3 weird businesses doing $10M, $20M, $30M

Business Idea Database: https://clickhubspot.com/ecat Episode 837: Sam Parr ( https://x.com/theSamParr ) and Shaan Puri ( https://x.com/ShaanVP ) bring in 3 founders with weird businesses making $10M, $20M, and $30M. — Show Notes: (0:00) Intro (3:32) Alex Daniels, $10M real estate magazine (20:31) Josh Weissenstein, $20M camp ground business (38:36) The $1.8B App Copying Politicians & Hedge Funds — Links: • Haven Lifestyles - https://www.havenlifestyles.com/ • Team Outsider - https://www.teamoutsider.com/ • Autopilot - https://www.joinautopilot.com/ — Check Out Sam's Stuff: • Hampton (joinhampton.com): My community for founders. Average member does $25m/year. Many of the guests are members. Get after it...apply: http://joinhampton.com/mfm — Check Out Shaan's Stuff: • Shaan's weekly email - https://www.shaanpuri.com • Visit https://www.somewhere.com/mfm to hire worldwide talent like Shaan and get $500 off for being an MFM listener. Hire developers, assistants, marketing pros, sales teams and more for 80% less than US equivalents. • Mercury - Shaan uses Mercury for banking across all of his companies. you can too: http://mercury.com/ Mercury is a fintech company, not an FDIC-insured bank. Banking services provided by Choice Financial Group, Column, N. A., and Evolve Bank & Trust, Members FDIC • I run all my newsletters on Beehiiv and you should too + we're giving away $10k to our favorite newsletter, check it out: beehiiv.com/mfm-challenge My First Million is a HubSpot Original Podcast // Brought to you by HubSpot Media // Production by Arie Desormeaux // Editing by Ezra Bakker Trupiano /

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  All right. I own forty ten million dollars in revenue.

• 0:03Sam Parr?

  We acquire and this year will generate around twenty million dollars of revenue.

• 0:07Speaker 00

  We manage and that makes thirty million dollars per year of revenue for the company.

• 0:13Shaan Puri?

  Those are three ideas that didn't even exist in my my cone of vision, you know, I didn't even know that people do businesses like that.

• 0:29Sam Parr?

  All right. How's it feel to be in real life? This is strange.

• 0:31Shaan Puri?

  This is weird. It's been.

• 0:33Sam Parr?

  There's normally a screen right here.

• 0:34Shaan Puri?

  Side by side of the last time we were in person in San Francisco, doing it on the red chairs.

• 0:39Sam Parr?

  So when we, when you started this thing and then I came on two or three months later, we had these bright red chairs that we bought off Amazon for a hundred and fifty dollars. And it was just us sitting on chairs and I hated it because you could like see like a crotch shot.

• 0:53Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I think I might be doing it now.

• 0:54Sam Parr?

  And you're like sitting like this and then we had a like a camcorder.

• 1:00Shaan Puri?

  We would have a guy in the room and we'd be like, hey, are we good to go? Is it all good? Audio, video? And he'd be like, I think so. It was like, I think so is like not what you want to hear from the guy who's setting up the recording.

• 1:12Sam Parr?

  He was my sever intern. And it was one camera.

• 1:15Shaan Puri?

  You ever done audio video before? No.

• 1:18Sam Parr?

  But I hear you.

• 1:19Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I can hear you great.

• 1:22Sam Parr?

  What do you think of New York? Have you been to a bodega yet?

• 1:25Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, we went to a bodega, yeah.

• 1:26Sam Parr?

  So I talk about bodega culture. I don't know if you've like seen any of that of have you seen any that have impressed you?

• 1:31Shaan Puri?

  I have to like stay out of bodegas because I just start chatting it up for too long.

• 1:34Sam Parr?

  It's the best, right?

• 1:34Shaan Puri?

  Like dude, I've been here for seventy five minutes talking to this guy.

• 1:37Sam Parr?

  They're like the like the cashier, right? It's the best. I'm friends with so many bodega owners.

• 1:41Shaan Puri?

  We could do a full MFM just inside a bodega. We probably should have done that, actually.

• 1:46Sam Parr?

  And like it's the pure definition of entrepreneurship because you could clearly tell like, oh, one day someone asked for cereal. Now they have ten Costco sized things of cereal and they're individually packed into an iced coffee cup and they just sell cereal now. Like, that's just what they do. There's no like, does this go with our mission statement? It's like, no, we sell cereal now.

• 2:03Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 2:03Sam Parr?

  I don't know if you need a license to sell food, even though it says, don't repackage this for individual sale. We sell cereal now.

• 2:09Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 2:10Sam Parr?

  That's what I love. All right. So today we're doing something a little bit special. You said you were coming and I reached out. I basically just slacked like the Hampton channel. I go, who in New York has like an odd business that we can like impress Sean with? And so we picked three different entrepreneurs. They had, I tried to find three businesses that were off the beaten path a little bit because that's why people like watching MFM. You guys like watching or seeing like kind of strange businesses. So hopefully you can open up your mind and being like, oh, there's a million ways to get done. Whatever I want to get done and build a big company.

• 2:38Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 2:38Sam Parr?

  So I picked three.

• 2:39Shaan Puri?

  Okay.

• 2:39Sam Parr?

  Okay. So they're going to come on. What are they going to do?

• 2:41Shaan Puri?

  So we told him, we just bumped into him. We just told him, hey, come in here and don't start with words. This is MFM. You got to start with a number and don't make us dig it out of you. Just give it to us. You know the shtick. You know what we like.

• 2:53Sam Parr?

  Brag.

• 2:53Shaan Puri?

  We like to know, we like to not be humble and brag about that. We want you to brag a little. So they're going to say a number. They're going to say what they do. And then we're going to get to know their business because we're nerdy about businesses. And then at the end, you know, we will ask them two things. We'll ask them what adjacent business opportunities are there? Like what other businesses do they see because of where they are in their tiny niche? That we don't have enough exposure to that other people might go run at. And then two, like, how can we help them? Like, what's, what's the burning question? What if they just had me and you for like, you know, 10 minutes, what would they want to talk to us about? So that's what we're going to try.

• 3:27Sam Parr?

  All right. The first guy.

• 3:28Shaan Puri?

  Ben, we could bring him in. What's up? How you doing? All right. Welcome to the podcast. Thanks.

• 3:34Sam Parr?

  All right. So I've known Alex for years, for a year.

• 3:38Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 3:38Sam Parr?

  A year.

• 3:39Shaan Puri?

  A year.

• 3:41Sam Parr?

  We're very good friends, so I'm going to be biased. Okay. Start us off with a big number.

• 3:45Speaker 03

  All right. I have four, I own 40 publications, 40 magazines, $10 million in revenue.

• 3:50Shaan Puri?

  40 magazines, 10 million in revenue?

• 3:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:53Shaan Puri?

  What, what source of magazines are we talking?

• 3:55Speaker 03

  Real estate advertising.

• 3:57Shaan Puri?

  Real estate advertising. Okay. Give us an example.

• 3:59Speaker 03

  All right. So.

• 4:00Shaan Puri?

  You gotta carry one. You don't have one on your times. That's insane.

• 4:02Speaker 03

  Yeah. Real estate agents basically pay us to promote their listings. So magazine is like a lookbook of all the listings that are on the market at that time in their neighborhood.

• 4:11Sam Parr?

  And it goes to a lot of different like locations? Like do you have different 40 meaning?

• 4:16Speaker 03

  Yeah. 40, 40 meaning basically we've divided the country into 40. Locations, yeah, zones. So we're covering all of the US and Canada.

• 4:23Sam Parr?

  How big is the magazine? Like, how many pages?

• 4:25Speaker 03

  Anywhere from like a hundred to two hundred.

• 4:27Shaan Puri?

  Well, who's the reader? Because Realtors are the ones advertising or what?

• 4:30Speaker 03

  Realtors are advertising.

• 4:31Shaan Puri?

  Who's the reader?

• 4:32Speaker 03

  Uh, we, we have a mixture, but basically we mail the magazine out and we'll mail it out based on property value, uh, income, things like that.

• 4:39Sam Parr?

  With the goal of being a real estate agent, uh, is, has a bunch of listings in New York City or something, I don't know, Dayton, Ohio.

• 4:47Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 4:48Sam Parr?

  And you want to show the resident of the homes on this block that they should either use this real estate agent or buy some of the nearby homes?

• 4:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, either or.

• 4:56Sam Parr?

  Okay.

• 4:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. Uh, agents definitely are using it to pick up listings. Like, they want to be able to say, look, we're going to advertise your home, things like that. But they also want to sell the listing they have.

• 5:05Shaan Puri?

  And what's it called?

• 5:06Speaker 03

  Haven Lifestyles.

• 5:07Shaan Puri?

  Haven Lifestyles, okay. How did you come up with this idea?

• 5:10Speaker 03

  All right, so I started it with my business partner, uh, Ryan. We were college roommates. I was a couple of years out of college. I was actually a bill collector for like five years through college and after.

• 5:21Shaan Puri?

  A bill collector?

• 5:21Speaker 03

  I was a bill collector, uh, which I actually, I think, really helped with sales. Like, uh, just having to call people all day for money, being rejected.

• 5:29Shaan Puri?

  Are you like the muscle? Like, what is a bill collector actually doing here?

• 5:32Speaker 03

  Dialing them up. It was a, it was credit card. Uh, so it's like Victoria's Secret. It's literally Victoria's Secret credit cards. But yeah, anyhow, I did that. I actually, I was supervisor. I got drug into some HR, uh, nonsense that I couldn't believe and like having to basically defend myself. And I texted my college buddy. I'm like, dude, you want to do something? And he's like, yeah, let's, let's start the magazine. So that's where we started.

• 5:56Shaan Puri?

  But why the idea of the magazine?

• 5:58Speaker 03

  He had, he had a small publication in Annapolis, Maryland, and he said that basically agents had reached out to him and like, why don't you do something in DC? We want to advertise in DC. So we just launched one.

• 6:08Sam Parr?

  Who's the bigot? How many companies do what you do?

• 6:11Speaker 03

  Most, there's a lot of small publications. So like each city you go into will have like a publication. But we have them across the whole country.

• 6:18Sam Parr?

  And you do 10 million in revenue. Can you say how much profit?

• 6:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, like 2.5.

• 6:22Sam Parr?

  Okay, and the biggest one in the space is how big?

• 6:25Speaker 03

  I don't know. It's not public. I don't, I mean, we could be one of the biggest in the space. Like, there's not, most of them are franchised.

• 6:32Shaan Puri?

  How many years you been doing this?

• 6:33Speaker 03

  10.

• 6:34Shaan Puri?

  10, okay, so it's been a slow build. You've been steady at this revenue for a while.

• 6:39Speaker 03

  It's been a slow build that, that has jumps.

• 6:42Shaan Puri?

  Give us your one. What was your one like?

• 6:44Speaker 03

  300K. And that's just me going, meeting individually, like, just grinding it out.

• 6:48Shaan Puri?

  Okay.

• 6:49Speaker 03

  And, and my business partner handling it.

• 6:51Shaan Puri?

  And did you know right away, like, this is it? It's, I'm gonna do this for a while? Or were you, even after year one, were you still like, I don't know?

• 6:57Speaker 03

  I never thought 10 million, but I thought enough to support myself, yeah. Uh, we launched, uh, an initial publication, like, we just did a free version of the magazine. Like, just let us put you in, I'm gonna show you what it's gonna look like. And then I went around and had meetings all week. Um, and I'm like, here, here it is. And I mean, literally, the very first meeting, the guy's like, I don't do it. I was like, okay, cool. Like, I'm like 25 years old, alright. And just, meeting after meeting was like that. Got to a meeting where a guy's like, uh, what can you do for 10,000? Which is way more than we were charging. Like, how many covers can I get? So just like, all of a sudden, like, I'm calling back to my business partner every few minutes, like, dude, there's another, another, another, like, there's something here. But I kept my other job for like, eight months.

• 7:33Sam Parr?

  But, so, so, the, the, it's more like a brochure, but it's a magazine because it's, it's got a lot of pages, but it's a brochure. I mean, you're just showing off other, other people's stuff.

• 7:42Speaker 03

  You're just spamming people, right? Yeah, it's a magazine.

• 7:44Shaan Puri?

  You're just sending a magazine unsolicited, correct?

• 7:46Speaker 03

  Yes, yes, yes, it's true. It's on, no subscribers.

• 7:49Shaan Puri?

  You're junk mail.

• 7:50Speaker 03

  Sure. Junk, yeah. It's not, it's, it's not a subscriber magazine. Also, I should say, I mean, there's-

• 7:55Shaan Puri?

  That's like calling Victoria's Secret, just underwear.

• 7:57Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly.

• 8:00Speaker 03

  A huge portion is online at this point. Like, we do drive most of our traffic online, but everyone is paying to be in the magazine.

• 8:07Sam Parr?

  And, and who is doing, so, let's say I wanna be in the magazine, and I like, say like, yeah, I'm in. Who does the artwork? Who actually makes, like, the pages?

• 8:14Speaker 03

  We handle it. Uh, most of our designers are-

• 8:17Shaan Puri?

  Philippines.

• 8:18Speaker 03

  What's that? Philippines, yeah, basically.

• 8:20Sam Parr?

  And how many of them are there? Cause to have 40 magazines, and how often? Quarterly or monthly?

• 8:24Speaker 03

  They're all every, once every six weeks. We print 30 different magazines a month.

• 8:27Shaan Puri?

  Why, why did you just say-

• 8:28Speaker 03

  So every week, we've got seven going.

• 8:29Shaan Puri?

  Most of it's online.

• 8:31Speaker 03

  Most of the exposure. So when you're talking about subscribers, junk mail, whatever. So like, we mail copies out. We do that based on, like I said, net worth, things like that. And then we're also driving another, you know, 90% of our readers online. Which are then looking for people that have, like, recently been looking for homes, things like that.

• 8:46Sam Parr?

  How many people work there? Twenty?

• 8:49Shaan Puri?

  So I'm confused. This is a dumb question. I don't really understand how junk mail works. So I can just mail anything to anybody?

• 8:54Speaker 03

  You mail anything to anyone.

• 8:55Shaan Puri?

  So you just look up like, hey, address, like what zip codes or neighborhoods have a certain profile?

• 9:03Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 9:03Shaan Puri?

  And then you download from some site all the addresses?

• 9:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's all through the post office. Like you, you basically can pick postal routes and they'll deliver. It's actually cheaper when you do that.

• 9:11Sam Parr?

  How many magazines do you send a year?

• 9:14Speaker 03

  Uh, like half a million.

• 9:16Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 9:17Shaan Puri?

  So this is the post office's business model, right?

• 9:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 9:19Shaan Puri?

  Basically, the post office is pretty much funded by guys like you who are using it.

• 9:22Speaker 03

  Like, we have to make sure it stays within certain dimensions. It can't go over a certain amount of weight or we're, it's a problem.

• 9:27Shaan Puri?

  The post office is basically Facebook ads.

• 9:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly.

• 9:29Shaan Puri?

  It's Facebook. It's selling, you are the product. It's selling your address and your mailbox without you benefiting or agreeing to it. To others.

• 9:38Sam Parr?

  What would it take to get you to a hundred million in revenue? It's definitely possible.

• 9:42Shaan Puri?

  No, no, ask in the like Asian mom way. Why aren't you at a hundred million?

• 9:47Speaker 03

  Uh, yeah, I mean, it's a good question.

• 9:51Shaan Puri?

  Hey, I want to tell you about something pretty cool. We have a database of all of the unsexy business ideas that have been discussed on this podcast. So hundreds of episodes, the team at HubSpot went through, they pulled out all the unsexy ideas. So not the super high-tech ones, but the simple, relatable, interesting, profitable ideas that we have brainstormed. And they're all available for download for free. Just click the link in the description below. Thank you to our friends at HubSpot for sponsoring this podcast and putting together this free resource for you guys. Back to the show.

• 10:20Speaker 03

  It's kind of a question I would have for you too, because I know you always say you get to 10 million. I know you can get to 100 million. So like, how? Uh, I think there's a few different ways. I don't think there's like one, like switch, uh, flip of a switch. I think there's a lot of other verticals we could be hitting.

• 10:36Sam Parr?

  Other than real stages?

• 10:37Shaan Puri?

  Like home services or that sort of thing you're talking about?

• 10:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. And which we do within our publication, but I think if it was specific to their market.

• 10:45Shaan Puri?

  You've told us about the business, magazine company, AKA junk mail. You send it to people. What's the burning question? Like where could? Smart friends help you?

• 10:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, honestly, I do think that question of how do you take this from 10 to 100?

• 11:00Shaan Puri?

  Can I take a stab at helping you? So first, I always want to know what's the default growth rate? Meaning, how much did you grow last year to this year? What do we like, what do I expect if nothing changes?

• 11:10Speaker 03

  Probably like 10%.

• 11:11Shaan Puri?

  10%? Okay, so to get to 100 or is your real goal 100? What's your real goal?

• 11:16Speaker 03

  My real goal is to double profit.

• 11:18Shaan Puri?

  Double profit? Okay, so you might not even need to grow top line.

• 11:20Speaker 03

  We grow profit faster than we grow revenue.

• 11:22Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, it seemed like when Sam was asking you like, who's the biggest at doing this? And you were kind of like, ah, we might be the biggest. One thing that I could immediately tell that's very different about you than the way both, both me and Sam are reverse engineer type guys. We like to understand what's working for others, how big other people are to give ourselves. Like we create this almost like box and I feel like you don't do that as much. Is that fair?

• 11:45Speaker 03

  Definitely a weakness. Yeah, yeah.

• 11:46Sam Parr?

  But you're happy.

• 11:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, super happy. Yeah.

• 11:50Sam Parr?

  What I mean is like.

• 11:52Shaan Puri?

  To be clear, we have a sickness and you seem fine, but we'd like to infect you with our sickness.

• 11:56Sam Parr?

  He doesn't need to change.

• 11:58Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. But if you did want to change, here's what I might do. I think what I would do is maybe it's not like direct, like, oh, who also sends home listings, sells to realtors, but just the general model of mailing out magazines or informational stuff to homes and generating a big business off the back of that. Who else does that? That's not exactly your space. Like, are there like wealth management companies that grow this way? Or is there some other category that grows this way?

• 12:25Speaker 03

  I think the most, I mean, it's a little different, but I think the most intriguing are like neighborhood publications. So I don't know if you've heard of Stroll.

• 12:33Sam Parr?

  Or Revolution, is that one?

• 12:34Speaker 03

  I don't think it's Revolution. There's Stroll, there, there are others.

• 12:37Shaan Puri?

  Is this kind of like what's going on in your area?

• 12:39Sam Parr?

  Exactly. Years ago, I talked about this. I think it was called Revolution. It was a neighborhood publication that's a franchise model that back then, I think we were in real life when we did this. Actually, it was like north of 100 million.

• 12:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, they're, they're definitely over 100 million.

• 12:53Sam Parr?

  My gut tells me that if you did have dedicated home services. That would be much.

• 13:00Shaan Puri?

  And maybe there's a way to do it more informationally. So instead of the one you do right now, you're just like, here's the homes for sale. It's kind of like utilitarian.

• 13:06Sam Parr?

  Mm hmm.

• 13:07Shaan Puri?

  If you just said like, hey, here's all the home service providers, that wouldn't be that great. But if it was like, let's say it's winter and it's like, here's the five tips every homeowner should do for like listical type of content.

• 13:17Sam Parr?

  Right.

• 13:18Shaan Puri?

  And then on the inside, there's providers, but like you just do something that's actually like to add. The front cover is basically like free a give.

• 13:26Sam Parr?

  Hmm.

• 13:26Shaan Puri?

  It's useful information, entertaining, useful information about about home service or home care.

• 13:32Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 13:32Shaan Puri?

  And then inside you obviously have home care providers where if people don't want to do it themselves, I could hire pros to come do this stuff for them. I wonder if you could get good at that. But I would, I would just kind of, if I was you, I would start with a, not an answer, but a study. I would, I would go get real familiar with what are all the other players doing in the space? Who's big, who's not? Who used to work there? Go talk to them, go learn from them. Like, I would kind of go on like a, like a one month expedition of that. And I think you'll know so much more.

• 13:57Sam Parr?

  Well, him and I are buddies. We talk about hiring all the time. I'm like, just go recruit someone who's at the bigger company and just have them come and work for you.

• 14:05Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 14:05Sam Parr?

  Um, why, and is there a world where instead of 40, it could be 80 markets?

• 14:09Shaan Puri?

  It would be dicing the, well, we could go international. We're already in Canada, so there are markets that make sense for us to go into. But as far as 40 to 80, you would then break down the 40 into 80. It's the same geographical area. It's just going to be more, because I mean, we're literally covering the whole US.

• 14:24Sam Parr?

  Got it.

• 14:24Shaan Puri?

  Uh, but I do think if you break it down, it's going to resonate more. Like there are areas that we have full states combined together because it's just not like Ohio, Indiana. It's just not that sexy of a market.

• 14:34Sam Parr?

  Would you ever sell this?

• 14:36Shaan Puri?

  I would. It's not necessarily my goal. Uh, I'm pretty happy doing it.

• 14:39Sam Parr?

  Forever.

• 14:40Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 14:40Sam Parr?

  God, it's crazy.

• 14:41Shaan Puri?

  You'd be too happy.

• 14:42Sam Parr?

  It's crazy talking to like an emotionally stable person.

• 14:45Shaan Puri?

  Yeah. Um, you, you wanted to double profits and I, I wonder what would happen. Again, I think this is more psychological than strategic. And I think people underrate how much of entrepreneurship is psychological and not strategic.

• 14:57Sam Parr?

  Hmm.

• 14:58Shaan Puri?

  I wonder if you just decided that instead of 25% net margins, you're going to have 35% net margins in the next six months. What would happen differently? Because I think you, I think right now my read is that you would like for there to be more profits. But you don't really have like a, I have to have more profits by this date.

• 15:14Sam Parr?

  Hmm.

• 15:14Shaan Puri?

  And if you literally just change the way you talked about it and thought about it. I'm sure that the answers would become pretty obvious to you as you started. Is that true? Like, do you have a, a goal and a date where it's going to happen by?

• 15:26Speaker 03

  Yes, but it is it is more recent change in the mindset. So

• 15:31Shaan Puri?

  What is the goal of the date we can hold you to?

• 15:33Speaker 03

  It was one year from a month ago. So it's

• 15:36Shaan Puri?

  To be at what? To double?

• 15:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 15:38Shaan Puri?

  Double profit?

• 15:39Speaker 03

  To be at a double, double as in double the run rate at that point.

• 15:42Sam Parr?

  So get to four million in run rate profit?

• 15:44Speaker 03

  Five, yeah.

• 15:45Sam Parr?

  Five.

• 15:46Shaan Puri?

  How's the first month been in terms of, if we were saying like out of 12 months, you've already used whatever 8% of your

• 15:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly.

• 15:55Shaan Puri?

  Time, are you like doing what you needed to do to create a bunch of momentum or not really? It's like

• 15:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think so. The the main thing, the easiest way to double profits right now, I think, is retention. We already work with 10,000 plus agents every year, but we don't get them to advertise it that many times. So, I mean, literally double retention and we're fine.

• 16:14Shaan Puri?

  You have the inventory, you're saying?

• 16:15Speaker 03

  Exactly. We have, we have the clients, like we have people that are agreeing to advertise with us.

• 16:19Sam Parr?

  Do you ask them multiple times?

• 16:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, we ask them every, every cycle.

• 16:23Shaan Puri?

  Why don't they just do it again if they're, if it's a money

• 16:25Speaker 03

  A lot of times they just want, it's like, you know, I've got a big listing. Great. Now's the time. And then they just drop off.

• 16:31Sam Parr?

  Do you ever pre-sell them on, like instead of this one time you say, I'll give you a discount if you do it for 12 months?

• 16:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. We have like 1500 people that do it for the year. So they're just on auto debit. So there's a decent amount doing that. But I think there's a lot of things we can do to improve their experience where they're coming back every month or just, I just need them to advertise one more time, basically.

• 16:49Sam Parr?

  I wish you would have brought us one.

• 16:50Shaan Puri?

  In the last, in the last, okay, let's say this year, how many of those agents have you personally talked to on the phone?

• 16:57Speaker 03

  Zero.

• 17:00Sam Parr?

  Should I?

• 17:00Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 17:01Sam Parr?

  Okay.

• 17:01Shaan Puri?

  Not necessarily to sell them, but like even just take your 100 top spenders. You should call every single one of them and figure out what do they love, what do they hate? Why aren't they doing it more? How do you get them? Are they actually, it's just been out of sight, out of mind. Oh, yeah, I do. I will do it. And you will learn a lot just by taking a roster of your top 100. I also learned this in our, our recent business that, that's done pretty well. I asked the CEO, I was like, hey, like this has gone pretty well. What, what'd you do? And he goes, you know what I did? I came in and he goes, I tiered out our key clients as tier one, tier two, tier three. And he created a A definition for each. He goes, tier one is somebody who's, they would do me a favor. I have them on a texting relationship. They know me. I know them. They would do me a favor, you know, quickly.

• 17:45Shaan Puri?

  Tier two is, I got their email. We've traded some emails. We like each other.

• 17:50Speaker 03

  We're acquaintances.

• 17:51Shaan Puri?

  We're, yeah, we're friendly acquaintances. Tier three is like, we're transactional. Like, when they need me, they call me. When I need them, I call them. We haven't really talked much because that transaction is infrequent.

• 18:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 18:02Shaan Puri?

  And then there's tier four, which is like worse than that. And he's like, when you do that and you just score yourself like, oh, what would a, what would a really healthy relationship look like here? What would a really weak relationship look like here? And then you look at your top hundred and you realize, shit, we have no tier ones. Couple tier twos and everybody else is tier three or four. Then it's like a wake up call. Nothing bad's gonna happen by talking to your top hundred customers. But a lot of good can happen from, from going and talking to them.

• 18:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, I like that.

• 18:27Shaan Puri?

  And you could do that in thirty days. You could talk to all hundred and thirty days.

• 18:30Speaker 03

  What do you think? Are you impressed? Did you ever know that something like this could exist?

• 18:33Shaan Puri?

  No. It's so simple of a business too, right? Like.

• 18:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's pretty simple.

• 18:38Shaan Puri?

  I mean, it's, they didn't even subscribe. I'm used to media businesses where it's like, first, I win their hearts and minds. And I get them to listen to me regularly or read me every day. Then I get to make money. He's like, no, no, no.

• 18:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, read, yeah.

• 18:53Speaker 03

  He, uh.

• 18:54Shaan Puri?

  That's incredible. Why are we doing junk mail?

• 18:57Speaker 03

  You know Lindy?

• 18:58Shaan Puri?

  The AI tool?

• 18:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. Flo, the guy who started Lindy's in Hampton, and he's like, Alex Daniels has the most impressive AI setup I have ever seen.

• 19:08Shaan Puri?

  Oh.

• 19:08Speaker 03

  And that's been like a little bit of a claim of fame that he's had.

• 19:10Shaan Puri?

  What, what, can I give us a little sauce real quick? What are you doing?

• 19:13Speaker 03

  Uh, we used Lindy to basic, to, to run the sales process. So.

• 19:19Shaan Puri?

  They don't have salespeople.

• 19:20Speaker 03

  We do have salespeople, but they're on, they've, they've shifted, but where they've really shifted to a, a different focus, basically, which is where I'd like them to be more of that customer experience and like getting people to come back. Uh, but Lindy is able to respond to the, every email that's coming in, follow up with it, upsell them, just go through the whole process. But yeah, it was, it's, it was a big Lindy, which is what Flo was talking about. It's crazy.

• 19:42Shaan Puri?

  That's awesome.

• 19:43Speaker 03

  All right, appreciate you, dude.

• 19:44Shaan Puri?

  What you've done is awesome, dude.

• 19:45Speaker 03

  All right.

• 19:45Shaan Puri?

  Good to meet you guys.

• 19:48Shaan Puri?

  Hey, let's take a quick break. You know that feeling when strategy is done, the brief is written, everyone's aligned, and you realize someone still has to sit down and actually create all the content? That someone is usually you, and it's due tomorrow. Well, the Breeze Assistant from HubSpot can help. It works right inside HubSpot. You can draft a campaign copy, blog posts, emails, all in your brand voice, all using your actual customer data. So you don't create just content, you create content that converts. Check out hubspot.com, the Agentic customer platform for growing businesses. We need like a name for this. The Dragon's Den, the Shark Tank, the

• 20:21Shaan Puri?

  swimming pool,

• 20:24Shaan Puri?

  the denim dungeon, let's go.

• 20:28Shaan Puri?

  What's up?

• 20:29Sam Parr?

  What up, brother?

• 20:30Shaan Puri?

  How's it going?

• 20:30Sam Parr?

  How are you? All right. Your name and the impressive number.

• 20:36Shaan Puri?

  Hit us with the big number.

• 20:37Speaker 00

  Great. I'm Josh. I run Team Outsider. We acquire family-owned campgrounds, and this year will generate around $20 million of revenue.

• 20:45Shaan Puri?

  20 million in revenue? Okay, so explain like I'm an idiot, because I kind of am. What do you do exactly? So?

• 20:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, so we acquire campgrounds typically from families who are looking to retire. And a campground, the majority of it is like a hotel, right? So we're renting different spaces. Some people come in their RVs, so they have effectively a traveling hotel room. We also have tent spaces and cabins that we rent to people who don't want to stay in a tent and don't have an RV.

• 21:11Shaan Puri?

  Do you camp? When's the last time you went camping? Like 10 years ago, but I appreciate it. I haven't gone camping in like 20 years. So a campground is literally just a piece of dirt, right? It's the ground?

• 21:23Speaker 00

  We have amenities, so all of our campgrounds have stores. We typically have a cafe where we'll sell ice cream and sometimes burgers and pizza.

• 21:30Shaan Puri?

  It's like cabins, basically, or?

• 21:32Speaker 00

  We have cabins as well. We have swimming pools, lakes. At one of our campgrounds, we have a go-kart track.

• 21:37Shaan Puri?

  Okay, so it's a very outdoorsy hotel, essentially?

• 21:39Speaker 00

  Effectively, yeah.

• 21:41Shaan Puri?

  Okay, we're looking at one here. What's like the most popular one you guys have?

• 21:44Speaker 00

  They're all really popular in their local communities. The first one we bought, which is right near Grand Teton in Yellowstone is really popular because that's a major tourist destination. We have one right outside New York City called the Never Sink River Resort, a couple hours away, so that's really popular with folks who live around here.

• 22:00Shaan Puri?

  So give us a, give us a story. What makes a guy want to buy a campground? How'd you even realize that that's a good opportunity?

• 22:07Speaker 00

  Yeah, so I met my partner in college, Cody. We studied together and started a business together, which was tremendously unsuccessful, but showed us that it was really a good relationship. And so we stayed friends post-college, got some working experience, and then realized we wanted to do something together again. We were looking for a business where two non-technical founders could hopefully have a winning situation, and we wanted a market that was large enough to participate in and interesting, one where there was an immense amount of fragmentation with ownership, one that was operationally complex, and one that was meaningful, where the team members would feel good working there and where the customers would feel good about being part of it as well.

• 22:45Shaan Puri?

  How many do you own?

• 22:47Speaker 00

  Currently, we have 16, and there are about 4,000 sites amongst those in 10 states.

• 22:51Shaan Puri?

  And did you raise money?

• 22:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, so the first one we did with our own cash and an SBA loan, so it's kind of...

• 22:56Shaan Puri?

  That was the Yellowstone one? How much was that?

• 22:59Speaker 00

  About 3 million.

• 23:00Shaan Puri?

  And so how much money of yours in loan did you put?

• 23:02Speaker 00

  The loan was 80-plus percent. Yeah, the rest was cash.

• 23:06Shaan Puri?

  Sorry, so that was an already operating site?

• 23:08Speaker 00

  Everything we buy is existing cash flow. It's been there generally for decades. Most of these are staples within their local communities.

• 23:15Shaan Puri?

  So let's walk through that first one. So you find this property, it's doing what when you buy it?

• 23:20Speaker 00

  It was generating around half a million dollars of top line, of total income.

• 23:24Shaan Puri?

  Top line, and then the cash flow on that's what?

• 23:26Speaker 00

  About 35%.

• 23:27Shaan Puri?

  Can you do that for me?

• 23:28Speaker 00

  Yeah, we, we... Call it 150.

• 23:31Shaan Puri?

  Okay. And you buy that for 3 million bucks? Okay, so that's, that's the entry. And then you do that knowing, hey, we think we can turn that 150 into 250? What was the... The inside at the time.

• 23:43Speaker 00

  Yeah, so that one didn't have a lot of digital marketing. It was.

• 23:48Shaan Puri?

  Was it like a mom and pop thing?

• 23:49Speaker 00

  All of them are.

• 23:50Shaan Puri?

  And it's all, everything's on paper and they've been doing it forever and they're like, our kids don't want this shit. Do you want it?

• 23:54Speaker 00

  Exactly. So we are oftentimes a succession plan for these sellers. And so these are multi-year relationships. We've got a couple under contract right now. One of them, I've been talking to the seller for five years. And generally what happens is we maintain the relationship and when they're ready to sell, we get the call, hopefully.

• 24:10Shaan Puri?

  And what were you going to do to make it better? And what is, what does better mean?

• 24:12Speaker 00

  Yeah, so there are a few things we can do. One of them is introduce just professionalized systems. So digital marketing, a better website, voice, voice systems for the phone. To be able to make sure that the training is happening the right way.

• 24:24Shaan Puri?

  Does marketing mean like Yelp and Google reviews?

• 24:26Speaker 00

  Google reviews, but also paid ads, a better website. Oftentimes there's no digital reservation systems. We'll introduce that.

• 24:32Shaan Puri?

  Got it.

• 24:33Speaker 00

  So that's kind of on the technology side.

• 24:35Shaan Puri?

  I think I missed it. So you're like, I wanted to do something with my friend. And then you had the like business school explanation, just like high fragmentation, blah, blah. No, no, no, like where were you sitting when someone was like, should we buy campgrounds? Or like you met a guy who's rich that bought campgrounds. You're like, we should do that shit. Like what actually happened?

• 24:51Speaker 00

  Great question. So our backgrounds were in hospitality and real estate.

• 24:54Shaan Puri?

  Okay.

• 24:55Speaker 00

  So there's the obvious confluence there. And then Cody lives in Bozeman, Montana and is an avid RV-er. So he said, hey, like the thesis sounds interesting. Why don't you fly out here and let's drive around the country, meet some owners, team members, guests, and see if this is something that actually has a little bit of a spark to it. So I flew out from New York, spent some time on the road, meeting different campground owners and team members and guests, and just fell in love with the space.

• 25:17Shaan Puri?

  And how much money have you raised in total now?

• 25:20Speaker 00

  We have raised around $60 million.

• 25:24Shaan Puri?

  You raised 60 million bucks.

• 25:25Speaker 00

  Throw fire, what'd you say, 15 ish properties? We've sold a couple, but we have 16 currently.

• 25:30Shaan Puri?

  And what is it all worth?

• 25:32Speaker 00

  North of a hundred million.

• 25:34Shaan Puri?

  Does that mean that forty million is you and your partner's equity?

• 25:38Speaker 00

  No, we've raised outside capital. So at this point, we have family offices we work with. We have a select group of accredited investors we work with. And we have a few institutional partners we've worked with as well.

• 25:47Shaan Puri?

  I guess what I'm saying is of the twenty million in revenue, or if you value it, I don't know anything about real estate. However, you value it, how do you get personal cash flow or net worth from it?

• 25:55Speaker 00

  Like most real estate operators, it's promote based. And different deals are different depending on the investment partner. Right? So we are back end incentivized largely for most of these. Typical private equity structure where there's a preferred return. There's a return of capital and then there's a split depending on kind of who the investor profile is.

• 26:14Shaan Puri?

  And so when you do that first one, you go buy it for three million. It's doing half a million in revenue, one hundred fifty K of cash flow. What happened? What was the like success story of that one? Obviously, it was successful, but you wouldn't have sixteen more.

• 26:26Speaker 00

  Well, we were able to refi a couple of years later. So took all of our cash out.

• 26:30Shaan Puri?

  And you brought the NOI up to what?

• 26:32Speaker 00

  The NOI in that one went from closer to closer to three hundred at that point.

• 26:37Shaan Puri?

  Okay, so you doubled the profit on the thing. Recap, refinance it out, use that capital to go buy the next one.

• 26:42Speaker 00

  Exactly, exactly.

• 26:44Shaan Puri?

  That's pretty awesome. Why are campgrounds? If I wanted to go to real estate, why would I choose campgrounds instead of whatever? Retail shopping, multifamily, office, whatever? What would be my advantages if I was going into this?

• 26:57Speaker 00

  Strong yield. It's operationally complex, which means there's opportunity to drive value and really attractive depreciation characteristics that are similar to manufactured housing, for example. So you can depreciate the roads and the infrastructure. There's very limited land value in a lot of these more rural markets, limited building value. So the depreciation characteristics are also really attractive to people who are tax sensitive.

• 27:19Shaan Puri?

  Will you do this for forever?

• 27:20Speaker 00

  I hope so.

• 27:21Shaan Puri?

  Like, I love it. Like, looking down ten years or twenty years down the line, where do you hope to be business wise?

• 27:28Speaker 00

  Yes, look, I think the the larger opportunity is more of life moves online. I believe businesses that get people together in the real world going to be more valuable. And there are different types of experience oriented real estate that can speak to that thesis. But campgrounds still have a lot of runway. We still have a big pipeline of properties we'd like to be a part of. And so hopefully, we're doing this for forever.

• 27:52Sam Parr?

  Who are the big dogs in this space?

• 27:53Speaker 00

  Yeah, so there are two very large REITs in this space that initially were into the manufactured housing side of the business, but recognized both from a depreciation perspective and also the infrastructure is very similar, right?

• 28:03Sam Parr?

  There's a campground REIT?

• 28:06Speaker 00

  There are manufactured housing REITs that have a large portion of campground exposure.

• 28:10Sam Parr?

  Oh, that's interesting.

• 28:11Speaker 00

  Yeah, so that was one of the ways we were researching this, that we got a little more comfortable with the idea.

• 28:16Sam Parr?

  When you're buying these, you're buying out the operator and then you put a property manager, property management companies.

• 28:21Speaker 00

  We're the manager.

• 28:23Sam Parr?

  You are the manager.

• 28:23Speaker 00

  Yeah, so initially, we didn't think we were going to go that route initially. So Cody, my partner, went and managed our first location for the first year, scrub toilets, did the whole thing. We thought, learn how to hold a shovel and dig a hole, and then you can hire a third party to manage it like most real estate sponsors do. And what we realized is, A, you can outsource culture, so that was going to be really important for our success. And B, if we wanted to scale, there weren't really, at least at that time, competent third parties that could scale with us. So we made the decision to build an opco in-house and have been managing our properties ever since.

• 28:53Sam Parr?

  Your branding's cool.

• 28:54Speaker 00

  Thank you.

• 28:55Sam Parr?

  It's awesome.

• 28:55Speaker 00

  I appreciate that.

• 28:56Sam Parr?

  And when I was looking, I was like, oh, I would like to go see this. Is there a world where you would buy, buy many of them in a similar region and create a membership, you know, like KO, is it KOA?

• 29:04Speaker 00

  Yeah, we're actually a KOA franchisee in certain markets.

• 29:07Sam Parr?

  So how do I explain KOA to someone? I mean, I don't know.

• 29:10Speaker 00

  McDonald's of campgrounds.

• 29:12Sam Parr?

  Okay.

• 29:12Speaker 00

  They've got 550 flags across the country. They own about 50 of them themselves, but they are a franchise.

• 29:18Sam Parr?

  It's a nonprofit?

• 29:18Speaker 00

  No, no, they're.

• 29:19Sam Parr?

  But is it like he's saying, it's a membership or it's just a brand?

• 29:21Speaker 00

  It's not a membership.

• 29:22Sam Parr?

  You know what you're going to get.

• 29:23Speaker 00

  It's a brand you can trust, that you know what you can get.

• 29:24Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it's like when I, when I do road trips and I want to camp, it's like, something might be a lot nicer, something could be a lot worser, but KOA, I just, I know what I'm rolling up on.

• 29:33Shaan Puri?

  Like I was talking to a, kind of like a famous guy and he was like, oh, out, an hour outside of cities, there's something called, was it postcard cabins or something like that? He's like, oh, I love going to those, my kids. It's like, what's the, what's the story there? Then I looked it up, it's like owned by Marriott or something.

• 29:47Speaker 00

  They sold to Marriott last year. It's a little bit of a different model. They were focused on very remote, single units in destinations where you didn't have to see your neighbors. We are more community focused. So a lot of our campgrounds have seasonal guests, which basically means these are people who reserve the right with specific space for the duration of the season, pay before the season starts and come every year. Grandma's there, aunts and uncles are there, kids are there, everyone's been raised there, all the friends are around, so it's very sticky and communal. But is there a world where you do brand it? So it's similar to each, uh, each property has a, uh, maybe a different shtick, but it's all under one brand? Potentially down the road. I think real estate brands are inherently tough to scale. Yeah. And until we have meaningfully more scale, that's probably not the right focus for us.

• 30:30Speaker 00

  But as regional concentration starts to happen, which is already naturally happening, perhaps that's something to explore. So when I hear you, I, I know nothing about real estate. When I hear you describe this, I think that sounds awesome. You're outdoors all the time. Yeah. Obviously that's not the case. What's the day to day work? Are you just like cold calling these places trying to make a deal? Writing a lot of handwritten letters, uh, a lot of cold calling, a lot of checking up on.

• 30:53Shaan Puri?

  Have you found like a letter with a cookie converts better than like, you know, a call?

• 30:57Speaker 00

  A, a lot, a lot of it is luck. The challenge in this space is effectively our sellers are behind the front desk most of the time, which means in season they're exhausted and they don't want to take a call. So the bottleneck of the business is just getting in touch and wooing.

• 31:10Shaan Puri?

  Finding people who want to sell.

• 31:11Speaker 00

  Building relationships and being the trusted succession plan. Because they care, they don't care. It's not just a money thing for them. Exactly. These are their friends that they have been personally servicing for oftentimes decades. And so whoever's taking over that relationship is a really important. Is there like a, like a camp campground owners, like publication or summit or podcasts? Yeah, there are Facebook groups and conventions and all these things. Posting them all the time with like the same thumbnail image of across all of them. So everyone like starts saying like, oh, this is the guy. He seems like a good guy. A, a bit of that. We're, we're trying to figure out how to do it in an authentic way. And that's a tough balance because there's a level of mistrust around being over marketed to in this space. So a lot of it is catching them on the right day when the campground's a little bit less busy and they answer the phone, we can start a relationship.

• 31:55Speaker 00

  And then, you know, years later, when they're ready to sell, we got the call. That sounds pretty awesome. Is this, um, how many hours a week do you work? A lot. Yeah. You, you grind? Oh, yeah. You're in grind mode? Yeah, absolutely. But I love it.

• 32:06Shaan Puri?

  There's a lot of real estate people, they choose real estate because all real estate is work. There's a way to do it or a, a state you can reach that is not about grinding. And it's about like, you have a lot of flexibility and you got. Cash flow coming in or you flip a property and you can take time off. You know, you can do all kinds of things. Sounds like you're approaching it more like company building than it is.

• 32:27Speaker 00

  Company building and it's a hospitality business.

• 32:29Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 32:29Speaker 00

  Right. We've got tens of thousands of guests every year, 350 people on the team. So there's no, no easy break period.

• 32:37Sam Parr?

  Is there, are the people you employ to run a campsite, are they pains in the asses? Like, are they hippies or are they meth addicts?

• 32:44Speaker 00

  No, we have some amazing people that work with us.

• 32:45Shaan Puri?

  We'll flip this incentive to the manager. You answered this question.

• 32:48Speaker 00

  Especially like the majority of our team is incredible. They are aligned with our mission, which is to be the most hospitable team in the world, which when you're trying to replace a mom and pop operator is really important because the hospitality that a family provides is

• 33:00Sam Parr?

  It was awesome.

• 33:00Speaker 00

  really tough to beat. But we do have some fun stories of team members that haven't been the right set. We had a situation where we found out we had employed a convicted bank robber. We'd robbed nine banks. I had to go personally fire him in person and

• 33:13Sam Parr?

  What was that like?

• 33:14Speaker 00

  Terrifying. Yeah. He actually was incredibly nice and reasonable, but the drive in, I was very scared. Had another situation where we found out through a guest that some people in the team had been cutting down our trees and selling the wood for cash in a Facebook page. So it wasn't a great situation. And again, these are total outlier situations. They're just fun for conversation.

• 33:33Sam Parr?

  Hey, why do you live in New York? Why do you do this in New York?

• 33:37Speaker 00

  My family's here. My wife's here, my son's here, my parents are here, my in-laws are here. So, you know, when you have kids and the grandparents around it. But my partner's in Bozeman and look.

• 33:46Shaan Puri?

  So let's hit it real quick. What's the burning question? If you, if you had a burning question, something that we can give you kind of a quick, maybe a different insight on than, as an outsider, what would be helpful?

• 33:55Speaker 00

  Sure. As you think about what we do and trying to scale culture to a team of hourly employees across 10 states with this workforce, what is something that we could do differently to keep people incentivized to deliver the level of service that we're trying to deliver? And if you can solve this in 10 minutes, I will love you forever.

• 34:14Shaan Puri?

  Well, actually I'll give you a quick story. So my first business was a restaurant business, which has the same problem. Frontline workers in hundreds of locations, if you do it right. And we met with the founder of Chipotle and he said, um, if you can get a frontline worker to care about the customer, like treat this the way you're treating this first location, you'll make billions of dollars. The problem is that's the hardest thing in the world to do. And Chipotle actually did some pretty interesting things where like both in the naming of it, like they have general managers, the general managers get comped. If any employee you ever have becomes a general manager, even if you don't longer work at Chipotle, you get 10 grand in the mail. Like they do lots of things to like build a culture where they get people to stay longer than they normally would, to work their way up the ranks, to actually think

• 34:55Shaan Puri?

  like an owner of that place. And so I would just study, I'd make a list of the 15 companies that have already solved this problem. I would study what works. I'd look for common patterns and I would try to hire people who were there in the early days, either as consultants or, or as a full-time person. Often you can find retired people who you're not going to hire them, but they kind of want something to do and they're sitting on this wealth of knowledge because they helped scale, you know, whatever, some cruise line.

• 35:19Sam Parr?

  Sure.

• 35:20Shaan Puri?

  And, uh, you know, and now they're just retired. And I think that's what I would do if I was going to solve this problem. My real life answer is I run away from businesses that have that problem. Um, cause I just, I'd rather pick a different hard, but you've picked this hard. So good luck.

• 35:32Sam Parr?

  Have you read, uh, uh, obviously you've read Will Gadero's Unreasonable Hospitality.

• 35:36Shaan Puri?

  Big fan.

• 35:37Sam Parr?

  Uh, we had him on the podcast and he told two stories that was interesting because I was like, okay, this works good in a fancy restaurant. Where else does this work? And he told two stories. The first one was, he was like, I worked with the, um, a dealer, a Ford dealer, like a car dealer. And I worked with them. I go, look, let's just find like a forgotten moment where we could blow someone away. And where they, I go, he, Will goes, let's go sit in the car. Let's look around. He goes, what's in the glove box? And the, the dealer was like, nothing. We don't keep anything in there. He goes, I got it. Let's put a $15 Starbucks gift card in the glove box of every card and we're going to put a note that says, we wanted to, whenever you go to open this glove box, we wanted to surprise you with something special. And that's all it said. The second example where he got his team to do it, he told the story of a UPS store owner. Not exactly a high

• 36:22Sam Parr?

  margin or wonderful business necessarily, but he was like, every week the owner had a competition to whatever person did that was considered the most hosp- thing. They just got a $20 bill. That was it. And he was like, just doing that one contest. It changed the whole culture. Cause now everyone was competing on who can be the most hospitable. And just like one little trick and like grownups are just like kids. We just like stickers. Totally. And he told these two stories and I was like, oh, that's, those are so small. And he was like, they tracked like referral business and it, and it definitely worked. And so he gave, you should listen to that podcast. It's my first million, Will Goddare. It was really cool. Amazing. But yeah, that guy's awesome. And he, and he gave you like some actionable tips. Yeah. Fantastic. Thank you.

• 37:04Shaan Puri?

  Right on. Congrats on everything, man. Thanks for coming on.

• 37:06Sam Parr?

  Appreciate it, guys. All right. All right. See you.

• 37:09Shaan Puri?

  Should go camping.

• 37:10Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it's pretty awesome.

• 37:15Sam Parr?

  A billionaire venture capitalist who's one of the greatest investors of all time. His name is Bill Gurley. He recently wrote about the single most important principle when it comes to building a company. It wasn't fundraising. It wasn't product market fit. It wasn't even hiring. Bill said that an engaged peer network might be the most powerful growth tool available, but it's also one of the most under discussed and under utilized. Now, keep in mind, Bill is a seed investor to Uber, Zillow, OpenTable. And so he's had a front row seat into how some of the best companies actually operate. And after decades of watching what separates the winners from the rest, he lands on this. Who you're in the room with is the most important thing to whether you're going to be successful and build a great company or not. Now, most of you founders who are listening to this, you treat a peer network as something that's a nice to have,

• 37:57Sam Parr?

  something that you're going to eventually get to do, but you actually never get around to making it happen. My company Hampton, we have changed that. We build curated groups of highly vetted founders in cities across the United States, Canada and England. This isn't a surface level networking event. It's not a mastermind full of strangers. It's a peer group of eight other entrepreneurs who will challenge you, hold you accountable, push you to grow, and you'll meet with every single month in your city. Apply at joinhampton.com/mfm and I will reply in the next 24 hours to help figure out if there's a good group in your city. That's the right fit. All right, the last one is gonna be funny.

• 38:34Speaker 04

  All right, how's it going?

• 38:35Shaan Puri?

  What's up? All right, welcome to the hot seat, the denim den.

• 38:39Speaker 04

  The denim den.

• 38:42Speaker 04

  Is it live right now?

• 38:43Shaan Puri?

  The dudes in denim, we're live, yes.

• 38:45Sam Parr?

  All right, you wanna give us the big?

• 38:47Speaker 04

  All right, the big number. I'm Brian, I run a company called Autopilot. We manage 1.8 billion dollars. And that makes 30 million dollars per year of revenue for the company. We started about three years ago for the company Autopilot. And one number that kind of blows my mind, and I think it's a testament to how much people want to invest in retail traders. It took Bill Ackman and Ray Dalio about 10 to 15 years to start managing a billion dollars. And the fact that Autopilot, this tech company that plugs into your Robinhood account, your Schwab account, can manage 1.8 billion, to me just blows my mind.

• 39:21Sam Parr?

  I'm shocked, that's crazy, I didn't realize how big you guys were. So what's the business do?

• 39:25Speaker 04

  Yeah, so the business, we're most popular for launching the Nancy Pelosi's stock tracker on Twitter.

• 39:30Shaan Puri?

  I thought your big number was gonna be like 44%. That's Nancy Pelosi's annual returns, or you know, like, what are her annual returns? What does Nancy Pelosi do?

• 39:39Speaker 04

  In the last three years, she's up around 240%. Check the app for the actual performance, I have to say that for SEC compliance. But she's outperformed the SPY significantly. So I think the SPY in that same time is around, is up around 30 to 40%, and she's up 240%.

• 39:56Sam Parr?

  In your app, I can invest alongside her picks, because she's a politician, so...

• 40:01Speaker 04

  Exactly, so there...

• 40:02Sam Parr?

  Well, she's not a politician anymore, though.

• 40:03Speaker 04

  So her, well, she retires in January of 2027. So we have that much time to copy her trades and follow her trades, but basically...

• 40:12Sam Parr?

  I can follow anyone.

• 40:13Speaker 04

  You could follow anyone. So you could follow her, you could follow different politicians. We also take 13 apps from different hedge funds. And that was the way that we kickstarted the marketplace. I think every startup has like that chicken egg problem they have to solve. For a marketplace, you have the supply side and the demand side. And if you don't have anyone to follow, that's good. You're not gonna get people to come follow that person. But if you don't have anyone to follow, no one's gonna wanna launch on your platform. They're like, why am I doing this? So we were like, Chris and I, we got together and we're like, let's just manufacture the supply side. Let's take publicly available information.

• 40:43Sam Parr?

  Because the whole premise of Autopilot was... Anyone can become a head, is that, anyone can become a hedge fund?

• 40:48Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 40:48Sam Parr?

  So instead of like having a Substack newsletter where you could follow my content, I can charge a certain amount and you could follow my trades or my portfolio that I think is good.

• 40:58Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 40:59Sam Parr?

  Got it.

• 40:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, and I think there's a lot of Substacks. I'm sure we've all like read some of them, but you don't know like the performance of this person. Maybe the right one, and they'll always post their winners.

• 41:07Shaan Puri?

  They write a very convincing case and then they talk about how last time they were right, but you only know they're cherry picking the winner.

• 41:13Speaker 04

  They might have been wrong like three or four other times for that one. And so with autopilot, you have a track record of success. You can see people's winners, their losers, their performance, their entire performance. And then you can see how many dollars are following them, their content, etc.

• 41:25Sam Parr?

  How much money have you raised?

• 41:26Speaker 04

  We've raised about 16 million.

• 41:27Sam Parr?

  One six.

• 41:28Speaker 04

  Oh yeah, one six, 16.

• 41:30Sam Parr?

  And 30 million in revenues seems like a good company.

• 41:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 41:34Sam Parr?

  What's that worth?

• 41:35Speaker 04

  I don't know. We're going out to raise a series B. Um, the valuations at different venture firms have, you know, floated around between 300, 400 million, which is crazy, but that is venture money. Not sure what it's actually worth.

• 41:49Sam Parr?

  How, how old are you?

• 41:50Speaker 04

  Uh, 31.

• 41:52Shaan Puri?

  You start this business, what was the first idea you had here? First idea is what?

• 41:57Speaker 04

  Uh, so the first idea we actually started six years ago was an idea, it was a company called Iris. Iris for the eyes, so you could see into other people's portfolios. I was trading on Robinhood.

• 42:05Shaan Puri?

  You've been thinking about this idea for like six plus years.

• 42:08Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah. And I think like, like we all kind of, any retail trader, I don't know if you guys invest in the stock market yourself on an app.

• 42:15Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 42:16Speaker 04

  Anyone's like, there's stocks that just fly and it's kind of obvious. Like I remember buying Nvidia or buying Tesla and you're like, some things are just obvious to younger people, but if you just like, don't do the research, you're not going to get those asymmetric gains.

• 42:29Sam Parr?

  Yeah, but most people don't do the research.

• 42:30Speaker 04

  Most, yeah, most people don't. And I, and I think.

• 42:32Shaan Puri?

  And most things I think are obvious are wrong. Most time when I invest, I lose money.

• 42:37Speaker 04

  That is fair. And there's, do you have like the inverse Kramer effect?

• 42:41Shaan Puri?

  No, not at.

• 42:42Speaker 04

  But I think, I think there's certain people who just have a knack for it. And I think we were talking earlier about like how most people should just invest in index funds. I would say, I think that's true for the most part because a lot of people want to do it themselves, especially, I think there's this advent of DIY. But I think the goal is for autopilot, for you to find someone who you have confidence in and can see the track record of success. You put like 10 to 20% of your net worth, not all of it, but in about 10 to 20% in these high risk, high reward strategies.

• 43:07Sam Parr?

  You know what's fun? Wait, so we're, we're doing this Ray Dalio thing tomorrow. We're interviewing him and he started as a newsletter. It was like a $1,500 a month newsletter that's smart. And then someone was like, hey, if you think you're the man, then why don't you have your own fund? And like, you know, and he's like, maybe I will.

• 43:22Shaan Puri?

  And now we have the biggest one.

• 43:23Sam Parr?

  Yeah, now we're the biggest one. And so my question is like, why doesn't, I, I think, you know, Motley Fool. So Motley Fool does nine figures a year in subscription revenue. So for you don't know, Motley Fool, you give them a hundred dollars or some amount of money and they give you stock picks. But they also have a fund where they invest in their own picks. And I think they have over a billion AUM. It's all public. You can like, look it up. So will like every financial blogger who like is a stock picker, like be an autopilot person?

• 43:50Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think that's gonna happen. We have.

• 43:52Sam Parr?

  But then there's gonna be way less of them because everyone's gonna be able to see who's legit and who's not.

• 43:56Speaker 04

  See, exactly. And so we have a 6,000 person waitlist to like launch a portfolio on autopilot. So we do a lot of due diligence. We look at the track record of success. We'll look at, we'll analyze their actual portfolio. Cause for example, if you run a newsletter, but your actual portfolio is bad, we don't really want you on the platform.

• 44:12Shaan Puri?

  Who's the most famous or successful person that launched their portfolio on here? Not like you're tracking the politicians.

• 44:18Speaker 04

  It's a guy named Peter Wolf. And so I checked out his personal Robinhood account and I was like, this guy's up 200%.

• 44:24Sam Parr?

  How do you check someone's personal Robinhood?

• 44:25Speaker 04

  Just by like, I would go on a video call and I would look at it. But right now we have tech where he could actually connect his Robinhood account to our platform and we could analyze it.

• 44:32Shaan Puri?

  And 200%?

• 44:34Speaker 04

  Over, over, over three years. And I was like, all right, 200% over three years.

• 44:37Shaan Puri?

  That's a pretty small amount of time, right? Three years is like.

• 44:40Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, you're right. And it's like, what does it do in a downturn? Um, but I liked the way he was thinking about what he does to hedge against risk. And I was like, you know what? Like launch on the platform.

• 44:51Shaan Puri?

  So you guys are kind of like, you're, you are like the editorial team. You're, you're the American idol. You're letting them sort of audition. You're picking, right?

• 44:59Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 44:59Shaan Puri?

  So you're picking the pickers.

• 45:02Shaan Puri?

  Then they launch their portfolio, people then pay upfront to do it? Or people just copy the trade and that person gets a commission?

• 45:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, there's like a subscription fee, very similar to Substack.

• 45:11Shaan Puri?

  How much?

• 45:12Speaker 04

  Um, the pilot could, we call them pilots, they could set it. It ranges from a hundred bucks a year to 500 bucks a year.

• 45:17Shaan Puri?

  And so they do that, uh, how much are the top people making as?

• 45:21Speaker 04

  The top people are making around one to $2 million per year on autopilot.

• 45:25Shaan Puri?

  Whoa.

• 45:26Speaker 04

  Which is insane.

• 45:26Shaan Puri?

  That's outside of their stock.

• 45:28Speaker 04

  That's just their autopilot revenue. That's just their autopilot.

• 45:31Shaan Puri?

  And so they, and so that's like, that means they have how many subscribers? Like 10,000 subscribers, 100,000?

• 45:35Speaker 04

  Uh, it depends on how much they charge, but for example, Peter Wolf has around 220 million dollars of following him on autopilot.

• 45:43Shaan Puri?

  Oh, so you see like how many dollars are backing you?

• 45:45Speaker 04

  Yeah. And so again, for example, uh, this is the stat that we pull. Uh, Bill Ackman, who traditionally raised a lot of money really quickly when he graduated Harvard. It took him about, uh, five years to raise $60 million. This guy on autopilot, within one year, raised 220 million dollars.

• 46:02Shaan Puri?

  So you're basically, it's kind of like, um, Justin Bieber was YouTube native.

• 46:07Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 46:08Shaan Puri?

  Right? He was a YouTuber first and became Justin Bieber. And you're basically saying like, the next Bill Ackman, the next generation's Ray Dalio is gonna come from like ours or from you guys specifically.

• 46:19Sam Parr?

  Do I put my money into Peter's fund?

• 46:21Speaker 04

  Yeah. So what would happen is you connect your Robinhood account or whatever brokerage you have. And it, we, it automatically follows his fund. So when he makes a trade, we send a notification to your brokerage to automatically buy or sell that security.

• 46:31Shaan Puri?

  Copy trade, but it's not giving the money to the guy.

• 46:34Speaker 04

  Yeah. And that's actually.

• 46:34Shaan Puri?

  You take the money, you're Robinhood.

• 46:36Speaker 04

  Yeah. And that's, that's how we are able to operate from a legal standpoint. Whenever you're giving custody of assets away to someone, the SEC gets really involved. Is that a brokerage? You have custody? That's when a lot of regulation pop up.

• 46:46Sam Parr?

  How else to business?

• 46:47Speaker 04

  It's autopilot, uh, we've been running autopilot for three years, but the entire business like structure is six years.

• 46:53Sam Parr?

  So autopilot has existed in three awesome years.

• 46:56Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 46:56Sam Parr?

  What's gonna happen in six years when you have three shit years?

• 47:01Speaker 04

  If we have three shit years.

• 47:02Shaan Puri?

  Like stock market shit years is what he's saying.

• 47:04Speaker 04

  I, I think what we see is the retail investor right now perseveres longer than they used to. Three years is a long time. Um, I would say if it was like three years downturn like consistently, I feel like the whole world will, there'll be a lot of questions for the whole world.

• 47:19Sam Parr?

  But that happens.

• 47:20Shaan Puri?

  It happens like Robin Hood and these other guys, right? Like, what do you mean?

• 47:22Speaker 04

  I think three years straight, it hasn't really happened, but I think you'll see like one and a half years happen. So I think.

• 47:28Sam Parr?

  And Robin Hood almost died.

• 47:30Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 47:31Sam Parr?

  But they, they didn't because they had raised billions of dollars.

• 47:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, and they, they had an emergency funding round.

• 47:36Sam Parr?

  Yeah. So like it was a near death.

• 47:38Shaan Puri?

  When was that? During the?

• 47:39Speaker 04

  That was during GameStop. Um, they were about to go under and I think they had raised forty billion dollars like immediately. Um, and, or not, sorry, uh, four billion dollars immediately.

• 47:47Shaan Puri?

  Because they needed liquidity?

• 47:49Speaker 04

  Yeah. There's something with like being a brokerage and like the DTCC, not too familiar with it, but they're like, you need to post up this money. There, we don't have it.

• 47:55Sam Parr?

  Are people nervous to invest, uh, in venture, venture guys that nervous to invest?

• 48:00Speaker 04

  I think what we've seen in venture is just the AI wave. Um, and it's just not fintech was sexy in twenty twenty, twenty twenty one. Right now with our metrics, I would think it would be very exciting for.

• 48:12Sam Parr?

  But with fintech, like we have some friends in fintech, like a lot of fintech companies make like no revenue. Like, you know, you could be like, what's the thing called wealth front? And you could have billions of dollars in AUM and like your fees are so tiny that, so you're making thirty actual million in revenue?

• 48:27Speaker 04

  I think, yeah.

• 48:28Sam Parr?

  Or GMV, like, that you still have to pay to.

• 48:30Speaker 04

  So right now, because we've launched our own portfolios where we take a hundred percent of the revenue, like the Pelosi portfolio is ours. So we get a hundred percent of that revenue. Um, our GMV revenue is thirty million, but our autopilot ARR is around twenty two million.

• 48:42Sam Parr?

  Okay, so you have more real revenue than like, remember Anker was doing carry and like, he had like a billion in AUM, but the revenue was like literally a million.

• 48:51Speaker 04

  I, I think, yeah, I know that's, that to me always blows my mind. I think the thing that's interesting about us is when you look at other traditional asset managers, they just put your money in like ETFs and like mutual funds. And there's no real alpha they're trying to get you. So they can't really charge that much money. Cause you're like, why would I go to them? Why don't I just go to wealth front that charges like point one percent? And so with autopilot, the reason you pay so much, uh, is because these people are, they're, they're, the hope is that they outperform the market. Um, and so I think the average income that people pay on autopilot is around three to four percent.

• 49:21Shaan Puri?

  Does Nancy Pelosi hate you?

• 49:24Speaker 04

  Probably, I would say.

• 49:25Shaan Puri?

  Have you guys interacted? Like, no cease and desist even from her?

• 49:28Speaker 04

  No, no.

• 49:30Sam Parr?

  Wow.

• 49:30Speaker 04

  They're, they're. Or she's getting soft for their old age. I mean, the goal is when she retires. To have her join. We try to have her actually join the fight. And have a commercial. That'd be incredible. We did sponsor the UFC and got a fake Nancy Pelosi. Did you see this? This is incredible. And so the goal was, this was the UFC before the election and Trump was supposed to sit row one at the UFC. And we were like, wouldn't it be funny if we sponsored the UFC and it shows Invest Like a Politician right in front of Donald Trump? And then we have a fake Nancy Pelosi right by him. Like you bought a ticket? Oh, yeah. Or as part of the sponsorship?

• 50:06Shaan Puri?

  We had the ring sponsors.

• 50:08Speaker 04

  Yeah, we had the ring.

• 50:08Shaan Puri?

  Invest Like a Politician.

• 50:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 50:10Shaan Puri?

  And then they hired a lookalike Nancy Pelosi and they had her walking in, they had like the, you had like kind of social content of her entering the arena.

• 50:17Speaker 04

  Did you have to actually buy that ticket? We had to buy that ticket. That ticket row one was $60,000.

• 50:21Shaan Puri?

  No way. How much you spent on the whole marketing buy?

• 50:24Speaker 04

  About $450,000. Did it help? Um, it didn't help directly. I think the brand affinity was there. Would I do it again? Probably not. It would have helped if Trump was actually showed up. That was a weekend when there was an assassination attempt, so. That makes sense. There was, and I was like, dang, he's not here, but I'm glad he's safe. But I think if he did show up, I think the media that would have been picked up, the earned media would have been insane.

• 50:48Shaan Puri?

  Hey, it was ballsy and sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do. I think it's cool. We're still talking about it now, right?

• 50:53Speaker 04

  Exactly.

• 50:54Shaan Puri?

  There's earned attention that happens when you do unique, over the top things. So that's amazing.

• 51:00Speaker 04

  Yeah, we're trying to think of the next stunt, but. How many people work there? Right now, 30, 35. So you're doing 800,000 a revenue per? It's about a million dollars per employee.

• 51:12Shaan Puri?

  Walk me through the like, what does this look like if this is actually big? Because some of the weird ideas, this is a weird idea.

• 51:18Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 51:19Shaan Puri?

  And weird ideas have a lot of potential, even though on the surface it takes a little time to like.

• 51:22Speaker 04

  I guess to me it was kind of like a common sense idea. Like, I don't know, growing up, I was like, man, why can't my Robinhood account just like follow this other guy's Robinhood account automatically? Like, I don't want to just give my funds away to someone else. Like, I want to be able to do stuff myself. But I also want to like go on vacation without worrying about like when to sell or when to buy. I think the solution to me was just the most obvious. But I think the ultimate goal of autopilot is to become the world's largest asset manager. When you look at BlackRock, they actually do this for institution. BlackRock connects all these financial institutions. Companies will go on a tool called BlackRock Aladdin and buy different portfolios. So it already exists at the institution level.

• 51:58Shaan Puri?

  You say buy different portfolios.

• 51:59Speaker 04

  Uh, BlackRock will create their own portfolios based on different risk. Um, and so like, if you're Walmart and you're, you know, heavily invested in, you know, uh, groceries for this quarter, you could actually like hedge your bet on BlackRock Aladdin. If you're a Facebook employee, you could actually find a portfolio on autopilot that hedges like tech. And that, and that tool that BlackRock created makes around $6 billion per year. And BlackRock's one of the largest asset managers. And so I think with autopilot, one of our goals is to get that same tech and like build it for retail investors.

• 52:26Sam Parr?

  How do you get those, how are you going to hire those people?

• 52:29Shaan Puri?

  Well, he's saying people come to the platform like it's two sided marketplace, right?

• 52:32Speaker 04

  Yeah. And so then the pilots come and they're the ones with the ideas. You verify, you know, their employment where they've worked, but really the goal is where anyone could just publish those portfolios and get paid. And then us as a marketplace, we take a, a cut of that revenue.

• 52:44Shaan Puri?

  What would be the burning question?

• 52:46Speaker 04

  I have a bunch of large macro questions on AI, but I also have questions because you guys have been running companies for 10 plus years. Um, one of the biggest things is hiring. How do you find people that are highly motivated? What questions do you ask? Because one thing that I've noticed is when you hire especially more senior level people, their ability to BS is greater than my ability to detect BS. And I think there's certain questions or certain things that you could look at that you guys probably have more experience. That would actually really help autopilot get to the next step.

• 53:15Sam Parr?

  Well, for one, having like a personal audience is like definitely, that's probably one of the biggest perks is that you're able to like, if you cold email someone, they're like, oh, I've heard of you or I know of you at the very least. At best, you have a lot of people who apply, but whenever I would hire for people who, uh, roles that I didn't know what the hell I was doing, I definitely would have like an outsider hiring committee. So I would have outsiders, uh, interview people all the time and that helped me a lot.

• 53:39Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, uh, that was going to be one of my, I, I've probably three or four tips. They're not all related. The first is I find a lot of my hiring mistakes where I didn't actually even understand what I was hiring for. I wasn't clear enough. Sometimes that comes from, I do the work for a little bit and I'm like, oh, okay. What the person's going to need to do is X, Y, Z. As you scale, that happens less, uh, but still writing down, not like a generic, like I think a lot of people outsource the job spec. To either chat GPT, a recruiter is super generic. It's going to attract a generic candidate and it's not actually clear. What are you, what are you trying to get somebody to come change in your company? What do they need to be world class at? What sort of problem are they going to have to solve? And be really, really clear. So that's the first thing. Second is kind of yours on outside help. So I have a buddy who he's better at hiring than I am.

• 54:24Shaan Puri?

  And so what I would do for any executive hire is I would call the favor. Be like, hey, like, once I've done the screening, will you talk to these? Will you talk to my favorite kind of three or four candidates? And give me your take. And it really wasn't about who he picked. It was me becoming a better hire and interviewer by understanding the delta of like, I thought this person was great. He sniffed out their bullshit really quick. Why did he do that? And I'm watching the call and I'm realizing like, oh, he dug in in a different way. Asked a different style of question and didn't accept their first answer at face value. I got to start doing that. And so I got better by doing that, not just because they helped me pick this person, but because I realized where I was weak in the interviewing process. I also think there's two really good pools to hire from.

• 55:07Shaan Puri?

  One is you want people who've either done it before or never done anything, but can do anything. So done it before is who solved this problem before? I always start there because if I can find somebody who's already done this before, that's going to help me a lot. And I mean specifically, so it's not just like, oh, he worked at a successful company, but they do enterprise sales and we don't even do enterprise sales, right? It's like, no, they solve, they, they did this exact thing before this.

• 55:31Sam Parr?

  We've talked about this a lot in the pod where it's like, it's so fun to hire young people. They don't have any experience. It's so fun, right? Cause that's what you were recently, but like nine out of 10 times, if you're just like, hey, you did that there, do that same thing here.

• 55:44Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 55:44Sam Parr?

  And that tends to just be way better.

• 55:46Shaan Puri?

  So we, we will map out which companies have solved this problem before. Who was the person that was there at the year when they had this problem where we are? Who was that person? And then were they the real shot caller on the team? Or were they just doing something, but there's somebody else who was amazing? I like go to that level of detail there. So that's one pool you gotta get good at. And the other pool is like, basically diamonds in the rough, like unproven talent that you can almost be a stock picker on and be like, okay, I think this person's like a 10xer. And I build the company with those two pools of, of people. Um, and you build systems so that you consistently are sourcing from both of those.

• 56:17Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 56:17Shaan Puri?

  Most of the one thing most people, are you the CEO of the business? How much time per week do you spend recruiting right now?

• 56:22Speaker 04

  Right now, about 20%.

• 56:25Shaan Puri?

  That's pretty good. Most people, that means a one full day a week, basically.

• 56:28Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 56:28Shaan Puri?

  Most founders who have like hiring problems, if you ask them that question, they're like, hours?

• 56:32Speaker 04

  I think it used to be that, and now I'm like seeing how important it is.

• 56:36Shaan Puri?

  If you listen to like a lot of the most successful founders that were in a scaling phase, they spend like 30 plus percent of their time just on recruiting.

• 56:45Sam Parr?

  Are you guys profitable?

• 56:47Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 56:47Sam Parr?

  Okay, so you're at 20 million in revenue?

• 56:49Speaker 04

  Or 30 million.

• 56:50Shaan Puri?

  30 million.

• 56:51Sam Parr?

  30 million in revenue.

• 56:52Speaker 04

  Positive, not like gap profitable, but.

• 56:53Sam Parr?

  Sure. So you're default alive?

• 56:56Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 56:57Sam Parr?

  What's the growth rate going to be this year over that year?

• 56:59Speaker 04

  About 250%.

• 57:01Sam Parr?

  I would think almost your entire job is collecting people.

• 57:04Shaan Puri?

  What sorts of people do you need to be hiring right now?

• 57:06Speaker 04

  A lot of software engineers, product people, growth people, marketing people, really anyone. But I think.

• 57:13Shaan Puri?

  People, people.

• 57:14Speaker 04

  Just people. I think the thing is, is just maintaining that high bar and we've just hired a lot of people. And perhaps I'm actually very quick to get rid of people. If they like come in and within like two to three weeks, they haven't really done anything, I just immediately, I'm like, all right, you're getting out of here.

• 57:28Sam Parr?

  Does that impact, that impacts culture, which is why you got to get the hiring, right?

• 57:32Speaker 04

  It impacts culture, but I think everyone who's been here, anyone who, we, we, we tell people, if you're here for longer than three months, you don't have to worry. So I think after the three month mark, people are like, okay, I'm chilling, but before that, everyone's like freaked out.

• 57:45Sam Parr?

  Are you going to only hire in New York?

• 57:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah.

• 57:47Sam Parr?

  Can you afford it?

• 57:48Speaker 04

  We, yeah, yeah, we've, I, I think especially with AI, the salaries that we're paying people, like we, we just, just offered a guy like a 350K salary. And I'm like, this is crazy because I've never made that much money. I still don't. But yeah, I think the, the goal is with AI, each person is much, much more effective. So a good person with AI could be 10, 20 times more effective than an average person with AI.

• 58:11Sam Parr?

  That's crazy.

• 58:12Shaan Puri?

  My CTOs used to say it too. He's like, you're one person, no, you're three people. He says, you're three people. He used to say it all the time. And people like, it's funny, it's like, it's real simple. It's people just realizing what you mean. It's like, no, you need to be able to do the work with three people because you got to be smart about what you don't do. Don't do the bullshit, automate stuff, you know, figure out like a faster path, you know? That's your job is to be three people. And when we used to do offsites, we would say every day is two days. Two days of stuff needs to happen every day. And so I think when you do that, you set up a set a different bar for for your team on how they operate.

• 58:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 58:47Sam Parr?

  Dude, thanks for doing this.

• 58:48Speaker 04

  Dude, this is awesome.

• 58:49Sam Parr?

  You're awesome. We, uh, I, I messaged him, um, roughly two hours ago. And I was like, where are you?

• 58:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, I saw the post. I'm like, yo, Sam, I gotta get on my first.

• 58:57Sam Parr?

  Is that where are you?

• 58:58Speaker 04

  This is a dream.

• 58:58Sam Parr?

  Can you be here?

• 58:59Shaan Puri?

  Well, you guys have are one of the great like growth hack stories like this. You know, what you guys did with the Pelosi tracker, you have another tracker. Do you have other trackers?

• 59:07Speaker 04

  Yeah, we have like, you know, the Leopold tracker.

• 59:08Sam Parr?

  Who's the best?

• 59:10Speaker 04

  Um, right now Leopold, he's up.

• 59:12Shaan Puri?

  You know, is he like a 25 year old?

• 59:14Speaker 04

  He was like a 22 year old. He worked for OpenAI. Now he's like 25. Um, he left OpenAI and then started a fund.

• 59:20Shaan Puri?

  Isn't he up like $10 billion or something?

• 59:22Speaker 04

  Uh, five, around five billion.

• 59:24Sam Parr?

  So he's a billionaire now?

• 59:25Speaker 04

  I think so. I think so.

• 59:26Sam Parr?

  And he raised outside capital?

• 59:28Speaker 04

  Uh, I think, I think of a lot of, a lot of it was friends and family, but he.

• 59:31Shaan Puri?

  Daniel Gross and Nat Friedman and like, smart money was immediately behind him.

• 59:36Sam Parr?

  How much did he raise?

• 59:37Speaker 04

  I think originally 500 million, not that much. And I was at like, upward of $5 billion. But what he did, which was super smart.

• 59:44Sam Parr?

  He knacks in two years?

• 59:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, he looked at what companies, what was the bottlenecks of OpenAI? And he was like, okay, well SSDs, like a lot of people thinking GPUs. He was like SSDs, like Micron. And so he just started buying all of like the other bottlenecks that no one was focusing on. And now they're just like skyrocketing.

• 1:00:00Shaan Puri?

  And isn't like his, somebody is like the chief of staff at Anthropic. Like, he's got some, some, some information flow as well. That's pretty good.

• 1:00:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:00:09Shaan Puri?

  I mean, he's brilliant. Have you read his like situational awareness paper?

• 1:00:11Sam Parr?

  No.

• 1:00:12Shaan Puri?

  Okay, so do this. Uh, I did this and it was very, very useful. Take the PDF for situational awareness. It was like on my list of like.

• 1:00:17Sam Parr?

  What a situational awareness.

• 1:00:18Speaker 04

  That's his hedge fund name.

• 1:00:19Shaan Puri?

  He published, he published a, a white paper or blog post, like a PDF. Before, like before he launched the hedge fund or right after, I think it was actually maybe before. And this is how he attracted the money. He launched this thing, which was basically, he had a very strong point of view on like, what the next 10 years of AI looks like. Very bold predictions. It was like, and then huge tension between China and America. And then because of that, this, it was like super specific predictions of how the puck, where the puck was going. So he published this thing and a lot of smart people were like, yo, this is like one of the smarter takes of what's going on. I think that attracted more capital, more awareness.

• 1:00:55Sam Parr?

  Situational awareness was the name of his publication.

• 1:00:57Shaan Puri?

  Publication and I think it's the name of his, uh, fund or his, his, whatever his company is. So take it, give it to, you have Victor in your Slack?

• 1:01:04Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:05Shaan Puri?

  Just say, Victor, break this down. Into the 10 key ideas, like predictions and hypotheses that he has, explain it and just explain it to me. Victor did a wonderful job. He like just chewed up this PDF for me. It explained it step by step. And then I asked follow up questions and it was just great. And I was like, so did that play out? Was he right about this? Did he trade on that? And it just, it just answered every single question. It was so good.

• 1:01:28Sam Parr?

  Is a guy like him.

• 1:01:30Shaan Puri?

  Victor, by the way, is like an AI thing that Sam put me on to that I am now hooked. I ended up investing in it.

• 1:01:35Sam Parr?

  Yeah, thanks for telling me. After I told you about it, you should have told me that.

• 1:01:38Shaan Puri?

  Well, it was at an absurd valuation, but like it's that good that I was like, yeah.

• 1:01:43Sam Parr?

  Well, I told you, I told him about this tool. He's like, I don't know. I don't trust these tools. These are stupid. And then two days later, he goes, these tools are awesome. Have you heard of this tool?

• 1:01:50Shaan Puri?

  I made him feel dumb. I was like, why do you just trust a random startup with all your stuff? And then I heard about it a little more and I was like, let's try it out. And I tried it in one of my slags. And I was like, this is amazing. Now it's in every business I have.

• 1:02:00Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it's good. But the, I'm curious about the personal, personal side on this. Is he like low key right now? Is he trying to hide out?

• 1:02:07Speaker 04

  No, he posts on Twitter.

• 1:02:09Sam Parr?

  Really?

• 1:02:10Shaan Puri?

  He's a, he's like, he's like very good friends with Dwar Kesh. So he's done the Dwar Kesh pod a couple of times. Where, I mean.

• 1:02:15Sam Parr?

  Is he cool?

• 1:02:16Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:02:17Shaan Puri?

  Do you think like Peter Thiel's cool? Like, you know, like, do you think a lot of Asperger's genius is cool? Yeah, like, yeah, he has that. He's great.

• 1:02:24Sam Parr?

  I love it.

• 1:02:24Shaan Puri?

  I love it. Yeah.

• 1:02:27Speaker 04

  You can follow him on autopilot.

• 1:02:29Shaan Puri?

  I'm saying, yeah, that's not the word I would use. I love it. Yes. I think he's awesome.

• 1:02:33Sam Parr?

  And so you can replicate his?

• 1:02:35Speaker 04

  You can follow his top 15 picks on autopilot.

• 1:02:37Sam Parr?

  And how do you know his picks?

• 1:02:38Speaker 04

  Uh, so he follows a 13F. And so it is.

• 1:02:40Shaan Puri?

  There's a little lag.

• 1:02:41Speaker 04

  There's about a 45 day lag, but even we only track with the lag.

• 1:02:45Sam Parr?

  And a 13 day F, how big does your fund need to be?

• 1:02:47Speaker 04

  Oh, a hundred million dollars.

• 1:02:49Sam Parr?

  Oh, okay. Damn. So he's the guy right now.

• 1:02:52Speaker 04

  He's the guy.

• 1:02:52Shaan Puri?

  He's the guy.

• 1:02:53Sam Parr?

  Does he, does he do podcasts?

• 1:02:55Shaan Puri?

  You have to get them on. There's a couple. We're trying. I think we were reaching out. Yeah.

• 1:02:58Speaker 04

  And it's stuff like this that makes me like very adamant of like, people should always invest in index funds. But there should always be like 10 to 15% of your like net worth on high risk, high reward stocks or portfolios. And so. This is where autopilot doesn't right now want to take a hundred percent of what you have. What percent? I would take ten to fifteen percent. Your liquid net worth, where is it allocated? Um. Who are you following? Right now, I follow basically like twenty different pilots on autopilot right now. So right now of your, of your one hundred percent net worth. So my hundred percent net worth, it's like ninety percent on autopilot. A lot of it is in autopilot equity.

• 1:03:31Shaan Puri?

  I want to know the truthiness. So you said you connect with their brokerage account.

• 1:03:34Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:03:34Shaan Puri?

  But like, people have many different accounts.

• 1:03:36Speaker 04

  Yes, we could connect to all of them. You could.

• 1:03:38Shaan Puri?

  But, but you don't know if, if this is tracking all of them or it's just tracking something, right? I, me as the user, I don't know if you have everything that this person has done, right?

• 1:03:46Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:03:47Shaan Puri?

  Winners and losers.

• 1:03:48Speaker 04

  So what it is, is the people will go on our platform and create a model portfolio. And so you only see the history of the model portfolio from when the pilot joins to, to now. Um, so it's not like actually following their brokerage account.

• 1:03:59Shaan Puri?

  Oh, okay.

• 1:04:00Speaker 04

  Um, but what we do have is we have what's called skin in the game where the pilots will also put their money on autopilot, following their own portfolio. And so you could be like, wow, Peter Wolf has five hundred thousand dollars following his own trades, verified by autopilot.

• 1:04:13Shaan Puri?

  Gotcha, gotcha, gotcha.

• 1:04:14Speaker 04

  Are you having fun? I would say right now I'm having fun. I would say the last three years have been, it's, it's hard. I would, I would say getting from zero to one million in revenue was the hardest thing I've ever had to do. Getting from one to thirty was actually a piece of cake. What do you think the next, the next threshold will be? I think we're on track to hit a hundred million in revenue by March next year. Um, I think it's gonna be difficult, but. Uh, uh, uh, reoccurring revenue, not run rate. Right now, we're at like a seventy million run rate. Um, but we want to get like. I passed on investing in this like twice already. Why don't you do it? I know. Um, but.

• 1:04:49Shaan Puri?

  It seemed like a really hard thing to get off the ground. I think it actually was. Uh, well, I'm a degenerate and they were listening to MFM, I think. So like, they knew that.

• 1:04:59Speaker 04

  I think you've talked to Chris a couple of times.

• 1:05:00Shaan Puri?

  I talked to Chris. I really admired the marketing. So I think I just reached out giving respect. I was like, hey, I, I think it's brilliant what you guys are doing with the plus tracker on Twitter and the UFC. I just thought you guys were doing a really good job of that.

• 1:05:09Speaker 04

  The marketing, we wouldn't be here just because of how hard this stuff is to do. What's your, what was the first round's valuation? The first round was, uh, seven million. Right. Yeah. But that was twenty twenty one. Like, there's a lot of, uh. Yeah, man. Yeah.

• 1:05:25Shaan Puri?

  Well, either way, I'm a fan and I think what you guys are doing is great, man. I appreciate you coming on.

• 1:05:29Sam Parr?

  This is awesome. All right. We appreciate you.

• 1:05:32Shaan Puri?

  Thank you guys.

• 1:05:32Sam Parr?

  We'll talk to you in a little bit.

• 1:05:34Shaan Puri?

  That was awesome. Good picks.

• 1:05:36Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:37Shaan Puri?

  That was cool. That was fun. I hope.

• 1:05:39Sam Parr?

  This is a Hampton plug, by the way. I definitely just went into the New York channel and I just said,

• 1:05:44Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:44Sam Parr?

  who's interesting because I didn't want to tweet it out because I wasn't sure what we're going to get.

• 1:05:47Shaan Puri?

  I'll do the plug for you. If you're an interesting business owner and you want to be in a community of other interesting business owners, join Hampton and maybe you too can be on MFM someday too.

• 1:05:56Sam Parr?

  I didn't realize how big autopilot was. I thought.

• 1:05:59Shaan Puri?

  It's been scaling a lot. Like it wasn't that big like six months ago, you know.

• 1:06:02Sam Parr?

  Well, he told I knew it was 30 million in revenue. I thought that meant like GMV. Because those businesses, not his business, but that category of business is usually pretty shitty.

• 1:06:12Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 1:06:13Sam Parr?

  Like numbers can be huge, but the actual business, but not his. That's insane.

• 1:06:16Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, he's doing well.

• 1:06:17Sam Parr?

  That was cool, right?

• 1:06:18Shaan Puri?

  You know, one of the things with probably the biggest thing for me since I started my first million until today was I remember pre my first million. And like 10 years before that, the full 10 years, I felt like opportunity, like success was this this needle.

• 1:06:33Sam Parr?

  You had to do these things.

• 1:06:34Shaan Puri?

  Haystack or it was this narrow thing. This thing I had to search for in this room. It was so hard to find and I needed this brilliant idea. And if I just, is this the brilliant idea? Where is the brilliant idea that I need perfect execution? I remember opportunities just felt so scarce. And then one of the things of you move to San Francisco, you meet a bunch of people, we start doing this podcast. It's like, you just realize, oh dude, there's thousands of different, tens of thousands of different ways that I can win. Opportunity is everywhere. It's really about picking what's the right fit for me. It was a total like from lack to abundance mindset shift on success. Like where does success live? And like what I like about a thing like this that we did today is those are three ideas

• 1:07:16Shaan Puri?

  that didn't even exist in my my cone of vision, you know, I couldn't even, I didn't even know that people do businesses like.

• 1:07:22Sam Parr?

  And there's also parts of their business and their lifestyles and personality that I want to like, like I love and I want to steal.

• 1:07:27Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 1:07:27Sam Parr?

  But I don't admire the whole thing. Like for example, Alex, I'm like, oh man, he's so calm. Like, like, oh, I need to learn from that. I don't necessarily want to trade what I have for what he has, but like I want to steal this from him.

• 1:07:38Shaan Puri?

  He wasn't in a rush, for better and for worse, but mostly for better.

• 1:07:41Sam Parr?

  And same with Brian, huge business, taking off. I don't want to do all those stunts. I don't want to raise VC, but that's pretty awesome.

• 1:07:48Shaan Puri?

  But I admire the creativity and the like.

• 1:07:50Sam Parr?

  Josh's outdoor business, I'm like, that's awesome. I don't want to raise money, but like it would be maybe fun to own one, like, you know, like there's really small.

• 1:07:57Shaan Puri?

  But I should go camping.

• 1:07:59Sam Parr?

  No, but there's like small things where I like, you know, I think people sometimes in the comments tease us about like having, I hate when people say you have these guests that are out of touch. Whenever I hear that, I'm like, no, you're out of touch with his life.

• 1:08:12Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, that's about you.

• 1:08:14Sam Parr?

  You're out of touch. But what I mean is I'm like, I am equally impressed by like a billion dollar company versus a five million dollar company. They're all, they're both equally awesome.

• 1:08:25Shaan Puri?

  Somebody, Jesse Itzler said this at one of our events. He, it was like an intro. I want somebody, what do people, what should people know about you? Say, hey, I'm Jesse Itzler, blah, blah, blah. I did this. And he goes, my thing is I root for everybody because when you root for everybody, you can never lose. And then he sat down and I was like, yo, I kind of like that fortune cookie shit he just did. I like.

• 1:08:44Sam Parr?

  Is Jesse Itzler really a cool black man?

• 1:08:49Shaan Puri?

  No, he's the best. It's cool black guys like him. It's like, whoa, that's like the next level. So in the same way of like you, when you root for everybody, you can never lose. There's something like, if you think you can learn from everybody, you can never lose, right? So it's like, great, tomorrow we're talking to Ray Dalio. There's going to be some awesome things to learn from him. Again, parts, not the whole. We're not trying to do what he's doing, but I'm still going to pull something away.

• 1:09:09Sam Parr?

  And I can get equal joy.

• 1:09:10Shaan Puri?

  Win and I'm going to have some fun in that hour. Just in the same way, I got wins and learnings and fun in this hour.

• 1:09:17Sam Parr?

  I think the new slogan should be, we can, we, we get, you know, high, high and low, low because I get like equal joy. Like we'll go to the, we'll like pop into a bodega. I'll love that shit. And now we're going to go hang out with like the 80 of the richest person in the world. I'm going to love that equally. Um, all right. That's it. That's the pod.

• 1:09:44Shaan Puri?

  All right, let's take a quick break to talk about a podcast. Because if you're listening to this, you like podcasts. And what's better than one podcast? Another podcast. And let me tell you, another podcast you should check out. It's called Success Story. If you like hearing about different success stories and hearing Q and A sessions with successful business leaders, or hearing keynote presentations, or just checking out conversations about sales and business and marketing tactics, this is a great podcast for you. So check it out wherever you get your podcasts.