This episode of the My First Million podcast features Sam Parr and Shaan Puri brainstorming various business ideas, ranging from a high-end matchmaking service for millionaires to a local computer repair service. The hosts discuss the importance of sales skills, the potential for niche service businesses, and the value of building a personal brand through content like blogging.
Topics: Entrepreneurship, Business Ideas, Sales, Matchmaking, Web Hosting, Blogging, Local Services
Enterprise Sales Team [00:00]
Sam Parr: You need to create a white-label enterprise sales team. Quit trying to hire programmers, whatever. I want you going out there recruiting the guys selling Cutco knives. I want you going to the mall, finding the most hustler guys selling that shoe soap stuff. And I want you to start building them and training them on how to sell B2B SaaS. If you are looking for an aqua hire, salespeople are in high demand. If you have guys that can sell, and girls that can sell, this company will get bought. I don’t care what you’re selling, but start collecting salespeople and build a sales team. You’ll either get bought out, you can build a SaaS around it, or you’ll just get aqua hired in. This is a good business idea.
Millionaire Matchmaker [00:47]
Sam Parr: So, this leads me to my next business idea. I am going to do, potentially, if enough people ask me for this, the first seven-figure millionaire matchmaker that is only based on a contingency fee. So I’m going to have no cost. I’m only going to take the top of the top clients. We’re talking people like, um, I’m not going to name names, but but folks that have a minimum probably 50 million net worth, 5 million social followers. I’m going to be matchmaking for these people, and if they get married, only success, gentleman’s agreement handshake, million-dollar minimum success fee.
Web Hosting Agency [01:28]
Shaan Puri: Okay, I got another business idea. I think we should bring back web hosting companies, specifically services agencies to help local small businesses build very basic WordPress websites. We poo-poo these simple ideas. Notice what the focus is. The focus there is sales. Can you sell it to them? But you go to somebody and you say, “Look, for 50 bucks a month, I’m going to host your site, I’ll make sure it doesn’t get hacked, I’ll keep it lightly updated, you know, you can buy an additional thing if you want to make updates.” But this is a SaaS business. You are now creating websites where you are selling them this service, hacker, web hosting, whatever. You’re just doing the basic stuff. I think we think that we have to come up with this new AI stuff. Go back to the basics. Like start making web pages for restaurants in town and start at the basics. I think we need to bring back web hosting companies.
Airbnb Experiences [02:20]
Shaan Puri: Which brings me to my next business idea. Airbnb Experiences. If you are interested in starting a new side hustle, you can sign up on Airbnb Experiences to lead a tour in your town and charge people for it. This is a way for you to immediately start to get money from people searching for cool things to do. Now, this only works in major towns where they’ve launched Airbnb Experiences, but it’s generally tier one and tier two cities. Find your favorite stuff, do tours for locals, show them around to some of your great stuff, provide a great experience, beg for five-star reviews, and you can literally create a side hustle on Airbnb Experiences.
Geek Squad for Neighborhoods [03:07]
Shaan Puri: Here’s the next one. It’s a similar one because you may not like doing tours, like I’m not a tour guide. Geek Squad type neighborhood computer service. I’ll give you one that is a genius. I was hanging out with a friend yesterday, her laptop was disgusting. The screen is all smudged up, there’s cookie crumbs in the keyboard, there’s all this stuff. And I’ve had this fantasy of doing of dressing up and just going door-to-door to help fix people’s stuff. I’m talking boosting their Wi-Fi, cleaning their computer, helping them with some basic tech support stuff, measuring the power. Another pet peeve of mine is a lot of people have really bad cell phone chargers and cables. They’re not charging with USB-C with the full max power. New business idea, it’s Geek Squad as a service where you go door-to-door, maybe even just to clean up their laptops and phones. I found this gunk online that’s this like gel sludge that you put into keyboards to suck up all the dust and the dirt. You can walk around with a little toolkit and for $100 make some massive improvements for people. All you need for that is about $100 worth of supplies, you need a little bit of knowledge on the tech side, and you need to dress up nice and look respectable. But thinking about these things that don’t necessarily scale, do those things, start there. You need to get your hands dirty in these type of environments. That’s my suggestion.
Old Home Videos [04:26]
Sam Parr: I got a riff on your idea, your Geek Squad thing. I think there’s a simpler version of it, which is every parent I know that’s like, kind of like my parents’ age, has this box in their house of just old home videos. And so I think an even easier one versus like, “Can I help you with your stuff?” is just to say, “Hey, do you guys have any like home videos from your kids?” because I can convert them into stuff that you can have, you know, on your computer on the internet so you’ll never lose them, they’ll live forever. Can’t even find a VHS player anymore. So I can take, if you just have that box, I’ll just take the box and I’ll do it for you. And then you can basically drive it to like, you know, CVS or Costco and they do the shit for you. But like, there’s a gap there where most people don’t, they’re not really aware of the problem or it’s on their to-do list, they’ll never do it. But if a kid showed up at their door, dressed nice, million-dollar smile, and said, “I’d love to take care of that for you. I’m doing that for people in the neighborhood. I can take it from you right now. Just show me the closet where it is and I’ll go grab it.” I think that you can make, you know, an easy few thousand dollars, um, you know, in a couple months of effort effort there, which sounds like not that much, but you know, at different phases of your life, a few thousand dollars is all the money. It’s all you need, right? And and it gets you going.
Blogging [05:33]
Sam Parr: Listeners, next experiment that you need to be doing, bring back blogging. You need to fill the AIs, and the AIs need to have data from the public web to scrape. I’ve been saying this for a long time, blogging needs to make a comeback. Take some of your best tweets, put them into your blogs if you need to. You don’t have to create new content, but just put the stuff you’re sharing elsewhere into blogs. A great example of that is my own monthly recaps. If you go to nickgraynews.com, you go to the blog, you click the monthly recaps, I take some of my best posts and I put it there on the blog on the public internet in order to scrape. And you need to do this for a few reasons, but one of the reasons is for nefarious purposes. I wanted to find a list of all of the Equinox gyms in New York City that had swimming pools, very hard list to find. And so I made my own list of all the Equinox gyms with swimming pools. It started to rank pretty quickly as the number one search result for other people searching for the same thing. Unfortunately, my gym started to get very crowded and I would have to wait for the lanes to swim at my gym, and I’m getting 50, 100 visitors a day to this page. And so I closed my gym swimming pool according to my blog for maintenance for a year so that I would have to wait for less people. And people would say, “Hey,” they’d go there, they’d say, “Hey guys, sorry, this pool’s closed for a year, you know, we’re resurfacing the bottom pavement, but these are some other nearby pools.” And yeah, so that’s how we got into jail.
Shaan Puri: Dude, shut up. Go, listen, go Google like Nick Gray Equinox. He has a PDF on his website. Download my full list of Equinox gyms with pools and you could and and if you sign up, we’ll send you the pool lengths for each of the New York City Equinox pools.
Sam Parr: You know I got that lead magnet for the Friends newsletter, brother. I’m out here hustling.
Shaan Puri: You’re going to be, you’re going to have just dozens of pool fans in New York who worship you.