My Step-By-Step Process To Building a $1M+ Business

Episode 570: Shaan Puri (https://twitter.com/ShaanVP) and Sam Parr (https://twitter.com/theSamParr) go through Sam’s journey of launching his company Hampton. It’s a step by step walkthrough of what went right and what went wrong. Want to see Sam and Shaan’s smiling faces? Head to the MFM YouTube Channel and subscribe - http://tinyurl.com/5n7ftsy5 — Show Notes: (00:00) Intro - A radically transparent look inside Hampton launch. (2:22) The beginning of the idea just after Sam sells The Hustle, starts tinkering with buying AirBnBs. (3:00) Fail #1: Short-term rental crew. Fail #2: Community of truckers. (4:30) The Hampton idea and what the business is. (5:45) Fail #3: V1, V2, V3 of Hampton - no one wanted it (8:00) Accepted where the demand was and found the hook for Hampton. Research begins. (10:08) Where the name came from. (12:05) Hired a branding agency (This was a hack that helped build the brand) (14:12) Things Sam said no to (17:00) Leverage the founder story (20:18) Shaan's branding agency experience (21:40) Shaan’s $25K Mistake: Hiring a naming agency (26:00) Takeaways — Links: https://www.joinhampton.com/ Hampton Brand Inspiration doc: https://tinyurl.com/4uw5a9sv — Check Out Shaan's Stuff: Need to hire? You should use the same service Shaan uses to hire developers, designers, & Virtual Assistants → it’s called Shepherd (tell ‘em Shaan sent you): https://bit.ly/SupportShepherd — Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton - https://www.joinhampton.com/ • Ideation Bootcamp - https://www.ideationbootcamp.co/ • Copy That - https://copythat.com • Hampton Wealth Survey - https://joinhampton.com/wealth My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by The HubSpot Podcast Network // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano Past guests on My First Million include Rob Dyrdek, Hasan Minhaj, Balaji Srinivasan, Jake Paul, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Gary Vee, Lance Armstrong, Sophia Amoruso, Ariel Helwani, Ramit Sethi, Stanley Druckenmiller, Peter Diamandis, Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan, Marc Lore, Jason Calacanis, Andrew Wilkinson, Julian Shapiro, Kat Cole, Codie Sanchez, Nader Al-Naji, Steph Smith, Trung Phan, Nick Huber, Anthony Pompliano, Ben Askren, Ramon Van Meer, Brianne Kimmel, Andrew Gazdecki, Scott Belsky, Moiz Ali, Dan Held, Elaine Zelby, Michael Saylor, Ryan Begelman, Jack Butcher, Reed Duchscher, Tai Lopez, Harley Finkelstein, Alexa von Tobel, Noah Kagan, Nick Bare, Greg Isenberg, James Altucher, Randy Hetrick and more. — Other episodes you might enjoy: • #224 Rob Dyrdek - How Tracking Every Second of His Life Took Rob Drydek from 0 to $405M in Exits • #209 Gary Vaynerchuk - Why NFTS Are the Future • #178 Balaji Srinivasan - Balaji on How to Fix the Media, Cloud Cities & Crypto • #169 - How One Man Started 5, Billion Dollar Companies, Dan Gilbert's Empire, & Talking With Warren Buffett • ​​​​#218 - Why You Should Take a Think Week Like Bill Gates • Dave Portnoy vs The World, Extreme Body Monitoring, The Future of Apparel Retail, "How Much is Anthony Pompliano Worth?", and More • How Mr Beast Got 100M Views in Less Than 4 Days, The $25M Chrome Extension, and More

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

• 0:00Sam Parr?

  I'm like, I should create this. And then I looked in the mirror and I was like, yeah, this ain't gonna work.

• 0:04Shaan Puri?

  There's a reason your nickname is the Vanilla Gorilla. Okay.

• 0:08Sam Parr?

  It wasn't gonna work.

• 0:16Shaan Puri?

  So Sam, I got a question for you. You have launched this business this year called Hampton and I love the name. I love the brand. I go to the website. I love the website. More than anything, I love the idea. Uh, me, I'm jealous of this idea. Andrew Wilkinson was said, I'm so jealous that I didn't start this idea. We are, I feel like you got so much right. And I know that the, that in doing any idea, whatever you cut, you know, there's something called the idea maze. You go through, you wander around, you try to figure out the right path and you cut, if you're lucky, you pop out the other side with what you did with Hampton where everything turned out right. What I want to know is what were the other paths you considered, but ended up saying no to?

• 0:57Shaan Puri?

  Along the way, because nobody sees that stuff. That's on the cutting room floor. I want to know, you know, I love the name Hampton. Were there other names that you thought about? And like, how did you pick that one? And like, what was that decision process? I want to know target market, like you, I feel like you nailed the target market. You've nailed the value prop. Were there three other runner ups that you consider that you didn't have? I kind of want to see what goes on underneath the surface before this beautiful execution comes out.

• 1:23Sam Parr?

  Well, first, thanks. You, you, you, you hopefully only see the good stuff. Obviously there's all types of bad shit that happens on the, on the back end where we're like, this sucks, but in general, it's been quite pleasant. So dude, with this company, it's so funny. I purposely had on, we had guests that ran these types of companies. And I wanted to prove to everyone, I'm gonna go, I'm gonna do my research in front of people.

• 1:46Shaan Puri?

  You left a paper trail, right? Like you left public breadcrumbs as to exactly how you did this step by step. And by the way, I love that you're honest about this because you definitely had guests come on and basically explain to you what the blueprint is. And then you were like, cool, thanks. Gonna go execute on that blueprint. And

• 2:05Sam Parr?

  And I didn't hide it from them. I told them, I told them before and after, I'm gonna launch, I wanna launch, I'm thinking of launching something like this and let's talk about it.

• 2:12Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 2:12Sam Parr?

  So there was nothing unethical or evil about this, but yeah, I wanted to do it publicly so people could see. So the, so let me tell you first, so I sold the hustle, I think in 22. Yeah. And, uh, or something like that. And I had about six months or eight months or 10 months, I forget, where I was just kind of fooling around and I was looking at different ideas. The two ideas that lost, I'm so thankful they lost. One, remember how I got super into Airbnb's? I was like, this is the thing. I could do this. So I bought one and I did it and it did okay. But I was like, this sucks. I do, I do not enjoy this. This does, this isn't in my zone of genius. It's a pain in the ass.

• 2:48Shaan Puri?

  And it seems on paper like a good idea. You had a, you created this Facebook group of, I forgot what you called it, like Sam's short-term rental bros or whatever the hell you called it. What was it?

• 2:57Sam Parr?

  STR crew.

• 2:58Shaan Puri?

  The STR crew, short-term rental crew. And people piled in and they started explaining their blueprint. They're like, yo, I own 40 Airbnb's. They make this much cash flow. Here's the pain points. Here's the plus sides. This other guy's like, oh, I do the same thing with this angle. And I was like, dude, this is fascinating. Sam's doing his research again in public. And you were wandering around the idea maze. You're like, maybe it's over here. Maybe the, maybe the exit path is over here in this short-term rentals thing. And it kind of seemed like a good idea, uh, on paper, but you ended up saying no to that.

• 3:27Sam Parr?

  And it was a good idea. It wasn't a good idea for me. It is a profitable thing, whatever. It was cool. The second thing that I thought about doing was I thought about creating, I've always wanted to create a trucking business. I'm passionate about truckers. I'm passionate about blue collar workers. My family, I grew up in a trucking family, sort of my, they work in that industry. And so I was like, I'm gonna become a YouTuber and I'm gonna create an audience of truckers and then I'm gonna build a product for them. And then I started like doing it and I was like, no, hate this. Not gonna do it.

• 3:54Shaan Puri?

  You're like, I love the idea of blue collar workers.

• 3:57Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 3:57Shaan Puri?

  I like the idea of it. Being amongst that.

• 4:00Sam Parr?

  Yeah. Yeah, it's like getting a neck tattoo. It's like the idea of it's kind of neat, but I don't know if I actually want it. And so then I was like, look, we had this thing called Trends at the Hustle and I got a lot wrong and I love the business model still. I think I can do this and my partner, my now business partner and I, uh, we had like basically a therapy group where we would like bitch and complain about everything going on. And we're like, I settled on that product.

• 4:21Shaan Puri?

  You built a product, launched it, did not use your audience initially publicly. You didn't use the podcast to promote it initially. Maybe your brand, your brand name helped in private, but you didn't do it publicly. And you drove, you drove it to millions of dollars in revenue, um, very early on. So a very successful thing that everybody listens to this podcast kind of wants that outcome. So, so you know, you're a walking case study. Go ahead.

• 4:45Sam Parr?

  Yeah. So Hampton is a peer group. So some people call it a community. I call it a peer group. Basically there's three parts of the peer group. So you have an eight person group that have, uh, like similar sized or types of companies. And you basically, it's like a therapy group. You just complain. So it takes about six months to like really like for it to like catch and be awesome. But I have a six person or eight person group. It's freaking awesome. And you will do everything like you, uh, someone will make a presentation for every meeting. And they'll say like, here's my portfolio. Here's my net worth. Can you guys tell me, am I doing something wrong? Am I doing something right? Here's how my company works. What am I doing wrong? What am I doing right? And so they do a presentation. So that's part one. Part two is we have a digital community where you can like post in there and see what other people are saying.

• 5:24Sam Parr?

  And you could like, hey, I'm trying to hire nanny. Um, what are your guys' best, uh, advice for agencies to use in the Northeast? Things like that. You can do personal stuff, non-personal stuff. The third thing is events. I think we host 200 events a year at this point, uh, including retreats, all these types of things. So, um, it's highly, uh, inspired by Chief, YPO, Vistage. These are large companies that are in the space. So that's the business. Originally I was trying to go after marketing executives and then just executives in general. Dude, I called, I did 50 to 70 meetings with people trying to convince them to join. And none of them wanted it.

• 5:59Shaan Puri?

  Hello, dear marketing executive.

• 6:02Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 6:02Shaan Puri?

  Anyway. How goes your marketing today?

• 6:05Sam Parr?

  No one fucking wanted it. I couldn't get. And then eventually I was like, I, I need to charge like around 10 grand a year in order to make this like a viable business. No one fucking wanted it. They're willing to pay $500 and I created a group that was actually $500. And I was like, dude, this sucks. I can't do this. And then my, and then we were like, should we do doctors? Doctors would be cool. But like, what the fuck? I don't know anything about doctors. I tried to get, I tried to get in touch with the ton and like, no one wanted it. And then I was like Fortune 500 CEOs, same problem. Like, how do I get in touch with the Fortune 500 CEO? Like, I don't, I don't know. One, like, it is really hard. And then.

• 6:41Shaan Puri?

  Ideas that sound good on paper, but as soon as they came into contact with reality, they got punched in the face and they ran home with a nosebleed.

• 6:49Sam Parr?

  Well, this one really punched me in the face. The next one, we thought about minorities where like, uh, you know, my, my wife is a minority and I like hear a little bit of the things that she goes through. I'm like, I should create this. And then I looked in the mirror and I was like, yeah, this ain't gonna work. I'm the opposite of a minority.

• 7:05Shaan Puri?

  Businessmen look great on paper, but.

• 7:07Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 7:08Shaan Puri?

  The old reflection.

• 7:09Sam Parr?

  Doesn't look good in the mirror. Yeah.

• 7:10Shaan Puri?

  I remember when you told me that idea and I was like, dude, honestly, it's a great idea. I think it's an underserved community. I think they want that career development. I think that, I think that makes sense. But I was like, dude, what are you gonna do when you're like, hey, I was like, you know, are you gonna have Sarah be the CEO? Like, what are you gonna do? You're gonna be like, I am this, this white man who's running this. I don't know. Possible, but like, I don't know.

• 7:38Sam Parr?

  If you Google the word white bread, you're gonna see a picture of Sam Parr. Like, it feels like it would not have worked.

• 7:43Shaan Puri?

  There's a reason your nickname is the Vanilla Gorilla. Okay.

• 7:47Sam Parr?

  It wasn't gonna work. And then my partner was like, dude, let's just go after CEOs. And he'd been saying this whole time. I'm like, they will never pay for this. But all along, some people had heard rumors I was launching this. So they asked me, like, can you do this for us? And I kept saying, no. And then finally, we were like, fuck it. Let's do it. And then that obviously was the right decision. But by the way, I did a ton of research. So I interviewed a ton of members of all these different groups. And they're like, I'm a tech guy, but there's, it's all like guys who own like 18 apartment buildings in South Florida in my group. It kind of sucks. Like, I love them, but we don't like align on business.

• 8:16Shaan Puri?

  Well, it just sounds like it's better founder fit, right? Like, you know, it's a, it's who our audience is on this podcast is where you had a reputation. It's where you knew the relatable pain points. It's you knew how to, you knew where to reach them because you knew where you hang out. It's like way better.

• 8:30Sam Parr?

  It was so much easier. It was way easier. Now, let's talk about the names. Here's a good story about the names. So the company's called Hampton. A lot of people think that means the Hamptons. Up until I was like 27, I didn't know what the Hamptons were. I thought I had read about it in like the Great Gatsby. I thought like it was like that. I didn't even know what it was until I married a woman from that area and I learned about it. So what I do is all of my LLCs are named after streets in my neighborhood of St. Louis. And there's a lot of really good names for some reason. And so I just usually look at the map of where I'm from and I just look at the names. So let me tell you some names that I thought about naming it. None of these really fit, but they could fit for other things. Number one is Macklin. I love that name. So at one point, I thought

• 9:12Sam Parr?

  about having the Macklin Running Club. The second one is Sablet. I've always liked Sablet. The third one was Simpson. That was a street I grew up near. And then the last one, check this out. King's Highway. Is King's Highway awesome? I love King's Highway. I love King's Highway. And then eventually we settled on Hampton because I grew up near Hampton Avenue. And everyone thinks that it means the Hamptons. It doesn't. It means Hampton. And so sometimes people will say like, oh, I love the Hamptons referring to my company. And I'm like, no, it's Hampton. So we settled on Hampton because I had a good, that had a good sound to it.

• 9:45Shaan Puri?

  By the way, can you tell me in deciding a name, is that like a one day process, a one hour process, a one month process for you? And are you bouncing it off people? Or are you just going into a dark room and saying, what feels right in my soul? Like, what's your, what is the actual way a name gets picked for you?

• 10:02Sam Parr?

  I only ask like three people. Usually it's my wife, my business partner, and that's about it.

• 10:05Shaan Puri?

  Three people, but actually there's only two. Even better.

• 10:10Sam Parr?

  Did I just name two?

• 10:11Shaan Puri?

  And yourself.

• 10:12Sam Parr?

  The royal we. Yeah. Um, no, I don't really ask too many people because I just don't care that much. Like, I just want to like hear someone's gut opinion. But, um, and also Hampton.com, I don't think I'm ever gonna get. You know who owns that is Marriott.

• 10:26Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, the Hampton Inn, yeah.

• 10:27Sam Parr?

  Uh, so I don't know if I'm ever gonna get that, but check this out with branding. If you asked me about this five or 10 years ago, I'd never in a million years thought this was important, but I actually do. I hired a branding agency. So I paid $15,000 right out the gate. And what I did was, and I sent this to you, I created this document and it all says, it just says one line. It says, "Elite but cheeky." And the reason I was inspired by that was, have you read Felix Dennis's book?

• 10:53Shaan Puri?

  Yes.

• 10:53Sam Parr?

  How to Get Rich?

• 10:54Shaan Puri?

  Yes.

• 10:54Sam Parr?

  So Felix Dennis is this famous entrepreneur. He's, he's dead now, but he was a wild guy. He was basically a combination of Richard Branson and Mick Jagger. So he had like swagger, but he was like a legit business guy. But he like was, he was like elite in that he was great at what he does, but he was like a silly person and he, uh, wrote in a very conversational way. And I love that. And so when I wrote out this branding document, I listed what the business is, who uses it, whatever. And then what I did was I listed a ton of ads that I liked. So there's a bunch of advertisements from the seventies. That's one of my favorite eras for ads. And I found a bunch of GQ ads, Porsche ads, and Rolex ads. Like Rolex had this famous series of ads called, um, "The men who built the world wear Rolex."

• 11:38Sam Parr?

  And they would do like a really cool expose on like an astronaut. And you could see the astronaut, he's wearing a Rolex. Or Dwight Eisenhower, the president of the United States, he's got a Rolex and it's, "The men who build America are wearing a Rolex." And so, and then there's one with the Wall Street Journal where it says, "Money talks, we translate." And it's just this beautiful imagery. And so I took that imagery and then I took the color British racing green. You know what British racing green is? I mean, it's the Hampton colors, but it's like a famous color from like Land Rover and Jaguar. It's like these British racing colors that I love. And I thought that, cause like, when I think of a Land Rover or a Range Rover or Jaguar, what do you got there? There you go. That's almost, so I freaking love that color. That's my favorite color. I've

• 12:22Sam Parr?

  got motorcycles in that color. I've had a car in that color. It's my favorite color. And I took that color and I'm like, we have to make the brand feel like these ads, but be that color. And I wrote a bunch of sentences that I would want on the website. And that's how we selected the branding. And dude, hiring a branding agency is like a total hack.

• 12:39Shaan Puri?

  What are some things along the way of making Hampton that you could have done, but you said no to? And in retrospect, maybe it was a good idea, bad idea, you don't know. You don't know how it would have turned out. But like, what were the no's? Because we can only see what you said yes to. We could see the name you chose. You told us what names you said no to. We could see the color you chose. What were the things you said no to along the way? Was there anything else that was like a path you considered?

• 13:03Sam Parr?

  Here's two really big ones. So Hampton gets, let's just say, these aren't the exact numbers, but we'll use them. Roughly 100 people a day who apply. We accept a fraction of that. And my partner, Joe and I, we watch, so in order to get into Hampton, you have to interview. We watch 100% of the interviews and we are the only people who click approve or deny. That is it. It was us two. That is our job is to watch 100% of the interviews.

• 13:31Shaan Puri?

  So you said no to delegating that out?

• 13:34Sam Parr?

  We said no to delegating that out. And we also, here's what sucks. Dude, we turned down so many people and it's like, we're turning down so much revenue and it fucking kills me. I'm like adding up the numbers. When I, now when you ask me, so Chief, cheap.com, it's like this business, I guess we're like them, but they're for women executives. You know why they grew so fast? They grew to 100 million in revenue in four or five years. They let in 100% of the people who apply and interview. We don't. And it fucking kills me. I see all this missed revenue and I'm like, oh my God. And so I'm thinking in my head, I'm like, so a lot of people, we've talked about this, but Kingsford charcoal was invented because Ford had all this extra wood

• 14:18Sam Parr?

  that they used to like their furnaces and they eventually turned it to charcoal. That's how Kingsford charcoal came about. And so always in my head, I'm like, what's the charcoal I could make from these people who we've rejected or who don't fit our criteria at the moment. But we've said no to doing any of those ideas. And so we're all, we said basically, we're only focusing on CEOs of this demographic, of this type of business, and we're only going to do that until we say otherwise. And there's no time in the near future that we intend to say otherwise.

• 14:45Shaan Puri?

  Well, let me tell you two things I think you could be doing. So I can give you two ideas I think you maybe should have said yes to. Number one, I think if I go to your website right now, I don't see that you say no to that many people or that it's a that there's a cure that how heavy the curation is. All the things you just said to me would make me want to join because like, oh, they're really actually curing the community. These are actually high quality people. The founders watch every single interview. They let they accept in less than 1% of people. They have a counter on their website of how many people they've said no to, or how many, how much revenue they've said no to in order to make the community solid, because that comes first. And we put our money where our mouth is. We turn down this much revenue. I don't maybe, maybe it's too, too vulgar, but like, I think you could use that. The second thing.

• 15:29Sam Parr?

  You got the elite part, right? Now, now, now we have to make it cheeky.

• 15:32Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, yeah, exactly. I just went elite douchey. So I don't know. We got to work on the other part. The other thing I don't think you did a great job of is your story. So like, would you, do you value a founding story? And like the founder's story and the founding story of the company? Do you think that's important or useful?

• 15:52Sam Parr?

  I think that's incredibly important, and I think I made a mistake because I wanted to make this not the Sam Parr business. And I think I've screwed up. I think I should have leaned into that. I think the way it works, I did this with the hustle. You can have the founder can be the company or be the face for a period of time and you could phase it out. And with this time, I was like, I'm not going to be it. And I screwed that up.

• 16:12Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, yeah, I think you should lean into that because the situation is where you don't want the founder to be the, the, the face and the reason to join is when the founder has to deliver the service. It's like the, the law firm or the, the specialty, you know, marketing exec. It's like, oh, this guy's great. But oh, now I'm handed off to some junior person. They're doing my marketing. I want that guy on my account. Whereas with this, you don't have to be the account. You're not delivering the actual service. So I think you could use it because the true founding story is that's how we met. We made a peer group in San Francisco when we didn't know shit, when we were running our companies and there was and it was awesome. Could fail or succeed. And in that group came. A billion dollar company, a hundred million dollar company, a thirty million dollar company,

• 16:53Shaan Puri?

  a two failures, but one best man at your wedding and a friend who you ended up investing in their thing and that came out of that. And then this podcast came out of that, which then has become one of the top business podcasts, blah, blah, blah. Like, that's actually almost like your founding story as an entrepreneur and helped you when you actually sold the hustle successfully. So from, I remember in our peer groups, it was like, I'm gonna do the hustle. It was an events business. Then, no, no, no, next month. No, it's not an events business. It's a blog business.

• 17:21Sam Parr?

  You said something that stuck with me and it was-

• 17:23Shaan Puri?

  It pissed, it pissed you off.

• 17:24Sam Parr?

  No, no, because you weren't wrong. You were right in that I couldn't build a huge company that way, but you were wrong in that I don't have to build a huge company in order to achieve my goals, which was, you go, dude, you're showing up to this fight, you're showing up to this knife fight with just a knife. I don't even want you to have a gun. You need to have a magic fucking wand. And I was like, well, you're not wrong. That would be nice to have that, but I, but I don't. And so until then, we're using our fists.

• 17:52Shaan Puri?

  At Silicon Valley, if you go pitch for investors, you're basically making a promise this is gonna be a billion dollar company. So I was like, I don't think this is gonna be a billion dollar company. What I didn't know is you were like, I'm not trying to build a billion dollar company. I'm trying to build a company that makes me X millions of dollars and like, and I could do it. It can actually do that. And that would change my life and be fucking awesome, which is a different pitch.

• 18:11Sam Parr?

  So you were right, but where I was wrong was I shouldn't have aimed for that in the get, from the get go.

• 18:18Shaan Puri?

  Right, right.

• 18:18Sam Parr?

  But you are correct.

• 18:19Shaan Puri?

  But so I think, you know, maybe using a founding story would be helpful for you because it's genuine. That's actually, you know, the origin of, I think, you know, a lot of this is like firsthand experience, how the peer group helped you and how blah, blah, blah. And then how it also leads to all these other things. That group became, you know, one guy's like, you know, a groomsmen at your wedding, another guy becomes an investment you make down the road, blah, blah, blah. Like, that's, that's kind of how these tend to work. So anyways, that's my, my two cents.

• 18:43Sam Parr?

  Well, thank you. Did you, have you ever used a branding agency?

• 18:47Shaan Puri?

  Um, have I used, I used a guy for the Milk Road, not, I mean, he's an agency, but it's like a guy, one guy.

• 18:54Sam Parr?

  Which I think you actually nailed. I think you nailed that, to be honest.

• 18:57Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 18:57Sam Parr?

  I loved it.

• 18:58Shaan Puri?

  It was a cool experience. It definitely felt so indulgent. It's like, oh, and now I'm going to take a break from my zero revenue business. To go through this mood boarding process with this designer and talk about how the brand needs to feel. It's like, it needs to feel like there's a user and a customer. And there's definitely a part of my voice that was like, shut up, shut up, you idiot. You go, go build your business. But what we did, the, the trade off we did was we actually with Milk Road, we wanted to do a brand right away. And we said, let's reward ourselves with a brand when we get to, I think we said a hundred thousand subscribers on the, on the list.

• 19:35Shaan Puri?

  And I said, today, we're going to make the brand. And, but when we get to a hundred thousand, then we'll know, like, this is, we can always rebrand or we can, we could polish it up. That's what we did to reward ourselves. I think in the future, I would probably use an agency if I'm confident about the idea. If I, uh, it's also just like, I don't know. It's a luxury item. It's not a necessity, but it's a luxury. I think for some things, it is a necessity. Like if you're e-commerce brand or something, you gotta get your brand right.

• 20:01Sam Parr?

  And you know, another thing that I thought was the dumbest thing ever, but I think could be cool, a naming agency.

• 20:05Shaan Puri?

  I used a naming agency once.

• 20:07Sam Parr?

  I, I find a lot of value in that now. I think that it's like most agencies where a lot will suck, but I actually think that could be quite valuable. What, what naming, how much of the?

• 20:16Shaan Puri?

  I hired, this is one of my many rookie mistakes. I hired a naming agency once. I paid them $25,000. A lot of money. And

• 20:26Shaan Puri?

  I, they came in. Now let me tell you a couple of things about them. That's interesting. One, the people who work at a naming agency are actually awesome. Somebody who is drawn to that is a super interesting person. And actually the move is to go vet branding agencies or naming agencies. And then just pluck the most interesting person you have and be like, you're going to run our whole brand. Come over, just come in house, you're going to run our whole brand. That's what I should have done.

• 20:47Sam Parr?

  And just, just the audacity that they think that they could just name something.

• 20:50Shaan Puri?

  That they think that could be the job.

• 20:54Shaan Puri?

  Who do you think you are? It's like, that's crazy. So they come in and there's three of them. I'm like, it takes three to do this? Oh, my God. And so they threw them come in and they sit down and they say, so tell me about, tell me about the company. And when I tell you I've never felt as much pressure in a pitch. Cause I'm like, this isn't pitching for an investor or a customer. I'm like, I need to give these creatives, because creative people like that, they're very skeptical. You know, they see a bunch of corporate BS. It's like, I need to be cool and so clear. And I need to capture the essence inside this business. I can't just say the surface. That's what they want. They were like, yeah, but, but what is it? And you're like, I just told you what it is. What do you mean, what is it?

• 21:36Shaan Puri?

  So anyways, I had this conversation with them. And then I'm like, I want to know this guy's process. And so I leave the room. He comes, I come back in. Mokes a bunch of weed and eats cereals. In the middle of the room, he's moved our table to the side. He's sitting in his all floor with a white, he took our whiteboard, put it on the ground. And he's writing long sentences. And I'm like, this is not names. Like this is like paragraphs. What are you doing? And he's just writing out almost in first person. This was awesome, actually. He was writing out in first person. I think we were doing a dating app at the time. So he was, he was helping us with a dating app. He was just writing out like from first person, almost venting as the customer. He's like, I don't download a dating app. I download dating apps, all of them, every single one of them. It's embarrassing. And he's like, I've tried them all.

• 22:21Shaan Puri?

  I use them all and I hate them all, but I use them. I hate use them. And he's like, I hate them because it's mostly me sitting there, sending out messages that are not getting replies. And I just, and then the next message I sent, I know this is probably not going to reply. That's a pretty hopeless feeling. At least if I go up to a girl at a bar, she rejects me to my face. Online, cowards, these women are cowards. And he's like, they don't even reply.

• 22:45Shaan Puri?

  Well, so then he's, he's just venting and he's like, and then he's scratching stuff out. Cause he's like, no, that's not really true. But it was almost like slam poetry. It's like, he was trying to like, almost get into the feeling of the problem. And then the solution. And he was, but he was doing it not in a business planning way, but a, whether it, I really actually liked that process. And I kind of hijacked that. So I paid. A very expensive 25K to learn that one process, which is actually very useful as a copywriter to to like get to the essence of like what you're trying to do. The name ended up sucking and like they did all these exercises where there would be like, they put out these flashcards that were like Branson, Elon Musk, Einstein. They're like, pick two that you think fit. And then they'd be like Corvette, Rolex, Louis Vuitton, blah, blah, pick two.

• 23:29Shaan Puri?

  And then I'm like, dude, what is this personality quiz? And I was just like, I hated the whole process and then whatever. The name was whatever it was. I don't even remember.

• 23:36Sam Parr?

  What was the name?

• 23:37Shaan Puri?

  You don't even remember the name? I'm sorry. It's a very unsatisfying ending to it, but.

• 23:41Sam Parr?

  How do you not remember the name that they picked?

• 23:45Shaan Puri?

  That's C'est la vie.

• 23:49Sam Parr?

  That's what you should have called the fucking app.

• 23:52Shaan Puri?

  The app like failed by the time they gave us the name. We were like, oh, this is a stupid idea. We don't know how to do this app. Let's move on.

• 23:58Sam Parr?

  I still think it's worth it, by the way. I still think it's worth it. I think that's a lot of money, though. 25 grand is a lot. I think I paid my branding agency 15,000.

• 24:06Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, it's hard, though. When you, once you start to fall into that hole, you're like, well, do I want the best brand or just a mediocre brand? Like, how much is my brand going to be worth? Is it not worth an extra 5K? It's very hard to say no, at least for me.

• 24:21Sam Parr?

  That's ridiculous. Um, is that the pod?

• 24:23Shaan Puri?

  Well, let's let's recap real quick. It took you, you did your research in public. It took you five false starts on figuring out who is the customer and the way you did it was, you had an idea that sounded good in theory and then you went and tried to contact them and be like, do you want this? And then you got like punched in the face five times and then one of them looked great, but then like no founder fit. And you settled on what was probably the obvious idea. So that's like the first takeaway. Second takeaway. Your name is awesome. The name is awesome, but you use streets around you. Okay. I don't know if anyone else wants to copy that. Mine would be a Grand Floral Boulevard, which I don't think is going to make for a great startup name.

• 24:58Sam Parr?

  No, San Francisco has a bunch of good names, too.

• 25:01Shaan Puri?

  Well, that's why I used to live when I was a kid. I think we, I think we should show the deck that you made for the branding agency. Because you, this is not what they gave you. This is what you gave them to get a good output, you know, because you, garbage in, garbage out. If you give the bad instructions or bad prompt, you're going to get a bad result on the brand. So I think that's cool to show. And I think, you know, maybe one, one other thing that I think people could take away is using a founder's story. I think a founder's story is very powerful.

• 25:26Sam Parr?

  And I think I need to fix that. So I just got like $25,000 worth of advice for free. So that's good. I appreciate that. You got my Venmo.

• 25:36Sam Parr?

  All right. Is that it? Is that the pod? That's it. That's the pod.