Asking 3 young millionaires how they make $1.8M, $5M, & $12M/year

30+ blue-collar business ideas: https://clickhubspot.com/refn Episode 853: Sam Parr ( https://x.com/theSamParr ) and Shaan Puri ( https://x.com/ShaanVP ) ask 3 founders to tell them the juiciest number behind their businesses and get advice live. — Show Notes: (0:00) Nick Haschka, OnPoint Generators (17:39) Kevin Moyer, Smash My Trash (36:54) Noam Eisenberg, TMJaw — Links: • OnPoint Generators - https://onpointgen.com/ • Smash My Trash - https://howitworks.smashmytrash.com/ • Your TMJ Pen - https://yourtmj.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 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., 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.

• 0:00Shaan Puri?

  All right. Today we're playing Shoot Your Shot where we let founders come in, sit in the hot seat and pitch us their business. We got founders that have million dollar businesses all the way up to a hundred million dollar businesses. They get 15 minutes and in it, they start by telling us the one big number. Give us the pitch and shoot the shot. They get to ask any questions that they want.

• 0:17Sam Parr?

  Yeah, we've done this in New York City. This time it's in San Francisco. Whether you're listening on Spotify or YouTube, if you're working out right now, whatever you're doing right now, you need to stop and go to Spotify or go to YouTube, look us up on My First Million, and let us know in the comments which city you want us to go to next.

• 0:33Shaan Puri?

  All right, let's do it.

• 0:43Sam Parr?

  All right, you want to bring the first guy out?

• 0:44Shaan Puri?

  Let's bring him out.

• 0:48Speaker 02

  What's up?

• 0:50Shaan Puri?

  Let's go.

• 0:51Sam Parr?

  Nick, what's good? Hit us with the big number.

• 0:53Speaker 02

  All right. So I'm running a backup generator company in California.

• 0:56Sam Parr?

  Okay.

• 0:57Speaker 02

  We're doing about 12 million in ARR right now.

• 0:59Sam Parr?

  Wow.

• 1:00Speaker 02

  And we've got line of sight to 14 million this year and contracted to go out to around 25.

• 1:06Shaan Puri?

  Okay, so the big number is 12 million in revenue and you're, what are you providing for people? You provide?

• 1:12Speaker 02

  Backup generator, sales and service.

• 1:14Shaan Puri?

  So what does that mean? Like I'm a house, I'm a homeowner out here.

• 1:17Speaker 02

  That's right.

• 1:18Shaan Puri?

  I would just buy a unit, I rent a unit, or you sell to power companies?

• 1:20Speaker 02

  We'll sell generators.

• 1:22Sam Parr?

  Like a Generac?

• 1:22Speaker 02

  Service generators. We typically do higher end units. Our clientele are typically the, like high end estate properties as well as large, more regulated facilities. So every telecom tower, every nursing home, every police station, fire station, every data center.

• 1:39Shaan Puri?

  So it's B to B?

• 1:40Speaker 02

  Mostly B to B. We will, and the product that the high end estate properties get, that's a, it's an industrial product.

• 1:46Shaan Puri?

  There's all these businesses that as soon as somebody says them, I'm like, oh, of course. Yet they've been a complete blind spot to me my entire life. I've never thought about it once. And I always wonder, how did that guy start thinking about this? So how did you realize this is a business I could go?

• 1:59Speaker 02

  So I started my career in management consulting where you dabble around a bunch of different industries. At one point I landed in a corporate job at NRG, large power company in the US, was doing innovation projects there, strategy. And one of the areas we had the hardest time finding good expertise in was backup generators.

• 2:17Sam Parr?

  And a backup generator is if your power goes down for one minute or 12 hours because of a storm or an earthquake or something, this thing kicks on, you're good to go.

• 2:26Speaker 02

  You do not want the power to go out when you're on the surgery table unless there's a backup generator there to cover.

• 2:31Sam Parr?

  Great.

• 2:32Speaker 02

  And so every surgery center, every hospital, they've all got them.

• 2:35Sam Parr?

  When did you start the company?

• 2:36Speaker 02

  So I acquired the first one. And so this has been an acquisition venture. It started with a thesis, went around looking, trying to find a service provider to buy. We bought our first one in January 2024, and then bought a second one about five, six months later.

• 2:50Shaan Puri?

  And describe the industry. So is this a bunch of mom and pop companies, a few large players? Like what does the industry even look like?

• 2:56Speaker 02

  So very barbelled. So you've got, we go head to head up against big, big industrial names like Caterpillar and Cummins and Generac on the direct side where we're competing for the business of, you know, marquee names, big counties, big state contracts and things like that. We also go head to head against the small mom and pop players. But really, the lion's share of the market is owned by the bigger platforms.

• 3:19Shaan Puri?

  So you did a search. You quit your job and did a search? You searched on the side? What'd you do?

• 3:22Speaker 02

  So this was actually, this is my third search venture. I had done, my first one was an office plant company.

• 3:30Sam Parr?

  What?

• 3:30Speaker 02

  An office plant company?

• 3:31Shaan Puri?

  Plants?

• 3:32Speaker 02

  Yep. Like, yep, probably, possibly those.

• 3:35Sam Parr?

  How'd that go?

• 3:37Speaker 02

  That's still own it.

• 3:38Sam Parr?

  You own it?

• 3:39Speaker 02

  Bought it in 2017. We've done 14 acquisitions on that platform.

• 3:43Sam Parr?

  Hold on. How much revenue does that do?

• 3:47Speaker 02

  That's around 10 million.

• 3:48Sam Parr?

  What? You owned it outright?

• 3:49Speaker 02

  Me and my partner. Yeah.

• 3:50Sam Parr?

  Okay. How much EBITDA?

• 3:53Speaker 02

  A little over two.

• 3:53Shaan Puri?

  Was that a thesis or that was I stumbled into a guy who owned a plant?

• 3:57Speaker 02

  That was a failed venture backed startup. There's gotta be an easier way to make money, sitting on my couch, cruising biz by sell in the way that a lot of people do with Zillow, instead of?

• 4:07Sam Parr?

  You had a venture company that failed?

• 4:10Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 4:11Sam Parr?

  And so you were like a management consultant? But you were like a management consultant nerd? You were just like a, an academic?

• 4:17Speaker 02

  Totally.

• 4:18Sam Parr?

  Like nerdy guy?

• 4:18Speaker 02

  Ivory Tower, here's your board deck.

• 4:20Sam Parr?

  Yeah, you're like, all right, now I need to get after it. So this company, it failed. Now we're gonna get into plants.

• 4:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 4:25Shaan Puri?

  Okay, I'm gonna buy something.

• 4:26Speaker 02

  Bought it with an SBA loan. It was like the polar opposite of what I had been doing throughout my career, which is a mix of like management consulting, boardroom, Fortune 500 type of stuff, and venture backed startups. And I guess there's a third leg to that, which is kind of the small business world.

• 4:43Sam Parr?

  You did plants, then what?

• 4:44Speaker 02

  We carved out a portfolio of commercial landscaping contracts in that plant business and sold that to private equity.

• 4:50Sam Parr?

  How much did you sell for?

• 4:51Speaker 02

  Just a little over a million.

• 4:53Sam Parr?

  Okay, so that was the whole?

• 4:54Speaker 02

  But it was, it was 20% of my cash flow and like 80% of my headaches. And that freed me up. Cause I was like the biz dev guy. I was finding the plant acquisitions. I, that business, I built it. I bought, did the first acquisition. I did four after that. And then I kind of handed off to my partner to run.

• 5:12Shaan Puri?

  You like doing the search, the biz dev, and then you like doing the M and A? You have a partner who does operations or?

• 5:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right.

• 5:18Sam Parr?

  How much should you raise for this third business? What's it called? It's called On Point?

• 5:22Speaker 02

  On Point. Yeah. So this is the first time we've raised outside money because we felt that, given where the macros were in terms of electricity demand booming, data center market booming, you know, electrical contractors booming, we felt like to meet the opportunity where, where it was gonna be, like we needed to raise some outside capital. So we brought in six and a half million. We did a significant chunk of it, but there's, you know, about five million of outside investment in this one.

• 5:47Sam Parr?

  And how big is this gonna get?

• 5:48Speaker 02

  I don't know yet. I think this business can get really, really big.

• 5:51Sam Parr?

  Hundreds of millions?

• 5:51Speaker 02

  Hundreds of millions. I think we can get to, we're, the question will be, it's really revenue throughput. Do we have the technicians to pull off the work? I've got the work contracted. It's pure, it's purely an execution game at this point.

• 6:02Shaan Puri?

  And so describe, you said you go up against Caterpillar and these other larger players? What, what axes do you need to compete on? Is it price? Is it, how do you win the pitch?

• 6:11Speaker 02

  100% speed. They are slow. They're good at what they do, but they're very slow.

• 6:16Shaan Puri?

  What's the speed difference? How long, just how long?

• 6:19Speaker 02

  For us, and AI has been an absolutely like central part of our strategy of speeding up every single process in that business. I need to be able to deliver a quote while my guy's there. These are complex machines with a very difficult parts supply chain. It can take weeks to turn around a quote from a, hey, your generator's broken to, hey, here's what it's gonna cost me to fix it and when we can do it. It's very, very slow business and it's very, very difficult because of all the research and tribal knowledge and it's, you know, spread across all different vendors.

• 6:46Shaan Puri?

  How do you use AI to speed up that quote? Let's say the guy's standing there.

• 6:49Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 6:49Shaan Puri?

  Understanding what's the issue?

• 6:51Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 6:51Shaan Puri?

  Is he inputting something on his phone and he's getting?

• 6:55Speaker 02

  And we've done all the backend work of every document that we have ever produced as a company has been ingested and studied by AI. We've built a retrieval augmented system so that we can do research on the fly and produce answers on the fly.

• 7:10Sam Parr?

  This is great. So there's companies, I've got a friend that owned an HVAC company and it does close to 200 million in revenue. And he was complaining and lamenting overall, my business sucks for this reason, and his, you know, you're stuck for that reason. And he was, and he was telling me like, he was like, well, we just have to get better at buying Google AdWords. And he was like, the demand's there. Like I just have to like operate. And I was like, so envious of that because that's not what I have. I've got to like teach people what it is and whatever. Are you in the weeds of training people or is your personal job just finding who else you're gonna buy?

• 7:41Speaker 02

  So we've kind of put a pause on M and A right now. We're really trying to nail the operational workflows.

• 7:47Sam Parr?

  And that's what you're doing?

• 7:47Speaker 02

  And AI support. And I'm doing a lot of the building myself.

• 7:50Sam Parr?

  Is it a pain in the ass to train these technicians?

• 7:52Speaker 02

  I'd say it's more than a pain in the ass. It's impossible. Like this is very, very-

• 7:56Shaan Puri?

  Training or finding them, which was?

• 7:58Speaker 02

  Both. Because A, there's not enough of them. Those that exist are on their way out, not in.

• 8:04Sam Parr?

  And who is they?

• 8:06Speaker 02

  Field technicians.

• 8:06Sam Parr?

  I know, but what, what do they, like, are they in the same category of an HVAC person where like, if you give me eight weeks of your time, I could teach you how to do this, but it's hard to find someone who's willing to do it?

• 8:15Speaker 02

  I'd say not far off of that.

• 8:17Sam Parr?

  Okay.

• 8:18Speaker 02

  It's mechanical, it's electrical, and it's both. And usually very few guys are good at both. It's increasingly instrumentation and controls. So there's more computer and like troubleshooting diagnostics.

• 8:29Shaan Puri?

  How much does a field technician make? Is this like a job that people are gonna want? Cause it's, pays really well?

• 8:33Speaker 02

  This is a good job. This is an opportunity where the elite field technicians, they will clear well into the six figures, a guy with a high school education, but it takes time to accumulate the experience. And you don't see a lot of generators, so experience accumulates slowly. Even in HVAC, you might do, you know, three, four service calls a day. Our guys are doing one or two service calls a day.

• 8:54Sam Parr?

  And the consequences are massive.

• 8:55Speaker 02

  The consequences are massive.

• 8:56Sam Parr?

  How big's the average contract?

• 8:58Shaan Puri?

  Hey, I want to tell you about something pretty cool. We have a database of all of the business ideas that have been discussed on this podcast. So hundreds of episodes, the team at HubSpot went through, they pulled out all 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.

• 9:23Sam Parr?

  How big's the average contract?

• 9:25Speaker 02

  It varies tremendously depending on whether you're dealing with a, you know, a three megawatt unit at an AWS data center or a Frank and Shirley's generator in their backyard. For the, you know, data center units, you're probably talking 25,000 a year in service revenue.

• 9:41Sam Parr?

  And is there ever churn?

• 9:43Speaker 02

  There is. But generally, they kind of want accountability on the vendor. And so, and that is one thing that's hard about competing against Caterpillar, right? Like, the, the facilities guys are like, well, I hired Caterpillar and they couldn't figure it out. So, right?

• 9:57Shaan Puri?

  So, so let me make sure I understand. It sounds like you do, you sell the generators, but you service them. I would guess servicing is more than new, new sales.

• 10:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:05Shaan Puri?

  And you get brought in directly by the facility or by the guy, whoever the company is that made that? They, they put service, they need service technicians out in the field everywhere. So they subcontract out to you.

• 10:14Speaker 02

  So we're an independent, so we have to, we have to eat what we kill, basically.

• 10:19Shaan Puri?

  So you go straight to the facility?

• 10:20Speaker 02

  We gotta go straight to the facility. We can work through the project, through the facilities operations companies, like the JLLs and CBRE real estate.

• 10:27Shaan Puri?

  And now you're, you're saying my biggest bottleneck is I gotta get enough technicians to be able to service the workload that we have. How are you gonna solve that problem?

• 10:35Speaker 02

  So, we're still figuring it out. We've got, you know, we've got every recruiter spun up sending us leads.

• 10:43Shaan Puri?

  Okay.

• 10:44Speaker 02

  Some of it is like, you can pay to bring guys here. Will they stay here? Open question. I'd say, we can find the guys who says that he knows how to fix those things. Can we select for the guys who actually know how to fix those things? That's, I think, we've had a harder, we've had an easier time finding people and getting them in the door and selling them on joining our company than we have had being damn certain that when that guy shows up there, he's gonna find the problem and fix the.

• 11:09Sam Parr?

  But what did the, um, like, we, this is a second time we've mentioned him, but like, you know, Tommy Mello, the A1 garage door guy? Have you heard of that guy?

• 11:16Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 11:16Sam Parr?

  Um, and then there's like tons of these like influencers who are legit business guys. What have they done to like, cause they have all had the exact same thing where they're like, you know, garage doors, like a lot of the people who come to me are kind of like problematic. And I gotta teach him how to like, I think he said, he's like, we teach him how to like pet the dog. You pet the dog right when you come in. You ask, may I come in?

• 11:34Shaan Puri?

  He does like sales excellence.

• 11:35Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 11:35Shaan Puri?

  But still, he needs the technicians to go do the work. One of the things we always talk about is like, uh, as an entrepreneur, it's easy to feel like I have this, this problem, this burden. And it's like unique to me. And it's like, very few problems in your business haven't already been solved by somebody else. So the easy thing to ask them, who else has solved this problem and how, how the heck did they do it? So he's saying, how the heck did the garage or tech, how did the garage companies get a scale up their technician force? Who do you look at that's already done this?

• 12:03Speaker 02

  So you basically have to start a trade school. You are the trade school. You have to bring these guys up.

• 12:07Sam Parr?

  My AC buddy who I'm referring to, he has Hoffman University.

• 12:10Speaker 02

  You have to.

• 12:11Shaan Puri?

  Have you done that?

• 12:11Speaker 02

  Not yet. We're not big enough to do it just yet. We're working on building our shop, building, we have a third bay in our shop that is the training bay. And we've handed our lead technician, you know, an assignment to, we gotta build out our own training capabilities. We've built the digital side of it. So turning every job we do into a training experience that can be relayed under the team. Because I need the guys to get more than one rep a day, right? If I can turn every rep we do that day.

• 12:39Shaan Puri?

  Well, how do you do that?

• 12:40Speaker 02

  Into a bunch of reps?

• 12:40Shaan Puri?

  How are you turning it into like a simulation?

• 12:42Speaker 02

  So as guys submit their field reports, we have a pre-job briefing. So we prepare these guys to go out to the field like they're CIA agents being dropped into Afghanistan, right? Here's everything we know about this unit. Here's everything we've ever seen. They play it on their phone. They can listen and hear, hey, this is what I'm, this is what I'm facing. And so, and that's the AI side. Then they do their report and they document their findings in the report. Um, and we've got a pretty slick data collection process where they can use their voice to produce their report. We've got AI reading everything that they do, everything that they say. And then at the end of the process, when they submit their report, we will flag the reports that are the best training material.

• 13:24Sam Parr?

  When you're laying in bed at night and you're thinking, if we can do this, this and this, maybe in five years we could sell. Or maybe I can have this much annual income or like whatever that number, that vanity thing is. For you, what is that?

• 13:38Speaker 02

  Man, I think for me, this is my third time around and I feel like I'm doing this because I chose this. I wanted to be doing this. So it's kind of about like, what are all the cool capabilities that we could build that have never been possible before?

• 13:51Sam Parr?

  Well, okay, and be specific though, when you're like, when you're thinking about this, you're like, what is that? Like, what really gets you going?

• 13:56Speaker 02

  Um, I think making like really great jobs for these tradesmen, helping them, like, ordinary people achieve like really, really extraordinary performance.

• 14:07Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 14:07Speaker 02

  Um, I'm like super excited about what we're gonna be able to do and like how we're gonna be able to empower people who have never really worked for a company that gave a crap that much about the process.

• 14:17Sam Parr?

  There was this really cool company, I forget the name, but they took out an ad in the Wall Street Journal, the New York Times, or some huge national publication. And they played off this idea of like, you know how like your grandfather walked me around the city and he's like, you see that building? I made that, you know? And he was just part of the construction crew or like, you know, look, about 50 years ago, we installed this thing because, and there's like this pride. And the ad that they put out, cause they were trying to recruit people is, do you really wanna brag to your kids that you made B2B software just a little bit better? You know, something like that. And like, I wonder if there's like some cool like, um, mission-driven like angles that you could take to this like recruiting? Because when you talk about like, I'm passionate about giving like everyday guys like a chance, like do something interesting.

• 14:57Speaker 02

  No, it's an interesting idea. And I think there's definitely a point of pride over, oh, we work on, you know, it's kind of fun too, cause we work on a lot of high-end properties. So these are like, you know, lifestyles of the rich and famous type of stuff where we work on those properties. We put those generators in.

• 15:10Shaan Puri?

  And the mission critical hospitals, whatnot.

• 15:12Speaker 02

  And that, right? There's such an important duty.

• 15:15Shaan Puri?

  It seems like, like I coached high school basketball this year and our star player, the power forward, he's graduating. We were like, do you wanna go play in college? We can get you in front of some scouts. And he's like, I'm going to trade school. He's like, I'm not gonna, the trade school doesn't have a basketball team. He wanted to go work for, you know, he wanted to become like an electrician, but like feel like crazy stuff, like hanging out of a helicopter, doing some repair and some crazy site. And it made me realize, you know, there's probably a lot of people who are like, have the talent, you know, whether it's veterans, whether it's ex-athletes. They kind of like the idea of doing certain types of work, getting paid really well for it, not having to go to a four-year university. And I wonder how you can service more of them faster or where they're going today that you can tap into that flow.

• 16:00Speaker 02

  I think the stigma of the trades is gone. I think that is behind us. Like the things that we were told when we were, you know, coming up, like, you know, you gotta go to college, better make sure it's a good one, yada, yada. I think that, there's some of that still there, but like, I think the stigma of going into the trades is behind us. And now it's like, this is the opportunity for the tradesman's craft to shine.

• 16:20Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 16:20Speaker 02

  And we're trying to give them the tools so that they really can, and so that they can grow faster, learn faster.

• 16:25Shaan Puri?

  Well, nobody's built a great brand around the trade school, right? Like, is there a, what's Harvard? What's Stanford for, for that, right? Like, where could you be proud that you got into, that you're going, that you're coming out like a Navy SEAL who's gonna be able to do all these amazing things? That to me is a even bigger opportunity than what you're currently doing, cause that serves.

• 16:41Sam Parr?

  Like a hundred and fifty to a thousand dollars.

• 16:42Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, it serves all kinds of industries, you know?

• 16:45Speaker 02

  And there are some, they're really niche, you know, and they're, uh, they're with that specific trade.

• 16:51Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 16:51Speaker 02

  And so it's, there's not like a big one that everybody would know, oh, that's the stamp of approval. But there's not a Harvard of the trades in general, which I do think there's like an excellent opportunity there. And I would love to work on that. I feel like right now I'm working toward that and I need to understand it at a level of depth and have solved it for one quarter of the universe. So that we could think about, okay, what, what, how would you next level this thing?

• 17:12Sam Parr?

  You have very, um, kinetic and contagious energy. I, I have a feeling that in the next four or five years, you're gonna be significantly further along than where you are now. It's very evident.

• 17:23Shaan Puri?

  You picked an amazing space and, uh, it's so cool. You know, we had a guy, the last guy was like a franchise guy and you're, you're doing entrepreneurship through search and acquisition. Uh, I just love all the different styles, so I appreciate you coming on, man.

• 17:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, thanks for having me.

• 17:37Sam Parr?

  All right, we appreciate you. Thank you.

• 17:42Shaan 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.

• 18:10Speaker 02

  We have someone else?

• 18:11Shaan Puri?

  Welcome.

• 18:13Speaker 03

  How's it going?

• 18:14Shaan Puri?

  Good, excellent posture.

• 18:15Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 18:16Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 18:16Sam Parr?

  Yeah, you scream good posture.

• 18:18Speaker 03

  I work on it.

• 18:18Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, look at this guy, gee. Up my game a little bit here. Yeah, thank you.

• 18:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 18:23Shaan Puri?

  All right, what's your name?

• 18:24Speaker 03

  What's up, guys? I'm Kevin.

• 18:25Shaan Puri?

  Kevin?

• 18:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 18:26Shaan Puri?

  Welcome.

• 18:27Speaker 03

  Thank you.

• 18:28Shaan Puri?

  Welcome to shoot your shot. Um, hit us with the big number to start.

• 18:31Speaker 03

  So big's relative. My number is 1.8 million. My, I think I'm a little unique with this setup, cause I actually just sold my business about two, three weeks ago.

• 18:39Sam Parr?

  Nice.

• 18:39Speaker 03

  That's what I sold it for, starter business on the board.

• 18:42Sam Parr?

  Wait, so you are?

• 18:43Shaan Puri?

  You just exited at 1.8?

• 18:44Speaker 03

  Just exited at 1.8, yeah.

• 18:46Sam Parr?

  What did you sell for 1.8 million dollars?

• 18:48Speaker 03

  Uh, it was a franchise business called Smash My Trash.

• 18:51Shaan Puri?

  Smash My Trash. I've heard of this. Have you heard of this before?

• 18:53Sam Parr?

  No, what is Smash My Trash?

• 18:55Shaan Puri?

  Explain, explain.

• 18:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, so the basic concept is companies that produce a lot of trash, industrial businesses, warehouses, factories, things like that, throw away a lot of stuff in these open top dumpsters that are these rectangles that hold like 40 cubic yards of stuff. The pricing model is that every time you fill it up and you need a new one, you have to get it replaced and that can cost like a thousand dollars.

• 19:14Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I used to like get on top of ours and like jump up and down.

• 19:17Speaker 03

  That's it. So imagine.

• 19:19Shaan Puri?

  Giant thing came and smashed the trash down.

• 19:22Sam Parr?

  I thought, I was gonna like hire someone to come and jump on the trash for me.

• 19:25Speaker 03

  That was it. No, so we have these trucks that back up to the dumpster. Like you said, Sean, there's a crane on the back with this spinning spike yarn that goes in, pushes the trash down. The deal is basically, let's say you get 10 pickups a month, a thousand bucks. That's $10,000 a month you're spending on trash. We'll get you down to just round numbers, five, and we'll split the savings with you.

• 19:45Sam Parr?

  Wait, so one, a, a large company will spend 10 grand a month in trash?

• 19:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, or more.

• 19:49Sam Parr?

  Who? Like a warehouse?

• 19:50Speaker 03

  Big factories, production facilities in like agricultural California is where I was doing a lot of work.

• 19:57Sam Parr?

  Wow.

• 19:57Speaker 03

  Companies that just.

• 19:58Shaan Puri?

  So these are like, you just go to the parking lot, there's a huge dumpster back there. That's, that was the opportunity.

• 20:03Speaker 03

  That's the opportunity.

• 20:04Shaan Puri?

  Is to smash the trash down, so you have to do less pickups per, per thing, cause you're paying per pickup.

• 20:10Speaker 03

  That's it.

• 20:11Sam Parr?

  And do smash, smashing trucks exist already?

• 20:14Speaker 03

  It was a new concept, so it's a franchise. This guy came up with the idea, started growing fast, decided to franchise it. So these didn't really exist. They exist in Europe, but they're like mounted to the side of the building. So those companies would back the dumpster up. So the insight was throw these things on a truck, have them drive around and do it as like a mobile service.

• 20:32Shaan Puri?

  You bought a franchise and then now sold your franchise?

• 20:35Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 20:35Shaan Puri?

  One location, how many?

• 20:37Speaker 03

  Five locations.

• 20:38Shaan Puri?

  Five locations.

• 20:39Sam Parr?

  How much did it cost to buy in?

• 20:41Speaker 03

  I bought it in chunks, so I think my buy-in was like 185K.

• 20:45Sam Parr?

  Upfront?

• 20:45Speaker 03

  Upfront. And then I.

• 20:46Sam Parr?

  How did you have money before?

• 20:48Speaker 03

  I worked in tech. I was like somebody who worked in SaaS and, uh, had like the W2 thing.

• 20:53Shaan Puri?

  Sales or what were you doing?

• 20:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, I was in like sales and product and stuff like that, like the kind of classic Bay Area W2 thing.

• 20:58Shaan Puri?

  So this is so interesting. So you're just sitting there at the office, you got a good job, you're working in tech. And yet you're like, I need to get out there amongst the trash. What was the, what was the chain of events that led you to like, quit this safe thing and go buy into a smash my trash franchise?

• 21:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's a couple of things. It was like a growing sense of dissatisfaction. I like, I kind of started to realize late in life that I wanted to work for myself. And I was also like in this venture world where you're like going after like the next round of funding, this eventual exit. And I didn't, I was like blind to the way that a lot of the world worked in terms of like cash flowing, blue collar businesses. And I started to get bit by that bug a little bit, like I started hearing stuff about that. And I got interested. And then it was really when I got married and went on my honeymoon. And I waited till like the last minute to book our honeymoon. So we stayed at places that like, we probably shouldn't have gone to, that were nicer than we otherwise would have. Started talking about, started talking to people there at the pool and stuff and been like,

• 21:53Shaan Puri?

  No way.

• 21:54Sam Parr?

  You're like, all the rich guys are trash people.

• 21:57Speaker 03

  People make cash doing businesses that are off the beaten path.

• 22:01Shaan Puri?

  Do you remember like, what were they, what were they saying? What did they do?

• 22:04Speaker 03

  So one guy did like real estate, one guy did like a food truck, but like did like a food truck, like as a serious operation, like had many of them. I'd also had the seed planted on my bachelor party. I was there with my friend who was in private equity. And he actually got in smash my trash before me.

• 22:17Shaan Puri?

  Gotcha.

• 22:18Speaker 03

  So he planted the seed and he's a private equity guy.

• 22:20Sam Parr?

  Of the, of the 180, how much of, was that a huge chunk of your savings?

• 22:25Speaker 03

  I did 85 myself. A buddy gave me 70. And then, so that was like the equity and then I did a $350,000 SBA loan as well.

• 22:34Shaan Puri?

  Were you like, this has to work? Or was this like a safe, like I'm putting a small amount in, I'm hedging.

• 22:40Speaker 03

  It felt like a pretty safe side bet. I had more than that, that I would have been able to, but it felt uncomfortable.

• 22:46Shaan Puri?

  Okay. So you, you decided to go in, you buy one. What happens?

• 22:49Speaker 03

  So I actually bought three out of the gate.

• 22:51Shaan Puri?

  Okay.

• 22:51Speaker 03

  I bought, I bought three territories out of the gate. Now territories in franchise world, like a lot of times people picture restaurants where like it's clearly a unit. This is area. So I mean, it's really one business. The areas are a little arbitrary.

• 23:01Sam Parr?

  How many years ago was this?

• 23:02Speaker 03

  This is in 2022. I got started.

• 23:04Sam Parr?

  Okay. So four years.

• 23:05Speaker 03

  Four years ago. So got started. And part of the reason I got into it was I was interested in something where I could draw a direct line between like brute force effort and cash in the bank. I felt like in tech world, I was so many layers abstracted away from like eventually making money.

• 23:23Sam Parr?

  Metric, right? Brute force to cash.

• 23:25Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly.

• 23:26Shaan Puri?

  So what, what do you mean? You just meant like if more people I call, the more money I'm gonna make.

• 23:30Speaker 03

  Right. Like I had this no brainer offer. I had these people who definitely could use this and 100% could make money. And all I needed to do was go get them to believe me.

• 23:40Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 23:41Speaker 03

  And I could just start making cash and it wasn't like this promise of some future outcome. And I found that really motivating.

• 23:47Shaan Puri?

  Okay.

• 23:47Speaker 03

  So I paid somebody overseas to like zoom in on Google satellite view and put pins on every dumpster.

• 23:55Shaan Puri?

  Okay.

• 23:55Speaker 03

  And like, that was my plan. And I would drive from Walnut Creek down to, you know, San Jose to Salinas, like hour and a half, two hours each way every day. And just like trespass, go into warehouses, try to talk to like the person there who's in charge of the dumpster.

• 24:10Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 24:11Speaker 03

  And just kind of willed it into existence, started driving beyond the confines of my territory.

• 24:17Shaan Puri?

  Zoom in, you go, you drive, okay, contractor gives you a pin, you drive to the pin. You get there, you weren't invited. Knock, knock. Now what?

• 24:25Speaker 03

  So not even knock, knock. Drive right around to the back where the dumpster is.

• 24:29Shaan Puri?

  Okay.

• 24:29Speaker 03

  My, so I built this up over time. I learned.

• 24:31Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 24:32Speaker 03

  You don't want to go to the office because the office, they're gonna, you know, they're gonna tell you no. So what I would do is I had a red hard hat that I would put on, get the clip cord going. Walk into the back and try to find the person who's physically loading the dumpster. You got the red hard hat on, start asking questions. Most of the time they would just tell me.

• 24:48Sam Parr?

  He's like, dude, there's no construction around here.

• 24:51Shaan Puri?

  You're the trash contractor for the company.

• 24:54Speaker 03

  Right. They're just not sure. They're just like, this guy's asking me like, how many pickups do you get? Who's in charge of it? I start to kind of size the account, get some info, and then I would go to the front armed with info. And then I would, you know, work my way to the decision maker.

• 25:06Sam Parr?

  How many months until your first dollar?

• 25:09Speaker 03

  Right away. Right away. And the first.

• 25:11Shaan Puri?

  How thrilling was that first sale?

• 25:12Speaker 03

  Oh, it was great. It was great. I was like out with our neighbors when they first, because these are like kind of chunky contracts. We're talking about like large, I mean, for me at the time, you know, couple thousand bucks a month recurring revenue. So it only took two, three, four accounts to basically pay my debt service and my driver.

• 25:30Sam Parr?

  So you had a driver right off the bat?

• 25:31Speaker 03

  I hired a driver right off the bat. Yeah.

• 25:34Shaan Puri?

  And did Smash Trash give you this playbook or you were just like, I'm gonna red hard hat this? Or they were like, hey, here's why you do it?

• 25:40Speaker 03

  They didn't tell me about the red hard hat, but they gave you the basic playbook. And then I, before I opened, went around to a couple other franchisees, including my buddy I mentioned. And just was like, show me everything. How do you guys do it? What works?

• 25:52Sam Parr?

  It's sort of like, have you ever seen those videos where someone's, something, my friend Neville Madora, he's an Indian guy and during South by Southwest, every year he dresses up like a chic. Like he wears like a white thing and a hat. And then he's just like, I get it.

• 26:11Sam Parr?

  And then there's like these Instagram videos of guys who like, they're like, I'm just gonna like, look like a DJ, whatever that means. And then they get into the club. Uh, that, that's like this version of that.

• 26:21Speaker 03

  Exactly. People just don't ask questions.

• 26:23Shaan Puri?

  So you, this is amazing. Okay. So you said you sold the business now. Year one, do you remember kind of like what was the P and L? Like what'd you, what'd you make in first year of business?

• 26:31Speaker 03

  It's hard to say. I, because in the first year I bought the two additional franchises. So one day I drove beyond the bounds of my territory and I found like the trash gold mine. And I bought those two franchises and bought two more trucks.

• 26:44Shaan Puri?

  Okay.

• 26:45Speaker 03

  So all the cash went right back in.

• 26:46Shaan Puri?

  Were all three territories successful or one sucked, but another one was amazing and made up for it?

• 26:50Speaker 03

  That was kind of it. There was a great one. There's an okay one. There's a medium one. And then I added on like these two amazing ones. So I had to buy two trucks, had to buy two new territories. So all the cash went right back into that. I think I probably did like six to 800K of top line in those first two years.

• 27:09Sam Parr?

  Wow. What was the biggest pain in the ass looking back?

• 27:12Speaker 03

  The trucks.

• 27:13Sam Parr?

  The operators or?

• 27:14Speaker 03

  Um, not even the operators. Fixing the trucks when there's issues was something I just don't, it's a big truck with hydraulic equipment. And I eventually just kind of adopted the philosophy that like, I had a mechanic. He was gonna charge me what he charged me and I, he was probably overcharging me. But when there was an issue, I would just overpay for it.

• 27:31Sam Parr?

  You didn't exactly have like a lot of like shopping around you could do for smashing.

• 27:35Speaker 03

  Yeah. I just wanted to get it done. Like a lot of our accounts, they're paying us a lot of money every month. And if we can't get to them, I just was willing to pay a lot to just solve that problem and have it not be something we deal with.

• 27:46Sam Parr?

  So how much profit, how much take home income did you do your last year?

• 27:49Speaker 03

  So it was kind of like the first two years and the last two years was, were very separate chapters. First two years I was down there every single day, not taking anything out, reinvesting everything into new trucks and new territories. The last two years, basically 2024 to 2026 summer. It was like maybe around like 450 EBITDA, if you want to call it that, but 150K that was debt service. So really my take home was like 300K.

• 28:14Sam Parr?

  So why sell?

• 28:16Speaker 03

  It was, you know, it just, it felt like a starter business. It was always kind of my starter business. I got into it because I thought it would be like this direct line. It just weighed heavily on me in a number of ways, like one, these loans, and I got loans for the second two trucks. So this is that first 350K SBA loan. I got subsequent loans for the other trucks. So that's a personal guarantee.

• 28:34Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 28:35Speaker 03

  In my head every day.

• 28:36Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 28:37Speaker 03

  A lot of people don't realize franchise agreements also have a personal guarantee. Where you owe them royalties every month as a percentage of revenue. I think most people know that with franchises, but there's minimum royalties, which means you either pay some percent of your revenue or this fixed amount on a schedule, whichever is higher. And that's a 10 year long agreement that also has a personal guarantee. So I always felt like I could handle that, but that's like also weighs on you. And just like having these big trucks out every day where like, a couple of times a year I'd get a call that was like something bad happened.

• 29:12Sam Parr?

  What, what did it feel like when the wire hit?

• 29:14Speaker 03

  It was kind of anticlimactic a little bit. So I had already, like I'd worked with my accountant. I'm like, all right, tell me like after taxes, after everything, what the number is. I had like seen that number in a Google sheet. And then when it happened, I was very happy. My wife and I, like we had a trip just coincidentally planned for, to go somewhere the next day. So we did get to enjoy it, but now it's just like back to baseline kind of.

• 29:36Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 29:36Speaker 03

  I feel the relief of not having like the responsibility. And like, I don't have my phone on me right now. I'm used to like.

• 29:42Sam Parr?

  You're walking around, you're raw dogging? You have no phone right now?

• 29:44Speaker 03

  No phone. What I'm saying is normally I would be stressed out. Like I could go back and there could be just like a bomb dropped on me on my phone where you know, something went wrong.

• 29:54Shaan Puri?

  Who bought it? Was it just somebody else who wanted even more territories or who, who's the buyer?

• 29:58Speaker 03

  It was the neighboring franchisees. So it's a great thing where, you know, I was happy with the amount they paid. I think they're gonna, they got a great deal on it for them because they're just gonna be able to fold it into their thing.

• 30:07Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 30:08Speaker 03

  That's how a lot of franchise M and A ends up happening.

• 30:10Sam Parr?

  I have a feeling that you're plotting. You have something that you've been, that you've been thinking about. What is that? What are the list of things?

• 30:17Shaan Puri?

  And also, did you know what that was before you sold or the space gave you the time to figure it out?

• 30:22Speaker 03

  So the first two years were a dead sprint. The last two years, I got it in passive mode. I had two kids. And so I wasn't able to go down there every day. So I did a lot of stuff to make it like truly passive. And I spent a lot of that time trying to figure out my next move. I don't want to say too much about what it is. But I do have something in the works.

• 30:41Sam Parr?

  What other opportunities did you consider doing that you did not?

• 30:43Speaker 03

  So what I got really interested in was like this concept of. How you could sell somebody a financial ROI no brainer where the only objection is that they don't believe you and it would be like cheap or free to prove it to them. And so I was looking at all kinds of stuff like that. Like I think you can like audit people's utility bills. I think the idea of doing like site speed optimization for e-commerce is kind of interesting. That was like the insight that I, that I thought was like a fun playbook to run. That was like pretty straightforward. If you're not that smart and you just want to work hard.

• 31:13Shaan Puri?

  What's really smart about your approach that I think very few people do is in business, what most people do is they think about the product. They're like, oh, I love that product or I know about that product or I love this industry. I've, I, they think about their college major or stupid shit like that. You work backwards from like, what type of sale process do I want to do every day? Because that's going to be like 90% of my existence as an entrepreneur is just going, trying to sell, get more business. And so you were like, where's somewhere that I can just brute force, you know, get dollars in the bank by going and, you know, calling or showing up on more sites. And then even just now, you're like, and the pitch I want to be giving is a, you definitely are going to make more money. All I got to do is prove it to you and I could prove it to you on a cost that's very

• 31:58Shaan Puri?

  little to me or a quick, quick demo from my side to show you that the value is there. And I think so few people take a sales first approach, but as an entrepreneur, that's actually all you experience in the business is just growing the business mostly. Like the product is very like fungible. You could swap the product out.

• 32:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, that I, so what it is for me is I just, I think like you guys, I like business. Like I'm a business nerd. I like hiring. I like selling. I like figuring out the systems and the processes. So when you have that, you kind of have the luxury of being able to pick a business that you think would be enjoyable and straightforward to run.

• 32:32Sam Parr?

  When are you going to start it?

• 32:34Speaker 03

  I already started the, the new thing.

• 32:36Sam Parr?

  So you only, and that's only three weeks ago that you sold.

• 32:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 32:39Shaan Puri?

  Do you have a new mindset with this new one? Like what's changed now that you had that experience? You're going into the new one. Do you have any new rules of how you want to do this?

• 32:47Speaker 03

  Bootstrapping, bootstrapping. I found, and this is probably just because I'm more risk averse than I care to admit, but like this idea of the personal guarantee being tied to a franchise agreement. I really felt like the one-way door, you know, irreversible decision thing. So I think going forward, I'm going to try to bootstrap as much as I can and keep my options open as much as I can.

• 33:11Sam Parr?

  What's funny is like, maybe your tech coworkers were like, that's, this is very risky. You know, this is like insane what you're doing. What I've noticed, talking to a lot of entrepreneurs on here and through my life is that most entrepreneurs, I don't consider myself to be a very risky person at all. And most say that as well. They're like, I, I'm not that risky. And like, it's this idea of like, there's difference between uncertainty, which always exists and risk, which you can reduce. Uncertainty always exists and you just got to get comfortable with that. But you can definitely can like limit the risk and taking those person, personal guarantees, that's actually quite risky. And so it's funny to hear that you're a risk adverse person.

• 33:46Shaan Puri?

  It's like great fighters, they don't pride themselves on how much, like how much risk they're taking in a fight. It's all, it's really, it's a self-defense. Hit and don't get hit. Right? And like the best fighters, if you look at like Floyd Mayweather, under goes undefeated, he didn't even really get hit that much. Didn't really get hit that much. It's like the black belts understand that it's about minimizing the damage you take while still winning.

• 34:06Sam Parr?

  Yeah. Like there's all these investors and they're like, rule number one, don't lose money. Rule number two, pay attention to rule number one. And it's pretty funny.

• 34:14Shaan Puri?

  Let me ask you another question. I'm, I'm talking to my friend who's a friend from college and he's got a, a normal job business. He wants to go do something entrepreneurial. And I think he wants to do it very much for the money, but I think truly the benefit would be that he's just going to have a lot more fun. He doesn't like his job and just liking your day matters a lot more. You had a good job. You did it for four or five years. Did you end up way ahead financially versus where you would have been just taking your salary with raises and savings? Was it a big financial win or was it the life win, the confidence, the fun that you had? Like where was the win?

• 34:45Speaker 03

  I think about it as like the escape velocity that I needed to go work. I can work for myself for the rest of my life, as long as I don't like mess it up. And that's how I think about it. It gave me that escape velocity out of that.

• 34:57Shaan Puri?

  And is it financial runway or it was confidence?

• 34:59Speaker 03

  It's financial runway. It's confidence. It's experience. It's pattern recognition, skills and everything like that. And for me, I kind of had to like do the, because, and really because I bought the business so far from my house, I was going to try to keep my job for like a second there. And then I realized I had to quit it. That was the case for me. I think for other people, the move is just find something you can like step into and test it out a little bit before you pulley, before you like fully rip it.

• 35:25Shaan Puri?

  We've never done franchises and I've always been a little skeptical of franchises. It's like franchises seem like great business for the franchisors, not the franchisee. And so you did it. You have a good outcome. What's your current perspective on like, is franchises a good, good place to go? Or like, did you discover some other franchise along the way that you're like, shit, I wish I had done that one. That's, now that I understand what makes these work, that's a way better one. Tell me something smart about franchises.

• 35:50Speaker 03

  I think there's three situations where doing a franchise makes sense. I think the first one is if the franchisor actually has some secret sauce. And like the nerdy way that I think about is if you listen to like the acquired podcast, they do the seven powers. If the franchisor gives you a seven, one of the seven powers, it could be worth it. So that's brand with like the Midas touch, or it's like cornered resource, like the Chick-fil-A recipe. You can only get it Chick-fil-A. That's worth it. Those are rare and in high demand. The second one is if you are going into it to do like a roll-up. Franchises are friendly for roll-ups, I think, because you just have carbon copies of each other. Like the systems are, like the integration is the hard part of a lot of roll-ups. The integration of a

• 36:33Speaker 03

  franchise is just like the people stuff. It's pretty straightforward to roll up and it's like a walled garden. Like if you're in the system and you have the appetite and the capital to do a roll-up, you can do it in a lot of cases. And a lot of franchises are ripe for consolidation because they're incentivized to sell a lot of units because they make franchise fees on each unit. And then what that means is in a couple of years, it's just like begging for consolidation. And the third reason is basically my reason, which like, if you're literally not going to do anything else, you're not going to do something unless you feel like you have the training wheels of a franchise. That's what it took for me to do it. Like I don't regret doing it. I probably won't do another franchise in my career, but like it played a important role in my.

• 37:15Sam Parr?

  It got you where you wanted to go.

• 37:16Speaker 03

  Right. I wasn't going to do it otherwise.

• 37:18Sam Parr?

  Well, Kevin, you're, you're the shit. Thank you for doing this.

• 37:19Speaker 03

  Yeah. Thanks, guys.

• 37:20Shaan Puri?

  Awesome. Thanks for coming on.

• 37:21Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 37:25Shaan Puri?

  Today's podcast is brought to you by my friends at Mercury. They make the world's best banking product. I think you know this already. I use Mercury for all of my businesses. I think I have like maybe seven or eight businesses. We use Mercury as our business banking across all of them. And now they actually just launched a personal banking account. So I have my personal account there. I moved off of Wells Fargo and Chase. I'm just all in on Mercury. Why? I like products that are easy to use. I like products that get me and the problems that I have. So like very easy to make a joint account with my wife. Very easy to spin up virtual cards. One click and I get savings yield. It just has all the stuff that I need in one place. So if you're looking for the best banking product on the market, it's definitely Mercury. I will fistfight anybody who disagrees with me on that. Go to mercury.com slash personal and learn more. Mercury is a fintech, not

• 38:08Shaan Puri?

  an FDIC insured bank. Banking services are provided through Choice Financial Group and Callum N A. Members FDIC. Bring them in. What's up?

• 38:17Speaker 04

  What's going on?

• 38:19Shaan Puri?

  Good to meet you.

• 38:20Speaker 04

  Great meeting you.

• 38:20Sam Parr?

  What's up, brother?

• 38:21Shaan Puri?

  What's your name?

• 38:22Speaker 04

  Noam.

• 38:23Shaan Puri?

  Noam. Yes. Noam, welcome to the show.

• 38:26Speaker 04

  Thanks for having me. I'm excited.

• 38:27Shaan Puri?

  Okay. I don't know if they told you what you're getting into, but maybe start with what we call the big juicy number. So give us one number that'll get us interested.

• 38:34Speaker 04

  All right. Big juicy number. We're doing $430,000 a month selling heated jaw massagers.

• 38:41Sam Parr?

  Jaw massagers?

• 38:42Speaker 04

  Yes, sir.

• 38:43Sam Parr?

  Okay. So that was my nickname in high school.

• 38:46Speaker 04

  Hey, okay.

• 38:48Shaan Puri?

  Less detail the better on that one. So do you have one? What is the, what is a heated jaw massager?

• 38:53Speaker 04

  Hey, listen, I do have one.

• 38:55Shaan Puri?

  Fits in your pocket.

• 38:56Sam Parr?

  Is this like a look maxing thing?

• 38:57Shaan Puri?

  See, Steve Jobs had a thousand songs in your pocket. He's got one hot jaw bone in your pocket.

• 39:02Sam Parr?

  Is it kosher to share jaw massagers or is this like a toothbrush?

• 39:06Speaker 04

  It's a, it's super kosher, actually. Okay. Yeah. Uh, it's not going in your mouth, but I mean, so I have two actually. This one is like what we're selling right now.

• 39:13Shaan Puri?

  Okay.

• 39:14Speaker 04

  Uh, it's the genuine, it's like 3D printed. It looks like a vape. All right. Um, this one is gentle. I'm flying to China tonight, actually. So I'm trying to do it, but you basically click this button.

• 39:25Shaan Puri?

  Our genuine doesn't work.

• 39:27Speaker 04

  Yeah, that one doesn't work. I gave, I gave all my San Francisco genuine's away. I was just at a conference. It's over. I only have this. So, um, but yeah, you, you have the two buttons there, adjustable heat, adjustable vibration.

• 39:38Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, there you go.

• 39:39Speaker 04

  Literally.

• 39:39Sam Parr?

  Okay. So I do this?

• 39:40Speaker 04

  Yeah. So it's like a couple of things. You have muscle scraping.

• 39:44Shaan Puri?

  Is that what we're doing?

• 39:45Speaker 04

  You know what? Some people are looks maxing, but the main thing actually is it's for people with like TMJ disorders.

• 39:51Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 39:52Speaker 04

  So, I mean, there are like tens of millions of people out there dealing with like chronic jaw pain. And generally that audience is a, is not the looks maxing crowd. My, my main customer is not that, but they do exist.

• 40:03Sam Parr?

  So it is TM, TM.

• 40:05Shaan Puri?

  TMJ. Can you explain TMJ? Like in America, how, how one out of every, how many people have it? Give us something like that.

• 40:11Speaker 04

  Yeah. So around 5% of people seek treatment, but it's many more that have it and potentially don't even know. So like, there are a lot of like really common things that happen. Like the way I started dealing with it was like five years ago, my jaw started clicking on the right side. And I was like, okay.

• 40:28Shaan Puri?

  I think my mom got this. Like you get it like temporarily sometimes, right? Stress and things like that can bring it up.

• 40:32Sam Parr?

  Is it just annoying or is it dangerous?

• 40:33Speaker 04

  So the, the clicking, if it's pain free, oftentimes it's, it's just annoying. Some people say up to like one in three people have this at some point in their life. But for me, it started getting worse. It started to click on the left and then my jaw started like locking closed. And then that would happen like once a month and then once a week, then once a day I would wake up and I couldn't like brush my teeth. I couldn't.

• 40:54Shaan Puri?

  What causes this?

• 40:55Speaker 04

  It's a good question. Like a lot of different things can cause it, you know, like clenching. For example, a lot of people have a clenching issue, clenching grinding at night. Some things is like, you know, a lot of looks maxing can actually end up causing this. It could be trauma to the joint. It could be all this. For, for lockup specifically, there's like a disc in there and it, you know, can displace.

• 41:14Sam Parr?

  And you put this on your jaw how often and how long?

• 41:17Speaker 04

  So the idea is a couple of things. For for the musculature, right? Like, most people's pain actually ends up coming from like the muscles and because it's overcompensating that kind of stuff. So you're using it as like a scraper, a heater, once a day, or like a couple of times a day, 20 minutes a day. That's what the research says you should do, the doctors say. But honestly, it's just like, hey, I am, I have a flare up, my, my head hurts. You go in, you, you work on the muscles, or you just have like instant heat in your pocket.

• 41:45Sam Parr?

  In your head, close to half a million a month.

• 41:47Speaker 04

  Uh, yeah.

• 41:48Shaan Puri?

  So you sell like five million a year of this?

• 41:50Speaker 04

  Uh, that's annualized.

• 41:52Shaan Puri?

  Annualized, yeah. And it's called, it's called your TMJ pen?

• 41:55Speaker 04

  Called your TMJ.

• 41:56Sam Parr?

  How much does it cost?

• 41:57Speaker 04

  So we're, we're normally 249. Uh, right now, there's like a clearance sale.

• 42:02Sam Parr?

  And did you raise funding?

• 42:03Speaker 04

  No, no, no. It's not very much fully bootstrapped, yeah.

• 42:06Shaan Puri?

  This is a, I feel like I would see this on TikTok shop. I would see this like on IG ads late at night.

• 42:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, listen, I, I wish, I wish, I am that guy, I am that guy on Instagram. I'm the TMJ guy.

• 42:18Shaan Puri?

  I've seen you. You're, you're the face of this, right?

• 42:20Speaker 04

  I am the face of that, yeah.

• 42:21Shaan Puri?

  I think I've seen you.

• 42:22Speaker 04

  A lot of rage bait on Instagram. I love it.

• 42:24Shaan Puri?

  So what, what's, you said rage bait?

• 42:26Speaker 04

  Okay, so one of our like big, most viral videos is like, I'm on this plane, right? And I, this, this Karen.

• 42:34Shaan Puri?

  He just went into.

• 42:34Speaker 04

  This absolute Karen next to me starts like calling me out. She's like, it's like, hey, you can't be vaping on a plane, you know? And I like get really flustered. I'm like, no, no, it's, it's, it's not a vape. Um, wait, let me explain. And I'm like, I'm like flustered trying to like explain this, that it's like my invention, like I made this, it's for people to drop in, it's not a vape. Um, and that concept got like 100 million views.

• 42:54Sam Parr?

  Really?

• 42:54Shaan Puri?

  Wow.

• 42:55Sam Parr?

  Uh, but. That's awesome.

• 42:56Shaan Puri?

  How did you think of that? Just to go with the Karen on the plane? Where, where?

• 42:59Speaker 04

  It's mostly the vape, it's the vape on the plane, really. It's like, it looks like a vape. Everyone tells me that, so.

• 43:05Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 43:06Sam Parr?

  What's gonna stop every Chinese knockoff from coming after you?

• 43:10Speaker 04

  I mean, listen, at some point, like, they're, they're gonna come, but the reality is like, when I, when I started this, like, I, I, I looked, I looked it up. I was heating and massaging myself like every day with like a mug of water, I'd microwave it, whatever. And I would, I would look it up and, um, there wasn't a heated massager for the job. That there were no products, period, sold for people with TMJ problems, like not a single one, which was baffling. And so I, like, not, there was no brand, there was no.

• 43:36Shaan Puri?

  You developed the actual device.

• 43:38Speaker 04

  This, and yeah, like I, I'm the first brand.

• 43:41Shaan Puri?

  Did you say you 3D printed this?

• 43:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, so the way I started the business is because like, dude, listen, hardware used to be, I think, one of the most risky things you can get into, making like a hardware device. Like, you'll look at Shark Tank, like, people are like, yeah, I spent like 100 grand making this. And it's like, dude, that was a big mistake.

• 43:59Sam Parr?

  How much did you spend to make the first handful?

• 44:02Speaker 04

  I spent less than $3,000. And the idea was like, there are like three things that like aligned in this age that we're living in that makes it probably now one of the least risky things that you can do, making like a hardware consumer product. First, having all the access to like information, like engineering at this point is like low key kind of easy. Like, okay, don't clip that, but with ChatGPT, with YouTube, like, I didn't know how to make electronics. I didn't know how to make a PCB.

• 44:29Shaan Puri?

  What were you doing before this?

• 44:30Speaker 04

  I was, I was a mechanical engineer. I was in college, like.

• 44:33Sam Parr?

  How old are you now?

• 44:35Speaker 04

  24.

• 44:35Sam Parr?

  How old's this?

• 44:36Speaker 04

  Three years since I started making it, and then two years of selling it.

• 44:41Sam Parr?

  And so you're, like, I'm, I'm an idiot. So you have a 3D printer at home?

• 44:44Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 44:45Sam Parr?

  And you're on ChatGPT at the time, and you're like, teach me how to like.

• 44:49Shaan Puri?

  You're like, give me a.

• 44:50Speaker 04

  Well, ChatGPT back in the day was not good enough.

• 44:52Sam Parr?

  But then like, but like, there's a motor. I mean, I don't know how electronics.

• 44:55Shaan Puri?

  Okay, so what, what did you do? You, you're at home, you never made a thing?

• 44:57Speaker 04

  I did, I, so, uh, I wrote out, what do I need this thing to do? I need it to heat, I need vibration, I need, you know, it to charge, it needs to be portable, da, da, da, whatever. You write out what you want. The obvious thing that it needs is like a PCB, it's a printed circuit board, so it's, it's those little green things.

• 45:12Sam Parr?

  Yeah.

• 45:13Speaker 04

  Yeah, it, it looks like a chip, has a bunch of things, a bunch of lines on it. Um, so to design that, like, I, I didn't know what to do, but I looked on Reddit, I asked for advice, I, I went on YouTube, I figured out how to design this thing. Um, that was like the first thing I did. Then you designed the casings, you look up potential motors, you buy them all, test them, and, and, uh.

• 45:33Shaan Puri?

  So you ended up making the, assembling the thing yourself?

• 45:37Speaker 04

  Yes. Yeah, so for, I was assembling these things myself up, up until literally a year ago to the day. Um, we, we got up to like 80K a month. I was assembling, shipping, I had two 3D printers running my closet in like, in my apartment. And then I, I kind of went like Alex Hermosy mode. I was like, wait, what if I just, you know, do this but more, you know? So I found like a 3PL, uh, and then normally a 3PL, I mean, you know this, but, um, they just ship stuff for you. Uh, they like fulfill your stuff, but I was like, hey, let me use your employees, like, I'll put my 3D printers in your place, you guys can use them, and.

• 46:13Shaan Puri?

  You made them on the spot there.

• 46:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, you can make them. And so now my 3PL makes it, and that's how we were able to grow to this point.

• 46:19Shaan Puri?

  So you're flying to China tonight?

• 46:20Speaker 04

  I'm flying to China tonight.

• 46:21Shaan Puri?

  You're gonna get, you already have, because this is made.

• 46:24Speaker 04

  Yeah, so we.

• 46:25Shaan Puri?

  Somebody get a prototype. You found somebody on Alibaba, what'd you do?

• 46:27Speaker 04

  No, no, I, I did not do that. That would be risky. Um, no, I, I got connected. So I, I'm like pretty big on Instagram now and like YouTube, so I, I, I made sure to like get connected via word of mouth. Um, so I found a factory together with them, we, we designed this thing. I flew there like a couple of months ago, we, um, we got to this sort of like golden sample. And now production is like, sort of done, like the molds are done-ish. So I'm going there now to like get the final samples and then we'll be able to.

• 46:54Sam Parr?

  How many employees do you have?

• 46:55Speaker 04

  I don't have any like, like full-time employees, uh, but I have like, you know, contractors, I have like, um, five contractors.

• 47:03Shaan Puri?

  So have you taken money out of the business yet? Are you like, I took a million bucks out of the business last year or two million bucks or something?

• 47:08Sam Parr?

  This year, it'll do, let's say, let's say hypothetically, you do 5 million in to- total revenue in 26, how much cash flow, like, how much, uh, profit? I don't know if you measure.

• 47:16Speaker 04

  Uh, yeah, it's around like 20% like net, um, income. I don't know, I, I kind of look at it, it's just like my business, like some of it's in the business bank, some of it's my Vanguard, some of it's in my personal bank, I don't know, I just kind of like take it as I see fit.

• 47:30Shaan Puri?

  And there's no repeat purchase, right? Like, nobody's gonna buy.

• 47:34Speaker 04

  Yeah, there's no.

• 47:34Shaan Puri?

  Again?

• 47:34Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 47:35Sam Parr?

  But what is like, uh, I remember years ago when, uh, Ther- you know Theragun?

• 47:39Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 47:39Sam Parr?

  Like my, I have a hypervolt that I use forever. I love it. And I remember they came out and people were like, dude, like, all the Chinese companies are just gonna knock this off, but they, they did.

• 47:48Shaan Puri?

  They did.

• 47:48Sam Parr?

  They did. But they did do a good job of like kind of branding it, where I, I am like into my hypervolt. But then they also came out with like 30 products. There's like the things that like do my legs, and I love all of them, and it's become my routine. Is there like a, other things that you're gonna, you can do?

• 48:04Speaker 04

  I do have this vision of being like a, a brand specifically focused on making products for the TMJ community. The brand is like your TMJ. So it's like your TMJ pen, then I'm thinking like your TMJ band, your.

• 48:17Sam Parr?

  We had this guy on the podcast named David.

• 48:18Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 48:19Sam Parr?

  And his whole company, and like, we started out as a shtick, but it wasn't entirely a shtick, where it was like, Sam doesn't believe that picking an important name is actually important. And this guy's whole job, he makes a lot of money naming companies.

• 48:31Shaan Puri?

  BlackBerry and Swiffer and.

• 48:34Sam Parr?

  Sonos, Fabreeze, he named all this stuff. And I am totally on board with what he's doing now. And his whole, I actually just hung out with him the other day, his whole thing is like, if you're a young entrepreneur, start your company, who cares? But once you get some traction, consider making a name that can last forever, because it actually does matter, and I buy into that. I would highly consider keeping that as maybe the TMJ pen, that product, but having like a proper company name.

• 48:59Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's, that's possible. I don't know, I feel like it's just like not the main like concern right now, because like the.

• 49:05Sam Parr?

  Maybe it's not now.

• 49:06Speaker 04

  Product, yeah, like, people, it's like, this is like the TMJ pen, you know, it's like, it's like when people say TMJ pen, it's this, like, there's no other thing, so it's like, I think that's a pretty good name, but yeah, for the company, like.

• 49:15Shaan Puri?

  Well, so you said like, you did have a question. Well, what was your question gonna be?

• 49:19Speaker 04

  Well, yeah, my question was gonna be like, listen, you're, you're gonna, you're gonna be like, oh, money doesn't matter, da, da, da, but.

• 49:24Shaan Puri?

  No, no, no, no, no.

• 49:25Speaker 04

  We won't say that.

• 49:28Shaan Puri?

  It's called my first million, not just one million and stop.

• 49:31Speaker 04

  Listen, I've, I've heard a lot of guests come on the show, it's like, you know, they've made it, and it's like, oh, yeah, da, da, da, da. I'm just like, no, I want a couple of mil in the bank, right? I want that. So I get this urge to like sell in maybe two to three years or something.

• 49:44Sam Parr?

  Sell the company.

• 49:45Speaker 04

  Yeah, and I don't know what therefore I should like really be focusing on, because like if it, for me, like the obvious thing right now is like, hey, what's the like main constraint? It's, uh, you know, going and solving the supply, the supply issue, then it's gonna be like demand.

• 49:59Shaan Puri?

  Short-term constraint, and then you have your long-term constraint in this scenario.

• 50:03Speaker 04

  Yeah, and, and I don't know what the like long-term, like, maybe it is a long-term constraint to not have other products, but the issue is like, I don't know like what would be super important then to weigh against like losing focus on just like cranking out more ads now. So maybe it's, uh, recurring revenue, right? Like, maybe I should get into TMJ like supplements and, and oils and creams and stuff. Or maybe it's having, uh, more products on the consumer side. Maybe it's having IP, maybe it's having registration with FDA, maybe it's having like.

• 50:31Shaan Puri?

  You have three options.

• 50:32Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 50:32Shaan Puri?

  And you don't have to decide right now, but it's good to know what they are, because then when you're doing the business, you'll look for clues that support one of the three options. Either you can go wider TMJ, so you could say, great, TMJ, this helps, but it's not a solved problem. I can sell the creams, I can sell the oils, I can sell the supplements, I can sell the whatever. So you go wider TMJ. You can go wider pain relief. So maybe heated massage for other conditions, other parts of your body, the kind of hyperice model, the, um, Theragun model where you're gonna create, you know, right?

• 51:01Sam Parr?

  They're just like a recovery company.

• 51:03Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, they're a recovery company, and you would be a pain relief company. And you would say, okay, cool, I'm gonna go find all the different types of pain, I'm gonna create like specialty products, I'm gonna run the same playbook across them. And so like right now, the, those slot, heated, heated vibrating slides is like the big one that's going viral right now, that I think someone's, Nike's doing or somebody's doing.

• 51:21Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 51:21Shaan Puri?

  So you could, you could go wider in that direction of pain relief, heated, maybe heated massaging pain relief. Or you could just say. Actually, I just got good at doing this model of like content-based selling of products. I now know how to do a little bit of supply chain, a little bit of this, a little bit of that. But I'm really good on the marketing side and I'm fundamentally limited by category and product. And if I just take, you know, I'm a nine out of 10 entrepreneur. I just need to find a nine out of 10 opportunity. TMJ is just a two out of 10 opportunity because of the nature of what I'm doing. And you just take your highly transferable skills of creating content, selling through content, you know, and you just apply it to a better category and you that has tailwinds. You don't fight the small TAM problem.

• 52:05Speaker 04

  And you'll potentially have liquidity already.

• 52:07Shaan Puri?

  And you're so young, you're going to have money in the bank and you're going to have like a bunch of lessons learned that with a clean slate, like this can be your starter business. Like most entrepreneurs have a starter business, have a thing that they did early. That wasn't their lifetime business. And, you know, so that's the other possibility. So you, you know, you don't know which one of the three it is right now. Maybe you should write down a hypothesis as to which one of those three it is. And then as you operate the next six to nine months and you're focused on growing this business, you'll at least be aware of and looking for clues as to which one this might be. Maybe you launch a little test in one of those, one of those three areas. You figure it out that way.

• 52:41Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, I think, I think it's, what it is, is like, I like to use the business as like a learning opportunity, like as just like a personal growth thing. It's probably going to be like, hey, is there more juice to squeeze out of that in the TMJ space?

• 52:57Sam Parr?

  There definitely is.

• 52:58Shaan Puri?

  I think so too.

• 52:59Sam Parr?

  When I, a few, a handful of years ago, I had Lyme disease and I like would look on like Reddit and stuff and I noticed that the very clear trend and amongst some other friends who got sick with different illnesses or injuries, there's dozens or hundreds of injuries or illnesses where people feel like, no one's listening to me. No one takes me seriously. What the hell, but I know something's wrong. I don't feel good. And so they go to these communities and they buy these products where it's like, finally, I'm being heard and I'm being catered to. And it's, if I had to guess, this is one of them because I've heard that word TMJ. But when you see it like clicking, I'm like, oh, that can't be that bad. And then the person who has it like, it's horrible. You know what I mean?

• 53:35Shaan Puri?

  And if you go to the doctor, they're just like.

• 53:37Sam Parr?

  Well, you know, just.

• 53:38Shaan Puri?

  Try not to stress so much. Like, yo, I'm pretty stressed because this hurts every day also, in addition to whatever caused it in the first place.

• 53:43Speaker 04

  My first, my first specialist I went to prescribed me like 2,000 milligrams of Tylenol a day.

• 53:49Sam Parr?

  Right. If I had to make a guess, this will, you're going to grow a lot over the next three years and sell it. And I think that would be pretty cool.

• 53:55Shaan Puri?

  These are fundamentally pretty tough businesses to sell. You know, non-recurring niche product, heavily based on your marketing genius. So it might be that like optimizing for the exit sometimes looks different than optimizing for cash flow. And so you want to kind of weigh those out. You don't even, again, you can go look at some comps and be like, is there any, who's done this before and exited well? Let me go talk to them and understand like, does the factors that made that a successful exit match what I, what I have fundamentally in my business? But if it's just a cash flow business, that's great. Cash flow business can be awesome.

• 54:29Sam Parr?

  Have you ever talked to any bankers or brokers?

• 54:31Speaker 04

  I haven't.

• 54:32Sam Parr?

  A lot of times people only do that when they're ready to sell, when you should have done it three years earlier and you find out, you're like, I have a number in my mind. Just tell me what I need to achieve to make that number possible. And I'm just going to go do that for two years.

• 54:42Shaan Puri?

  Tell me three companies you looked at that are like this. What did they sell for? Why did they get that multiple they got? When did they do it?

• 54:48Sam Parr?

  And you're like, okay, it could be like this revenue, this cash flow, and you know, these are the, the five or six other metrics. I'll just do that for three years and then I'll look up and be like, okay.

• 54:57Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 54:58Sam Parr?

  Yeah. If you guys know any, I had some people reach out on LinkedIn about it, but they seemed kind of skeezy. So I was like, I'm good.

• 55:04Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, no, I would, so I would talk to Quiet Light. They're more of a online brokerage, but they're easy to talk to. Go to, they, if you go look at their thing, they'll, they have a lot of these like FBA businesses that they sell that like, are kind of like, I would say, lower durability, lower quality businesses overall, but they seem to be selling. So like, they know how to package those, what type, what business is working.

• 55:25Sam Parr?

  Quiet Light Brokerage.

• 55:26Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, dot com. So go to them and then go look at brokers in your space. Maybe like, you know, you just have to Google and like tell ChatGPT, go do deep research on who's sold, you know, who are bankers that sell products like mine? Like, I don't even know what the name of this category is, but it might be like.

• 55:41Speaker 04

  It's like wellness.

• 55:43Shaan Puri?

  Non-medical wellness devices. Okay, cool.

• 55:45Sam Parr?

  And you could, you email the founders of people who have had, had exits and say, who did you, who all did you talk to? Cause everyone who sells their company will talk to three or four. They'll say, I use this person, they're great. These two were kind of good.

• 55:55Shaan Puri?

  But I would not delay this. What Sam said is he's absolutely right. You don't talk to them when you're, it's time to sell. You first talk to them a year or two before to actually understand what you need to do in the next 24 months to be a sellable business in the end. And the good thing about a sellable business is if somebody else is going to want to own it, it's probably the same like reasons you would want to own it.

• 56:14Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 56:15Shaan Puri?

  So there's no harm in building a very sellable business. Cause at the very least, you made a business that's higher desirability to own for yourself or for somebody else.

• 56:23Sam Parr?

  Yeah. Dude, thanks for doing this. You're awesome.

• 56:24Speaker 04

  No, of course. Thanks for having me.

• 56:26Shaan Puri?

  Good luck in China.

• 56:26Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 56:30Shaan Puri?

  All right. That is part two of Shoot Your Shot. We got one more episode coming out of the San Francisco location. We got three more founders coming up on the next episode. Make sure you're subscribed on YouTube, on Spotify. We looked at the data, I think 80, 90% of you guys are not subscribed who watch the episodes. What are you doing? Subscribe so you can watch episode two.

• 56:48Sam Parr?

  And do me a favor, whether you're a listener, then you're going to go to Spotify or if you're a watcher, go to YouTube, put in the comments, the city that you want us to go to next. Right now, we're doing this in San Francisco. We've already done New York. We'll go somewhere next to do it. So let us know in the comments right now.

• 57:11Shaan Puri?

  All right, let's take a quick break. I want to tell you about Marketing School. It is a podcast that is part of the HubSpot Podcast Network and it is run by Neil Patel and Eric Su. And these guys are both marketers who are running businesses. And so if you want real world tactics from practitioners who are actually out there in the field doing it, this is the podcast for you. Check it out wherever you get your podcasts.