#88 with Greg Isenberg (part 2) - Why Plugins Are Big Business

Joined our private FB group yet? It's a page where people share each others million dollar ideas or what they're already working on: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ourfirstmillion. The guys discuss: Andrew Wilkinson Hey.com replacer, VidIQ for influencers, why Grammarly is a huge business, learning via text messages and Stadium Live (ESPN for Gen Z). See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Welcome back. This is part two of our brainstorm session with Greg Isenberg. We're going to continue on. We talked about a bunch of different topics. It's pretty fun. Greg's a good guy. Hope you guys like it. So here we go. Part two. Let's do it.

• 0:20Greg Isenberg?

  I basically sold a box of air on eBay for like three to seven bucks and it would make money on shipping. But I would say like, hey, you're buying a box of air and people would think it would funny. It was funny.

• 0:34Speaker 00

  And they were buying it for somebody else as a gag or what?

• 0:36Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah, I think it was mostly a gifting thing.

• 0:40Speaker 00

  Did you get PR for it?

• 0:42Greg Isenberg?

  I got some PR, yeah, a little bit.

• 0:46Sam Parr?

  All right, I'll tell you guys something, one interesting thing that I'm paying attention to. Greg, are you a car guy?

• 0:52Greg Isenberg?

  I like cars.

• 0:53Sam Parr?

  Okay, there's this guy named Doug Demoro. Do you guys know who Doug Demoro is? He's this really nerdy, just like a horribly nerdy guy and he reviews cars and he's really funny and he's cool and he's well loved. And he's got two or three million subscribers on YouTube and he'll review all types of cars and he's funny and he's like cute and endearing. And he just launched his own car auction. It's pretty amazing that he did this because he's a YouTuber and you think, well, like, he's probably not that good at doing other. I mean, you know, he's a YouTuber. I wouldn't expect him to build a content thing. But I accidentally pulled up. It's called carsandbids.com.

• 1:34Sam Parr?

  He launched this site. It looks amazing and he's already populated the site with hundreds of like fancy cars for sale. So the whole point is that it's cars that are vintage or cars that enthusiasts love. So like a 2013 BMW M5, it's not like a particularly expensive car, but people who love BMWs love this model of car. It's amazing that this guy built this and I think that what's interesting to me is that a lot of people, I don't know if he's partnered with someone. I think that I bet you that's what happened, but a lot of people partner with YouTubers, kind of like what they did with Ypsy and the Kardashian lady.

• 2:14Sam Parr?

  And this is just the perfect execution of this. It just launched two weeks ago. I think this is going to be a huge thing. And these car companies are quite interesting.

• 2:23Shaan Puri?

  These marketplaces.

• 2:24Greg Isenberg?

  This is brilliant. I think if you, if we take, if you marry the unbundling of Reddit with the partnerships of influencers.

• 2:33Shaan Puri?

  Yes.

• 2:34Greg Isenberg?

  You're good.

• 2:35Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 2:36Greg Isenberg?

  There you go. You get the credibility from the influencer. Put them in, put them on the cap table, whatever.

• 2:43Shaan Puri?

  Right. Cause look, for any, for any like lifestyle trend that you find on Reddit, like the body weight based fitness thing that Sam's talking about, or vegans or whatever, there's going to be lifestyle influencers that live that same lifestyle that have gotten famous for it on Instagram, on YouTube, whoever. And if you marry those two together, you use Reddit as a source for, okay, which lifestyles are trending? Okay, the fire movement is trending in the personal finance community. Cool. Then I need to go find people who live that lifestyle, partner with them for distribution for my product. And in this case, the influencer did it themselves, but more and more people are sort of doing it on an equity basis instead of, you know, pay for post type of thing, which I think is, you know, has its trade-offs, has its pros and cons.

• 3:28Sam Parr?

  It's pretty interesting. Like another, what I would do is I'm quite fascinated with the job board space still. I don't think anyone has completely nailed the job board space, but you could definitely do it where you partner with people and you talk about cool companies, because the pay per lead for jobs is quite, quite high.

• 3:46Shaan Puri?

  So, did you guys see what Andrew Wilkinson, another friend of the pod who's coming on, I think next week? Did you see what he posted yesterday on Twitter? I think this is pretty smart. He posted about this Gmail idea. Sam, did you see it?

• 3:59Sam Parr?

  I did. I did. It was a, it's a plugin for Gmail that I don't know what it does. I forget.

• 4:06Shaan Puri?

  Basically, he took, he replicated the two features that matter in Hey, in Hey.com, like, hey, you could screen, you know, new recipients first before they show up in your inbox. And also it'll just hide all your newsletter cruft in one, one spot, like better than the core thing. I think that was, that was the crux of his idea. But it's like, hey, do you want those cool features of Hey without having to like go get this new email service and like go learn this new thing? Cause I'll just make it an add-on for Gmail. And I was like, this is why this guy is smart. That was like such a simple. Beautiful idea. And I really hope he makes this and is not just tweeting about it, but I know how he rolls. He tweets to like publicly commit to doing something. And so I think he's actually going to get this built because he definitely got a good response from it.

• 4:50Shaan Puri?

  But I thought it was a great idea. What do you think of that, Greg?

• 4:54Greg Isenberg?

  I love it. He got 2.4 thousand likes.

• 4:58Shaan Puri?

  And was I right about the summary of what it is?

• 5:01Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah, so it's basically, and I love the way he he actually like communicates it, which is also just seems like a magical part of how he operates, which is

• 5:10Shaan Puri?

  Read it out.

• 5:11Greg Isenberg?

  All right, I'm working on a fun little Gmail plugin side project, dot, dot, dot. New line, it's an email firewall, colon, number one, filters out newsletters slash noisy crap emails. Side note for, you know, Greg's side note, that's like beautiful, like layman's terms. Number two, screens first time senders similar to hey. Number three, delivers emails a few times a day on a set schedule versus 24/7. And brackets like the ND, who wants to beta test 782 responses?

• 5:47Shaan Puri?

  Right. Yeah, this is like, you know, we got to invest in this little Gmail plugin. That like that's how that's how good this is. This, this is like a real idea because it's a, if you did these three things, productivity would rise significantly in in email, which is something that everybody's using. And so I think A, he's the right type of guy to kind of spearhead something like this. Uh, he communicated it well, and it's just a simple, it's a simple good idea.

• 6:13Sam Parr?

  Greg, who else do you know that has, do you know any big Gmail plugin or Google Chrome plugin businesses?

• 6:21Greg Isenberg?

  I do. So I invested in a company called VidIQ. Sean, you you know Rob, right? Dude, the guy is a legend and crushing it.

• 6:32Sam Parr?

  Can you tell a story?

• 6:34Shaan Puri?

  He's a tank. Physically, he's a tank. We got to say that.

• 6:38Greg Isenberg?

  Physically, he's a tank. Um, he's like the most lovable teddy bear ex-football player of all time. Um, he's in San Francisco. He raises money from like, um, all the right people. He builds a startup, basically like Hootsuite, but for YouTubers. Uh, this is in like 2012-ish. Gets, you know, the top 10 biggest video publishers on the platform AOL, Yahoo, all these, you know, big companies realizes that there's no, although it like looks cool to work with big companies, you can actually make more money if you just work with like little to medium sized video creators, ends up doing at this time, this is like 2014, maybe like

• 7:23Greg Isenberg?

  the, the, the equivalent of nuclear bomb, which is number one, he like gets rid of most of his team and moves to Santa Cruz, California and becomes like surfs every day, like four to five hours a day.

• 7:35Greg Isenberg?

  Um, so number, you know, now remote is obviously more of a thing, but like back then like no, you know, and then decides to completely pivot the business and, and because he like fundamentally believed like, hey, like, I'm gonna like, forget this website, I'm gonna con, I'm gonna like, change this to a Chrome extension. Like imagine writing that email to your like, to like Mark Cuban's one of his investors and like.

• 8:01Sam Parr?

  How much did they raise?

• 8:04Greg Isenberg?

  Couple million bucks.

• 8:05Sam Parr?

  Okay, this, so what happened?

• 8:08Greg Isenberg?

  Um, he moves to Santa Cruz, converts it to a plugin. Um, it becomes like, I think the most widely used plugin for, for video creators. He charges for it. Can't show the numbers, but I will say the business is exploding. Team size is, is, is quite big as well.

• 8:29Sam Parr?

  How big?

• 8:30Greg Isenberg?

  I'd have to pull up the investor update, but somewhere between, you know, 45 people. I'd, I'd say somewhere in that range, 45 people, full time and like.

• 8:37Shaan Puri?

  And he was just grinding on it. Like this, last time I saw him was a few years ago when we were all hanging out and it wasn't like clear that this was gonna be this runaway thing, but it was clear that this guy's never gonna fucking quit. Like he was like, look, I'm doing this. And it was, wasn't like, I would have quit literally nine times during the process that he just kept going. And, uh, that's what I admire about this guy.

• 9:00Greg Isenberg?

  I admire that. I admire also that he. He didn't really listen to anyone. Like, you know, I think there's this like, a lot of founders like listen to podcasts like this and they're like, oh, I'm gonna do like, what they did and, and it's oftentimes actually the founders that don't even listen to anyone. And who just like take selective tidbits based on their life experience.

• 9:26Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 9:26Greg Isenberg?

  And like really understand, like Rob knows video more than and video creators better than anyone in the industry. And was just like, I, he's like, he, he had a point of view, like having a point of view matters, like, he's like, my point of view is that like, video creators don't wanna log into this like website. You know, and like have another website and like, who cares if it's on built on top of Google Chrome? Like, who cares? As long as I'm like, like swiping nine ninety-nine a month for thousands of creators, who the hell cares?

• 10:00Shaan Puri?

  Well, that's, that's a good one. Who else do you know? Or what else do you know?

• 10:05Greg Isenberg?

  Um, I mean, in the Chrome extension space, none as intimately as Rob.

• 10:11Shaan Puri?

  I have, I have a friend doing something cool. My friend Stuart is building this thing called, I think it's called Luster.ai. Greg, have you seen this one?

• 10:18Greg Isenberg?

  No.

• 10:19Shaan Puri?

  So I don't know how much, I'll, I'll have to ask him if I can even talk about this, but it's pretty cool. I think he's out publicly, public with it now. But basically, he had built this company called Slant. And Slant was like crushing it on SEO for like, when you would search for a product, let's say you want, find a pair of headphones. He was kinda doing the Wirecutter thing, but programmatically and, or crowdsourced actually, so. Um, you would search for headphones and you would get a result which is like, this is the best affordable pick. This is the medium range pick and this is the high end, I want the best thing for the best, you know, at a, at a high, I don't, I'm not a price sensitive pick. And, um, and so he was doing that and Slant was doing well, but he was like, he similarly threw the whole thing away. Pivoted to a Chrome extension that works on top of several sites, like I use it on top of Amazon, for example.

• 11:04Shaan Puri?

  And it'll just say like, hey, you know, I'm looking for a TV, it'll be like, by the way, here's the best TV worth buying. And here's where you can find it at the best price across other, other sites. So it's kind of honey-esque. But it's really about the, um, the recommendation along with understanding, oh, the price has dropped over here, you should actually get it over here.

• 11:22Sam Parr?

  It's like Kayak or something where they like aggregate New York Times, Wirecutter and a whole bunch of stuff to get the reviews.

• 11:30Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I don't use kayak, but uh but it's pretty good.

• 11:33Greg Isenberg?

  In the in the thirty seconds that you started explaining this, I like added it and I'm on Amazon and I'm actually looking for a TV and it's giving me recommendations. So that's why like.

• 11:48Shaan Puri?

  That's why these rock cuz how lightweight they are.

• 11:50Greg Isenberg?

  Rock. These rock. I like it cuz it's ea- it's super easy to install. It's always present. Like, that's it. Now I'm an active user, right?

• 12:01Shaan Puri?

  Um. And you're not gonna churn.

• 12:04Greg Isenberg?

  I'm not gonna churn. Um, I mean. And number three, like, I'm a big, you know, from a thesis perspective, a big believer in curation. I think like. Amazons for for, you know, great examples. Amazon's great because it you can get anything, but people want curation, you know? Instagram's great for people on creation. There's just this demand towards curation. And it's a huge opportunity and I think this is.

• 12:28Shaan Puri?

  Like the Gmail plugin idea, like because everybody uses email, you only need to grab such a small fraction of this sort of total base. Um, and same thing with like shopping, Amazon, right? Like so. For Lester to work, they only need such a small number of people who are regularly shopping and I've seen his charts and it's growing really well. Um, like I I thi- I think that these I I personally gravitate towards either super niche and you can own that scene or universal product and you can go for the people who care about, let's say, quality more than the average in more than the ninety-eight percent of the other people who use that thing. Um, those are like the you you wanna kind of polarize in one end or the other and not get stuck in the middle.

• 13:08Greg Isenberg?

  One of the greatest companies ever or that I know of uh personally is Grammarly. Um, if if you're live underneath a rock, Grammarly is a plugin that helps you write better. It just you people dismiss probably dismiss the business early on saying this is just word or what what's that called? Word check?

• 13:25Shaan Puri?

  Spell check.

• 13:26Greg Isenberg?

  Spell check, I mean, this is just spell check and it's not. It helps you have better grammar. And uh that's.

• 13:31Shaan Puri?

  Also, it kind of just is spell check. Like, is like, right, like, and that's actually okay, like, it was just spell check, but for the internet. Because spell check was limited to like word documents and, uh, you know, your text messaging. But you didn't get spell check in every email you were sending or wherever, right? Like, it, it didn't even have to be more. I mean, it became more as it went, but like,

• 13:53Sam Parr?

  But not much.

• 13:54Shaan Puri?

  Actually, just spell check was fucking great. It was, that was a great thesis right there, and I totally dismissed it.

• 13:59Sam Parr?

  Yeah, I dismissed it as well. And then the founder spoke at HustleCon and he's like, yeah, we raised a hundred million dollars at a billion dollar valuation. And I was like, that's crazy. And he goes, yeah, it's pretty awesome. All the money went to us because we, we make so much. So they must make over a hundred million dollars in revenue.

• 14:13Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I think they're like stupidly profitable.

• 14:16Sam Parr?

  Yeah, it's a fucking plug in.

• 14:18Shaan Puri?

  On the other hand, like as a consumer, Chrome extensions are a fucking crazy thing to install because they get like read permissions on every website you visit, which is just insane. Um, that's like handing over the keys to every account, your bank account and everything you ever said to anybody. So I'm very like judicious with Chrome extension installation. Most people, it appears, you know, I would say most people don't even know what a Chrome extension is. But then a lot of people install them when it seems like a huge privacy issue.

• 14:47Shaan Puri?

  And that's Chrome's fault. Chrome doesn't allow you.

• 14:49Greg Isenberg?

  Do you guys use, uh, OnePassword?

• 14:52Sam Parr?

  Hate it.

• 14:54Shaan Puri?

  I use it. I also hate it, but yeah, I use it.

• 14:58Greg Isenberg?

  Explain, explain, I want to hear why.

• 15:00Sam Parr?

  Mine just never works.

• 15:03Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, same.

• 15:04Greg Isenberg?

  You use it?

• 15:04Shaan Puri?

  It's quite, it's quite complicated for me. Like, there's the Chrome extension, there's the app I have on my desktop. And then at some point, like one of those like just stops, like, like it'll stop auto filling. I'm like, fuck, and now I always have to do this like two step process or I'll get a new computer. And I'm like, it's like, what's your seed? I'm like, man, I don't know. I did this like four years ago. I need to remember this thing like, I, I don't know. That's just really hard. And then the other thing is like, anything that's social or with teams, you have to then sort of get to the team thing. And now I get, need to get everybody else to adopt one pass. And they're usually less tech savvy than me, and I'm not even that tech savvy. So it ends up being this like failure of like getting other people to adopt it. Like, I wish there was a simpler, I wish it was a simpler way.

• 15:46Sam Parr?

  It always runs into Google's password thing.

• 15:49Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 15:50Sam Parr?

  Like they hit, they hit each other somehow. Uh, yeah, I can't stand it. Why? Are you an investor? Sorry.

• 15:59Greg Isenberg?

  No, I, listen, OnePassword to me is the necessary evil to, to,

• 16:07Greg Isenberg?

  to do stuff on the internet. Like, I think that, like, people who don't have password managers, like, good luck.

• 16:13Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 16:13Greg Isenberg?

  You know, I think it's worth it. I think, I think, you know, I have it as an extension. I was just looking at my, my extension. I'm like, looking at Loom. I'm looking at OnePassword. Um, I actually think that there's an opportunity, you know, to create a better OnePassword, but it's probably a difficult problem, and I hate difficult problems. Um, sometimes.

• 16:33Shaan Puri?

  I don't even think it's a difficult problem. I think you could do the same thing and just brand it better and write better copy and make it more family-friendly and be like, this is called Family Password. And Family Password helps your family be safe. And, uh, it's not OnePassword, which feels to me like an engineer's product built for engineers. And all my engineers, uh, like at my company are like, yeah, it's great. And they can't believe I'm not using it. And I'm like, I can't believe you use this fucking thing. It's so, like, difficult to use and, like, I don't know, there's just layers of, of annoyance with it.

• 17:02Greg Isenberg?

  Oh, well, you, you mentioned a really, you know, smart idea, which is basically like, how do you take products and just brand them for other audiences?

• 17:13Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 17:13Greg Isenberg?

  Like, the, the, the Christian Mingle effect, right? It's like,

• 17:18Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 17:19Greg Isenberg?

  You know, Match.com basically created this technology, if you can call it technology. Um, and I guess it's technology, created some technology, some, you know, basically basic social networking technology and then focused on a bunch of different verticals. But it's the same underlying, the only thing that's different is marketing. So the question is, what are other opportunities where you can just take a thing and just brand it for other verticals?

• 17:45Sam Parr?

  Do you guys wanna, this is a slight deviation, but you guys wanna see the numbers for, so I, I own a Google plugin. Yeah. You wanna see the numbers for it?

• 17:56Sam Parr?

  It's pretty crazy.

• 17:57Greg Isenberg?

  That's me twice.

• 17:59Sam Parr?

  Watch this.

• 18:00Greg Isenberg?

  Okay, I'm pulling up his skirt right now.

• 18:02Sam Parr?

  So, the Hustle has a plugin. Can you see my screen?

• 18:07Shaan Puri?

  Yeah.

• 18:08Sam Parr?

  Okay.

• 18:08Shaan Puri?

  It's gonna be thrilling for the audio listeners.

• 18:10Sam Parr?

  Okay, guys, well, I'm gonna try and tell them. Okay, so if you go to snippets by the Hustle, it's a plugin that says it has 5,000 users. And all it is, is you open your plugin, you open your desktop and a new, and an article comes up, like a new headline.

• 18:26Shaan Puri?

  Every new tab, every new tab, the default, like blank page, has a news article.

• 18:31Sam Parr?

  Yeah, and you can hit refresh up here, and that will refresh it and give you a new article. It's super simple. It's not complicated at all. I made it, or we made it in 2015.

• 18:43Sam Parr?

  I'll check out this, check out this. We made it one time, and we sent one email about it, and I never touched it ever again.

• 18:51Sam Parr?

  It has, check this out. Okay, so I'm going, I'm on Google Analytics. I'm going back to 2015. Let's see how many page views. Probably gotten 20 million page views. So, 30, 40 million page views it's gotten, and it's only had a lifetime of 28,000 users. But I promoted it one time, literally one time. And, uh,

• 19:15Sam Parr?

  look at the retention. That's crazy, right? So, like, this was in, what year was this? Oh, I changed the Google Analytics, but this, I believe, was still in 16. But, like, they stuck, they stick. And, and what's interesting is that,

• 19:33Sam Parr?

  per session, so each time someone opens a new tab, on average, they click refresh four times.

• 19:41Shaan Puri?

  That's cool. So you're basically hijacking their, their,

• 19:44Sam Parr?

  Attention.

• 19:44Shaan Puri?

  Workflow, what they're trying to do. They're like, oh, I need to go to, you know, my email. Oh, wait, hold on. There used to be this Chrome extension called Momentum that I thought was awesome. It was really fucking simple. You would open a new tab, and it would just have a beautiful photo, and it would say, "Good afternoon, Sean", or whatever time of the day it was. And the lighting would kind of change depending on what time of day it was. And it would say, um, you know, "What's your focus for today?" And I could just type it in. And then from, from that moment on, like, it would just always say, like, "Good evening, Sean, your focus of the day is this." And I love that thing. And this was so viral. I just noticed every time I'd open my laptop, and I'd be doing something, somebody, like, the person over my shoulder would always pause me and be like, "What's that?" What's that thing? And so like this could be paired with the Reddit thing from earlier where you could actually pair

• 20:27Shaan Puri?

  a delivery mechanism, which is this Chrome extension for new tabs with a market segment that's really avid that you found on a subreddit. There's a product idea here I really want to fund. I tried telling my friend Jake to do, to build this thing, but he wasn't super interested. Just because it's very like front end heavy and he's a backend engineer. But if there's a front end engineer, if there's an engineer who loves good design, this is the product I want to, I would invest in to get built. So I don't know if you guys ever seen, I think I talked about this once, but have you ever seen Stripe Home? Have you guys ever seen this product? So Stripe basically did something that's actually several companies do, which is they build an internal sort of like homepage for their company.

• 21:10Shaan Puri?

  And Stripe Home is unreleased product. I don't know why, it looks amazing. They clearly put like thousands of hours of dev cycles and design cycles into this thing. Basically it'll show like, hey, here's the five new employees we hired. Here's some company announcements. Here's like, you know, some funny quote or whatever. And it's just this really good homepage. And if you start opening a new tab, I think that's what you see if you have a Stripe imaged laptop for your company. And so I think every company would want this. When you give your employee a laptop, I think you would want to have like a branded new tab homepage. And so it would be home for whatever your company is. And Sam, I know you kind of had something like this out of Rippling or something like

• 21:47Sam Parr?

  Yeah, well, that's what I was about to say. The, the, this is, I agree, everyone wants this, but you'd have to, you'd have to attach it to someone's payroll or their HR software.

• 21:56Shaan Puri?

  I don't think, I don't think you do. I don't, I don't think you do, because I think what you do is you just make it where any, it's like bottoms up. Any engineer at the company can like enable this for their company. You don't have to really hook into who are the new hires and all that good stuff. Like there's just some basic information that you can, that you, that you can show without hooking in, and then you can get better like Slack as you integrate more sources of data. And so like Amazon has a thing called Phone Tool that does this, where you can go to Phone Tool and it's hooked into the data system. So you can go look up any employee, you can see who they report to, you can see where they are in the org chart, you can see their level. And I know that Clearbit made this for their company. And so they have a Clearbit homepage that they worked on, you know, developing.

• 22:37Shaan Puri?

  So anytime some, anytime you see several companies building the same in-house system for themselves, that's something that you could export out and can be given to any company out of the box as an easy to use thing. And this is something that literally you just went on design. If you go look at when Stripe Home talks about it on Twitter, there's like hundreds and hundreds of replies on the tweet because people just think it's beautiful. And they don't even need the functionality. They just like the look of it, just like the momentum tab. People liked what my new tab looked like. And I think you could do the same for businesses and you could charge them for it. So free idea.

• 23:09Sam Parr?

  Free idea.

• 23:10Shaan Puri?

  Just tell me if you're doing it because I want to invest.

• 23:12Sam Parr?

  I got to check out, guys. I'll talk to you soon, Greg. See you, Sean.

• 23:15Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah.

• 23:15Shaan Puri?

  See ya.

• 23:16Greg Isenberg?

  Later.

• 23:16Sam Parr?

  Keep it going.

• 23:18Shaan Puri?

  Greg, I got two more things for you and then we can bounce.

• 23:20Greg Isenberg?

  Cool.

• 23:21Shaan Puri?

  First question for you. Do you think that there's that? Do you think that there's going to be sort of a backlash against TikTok? Or TikTok will just get banned for being sort of Chinese spyware? And should somebody just be, you know, like Triller or somebody just be positioning themselves as the, as a net waiting to catch all these TikTok users? If people revolt against TikTok, which is sort of, you know, a Chinese company. And it had, there's been lots of reports. It was a big Reddit thread recently about how, how much data it's pulling off of your phone and how it's basically spyware.

• 23:57Greg Isenberg?

  I think, and I think Jason Calcanis has tweeted about this too. I think he sees a lot of opportunity. Um, you know, I think if we look as like the past as a best predictor of the future, there's been so much anti-Facebook sentiment and people still use Facebook products. I think, um,

• 24:22Greg Isenberg?

  I I don't see

• 24:25Greg Isenberg?

  a massive opportunity to like wait for for that, to be honest.

• 24:29Shaan Puri?

  I I would agree. The only difference here is that I think it might be government based this time, like India just banned TikTok in India. And TikTok's fucking huge in India. So somebody's gonna get the benefit of that. I don't know who it's gonna be, but like I I think if the government comes out and does it, that's different than like people all sort of there's no way they're all gonna coordinate and decide to care on a given day and move networks. That that I don't think happens.

• 24:54Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah.

• 24:55Shaan Puri?

  Um, okay. Two other random ideas I saw. There's a company called Arist. I don't know how you say it, Aris, but that's kind of interesting. It's called, uh, the the website is let's find it. It's like Arist text messaging courses. Basically, these guys are letting you build a course like Teachable just through uh, text message delivery. So it's acast.co. And so you can go on. I could be like, hey, I'm gonna teach you how to start businesses. Like, I might do this. I might just make one of these just to try this platform out. But I can be like, hey, I can help you, uh, I don't know, get business ideas or learn how to start a business. And I have a little editor on my side. I can create a text drip and people can receive these uh, text messages.

• 25:38Shaan Puri?

  Um, you know, on a daily basis, like learning in little nuggets. Um, I thought it was kind of an interesting idea, interesting concept. What do you think of this?

• 25:45Greg Isenberg?

  I can't tell you how good of an idea this is. This is like this is like a no brainer to like set up ten courses. Like, you you know, what I would do is start like almost like a little bit of a management company for Aris, like find like you know, you're the idea guy and

• 26:06Shaan Puri?

  Dating coach.

• 26:07Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah, data like and just and just like, okay, we're, I'm gonna help you like get this out there. You do the editing. You do the paid ads on Facebook and then it's new. So it's interesting, the idea around like, oh, through text, that's kind of interesting. It's not like just another guy pressing a button. You get to this landing page. Hey, let me sell you this course.

• 26:28Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 26:29Greg Isenberg?

  Easy.

• 26:30Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, I think this is kind of cool. I'm gonna try, I'm gonna try it. I'm gonna make one, actually. I don't know how much effort it's gonna be. If the platform is easy to use, I'm gonna try one and we'll see what happens with this. What's the most sort of interesting thing you've seen lately? That's outside of the sort of Reddit investigation you've been doing, either something you've thought of or another product that you really like right now?

• 26:53Greg Isenberg?

  Um, top of mind, there's a app called Hags, H A G S, which is a app built on top of Snap, basically.

• 27:06Shaan Puri?

  Is that like the old yearbook, like Hags thing? Is that what it stands for?

• 27:10Greg Isenberg?

  Yes, exactly. So it's yearbook signatures. You, I think there's tons of opportunity on top of SnapKit, which is Snap's developer platform.

• 27:22Greg Isenberg?

  And Hags is obviously taking advantage of that. You

• 27:25Shaan Puri?

  Hags, if you don't know, stands for have a great summer, which is what people used to sign off with on yearbooks.

• 27:30Greg Isenberg?

  Exactly. So you basically post a story, like swipe up to sign my my yearbook and you can, it's basically a high school social network and the entry point is through yearbooks. What I love about it, number one, built on top of SnapKit, tons of opportunity right there. Go look into that, like especially like building, they just announced mini apps. You can create like apps within Snap conversations. I see that being huge.

• 28:02Greg Isenberg?

  So I like that. I like their design style, like their design, like if you, you know, I think there's so many apps out there that they all just look the same. And it's just refreshing to see something new, even that at the website that you showed with the Chrome extension, the Amazon one. That, or the product recommendation one like that, like I looked at it, I'm like, yeah, I'm in, because it's like, cool. It's interesting looking. So it's like design something that's interesting. Hags does that.

• 28:30Greg Isenberg?

  And it just shot up in the charts and, you know, it, and it's been cool to see. So I really like that.

• 28:37Greg Isenberg?

  Um. What else have I been really liking? Stadium Live is pretty cool. I don't know if you've seen that.

• 28:47Shaan Puri?

  I saw when it got funded. It's like a sports fan thing, but what's cool about it?

• 28:51Greg Isenberg?

  For it's like basically like, again, in this sort of like Gen Z world, it's like basically ESPN for Gen Z. You get assigned of I'm very interested in like virtual avatars as an entry point to um socialization as COVID. And this pandemic continues, people are going to be looking for new ways to just connect with one another. Um and avatars is a really good one. Um you get assigned an avatar. Uh you join um like a game, basically esports or sports. And you know, it might be like Toronto Maple Leafs versus Montreal Canadiens. You see it it again connects with Snapchat.

• 29:35Greg Isenberg?

  So you get it's your bit emoji um that you can like edit. And you could just see other people there. There's like polls and stuff to like keep you entertained and you kind of feel like you're in this like virtual environment. So what I love about it is like number one, virtual environment. Number two, vertical network. Number three, built on top of Snap.

• 29:55Shaan Puri?

  I like that. You you know, when you said avatars, it reminded me of an app I saw this weekend. Uh it's actually number one in the charts right now. I don't know if you've seen it. It's called Trivia Royale.

• 30:04Greg Isenberg?

  Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I love it.

• 30:06Shaan Puri?

  So this was made by um the guys who made QuizUp, I think. So uh this guy Thor and somebody else. Uh they they have this new company called T-Time Games and they made QuizUp, which was like, you know, the most popular quiz trivia app at the time. Kind of went through a rise and a big fall and then they kind of spun out. They're like, all right, we're doing it again. And so the way this one works, you download the app, you make a little avatar, which is like, doesn't sound that great yet, but um they use Face Moji, which is cool. So it's actually a pretty good, high quality one. Uh but they they combined the trivia game of like HQ or QuizUp with Battle Royale from Fortnite. So it start every game starts with a thousand people and you go head to head against somebody. And you play you do five questions of trivia.

• 30:50Shaan Puri?

  And at the end, you win or they win, and then it goes like the pool cuts in half. Now there's 500 players left, then 250, then 125, and it just keeps going till there's one person left standing as the winner winner of Trivial Royale. And it's number one in the charts right now. It's beautifully made app, just really well done. Um, I don't know if it'll have, you know, the sort of stickiness that you would want, but um, I don't know, I like, I like it. It's sort of same guys working on the problem from a different angle, which I always respect.

• 31:17Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah, I think I, I love it. Beautiful games is always one of those things where, you know, as you know, it kind of like, is it, is it a hit or can they build it sort of as a platform?

• 31:29Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 31:30Greg Isenberg?

  But I feel like these guys, I mean, they probably learned a lot from QuizUp and they probably got a good shot at it. So I'm pretty excited about it.

• 31:38Shaan Puri?

  Games struggle because games are both a hit business and a fad business. And people kind of confuse those two. And it's like, it's a hit business as in your game just out the gate could be a flop or a hit. But even if it's a hit, it could then be a fad hit, or it could be a long lasting League of Legends type of hit, which is super sticky. And you really only get the value if you get the hit and it's not a fad. Or you just do a bunch of fad hits over and over and over again as a studio doing little quick hitters. And so that's the, those are the only two models that work in gaming, unfortunately.

• 32:11Greg Isenberg?

  Which is tough, like you don't want to be on that treadmill.

• 32:14Shaan Puri?

  Exactly. Or you do if it's your first time and you got a bunch of energy and you're like, yeah, uh, this is great. I'm going to do this thing that's really fun. And then, you know, for me at least, the further you go, you're like, hell no, I don't want to. If it's a treadmill, I don't even want to touch it. I don't want to get near it.

• 32:30Greg Isenberg?

  Um, another like, I don't know if you saw it, It's Me.

• 32:34Shaan Puri?

  It's Me, is this a, is this the dating app or which one is this?

• 32:38Greg Isenberg?

  Yeah, it's kind of a, it's more of like a make friends app, but it could be used for dating. Um, also Avatar. Um, so you download the app, you tell you, you know, they ask you like, what are you into? Animals, whatever, there's some sort of like

• 32:53Shaan Puri?

  Personality quiz, yeah.

• 32:55Greg Isenberg?

  Personality quiz, exactly. Um, they ask you to create an avatar, you create an avatar. Then you're in this world, basically. You chat roulette style, press a button, get connected with someone who they think you would like jive with. And basically, as you like move your your head, your avatar, just like um

• 33:18Shaan Puri?

  Tracks you.

• 33:18Greg Isenberg?

  Face move. Yeah, exactly. It tracks you. It's it's cool because you're getting to know someone through your voice plus avatar.

• 33:26Shaan Puri?

  Right. Because it kind of lowers the barrier, the friction where

• 33:29Greg Isenberg?

  lowers the barrier.

• 33:30Shaan Puri?

  It's not your real face. You're not on webcam. You don't have to care about how you look, but it's higher fidelity than just a still photo and text.

• 33:38Greg Isenberg?

  Exactly. So what other verticals could you do that in?

• 33:42Shaan Puri?

  Right.

• 33:45Shaan Puri?

  Yeah, so many ideas, dude. Okay, dude, this is great. I'm glad you came back on. We should wrap it up. But let us know what you think. If you guys love Greg, let us know that we have Greg on more. If you hate Greg, let us know that we'll never let Greg on again. We have a deal. So Greg, good good times, man.

• 34:02Greg Isenberg?

  All right. Thanks, man. Appreciate it.

• 34:04Shaan Puri?

  Cool.

• 34:04Greg Isenberg?

  Take care.

• 34:05Shaan Puri?

  See ya.