of the, the village elders, you know,

• 33:55Shaan Puri?

  the, the sort of leaders in the, in the community, that says, "Yes, this is, you know, I think Shaan Al-Laws it's called, it's compliant with Shaan Al-Law. And then on the other side, this is, um, this will, this works as a mortgage, you can actually buy your home." And so these guys have this, have this concept. And in other countries, this is apparently really big. So in Africa, Indonesia, places where the Muslim population is the dominant population, they've already solved this problem. But in places like US, Canada, where it's just a minority of the population is, is Muslim, they don't have these banks yet. So I love this startup idea because-

• 34:26Sam Parr?

  How are they doing?

• 34:27Shaan Puri?

  So how they're doing, so they've they've spent a lot of time making sure that they can actually get it to be compliant and actually get the financial mechanism to work. That took them a while, over a year, maybe two years. Now they've gotten that to work and they have basically they have two sides of a marketplace. On one side, they have people who are investors, because you know, if you're going to issue mortgages, their average mortgage is like $500,000. So it takes a lot of capital to start this business. They don't want to be the one, they don't want to go raise a billion dollars and then start issuing these loans. They want on one side to have investors who will put in the capital to fund these loans. And on the other side, they want to have the borrowers who are trying to buy a home, who can pull from this pool of, you know, sort of halal

• 35:07Shaan Puri?

  financing, you know, this financing that's compliant. And so they have $10 million committed on the on the investor side, 1.2 million in their bank, 10 million total. And then, and they're just every week, they're trying to close more of those checks.

• 35:21Sam Parr?

  Which is nothing, I think.

• 35:22Shaan Puri?

  Which is a small amount, but this is like, just inbound interest. This is not like, they haven't really done anything yet. But 10 million will let you let you do if you just do half a million dollar loans, that means they can do whatever, 20 mortgages right now. And every mortgage has a certain value. So it's about worth about, I don't know, 20K a year to them is that mortgage, just in their fee that they get on top of it. And so, and on the other side, they have all these applicants, I think, you know, about 1,000 applicants. And these are what they call super prime applicants, because these are people who are doctors, lawyers, they have good jobs, they they have the money, they have the means to afford their homes, they're just looking for a solution that doesn't force them to compromise their faith. So I really like this business.

• 36:03Sam Parr?

  That's cool.

• 36:03Shaan Puri?

  There's a working model in the UK, there's a working model in Africa, there's a working model in Indonesia. There's nothing in Canada where these guys are, and there's nothing really in the US where.

• 36:12Sam Parr?

  How many Muslims do you think there are in America?

• 36:14Shaan Puri?

  I think there's, look this up, I think there's like a couple million, only two, two million, I want to say, roughly.

• 36:21Sam Parr?

  That's pretty interesting. I like that. I think that there's a bunch of weird rules around banking. I mean, they're not weird. They should be there, but um and so starting a starting a bank, I think is it's almost like nearly impossible.

• 36:34Shaan Puri?

  It's very difficult. So what all the neo-banks do, all the charter banks do.

• 36:38Sam Parr?

  They're not real banks.

• 36:39Shaan Puri?

  They're not real banks. They sit on top of BBVA or they sit on top of these other banks and they're just the they're the consumer facing layer, but the banking happens with their underlying partner. And it's sort of like the lead gen model that you're talking about. They go to these banks and say, hey, I can get you a whole bunch more customers. I'm going to spend all the money doing the marketing. They'll be banking with you, but we own this sort of relationship.

• 36:58Sam Parr?

  Yeah, and that's actually pretty common. I use this thing. My debit card is simple.

• 37:02Shaan Puri?

  Right. I've heard of it. Yeah.

• 37:03Sam Parr?

  Um, this is my debit card. It's pretty cool. I like it because the customer service, I can just text and they're like

• 37:09Shaan Puri?

  Easy.

• 37:10Sam Parr?

  These like young guys in Portland and they they're easy to chat with and they answer 24 hours a day. They were acquired for a hundred million dollars and I was like, this is like a freaking bank. That's it.

• 37:20Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 37:21Sam Parr?

  And I did research.

• 37:22Shaan Puri?

  Bank. Yeah.

• 37:22Sam Parr?

  And it was, what's it called? BBVA?

• 37:24Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 37:24Sam Parr?

  That's who they use. BBVA Compass, I think it's.

• 37:26Shaan Puri?

  Exactly. They're under there. There's a few that are underneath all these. Now, the very first, there's now one of the challenger banks got their very first banking charter banking license.

• 37:35Sam Parr?

  Who?

• 37:35Shaan Puri?

  Which is very rare. I forgot their name, but they just announced a couple of weeks ago, last two weeks that so the so now it's very interesting. Now, once that seal broke, because it was so hard to apply for this.

• 37:44Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I think.

• 37:44Shaan Puri?

  And they all want it. Robinhood wants their license. Brex wants their license. It's just very hard for them to get this.

• 37:50Sam Parr?

  I think you need five percent or what is the number? I think you need 10%.

• 37:54Shaan Puri?

  In reserve.

• 37:55Sam Parr?

  Yeah, you need a certain amount of reserve, which is a massive amount.

• 37:58Shaan Puri?

  It's just that there's no incentive for the government to give these out. They're like, ah, you you kind of highfalutin, you know, tech startups. Do I really want to give this to you? You've only been around for so long. I don't know if I have the trust in you. So now the seal's broken. The first one got it. We'll see what what that means. Um, but what I like about these guys is they're not a bank. They're not taking your deposits. They're just doing loan issuance. So on one side, they have the reserve cap, the the investment fund.

• 38:20Sam Parr?

  But they're using other people's money.

• 38:21Shaan Puri?

  OPM on one side, yeah, other people's money to make the loans and they're the broker and they take one to two percent of the transaction fee and people are willing to pay a premium to have halal financing, just like people willing to pay a premium for halal meat or for vegan or kosher meat, you know, whatever, like, people are willing to pay a premium for things that are compliant with their faith. I think this could be big. And you want's interesting, I think that they've had a hard time raising money from traditional VCs because this is

• 38:46Sam Parr?

  They didn't understand it.

• 38:47Shaan Puri?

  Hard to understand. Yeah, you have to like, you know, most VCs are old white guys and you know, it's the sort of cliche and you know, I know they do look into it, but I think that there's now there's the natural challenges of any high aspiration startup, they have those, they have the problems that any any startup that's really ambitious, but then they also have the problem of like, first, they need to educate you about this problem. Like, you saw how I stumbled through this explanation and I talked to these guys for an hour, you know, and that's where I am after an hour of really trying to understand it.

• 39:17Sam Parr?

  But you and you read this by Furcon, your best.

• 39:19Shaan Puri?

  So I ran, yeah, I ran it by him. I introduced him yesterday. I said, hey, Furcon understands this. He's Muslim. He's an investor. He's a technologist and he's an entrepreneur. If he doesn't like this, I don't like this.

• 39:29Sam Parr?

  And what did he say?

• 39:29Shaan Puri?

  And so he, so he's like, I've looked into this. He's like, a lot of my friends really wanted this. I tried to look at what options are available in the US. They suck. They're really super high premiums.

• 39:39Sam Parr?

  Is he practicing?

• 39:40Shaan Puri?

  Um, yeah, like, you know, to an extent.

• 39:43Sam Parr?

  Like, what I want to know is do really like

• 39:45Shaan Puri?

  Like, he doesn't pray five times a day, but he doesn't eat pork.

• 39:47Sam Parr?

  Right. So he's like culturally.

• 39:49Shaan Puri?

  He drinks, but like his dad runs the mosque in San Jose and you know, like it's

• 39:52Sam Parr?

  So even people who are like culture, who aren't incredibly devout are into this.

• 39:56Shaan Puri?

  If he had the option, he would prefer halal financing over not, if it was convenient. And he's like, the problem with all the existing options, they're not convenient, they're not easy to use, and they're very high premiums. He's like, if these guys did it conveniently, I think this could be big. So he's gonna talk to them. We'll see.

• 40:08Sam Parr?

  Like, I'm not a practicing Catholic anymore. Are you, are you, you guys Catholic? You're Catholic for sure, right?

• 40:13Speaker 02

  I am.

• 40:13Sam Parr?

  Do you eat meat on Friday?

• 40:15Speaker 02

  Yeah, I've been bad about it, honestly. I went to like all boys Catholic high school, so.

• 40:19Sam Parr?

  Me too. I went to an all boys Catholic high school. I don't practice anymore, but that's another thing. I don't eat meat during Lent on Fridays. I try not to. So it's kind of, it sounds like that's what it's kind of like where it's like

• 40:28Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, people, it's a spectrum.

• 40:29Sam Parr?

  It's a, you prefer it, but not

• 40:31Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, you prefer it, especially if it's convenient for you. You, you know, the way Henry just said that, a lot of guilt there of like, yeah, I should, but I don't. So there's, you know, if you can make it where people do what they want to do without lifting a finger, then they'll do it. You know, that's great.

• 40:45Sam Parr?

  That's pretty cool. I like that. I like that thing, or I like that angle of finding, because I don't know anything about Muslim culture. I don't know anything about Hindu culture, which is where you're from. I don't know, you probably don't know too much about Catholic.

• 40:57Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 40:57Sam Parr?

  It's kind of an interesting way to like, look at how other religions do things.

• 41:02Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 41:03Sam Parr?

  Another thing that we should talk about, not today, because I don't think we know what we're talking about. We definitely don't yet, is building things on top of banks. I think that's super interesting.

• 41:12Shaan Puri?

  What do you mean by that?

• 41:13Sam Parr?

  So like what Simple did, and like what the, what's the name of this company?

• 41:17Shaan Puri?

  Manziel.

• 41:18Sam Parr?

  Man, spell it.

• 41:19Shaan Puri?

  M A N Z I L.

• 41:20Sam Parr?

  Manziel. Okay, kind of like what Manziel did, a building, a building a front end on top of someone else's backend.

• 41:26Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 41:27Sam Parr?

  Which is the bank. I think that that's really interesting. Simple.com is my card. I didn't know they did this at first.

• 41:34Shaan Puri?

  This is kind of what drop shipping is. So where you build the layer that says, I'm going to get the customer to a landing page and they buy.

• 41:40Sam Parr?

  Yep.

• 41:40Shaan Puri?

  But it's just going to place an order with this other manufacturer and they'll ship it directly to them.

• 41:45Sam Parr?

  It's super effective. I like that with banks because like Simple, they did this all, I mean, it's, it's a little different. The card is all white and it's a slick looking.

• 41:54Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 41:55Sam Parr?

  And their app is really good. And so it's kind of interesting. I, I think this is kind of what Brex is doing.

• 42:01Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 42:02Sam Parr?

  Corporate credit card. They're layered on top of Mastercard. I, I love these things. I really like that. Let's talk about, uh, how, how many minutes are we in?

• 42:13Shaan Puri?

  Uh, we're, we're about an hour in.

• 42:14Sam Parr?

  Okay, you want to, we can answer some questions or what do you want to do?

• 42:18Shaan Puri?

  Uh, let's do one of these fun ones. So let's do the rebranding words. So this was in the hustle, hustle trends, the trends hustle Facebook group, which is like a source for, for entertainment and gold.

• 42:28Sam Parr?

  Which go to trends.co and sign up. And if you use the phrase, million?

• 42:32Shaan Puri?

  Million.

• 42:33Sam Parr?

  You'll get 50% off.

• 42:34Shaan Puri?

  Trends.co slash million.

• 42:34Sam Parr?

  That's my plug.

• 42:35Shaan Puri?

  I believe that's it. Is it, is it slash million or is it promo code?

• 42:38Sam Parr?

  Both, both will work. Trends.co slash million or trends.co.

• 42:41Shaan Puri?

  And you guys have this thing where you can sign up for a dollar, which is pretty dope.

• 42:43Sam Parr?

  Yeah, and it's working. People love it.

• 42:45Shaan Puri?

  I love it. Okay, so, so, so somebody in the group, can you scroll up? I don't remember if I have their name. I should have their name to.

• 42:53Sam Parr?

  Your other up.

• 42:53Shaan Puri?

  Up. Yeah, there you go. Okay, we don't have the name. We should, we should find, Alan, will you find the name of the guy who wrote this? Cause I want to give him credit. So somebody was just talking about like, hey, isn't it funny? How people just rebrand stuff and like, give it a whole new meaning. So he's talking about MSG. He's like, oh, MSG, which was like, got this really bad reputation for being this food additive, whatever. And just rebranded as umami. And now it's this like foodie word that like is good. And somebody came into the, the comments with like a bunch of really funny ones.

• 43:23Sam Parr?

  You want to know another food one? Aioli.

• 43:25Shaan Puri?

  Aioli?

• 43:26Sam Parr?

  It's mayonnaise. Aioli is mayonnaise that has a little garlic flavoring. Look it up.

• 43:31Speaker 02

  I don't think that's true. I'm pretty sure it's better for you than mayonnaise.

• 43:34Sam Parr?

  Look it up. Aioli is flavored mayonnaise. Look up aioli versus.

• 43:38Shaan Puri?

  Google is aioli mayonnaise?

• 43:41Sam Parr?

  I'm telling you, aioli is mayonnaise. But there's like way more. You have to do it in a separate tab.

• 43:46Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, you can't, you can't do this because we have to.

• 43:47Sam Parr?

  Oh, here, right there. What's the answer say? It says it right there. What's the top result?

• 43:53Sam Parr?

  What's it say? Is aioli any different than mayonnaise?

• 43:56Speaker 02

  Aioli is made from garlic and olive oil. Mayo is made from egg yolks and canola oil.

• 44:00Sam Parr?

  Am I off?

• 44:01Shaan Puri?

  All right, Henry wins. Okay, it's not, it's not exactly mayo, but I like the intent. All right, so let's go back to the doc.

• 44:06Speaker 03

  Chilean sea bass is actually called Patagonian toothfish.

• 44:10Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it's awesome.

• 44:11Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I love it. So, so this guy had a bunch of them for business, which I like. So.

• 44:16Sam Parr?

  Or nerds.

• 44:17Shaan Puri?

  You know, when you skip, you know, I don't know, I'm like this, I skipped breakfast for years because I'm just lazy. It didn't wake up early enough. And now it's intermittent fasting. It's like this health trend. It's like, oh, I'm fasting till noon. It's like, yeah, you skip breakfast.

• 44:30Speaker 03

  It's by Marlin Montgomery.

• 44:32Shaan Puri?

  Okay, Marlin, Marlin was the original post. And then who posted all these comments in it? So Logan Jeffrey, Logan had a bunch of them that were fire that I liked. That's the reason I put it on here. Okay. So when you just quit your job because you want to travel, now that's called dispersed retirement.

• 44:46Sam Parr?

  That's hilarious.

• 44:46Shaan Puri?

  Which I like. When you're a grossly underemployed writer or marketer, now you're a digital nomad. Because you have to go live in some low cost area.

• 44:55Sam Parr?

  Or a coach.

• 44:57Shaan Puri?

  When you just like to eat beef and cheese because it's delicious, and now that's called the carnivore diet or keto.

• 45:02Sam Parr?

  I used to call the salami and cheese redneck charcuterie.

• 45:07Shaan Puri?

  Sleeping around, online dating. I don't agree with all these. I'm just, I'm relaying Logan's good ones. When you quit your shitty business idea that was bad all along and everyone told you it was bad. It's called pivoting.

• 45:19Sam Parr?

  I like that. Failing fast.

• 45:21Shaan Puri?

  When you have a fear of commitment and therefore do not own anything and do not settle down. You're now practicing minimalism.

• 45:28Sam Parr?

  I love that.

• 45:29Shaan Puri?

  So these are great. And in general, you know, funny shit aside. I think there's a lot of power to this. I think as a leader, you often have to rebrand stuff. So that it's more palatable to your team and or to your customers.

• 45:42Sam Parr?

  Packaging.

• 45:43Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, you have to frame things, package them up in a certain way. We did this with our sushi restaurant where we realized that if we just describe things better or differently with with better words, people would buy more and we could charge more because people wanted to have sushi that was more sophisticated. So when we called it, you know, whatever.

• 46:03Shaan Puri?

  You know, Atlantic salmon with blah, blah, blah, rather than just saying salmon, that was better. Or if we would create a whole new word altogether and put a little trademark next to it, that was even better than using common words.

• 46:15Sam Parr?

  Every once in a while, I like, there's certain things that they use a positive phrase and just generally accept it. I like to use like a word that means the same thing, but is generally regarded as a negative, just to fuck with people. So for example, instead of saying like, well, we're gonna get the customer to do this. Like we're gonna get them to buy by doing this, or we're gonna influence them by doing this. I like to use the word manipulate.

• 46:36Sam Parr?

  Like, yeah, let's manipulate them and get them to do this. Like, like words that by definition work.

• 46:42Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 46:42Sam Parr?

  Just to, just to kind of.

• 46:43Shaan Puri?

  What happens if we call it what it is?

• 46:45Sam Parr?

  Yeah, let's just say, so we're gonna manipulate them. Like, I'm gonna manipulate this person into liking me. And they're like, well, how are you gonna do that? Well, I'm just gonna be nice and charming and listen to what they say. But if you use that word manipulate instead of influence, it fucks with them. And I love using that just to screw with people. Like, yeah, or like when political people say like, well, they have an agenda. I'd be like, yeah, well, so the guys, I'm here to talk to you about my agenda, which is to do like, of course I have an agenda. I'm trying to get you to do stuff. I'm like, yeah, you're targeting like someone has a political agenda.

• 47:15Shaan Puri?

  They should, right?

• 47:16Sam Parr?

  Yeah, they should have a political agenda. I love using those words.

• 47:20Shaan Puri?

  Henry, if you scroll up for a second, so that's the end of this episode. Thanks for listening. Tell your friends. Make it all happen. Leave us a review. We like that. Give us the real talk in the reviews because we read all of them and we like it. Or tweet at us. Sam's got 12,000 Twitter followers now. He has surpassed me in the Twitter rankings.

• 47:35Sam Parr?

  11,300.

• 47:36Shaan Puri?

  11,300.

• 47:37Sam Parr?

  And he's counting.

• 47:37Shaan Puri?

  So, so he's winning. Great. All right. We're out of here.

• 47:40Sam Parr?

  Thank you.