In this episode, Sam Parr and Shaan Puri discuss the business model behind high-stakes gambling live streams, specifically focusing on the rise of platforms like Stake.com. They analyze how popular streamers and celebrities are incentivized to promote these sites and the potential financial mechanics driving these massive, often public, gambling losses.
Topics: Gambling, Live Streaming, Stake.com, Influencer Marketing, Business Models, Affiliate Marketing, Crypto Casinos
MugShotties and Viral Marketing [00:06]
Sam Parr: Okay. I just sent you something hilarious. I’ve been following this Twitter called MugShotties. And it’s like a play on mugshots, and it’s [inaudible]
Shaan Puri: We talked about this. We talked about this. You’ve talked about…
Sam Parr: Oh, did we talk about MugShotties?
Shaan Puri: Yeah.
Sam Parr: It’s so funny. And the tagline is, uh, the tagline is, uh, “Hope Bae gets bail.” Uh, and it’s MugShotties, and it’s all like good-looking girls who have a mugshot. It’s hilarious. It’s so funny.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, we talked about that because there was a guy who his mugshot went viral because he’s got like, he’s just like really stunningly good-looking, and he became like a model after afterwards or whatever.
Sam Parr: Yeah, I remember that guy. People still talk about him.
Gambling Live Streams and Drake [00:47]
Shaan Puri: Can I tell you a crazy story? Uh, so, have you ever seen, I think this is probably outside of your your like kind of orbit of what you pay attention to, but have you seen these gambling live streams where Drake will go on Twitch and he’ll gamble like $20 million live on stream?
Sam Parr: No, really?
Shaan Puri: Yeah. Like a like a real $20 million?
Sam Parr: A real $20 million? Like he lost like I think $17 million on roulette one night last like two weeks ago or something like that.
Shaan Puri: It seems really that rich that I mean like if you’re $200 million rich, that’s 10% of your net worth.
Sam Parr: In a night. Okay, so that’s a substantial amount.
Shaan Puri: Good question. I had the same question, which led me to some pretty interesting findings. Okay, so, um, so I saw Drake doing this, and I’ve seen other popular streamers like xQc, and these guys, they do these gambling streams from time to time. People love to see it because they’re playing kind of like high stakes online, uh, you know, gambling, and they’re reacting to the highs and lows or whatever. Um, Ben, have you seen this? I think it’s probably also outside of your, you know, Mormon orbit. You you don’t watch these kinds of sins.
Sam Parr: Yeah, so exactly. So, so I saw this on…
Shaan Puri: This is all uh, this is all on Twitch.
Sam Parr: It’s happening on, it was happening on Twitch. Maybe some people do it on YouTube as well, but it got me curious. I was like, there’s no way this guy’s gambling $25 million, $20 million of his own money on these things. And I was like, they these streams get so popular. I’m like, this is actually great marketing for the website that it’s on. So he’s he’s gambling on something called Stake.com, S-T-A-K-E.com. And, um, so I was like, I bet this is house money that they’re giving him in order to just promote the site. And sure enough, that’s what it is. So get this.
Sam Parr: But is he is he losing it again? When you play Blackjack, you lose against the dealer, right?
Shaan Puri: House, yeah. So they’re just like, if I gave you $20 million to come play my rigged game, I gave you 20 million, you lose it right back to me. I get not I I know I you know, I’m back whole. Um, they don’t even lose the vig because they’re the house, so they would take that, you know, 4% edge or whatever that they would have, they keep that as well. Um, and if you win, maybe they have some deal where like, hey, if you win, you keep the winnings. Uh, I would assume they have some deal like that with them.
Sam Parr: But it it it’s electronic, right? Like it’s like the cards are digital. It’s not like a camera on. So then they could just be like, “Oh shoot, Drake has 20. We have to make ourselves have 21.”
Shaan Puri: Yeah, well that that’s yeah, that’s a little bit that’s illegal for sure, but uh they wouldn’t need to do that. I guess that’s kind of my point is that they they already have a house edge and over time, like they will win. And so, and even if they don’t, like this is as a marketing campaign, like uh this is like kind of genius. And so what they’re doing is Stake.com is this website, and it is the largest cryptocurrency-based online gambling site in the world. And nobody knew who was behind it until recently, some guy in Australia bought like a $36 million home. And they were like, “Who who is this? You’re in your 20s. How did you buy a $36 million home all cash? Like what’s what’s…”
Sam Parr: Was he he was he was in his 20s?
Shaan Puri: So these guys, they’re in their mid-20s. I think one guy’s 25 or 26, the other guy’s 28. And, um, and so there’s this guy Ed, you can just search Ed Craven, uh, Ed Craven Stake, and you’ll see the secret origins, the secret Australian origins of the world’s biggest crypto casino. And so get this. So basically they have a…
Sam Parr: There’s these guys in, um, in Australia, and they’ve got this office, and it’s just like, and they the office is under this name called Easygo Gaming. It’s like, “We build online, uh, games.” And the office is super nice, and people would see it on social media. They would see like, “Wow, these guys got like a chef, and they got all these perks, and they got like they’re always going on these trips, and like what’s going on with man, Easygo Gaming, you guys must be an awesome gaming company.” So, uh…
Sam Parr: It must just be like a couple people and they’re just hanging out at someone’s house.
Shaan Puri: And so, well, no, no, so so this is a legit company, but basically Easygo Gaming is the licensed gaming provider, like they provide the games to the casino company, Stake, which is based in some place called Curacao or something like that, which is like some Dutch Caribbean island, uh, where the actual casino is based, and these guys own both. So they were kind of known as only the owners of Easygo, but they actually own Stake. And so it all got kind of like revealed when the guy bought this home for whatever. You can see even there’s like a Daily Mail article. He buys a…
Sam Parr: I’m I’m reading it right now. Casino.org, yeah.
Shaan Puri: A $38.5 million mansion he buys, and, um, they’re like, “Who is this kid? He’s 26 years old or whatever.” And that’s kind of how people figured out like, “Oh, he owns Stake.com.” Now, I I believe, these are kind of like my predictions, my guesses. So Stake.com, I think is pretty clearly clearing like billions of dollars in revenue. I think both of these guys are now self-made billionaires, possibly even 10 billion plus is what they’ve made off of Stake.com because this thing is a absolute cash cow. And you can kind of back into this by looking at like, um, they do these like Sunday raffle, whatever, lottery type thing, and it’s like you pay, it’s like, “Oh wow, you know, 250,000 people bought this like $10 ticket.” It’s like, “Oh wow, that they just, you know, that that was just like a two two and a half million dollar Sunday for them,” and then they pay out this much and they keep 26 million or 50 million. Like that’s just a week for them. And so, um, and so you can kind of see, you can kind of back into it. I did some some calculations on it, but but I’m pretty sure that these guys are both self-made billionaires, if not 10 billion at this point, uh, in equity value of of Stake.com. And it’s just kind of crazy to me like that this exists, that these guys are so young, able to do this, and, um, and people who are just willing to like live on the edge. It’s like, “Yeah, I’m going to go set up a company in the Dutch Caribbean island of Curacao, which gives out like online gambling licenses like, you know, my neighborhood gives out candy on Halloween.” And these guys have amassed this absolute fortune, kind of anonymously building this. Isn’t this just like, isn’t this kind of crazy to you?
Sam Parr: Yeah, this is I’m researching and I know how I recognize this. They’re a sponsor of the UFC.
Shaan Puri: Yes.
Sam Parr: And so they’re big UFC sponsors, and I think…
Shaan Puri: They also sponsor Watford, the like, uh, the English soccer team. So they like pay 10 million a year as their like lead, uh, lead sponsor for that, too.
Sam Parr: So, I’m doing research just as as you’re talking. Um, have on LinkedIn, there’s I I don’t Well, here, one guy says he’s the CEO, but that seems I don’t know if that’s legit. Uh, this is this is crazy. This is one of those amazing companies. This like just like VPN and a few other things that’s completely under the radar and is totally crushing. And I’ve said this to you before, I actually think that people’s personal homes, the price of it, it, you know, like a rich person can live in a low-priced home, but if you purchase a high-priced home, the likelihood that you’re rich is like it’s an indicative of what you have because it’s hard to it’s not impossible, but it’s hard to give a bank to give you a loan if you don’t have a significant amount of income, not just assets, but income. So if he bought a 30 and if he bought a $37 million home in cash, is that really what it said? Then…
Shaan Puri: Yeah, I don’t know if it was all cash, uh, but it was like three times more the house sold in 2018 for three times less, and then the guy renovated it and he this guy bought it for for whatever, almost 40 million.
Sam Parr: To buy a $40 million home, I would think you’d want to be worth like at least $250 million and at least some type of liquid situation as well, not just privately held company.
Shaan Puri: So here’s my notes on this thing. So I’m just going to read you my raw notes from last night. It says, uh, “Small company in Australia in Melbourne called Easygo, um, looks like your typical successful startup. You got ping pong tables, you got a chef, you got perks, you’re going on on on boat trips with the with the team, but they’re hiding a massive secret. They’re also the founders of Stake, which I believe might be the world’s largest casino ever. It’s crypto-only, which is a massive growth lever.”
Sam Parr: Does that mean that it that it’s legal?
Shaan Puri: Um, you mean illegal? I I don’t know the legality of it. That’s like probably a pretty complicated thing. Like…
Sam Parr: Like full tilt went away in America. I used to play Tilt.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, like you can’t go if you’re on Stake.com in the US, you can’t go to it. It’s like, “No, this is not available to US citizens.” Um, but it but internationally it is, and they they based out of Curacao which gives out the online gambling. So I think they are fully licensed, but they use uh crypto, which I think lets them do things like no, um, as they say, KYC AML, like know your customer. So basically, I think you could just transfer in Bitcoin or whatever, and you could just gamble it on the site. Uh, you just put an email in and you start gambling. And uh so they got like all these games or whatever. Um, I think that they’re paying Drake like $20 million a month to be the like sponsor of this thing, which is No way. You really think that much?
Shaan Puri: Because he’s gambling at those stakes, and I’m pretty sure that’s all house money. I don’t think Drake is promoting this company for by by putting in $20 million of his own money and losing it every month.
Sam Parr: Well, they’re not they’re not giving him $20 million. They’re saying, “You can win up to 20 million or you could…”
Shaan Puri: No, they’re giving him house money. They’re giving him a chip or a credit line that basically says, “Here’s $20 million to go play on the site.” You probably can’t just cash that out. You have to gamble it here. Um, but but I’m pretty sure that’s how it’s working.
Sam Parr: That would be crazy. I mean, I I like okay, so the private some of some of the private equity guys, like, um, Steve Schwarzman and uh a few other folks who founded Carlyle and BlackRock and Blackstone and all that, they there’s there’s some years where they’ll get paid like $800 million or $500 million because of performance. But, um, two $20 million a month is $240 million a year. That would there’s probably, I can’t imagine there’s more than 100 people in the whole world that earn that much income. I mean, of course there’s a lot of people who earn like paper gains, but who earn that much income in a given year. That would be absolutely astounding.
Shaan Puri: So get this. So they so the guy buys this house for 40 million. They also own multiple penthouses, like the top floor of the Eureka Tower in Melbourne, which is the largest skyscraper. But here’s what’s even more interesting. When they were 18, um, when one of them was 18, the other guy’s 20, they started something called primedice.com. It’s still up. If you go to primedice.com, and it’s basically a crypto gambling site where you just bet, is it going to be uh like what what’s going to happen? It’s like a heads or tails. It’s like a roll of the dice, and uh you could just wager on it. And like, you know, here you go. And you can just see people just betting constantly on what the dice is going to roll out to, right? Uh and like what they’re going to what they’re going to win for it. So they created this when they were back in, I don’t know, uh 2013. It says, I think on the site, it says, “Largest crypto gambling site since 2013.” Uh so they were pretty early on that. Um, this site is wild. Do you see all the live users betting money?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, it’s crazy. And uh it’s I mean just look at this one guy, Shane Recover, he’s just betting over and over again.
Sam Parr: This company, this is this is such an amazing five find. This company alone, this prime dice thing is awesome.
Shaan Puri: So then let me tell you some of the the other things that that come into it. So, uh so basically, um, I think one of the YouTubers that they pay or or maybe a Twitch streamer, this guy Aiden Ross, I think is getting paid a few million bucks per month to to do it. That that I think there’s pretty good authority on. Um, $3 million a month.
Shaan Puri: Yeah. Uh, I know, I think two, $2 million a month. Um, okay, now let me go into more. Okay, so all of that was like, you know, this is all like not confirmed, but like these are now like some rumors. So, uh, or I guess this part’s not a rumor. Like, if you go to their website, you could see that there’s a a company called Medium Rare NV, which is incorporated in Curacao. That’s the company that holds the the gaming license. If you Google Map the address, it’s just like a shitty warehouse building that you’ll find of like where this company is based. And so I don’t know what’s going on there. It’s like, you know, when you incorporate in Delaware and they give you like a PO box as your address. Um, so okay, and a couple of other, you know, random rumors are like, uh, they had a they they added, um, Dogecoin to their site as like a way to deposit back in the day. And like when Elon when all the Elon stuff was happening, I think they dumped like hundreds of millions of dollars worth of Doge. They like sold it all when the Elon pump was happening to to Dogecoin. Um, and uh yeah, it’s crazy. So so anyways, this is just like a crazy thing. But what like, okay, let’s say you even had the idea for this.
Sam Parr: I Googled I Googled I’m Googling these guys as you’re talking. There’s very, very, very little information on these folks. There’s there’s almost nothing. I Do you think could I change my browser to Australia and maybe get better results? Because I’m Googling their names now and there is like there’s one picture on them on the whole on everything.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, I like found their Instagrams. Both their Instagrams are private, but like, uh, yeah, like I know somebody who who follows them or whatever, so I like stalked their Instagram too just to see like what’s going on and it’s like Are they jacked? Are they jacked bros now or are they still nerds?
Shaan Puri: They’re uh they’re I wouldn’t say they’re jacked, but they’re fit, uh and they’re bros for sure. Like, you know, Damn, I’m breaking the stereotype. You know, like here’s the like, I’m just going to describe to you, uh I’ll send this photo. We can put this in the Are there Ferrari pictures?
Shaan Puri: Okay, so one, okay, picture number one. Uh, you would have guessed Ferrari, but here’s a close second. Picture of a Range Rover with a giant bow and somebody hugging them because they just gave them a Range Rover. Uh, okay, that’s a classic. You got to love that one. Another classic. You know the like influencer balloons you get when you cross like a million followers or whatever, the yellow giant inflatable balloon of a number. They have that, uh, and it’s like some guy, uh, you know, hugging them doing that. Another one like courtside at the Lakers game, courtside at the French Open. Like I could see Nadal’s calf like, you know, right behind this guy’s head in this picture. So they’re definitely living it up, uh, and as they should. This is what I this is exactly what I want my online casino dealer guys’ life to be. This is who I want it to be, and this is how I want them to live, and I’m glad that they are doing exactly what they’re doing.
Sam Parr: And you one of them’s only 26 is what you’re saying?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, and this article might be a little out of date, but uh, yeah, they definitely they definitely hit this scale when they were in their 20s. Like the youngest rich the richest young person in the world, like uh richer than what’s his name? The Sam Bankman-Fried guy.
Sam Parr: Yeah, and younger.
Shaan Puri: Or on par with it and and younger. That is outstanding. That is crazy. What a good find.
Sam Parr: Speaking of young billionaires, uh I think the world’s youngest self-billionaire now is this guy Alexander Wang. Do you know this guy? I I I don’t really know him. I think I was in a group chat with him. Um Is that from that company, uh the startup? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Shaan Puri: So what what they do is pretty cool. Um, they basically saw the kind of like machine learning, um, trend, you know, like this is going to keep growing, and they were like, “Well, you know, one one thing that’s really hard is like when you’re doing machine learning, you need like the data to be labeled, right? So if you’re trying to teach a computer how to recognize a a a you know, a kitten or something like that, it’s like you first have to train it in some ways or be able to like, um, teach it when it’s wrong and correct it.” And, um, so that labeling process is is quite like time-consuming. And so what they did was they created like a I think a giant workforce force of overseas people that will label your images for you. And so like if you’re a self-driving car company, if you’re uh Waymo or or Tesla or whatever, you get like tons and tons of footage, and then now those need to be labeled as like, “Yep, that was a dog crossing the street. Yep, that’s a stop sign,” even though it’s partially obstructed. And so how does that happen? That’s like a human intervention. Humans go and do that. And so Scale started off as like a it was labeling as a service. I’m sure they do a lot more stuff now, but it’s pretty crazy. That’s like a $10 billion company now. And this guy, I think he started it when he was 19 or something. What? Um, so Is he cool?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, he was cool. Uh, like I didn’t know him for long because as soon as they’re, it’s pretty funny. It’s like, I’m in this group chat that’s like four founders, um, yeah, four four a bunch of founders, and it’s like, “Oh, this is kind of like the underground founders hangout, like we we chill here.” And everybody’s trying to do big things. But then when one guy actually started doing big things, he’s like, “I’m busy. I need to leave this now.” And so it’s like the the ultimate signal. It’s like, “Oh, when it really takes off, you don’t stay in these chats. You just sort of like go do your billionaire thing now.” Meaning like you go do your like, “I’m actually on a rocket ship. I don’t have time to socialize anymore.” Um, which, you know, respect to him.
Sam Parr: Dude, I was going to show you something that I thought was like a major good find, and now it seems like achievable given that you just set the baseline at to 26-year-olds who are now worth $10 billion. This one’s a little this one’s much smaller, but still oddly interesting. Uh, go to the the MFM or the uh million dollar brainstorm document.
Shaan Puri: Okay. That we have. And scroll down, and so you can kind of see that like this is truthful. The guy sent me a picture of his QuickBooks. So, you see that?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, looking at it.
Sam Parr: All right, so this guy named Matt Paulson. So you remember when my Twitter got hacked?
Shaan Puri: Yes.
Sam Parr: So, uh, there was the basically people hacked my Twitter and they tweeted out like, “I’m giving away a PS5 or whatever the number is, and just like send me $400 and I’m donating the money to St. Jude’s.” And this guy Matt, I when I got back in my Twitter, I saw that he sent two times the asked amount. He was like, “He’s like, I just want to set it went ahead and sent you $1,000, just, you know, so St. Jude’s has a little extra money.” And I I was like, “Oh my god, dude, that that sucks. I’m so sorry about this.” And he was like, “Oh, no big deal.” And I was like, “All right, well, who who are you that you’re this nice?” And I clicked out, and he runs this website called MarketBeat. Have you ever heard of MarketBeat?
Shaan Puri: Only when you uh you you shared this in the Treds group. So I did a little bit of stalking at that time because I was like, “What is that?” You know, your tweet was intriguing you because you had said something like, “I met a guy who runs a company that does $25 million a year in revenue, only 13 employees, and it was like $17 million of the 25 was profit.” And I was like, Yes. All right. I’m fully aroused. Tell me more. What is this company, you know?
Sam Parr: Got him. Uh, yeah. Uh, and so he sent me a picture of his QuickBooks, and he was like, “Here’s the profit.” And keep in mind, this doesn’t include my huge salary, my huge salary is it part of the expenses, but we actually do $17 million in profit. The P&L that he sent me, it’s like, I think $13 million in profit. So it’s called MarketBeat, marketbeat.com. And, um, for the first two years, it was just him. And you go to MarketBeat Explain what it is. Yeah, like what what is this? Yeah, you you go to marketbeat.com, like I always Google like “HubSpot price targets” because I’m curious what HubSpot’s what analysts think the the the stock might be in one year, and he shows up early in Google, one, two, three, if you Google “Amazon price targets,” “Target price targets,” whatever, like any company. And it’s he calls it a web portal, but if you didn’t know better, you’d look at it and just call it a media company. So you you see different headlines and different news. It’s kind of like Wall Street Journal, but really even more niche and just for stocks, just for dividend stocks, and it’s just a way to really quickly see headlines of what’s coming up. So it’s kind of like a um uh a portal or a data aggregator where you could just like see like, “All right, um this stock has an earnings call on this date.” So it’s basically just a place to get information, but it’s also part um media company because they have they published 250 articles a year, or sorry, a month, and they have contractors who they pay $150 per article to write these. But he told me, he goes, “Regardless, if the articles don’t actually add to any of our revenue. People come to the website mostly just to see like the stock prices and things like that.” And so right now, the guy uh has 11 employees, and I actually have a list of, sorry, 13 employees. I have a list of what they all do. He’s got he’s got four developers, four support people, one ad guy, one accountant, one content manager, one marketing assistant, and him. And, uh, they make money through subscription and through advertising, most of which comes through advertising. They’ve got 15,000 subscribers who pay between $20 and $40,000 $20 and $40 a month depending on whichever one they get. So let’s call it 30, so that’s five and five and a half million uh from the subscription, from the premium subscription. And then the rest being ad revenue. 20 million of ads. Okay, wow. Crazy, right? And there’s only one ad sales person. He doesn’t have a team of ad sales guys. And he’ll they’ll sell directly to large like uh maybe like the Motley Fool or some other like uh stock picking newsletter or some other financial brand or some company looking to promote their stock or different financial brokers, uh financial products like wealth advisors, things like that. But if an advertiser is too small, they just work with an agency and and they just say, “Hey, agency, you know, we’ve got some leftover inventory. You want to put your ads in here?” And it’s just one guy doing the whole thing. Doing all the uh Unbelievable. Unbelievable. So it seems like the the trick for them, and by trick I mean hard work and strategy, was Look at the guy. Yeah, by the way, they’ve been around I think they’ve been around for 15 years. Right. And it was SEO. It’s SEO that drives the bulk of the traffic. Is that the idea?
Sam Parr: I think early on. Now it has a little bit of a brand. Before I even knew the guy, I would actually go to it all the time just to look because they’re their interface It’s really nicely organized. Like I’m on like the Amazon one right now, and it’s basically like it has just like a bunch of stuff put together. It’s like, “Oh, here’s the exacts. Here’s the CEO, here’s their age, here’s their pay.” It’s like, “Here’s the, um, you know, here’s the percent shareholding, you know, amongst these different groups. Here’s the analyst targets,” etc. Yeah, it’s like It’s kind of ugly by traditional web, you know, 2.0 standards, like it doesn’t meet any of the design requirements that like Airbnb would approve of, but it in my mind, it’s perfect. It actually is designed beautifully, like it works wonderfully. And so it’s like a cluttered website. It kind of looks like Drudge Report or Craigslist or something or eBay. Like it’s this messy website, but I think it’s quite good.
Shaan Puri: We need to put together a compilation of what I’m calling “Sam’s Ugly Ducklings.” And this is an example of Sam’s Ugly Ducklings, which is a website that like, who the fuck even heard of this? It doesn’t look super fancy. It’s kind of been around for a while. It’s got this like niche passionate audience. Drudge Report is one, this is another. You’ve showed me like 10 of these in the last year, and I think people are I think people really dig these, and so we should do an episode that just highlights each one of these, and it doesn’t have to be like a podcast. It’s almost like a screen share, uh maybe it’s just for YouTube. Or like there’s this guy reaching out. He’s trying to turn our podcast into like a e-book or whatever, like a really nicely designed PDF. Um, we should have him do it on your Ugly Ducklings, because he’s got extensive notes on what you talk about in each episode. Really, who? Uh, this guy in India. I I forgot his name, but I’m talking to him right now, uh to get one of these made for us because I think it’d be dope, right? Like That’d be sick. Dude, it’s embarrassing. Like I I get some people who are like, now there’s people who are like, I would say, kind of like a little more successful in the tech industry that are getting into our podcast, whereas I feel like before we were kind of like a different audience for whatever reason, like Like kids, almost like kids. Well, not not kids. It was more like just like entrepreneurial, I would say, is definitely a big component of it. Uh, which might be K’s, but might be like somebody in their 30s that wants to make a change or whatever. Or it’s just like, “Yeah, I own this awesome business. I’m based out of, you know, Peoria, Illinois,” and it’s like, “What the fuck? Who are you, and how did you find us?” And but like that was more of our main target. And now I’m getting people that are like kind of in the heart of Silicon Valley that are like, “Dude, I kind of got hooked to the podcast.” And I’m like, “Dude, I’ve been telling you about this for like two years.” And they’re like, “Yeah, it’s actually good.” And they’re like, “What are like the best episodes? You got like 200.” And I was like, “Uh, I don’t really know.” He’s like, “Well, what’s like a good place to find the most popular ones?” I was like, “Uh, I don’t have it.” He’s like, “Is there a place with summaries?” I was like, “Nah, not really.” He’s like, “Well, you have all these ideas. Is there a compilation of all the ideas?” I was like, “Ah, there should be. Someone I think made one once.” It’s like all the obvious like kind of like growth things that you would do or like onboarding things you would do, we’ve done none of. And so I’m like kind of embarrassed about that. But I’m not embarrassed. Who cares? It’s working.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, I know. I just think it would help us. Like I think I think I would want that if I was getting into a podcast. And let me, this is funny. Let me tell you how I found out about MarketBeat. I was reading Starter Story. I like that website, Starter Story, and one of the questions is, “What books and podcasts do you read?” And he said, “On the podcast front, I really enjoy listening to My First Million, which breaks down unique ways that business owners are using uh unique ways business owners are generating massive profits.” That’s how I found out about about this guy because he said he listens to us as his only podcast.
Shaan Puri: Oh, nice. Uh, that’s great. Um Who told you that they’re listening?
Shaan Puri: Uh, I don’t want to say their name, but uh you know, someone cool.
Sam Parr: That’s cool. That’s always funny when people listen. Dude, I was with my dad when I took my took my parents to Europe, and I brought my parents to this conference, and my parents are like, you know, in their 60s from Missouri, and they were walking around this conference, and they were like, “Oh, we love swag.” They call it swag. I think it’s like I think it’s supposed to be swag. They go, “We love swag,” which means free stuff. And they’re like, “Oh, let’s go to this company and get this.” And it’s like some like European sales marketing company. I’m like, you know, Dad, like no one gives a shit about like, you know, sales.io. Like I don’t know what they do. Yeah, the long tail. Yeah, yeah, and he was like, he’s like, “Oh, let’s go talk to them.” I’m like, “Dude, I don’t like you don’t even know what that means. I can tell you what it They go, “What do they do?” I’m like, “I can use words to explain it, but you won’t understand.” And so he’s like, “Well, let’s go get some swag. They’re giving away like free uh bouncy ball.” Bouncy ball. He thinks it’s like shawarma, but it’s just Yeah. And he’s like, he’s like, “Let’s go get a ball. We’re going to bring it back for for the kids,” their grandkids. They go, “Let’s go, oh, like, oh, they have envelope openers. Like, let’s go get one for the kids. Oh, they got candy.” I’m like, “Mom, this is a Snickers.” Like you could this is That’s awesome, dude. He’s just going to give it to you in the hotel. He’s like, “Hey kid, I got you this bouncy ball.” And you’re going to be like, “Sweet.” Well, and they’re bringing like they’re bringing like Kinder chocolate. You know like Kinder, like the I’m like, “You guys realize that you can get that at 7-Eleven down the street from your house. Like this isn’t special.” And they’re just grabbing all this stuff. And they brought an empty suitcase because they knew they were going to find swag and just to buy it. And so like I come home I come home and my four-year-old nephew is like wearing a t-shirt that says like, “Hi, we’re here to help with customer solutions.” Like it is and it’s like and the kids are bragging that they got that from Europe. I’m like, “Oh my god.” Anyway. Yeah, it’s European. It’s European fashion. Yeah. They’re like, “What’s this brand Gideon?” Uh It’s just it’s just yeah, they’re just like crazy. And then they’re at this conference and they’re like they’re talking to people and they go to people, I hear like I went I was hard for me to stand next to them and I hear them talking to people, they go, “Hey, do you like podcasts?” And they just like, “Do you like podcasts?” Do you love podcasts? Uh and the guy be like, “Yeah, you know, I listen.” He goes, my dad calls and he goes, “Sam, he says he listens to eight podcasts. I’ll tell him to listen to yours. What’s the name of it again?” And I’m like, “Uh, Dad, like how do you you don’t know you don’t know the name. It’s called it’s called My First Million.” And he goes, “Oh, okay, I’ll tell him. Hey, so it’s called My First Million.” And then he’ll come back and goes, “Hey, I got you another listener. I made him click subscribe.” And and he’s just going after people saying like, “You like podcasts? Oh, great. I got you a I’ll get you I’m going to have you subscribe.” And he and he doesn’t know the name of the podcast. Every single time he goes, “What’s it called? Million dollar podcast?” Uh he’s like, “I listen to it all the time. It’s my favorite. But what’s it called again?” My mom does the same thing, dude. She clicks every ad in my newsletter. She’s like, “I clicked your ads today to help you.” I’m like, “Mom, I don’t know I don’t think that that’s not going to count. It’s not going to do anything.” She’s like, “No, no, no. You said you get paid if they click, right?” I’m like, “Well, kind of. You know, you got to like go buy the thing.” And then she’s like, “Oh, I’m not going to buy it.” I’m like, “Yeah, you also don’t need to click it. In fact, you don’t even need to read it. I don’t think you’re very interested in this subject, Mom.” That’s hilarious. That is so funny. Uh God, it’s so funny. You should have seen them walking around just like putting around this conference like saying like, “Oh, Sammy, come look at let’s look at this booth.” And it’s just I don’t even know what it is. Like I don’t even know what it is. You know what I mean? And it’s like procurement. I’m like, “I don’t I don’t even know what that means, Dad. Neither do you. You definitely don’t know what that means.” Yeah, dude, that’s so funny. He said procurement. So so Romine, who runs like I I he’s my basically my partner in my fund. And Romine’s got this company that’s like a kind of like a old school but baller company in uh based out of like um Georgia, right? Yeah, so he lives in Georgia. Um so he’s like in the tech scene, but he kind of lives in Georgia and runs kind of like a bit of an old school, more more service-based company that like, I think his wife’s dad or something started and he like took it over and like grew it a bunch and is doing great with it. So I think the business does like 50 million a year or something like that. It’s like a sizable business and so I’m I’ve asked him, I think no less than 15 times, like, so yo, yo, so what does your business do again? And he’d be like, “Yeah, we do procurement for uh for SMBs and for whatever enterprise companies.” And I’m like, “Like you get office supplies?” I can’t I can’t wrap my head around what procurement is. And he’s like, he’s like, “You know what the word procurement means, right?” And I’m like, “Yeah, he’s like, so it’s that.” And I’m like, “But this, see, I guess I don’t know what the word means then because I still don’t know.” Yeah, I don’t know like like does does anyone use staples anymore? Like I I don’t yeah, like And it’s like he’s like he’s like, “It’s not office supplies. It’s like, you know, you need a vendor for something.” But I’m like, so then why wouldn’t you just Google and get the vendor? He’s like, “Yeah, but like bigger companies, they just do it differently. They need like this middleman who’s going to basically like help them get the things that they need.” And I’m like, “You get paid for that?” And he’s like, “Yeah.” Is this like someone who just like knows all the people who do blank and they just it talks to them on the phone? Yeah, it’s like you need vendors. I think I still fucking don’t know, dude. Like I’m on explanation number 17. In fact, I just feel bad now every time I I ask him or I try to tell somebody else what he does because I’m like, I I clearly don’t know. It’s almost like a you know, like there’s like a spot in my brain where there’s just like if you did a scan, it would just be like, “Oh, there’s some dark cloud here.” Yeah, that’s the part of my brain that’s trying to understand procurement and it’s just never happening. It’s just like a a fuzzy region. So I’ve got a story related to this. So, uh two days ago, Saturday night, I went out to dinner at at like the a fancy place in St. Louis. And we get to dinner and my dad goes, or I or uh yeah, my dad goes, “Hey, the the president of NASCAR, I guess NASCAR like performed or raced, whatever you call it, yesterday, Sunday, in St. Louis.” And he goes, my dad likes NASCAR. He goes, “That’s the president uh of NASCAR, like Jim Nance or I don’t forget his name.” And uh and uh The football commentator? Yeah, the football. I think it it was Nance something, not Jim Nance, yeah, not Jim Nance. And uh he uh and I was like, “Oh yeah, you know, he’s sitting with this guy named David Stewart. He’s like the second richest black man in the world.” And that like and it’s like it’s pretty funny how like I knew exactly who that rich guy was because he’s he’s worth like four or five billion dollars and and I start researching him and I was like, “Yeah, I’ve seen that guy before. I’ve seen him in articles because he’s like the second or third richest black man and he’s from St. Louis. He’s like the richest guy in St. Louis.” And he’s got this company called Worldwide Systems. You’ve never heard of that, have you? No. So, it does uh $14 billion a year, uh and it’s like the fourth or eighth, like in the top 10 largest privately held companies in the world. And him and his partner just own own the whole thing outright. And what they do is they’re a systems integrator. And that’s one of those words like procurement. I heard that and I’m like, “What does that mean?” And so I went on this deep dive. I’m like, “I got to figure out exactly what they do.” I I I don’t understand this. And then like it it says they’re a Cisco systems integrator. And I went to Cisco’s website and I’m like, “What does Cisco do?” Yeah, I’m like, I they’re like networking, hardware and networking or like networking hardware. And I like read those words and I’m like Oh no, like the website would just be like “Networking Redefined.” And you’re like, “I didn’t I didn’t know the first definition.” Now it’s redefined. Great. Yeah, I didn’t Yeah, we I didn’t know we had to change the definition. And then like they talk about like switches and stuff and I’m like, “I don’t know what like a switch is.” I guess that’s to do with electronics. Like I just I didn’t have have any idea what this stuff did. Uh and but I Google it and like I I know that Cisco is like one of the largest companies in the world, but I’m just I like I don’t know what it is. And so I had to research it. It took me forever to figure out what a systems integrator is. Do you know what it is? Dude, no, I don’t know any I don’t know what I don’t know what SAP does. I’ve been on a mission also to understand what SAP does for a long ass time. And I don’t know what that does. They’re they’re a European though. They got a different word for everything. We’d never be able to figure that out. And I feel like sometimes I’m watching TV and it’ll just pop up SAP and I think it means like closed captioning or Spanish or something like that. I’m like, “Oh, hey, this is different. Now I’m now I’m super confused about SAP.” Yeah, well, I don’t even know why they named their company after their stock ticker either. It’s kind of weird. But um they uh so so a systems integrator basically, so what my father-in-law does for a living is if you’re like Chase and you have 100 employees working on floor 18 and you’re like, “Hey, we got to move these 100 employees up to floor 43 in the same building.” He studies it for a few weeks and then you go to home for work on Friday and you come back on the floor 47 and you sit down at your desk that’s already set up and everything just works. And there’s no downtime. And I think system integrators kind of do that, but like if you’re a $20 billion company and you’re selling like a $3 billion division to this other thing, like they have to go to work one day and like all their computers are new and like this new setup exists. Or if you’re like a a hospital and you’re like, “We need an app.” And it’s like, “Well, it’s not as simple. It’s just like checking into your lobby and saying you’re there.” Like you got to like integrate all this crap into it. And I think that’s what they do. But I don’t know why they don’t just call it like an agency. You know what I mean? So Yeah. Yeah, I I don’t know either. But I I do know like, you know, I guess like jokes aside, you know, there’s basically things that are like uh like you know, Net suite, Net suite’s another one of these where you’re like I don’t know what what is Net suite? Is that like QuickBooks but different? It’s basically like um I mean I’ll butcher the thing but like I mean people use it for like inventory management for example. So it’s basically like a database that’s like usable for um like it’s usable in a couple different ways. It tells you what you got, it tells you what’s like running out, it tells you um what you need, it’ll tell you kind of like it’ll help generate a purchase order, it’ll do things like that. Um by the way, if you go to Net suite’s website, I just went to it. It says complete procure to pay purchasing. Oh no, procurement. It has to do with this too. But basically there’s there’s entire companies, I think this is what um you know, like the P word. What Deloitte and other other consulting companies do a lot of, which is basically they teach your company like these these businesses, they’re these programs are so uh unintuitive that there’s entire consulting businesses that generate billions of dollars a year that just go to a company like, “Oh, um like right here on their website, LoveSac uses them.” So it’s like, you go to LoveSac, you’re like, “Great, you guys sell giant bean bags, huh?” They’re like, “Yeah, like you know, these things are getting a little out of hand, getting a little willy-nilly now that it’s growing so much.” Like, “Yeah, it is. Sure is.” Don’t you wish there was just a way to have everything organized in one place and a system that just all talk to each other and everyone of your employees can log in and interface with it? They’re like, “That sounds pretty good.” So I I just go set it up on my own. I just go to the website and they’re like, “No, no, no. We do that for you. It takes 12 months and we will we will add Net suite to your thing. We will add Oracle, we will add these different services to your We will we will integrate them into your current business and we’ll train your employees on how to actually use it. Is that what service revenue in a SAS line? So if you go to like Atlassian and look at their annual report, there’s a huge amount of services revenue. So do they charge in a I don’t know what the service how they what what they bucket in services. I would have thought like, does that mean just the software? But I I think it’s different for different companies, but at the same time, uh this is sort of like if you were like, “Hey Sean, you know, uh what does it mean to blanch a vegetable?” I’d be like, “You know, I think it uses hot and cold water in some way.” It’s like, you know, like I just don’t know, right? Like if you’re asking me about like what are these like giant enterprise companies that are like B2B service/software companies, like these are like again, I don’t know the first thing about the first thing about these. Dude, the the craziest thing to me is when I think about these, is to understand how someone came up with this idea. So for example, uh there’s Okta. Do you know Okta? That’s what we use for like logging into like websites and shit like that. Or there’s um what’s that one Snowflake? You know Snowflake? Yeah, like a data warehouse. So like those are all companies that are founded relatively recently, like in the 2005, 2015 era. And I’m like, “How did a person know that this was a problem and had to get built?” You know what I mean? Well, you just work in a big company, right? Like okay, so for example, um we were talking the other day about uh what what is it called? The um or like like we have like you you run a chain for companies. Yeah, exactly. Uh what was the name of it again? I forgot I can’t remember the name off the top of my head. Uh I just committed to invest into it. But um but basically we’re when we ran a company or like you ran a a a, you know, like a email-based company. And so if I asked you, you know, like, what does ConvertKit do? You’re like, if you’re very well versed on like what ConvertKit does because you’re like, “Well, like here’s a scenario. You get a bunch of people coming to your website, but you, you know, you want to grab their email because you’re going to be able to market to them later. So you so ConvertKit lets you put up a little web page that grabs their email.” And then once you have it, you want to be able to like tag them or segment them based on like if they’ve paid for your thing or if they’re free. And then like, wouldn’t it be cool instead of like waking up every day and like writing the same email over and over again, you could like automate a a a sequence of emails. One that goes out on day one, one goes out on day three, one goes out on day 10. And it’s like, you saw a problem in your business and therefore, you know, you kind of understand what the solutions are and you can even create them. Well, there’s another one that’s like uh like, you know, that this is basically what happens when you’re when you work inside of a large company, you’re like, “Oh man, there needs to be a solution for X.” You just see a problem and you’re like, “There needs to be a solution for X,” but you understand that context because it’s like the like we spent basically 15 years just starting companies from scratch. You started media companies, I started more like software social networking type companies. Um and we’ve done content a bunch, so we can tell you all about content. Like we just don’t have that that same frame of reference to that like somebody who’s been like, you know, somebody who’s used Salesforce every single day for like 10 years, then they understand why you need this like Salesforce add-on or app. Which All the time I’m like, “Damn, I wish I knew how to do this stuff that people charge a million dollars a year in subscription revenue.” I’m like, “Damn, I just got to talk to some stupid freaking guy about starting a newsletter and give the same spiel constantly. I don’t want to talk about how to get a your first thousand subscribers on Substack. You know, I’d rather get paid like a million dollars a year to do X, Y and Z and you know, get 100,000 customers.” Yeah, I mean, yeah, exactly. And this is why like when I was at Twitch, when we got acquired, I had like I had wrote down, “I’m going to walk out of here with like 10 ideas,” and I I used that import-export framework, which is like, “What are five ideas that Twitch would import a solution for?” Like we need some like in a country need something, they import it, you know, like the US needs oil, we import it from whatever Iraq or whatever Afghanistan, wherever it needs to come from. Um, Saudi Arabia. And so uh in the same way, companies have these pain points and you’re like, when you’re sitting there and you’re like, “Oh damn, if somebody had us if somebody had a magic way to do this, we would pay $100,000 a month for this. You know, we would pay X dollars for this.” Like for example, when I was there, uh I I I’ve talked about this idea way back in the day, but like all hands. It’s like, at our company, you know, if I needed to say something to the whole company as a startup, I would just like literally fucking stand up at my desk and be like, “Hey, hey, yo, headphones. Um, we’re doing this now. The company we’ve pivoted to this, okay?” Good. Uh or like, you know, we’re we’d be at lunch and I’d just like stand up and say something. Um, but like at a at a company like Twitch, 2,000 people, you know, there was like this organize every Thursday, there’s an all hands, it happens at lunch. They do it at lunch because that’s where they have like a captive audience of people that will actually sit there and pay attention because they’re eating. And like, and they would do the thing and it had like a presentation and there was like a whole there was like a conductor of the whole ceremony and then there’s like a Q&A and they needed like this question and answer thing, then they needed to stream it to remote employees. There was like all these things they had to think about. And we were just stitching together like these four different tools. It’s like, “We use this for the Q&A, we use this for streaming, we use this for the presentation, we use this for new employees, whatever.” And I was like, “Oh, if somebody just made like a really good like uh all hands software, I’m pretty sure you could get a company like Twitch to pay like $25 to $50,000 a year uh for your software.” And it would need to be secure, it would need to be, you know, easy to stream on your phone, it would need to have the Q&A integrated, like etc, etc. And um I believe that to be true and like I could go validate that. I could have just gone and talked to like, you know, the head of the all-in the the all hands thing and be like, “Hey, if this existed, would you buy this?” And like I saw that problem because I was there. Before that, I didn’t even see that problem. Yeah, and we had talked about it. It was like a high school newspaper, but for your company. Yeah, and by the way, Workshop is the name of it that came to me now. So What’s the URL? Useworkshop.com. So it’s pretty sick. We talked about this before, which is in inside like we all have like MailChimp or you have like SendGrid, you have a ton of different services to send mass marketing emails to customers. But like there’s actually internal marketing, too, that happens all the time. Like a company is like a small like, you know, tribe, and like you constantly need like information and sort of propaganda from the top that needs to get to your employees, and whether it’s like, “Hey, remember this Friday we’re doing casual Friday,” like, you know, whatever. Don’t wear underwear this Friday. But you have to like get some message across about like what’s going on. Or it’s like, “Hey, uh we had these wins in the company, like congrats to this team for launching this safety feature that saved us whatever.” Um, and so what use Workshop does is basically creates like a a I think a giant workforce force of overseas people that will label your images for you. And so like if you’re a self-driving car company, if you’re uh Waymo or or Tesla or whatever, you get like tons and tons of footage, and then now those need to be labeled as like, “Yep, that was a dog crossing the street. Yep, that’s a stop sign,” even though it’s partially obstructed. And so how does that happen? That’s like a human intervention. Humans go and do that. And so Scale started off as like a it was labeling as a service. I’m sure they do a lot more stuff now, but it’s pretty crazy. That’s like a $10 billion company now. And this guy, I think he started it when he was 19 or something. What? Um, so Is he cool?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, he was cool. Uh, like I didn’t know him for long because as soon as they’re, it’s pretty funny. It’s like, I’m in this group chat that’s like four founders, um, yeah, four four a bunch of founders, and it’s like, “Oh, this is kind of like the underground founders hangout, like we we chill here.” And everybody’s trying to do big things. But then when one guy actually started doing big things, he’s like, “I’m busy. I need to leave this now.” And so it’s like the the ultimate signal. It’s like, “Oh, when it really takes off, you don’t stay in these chats. You just sort of like go do your billionaire thing now.” Meaning like you go do your like, “I’m actually on a rocket ship. I don’t have time to socialize anymore.” Um, which, you know, respect to him.
Sam Parr: Dude, I was going to show you something that I thought was like a major good find, and now it seems like achievable given that you just set the baseline at to 26-year-olds who are now worth $10 billion. This one’s a little this one’s much smaller, but still oddly interesting. Uh, go to the the MFM or the uh million dollar brainstorm document.
Shaan Puri: Okay. That we have. And scroll down, and so you can kind of see that like this is truthful. The guy sent me a picture of his QuickBooks. So, you see that?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, looking at it.
Sam Parr: All right, so this guy named Matt Paulson. So you remember when my Twitter got hacked?
Shaan Puri: Yes.
Sam Parr: So, uh, there was the basically people hacked my Twitter and they tweeted out like, “I’m giving away a PS5 or whatever the number is, and just like send me $400 and I’m donating the money to St. Jude’s.” And this guy Matt, I when I got back in my Twitter, I saw that he sent two times the asked amount. He was like, “He’s like, I just want to set it went ahead and sent you $1,000, just, you know, so St. Jude’s has a little extra money.” And I I was like, “Oh my god, dude, that that sucks. I’m so sorry about this.” And he was like, “Oh, no big deal.” And I was like, “All right, well, who who are you that you’re this nice?” And I clicked out, and he runs this website called MarketBeat. Have you ever heard of MarketBeat?
Shaan Puri: Only when you uh you you shared this in the Treds group. So I did a little bit of stalking at that time because I was like, “What is that?” You know, your tweet was intriguing you because you had said something like, “I met a guy who runs a company that does $25 million a year in revenue, only 13 employees, and it was like $17 million of the 25 was profit.” And I was like, Yes. All right. I’m fully aroused. Tell me more. What is this company, you know?
Sam Parr: Got him. Uh, yeah. Uh, and so he sent me a picture of his QuickBooks, and he was like, “Here’s the profit.” And keep in mind, this doesn’t include my huge salary, my huge salary is it part of the expenses, but we actually do $17 million in profit. The P&L that he sent me, it’s like, I think $13 million in profit. So it’s called MarketBeat, marketbeat.com. And, um, for the first two years, it was just him. And you go to MarketBeat Explain what it is. Yeah, like what what is this? Yeah, you you go to marketbeat.com, like I always Google like “HubSpot price targets” because I’m curious what HubSpot’s what analysts think the the the stock might be in one year, and he shows up early in Google, one, two, three, if you Google “Amazon price targets,” “Target price targets,” whatever, like any company. And it’s he calls it a web portal, but if you didn’t know better, you’d look at it and just call it a media company. So you you see different headlines and different news. It’s kind of like Wall Street Journal, but really even more niche and just for stocks, just for dividend stocks, and it’s just a way to really quickly see headlines of what’s coming up. So it’s kind of like a um uh a portal or a data aggregator where you could just like see like, “All right, um this stock has an earnings call on this date.” So it’s basically just a place to get information, but it’s also part um media company because they have they published 250 articles a year, or sorry, a month, and they have contractors who they pay $150 per article to write these. But he told me, he goes, “Regardless, if the articles don’t actually add to any of our revenue. People come to the website mostly just to see like the stock prices and things like that.” And so right now, the guy uh has 11 employees, and I actually have a list of, sorry, 13 employees. I have a list of what they all do. He’s got he’s got four developers, four support people, one ad guy, one accountant, one content manager, one marketing assistant, and him. And, uh, they make money through subscription and through advertising, most of which comes through advertising. They’ve got 15,000 subscribers who pay between $20 and $40,000 $20 and $40 a month depending on whichever one they get. So let’s call it 30, so that’s five and five and a half million uh from the subscription, from the premium subscription. And then the rest being ad revenue. 20 million of ads. Okay, wow. Crazy, right? And there’s only one ad sales person. He doesn’t have a team of ad sales guys. And he’ll they’ll sell directly to large like uh maybe like the Motley Fool or some other like uh stock picking newsletter or some other financial brand or some company looking to promote their stock or different financial brokers, uh financial products like wealth advisors, things like that. But if an advertiser is too small, they just work with an agency and and they just say, “Hey, agency, you know, we’ve got some leftover inventory. You want to put your ads in here?” And it’s just one guy doing the whole thing. Doing all the uh Unbelievable. Unbelievable. So it seems like the the trick for them, and by trick I mean hard work and strategy, was Look at the guy. Yeah, by the way, they’ve been around I think they’ve been around for 15 years. Right. And it was SEO. It’s SEO that drives the bulk of the traffic. Is that the idea?
Sam Parr: I think early on. Now it has a little bit of a brand. Before I even knew the guy, I would actually go to it all the time just to look because they’re their interface It’s really nicely organized. Like I’m on like the Amazon one right now, and it’s basically like it has just like a bunch of stuff put together. It’s like, “Oh, here’s the exacts. Here’s the CEO, here’s their age, here’s their pay.” It’s like, “Here’s the, um, you know, here’s the percent shareholding, you know, amongst these different groups. Here’s the analyst targets,” etc. Yeah, it’s like It’s kind of ugly by traditional web, you know, 2.0 standards, like it doesn’t meet any of the design requirements that like Airbnb would approve of, but it in my mind, it’s perfect. It actually is designed beautifully, like it works wonderfully. And so it’s like a cluttered website. It kind of looks like Drudge Report or Craigslist or something or eBay. Like it’s this messy website, but I think it’s quite good.
Shaan Puri: We need to put together a compilation of what I’m calling “Sam’s Ugly Ducklings.” And this is an example of Sam’s Ugly Ducklings, which is a website that like, who the fuck even heard of this? It doesn’t look super fancy. It’s kind of been around for a while. It’s got this like niche passionate audience. Drudge Report is one, this is another. You’ve showed me like 10 of these in the last year, and I think people are I think people really dig these, and so we should do an episode that just highlights each one of these, and it doesn’t have to be like a podcast. It’s almost like a screen share, uh maybe it’s just for YouTube. Or like there’s this guy reaching out. He’s trying to turn our podcast into like a e-book or whatever, like a really nicely designed PDF. Um, we should have him do it on your Ugly Ducklings, because he’s got extensive notes on what you talk about in each episode. Really, who? Uh, this guy in India. I I forgot his name, but I’m talking to him right now, uh to get one of these made for us because I think it’d be dope, right? Like That’d be sick. Dude, it’s embarrassing. Like I I get some people who are like, now there’s people who are like, I would say, kind of like a little more successful in the tech industry that are getting into our podcast, whereas I feel like before we were kind of like a different audience for whatever reason, like Like kids, almost like kids. Well, not not kids. It was more like just like entrepreneurial, I would say, is definitely a big component of it. Uh, which might be K’s, but might be like somebody in their 30s that wants to make a change or whatever. Or it’s just like, “Yeah, I own this awesome business. I’m based out of, you know, Peoria, Illinois,” and it’s like, “What the fuck? Who are you, and how did you find us?” And but like that was more of our main target. And now I’m getting people that are like kind of in the heart of Silicon Valley that are like, “Dude, I kind of got hooked to the podcast.” And I’m like, “Dude, I’ve been telling you about this for like two years.” And they’re like, “Yeah, it’s actually good.” And they’re like, “What are like the best episodes? You got like 200.” And I was like, “Uh, I don’t really know.” He’s like, “Well, what’s like a good place to find the most popular ones?” I was like, “Uh, I don’t have it.” He’s like, “Is there a place with summaries?” I was like, “Nah, not really.” He’s like, “Well, you have all these ideas. Is there a compilation of all the ideas?” I was like, “Ah, there should be. Someone I think made one once.” It’s like all the obvious like kind of like growth things that you would do or like onboarding things you would do, we’ve done none of. And so I’m like kind of embarrassed about that. But I’m not embarrassed. Who cares? It’s working.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, I know. I just think it would help us. Like I think I think I would want that if I was getting into a podcast. And let me, this is funny. Let me tell you how I found out about MarketBeat. I was reading Starter Story. I like that website, Starter Story, and one of the questions is, “What books and podcasts do you read?” And he said, “On the podcast front, I really enjoy listening to My First Million, which breaks down unique ways that business owners are using uh unique ways business owners are generating massive profits.” That’s how I found out about about this guy because he said he listens to us as his only podcast.
Shaan Puri: Oh, nice. Uh, that’s great. Um Who told you that they’re listening?
Shaan Puri: Uh, I don’t want to say their name, but uh you know, someone cool.
Sam Parr: That’s cool. That’s always funny when people listen. Dude, I was with my dad when I took my took my parents to Europe, and I brought my parents to this conference, and my parents are like, you know, in their 60s from Missouri, and they were walking around this conference, and they were like, “Oh, we love swag.” They call it swag. I think it’s like I think it’s supposed to be swag. They go, “We love swag,” which means free stuff. And they’re like, “Oh, let’s go to this company and get this.” And it’s like some like European sales marketing company. I’m like, you know, Dad, like no one gives a shit about like, you know, sales.io. Like I don’t know what they do. Yeah, the long tail. Yeah, yeah, and he was like, he’s like, “Oh, let’s go talk to them.” I’m like, “Dude, I don’t like you don’t even know what that means. I can tell you what it They go, “What do they do?” I’m like, “I can use words to explain it, but you won’t understand.” And so he’s like, “Well, let’s go get some swag. They’re giving away like free uh bouncy ball.” Bouncy ball. He thinks it’s like shawarma, but it’s just Yeah. And he’s like, he’s like, “Let’s go get a ball. We’re going to bring it back for for the kids,” their grandkids. They go, “Let’s go, oh, like, oh, they have envelope openers. Like, let’s go get one for the kids. Oh, they got candy.” I’m like, “Mom, this is a Snickers.” Like you could this is That’s awesome, dude. He’s just going to give it to you in the hotel. He’s like, “Hey kid, I got you this bouncy ball.” And you’re going to be like, “Sweet.” Well, and they’re bringing like they’re bringing like Kinder chocolate. You know like Kinder, like the I’m like, “You guys realize that you can get that at 7-Eleven down the street from your house. Like this isn’t special.” And they’re just grabbing all this stuff. And they brought an empty suitcase because they knew they were going to find swag and just to buy it. And so like I come home I come home and my four-year-old nephew is like wearing a t-shirt that says like, “Hi, we’re here to help with customer solutions.” Like it is and it’s like and the kids are bragging that they got that from Europe. I’m like, “Oh my god.” Anyway. Yeah, it’s European. It’s European fashion. Yeah. They’re like, “What’s this brand Gideon?” Uh It’s just it’s just yeah, they’re just like crazy. And then they’re at this conference and they’re like they’re talking to people and they go to people, I hear like I went I was hard for me to stand next to them and I hear them talking to people, they go, “Hey, do you like podcasts?” And they just like, “Do you like podcasts?” Do you love podcasts? Uh and the guy be like, “Yeah, you know, I listen.” He goes, my dad calls and he goes, “Sam, he says he listens to eight podcasts. I’ll tell him to listen to yours. What’s the name of it again?” And I’m like, “Uh, Dad, like how do you you don’t know you don’t know the name. It’s called it’s called My First Million.” And he goes, “Oh, okay, I’ll tell him. Hey, so it’s called My First Million.” And then he’ll come back and goes, “Hey, I got you another listener. I made him click subscribe.” And and he’s just going after people saying like, “You like podcasts? Oh, great. I got you a I’ll get you I’m going to have you subscribe.” And he and he doesn’t know the name of the podcast. Every single time he goes, “What’s it called? Million dollar podcast?” Uh he’s like, “I listen to it all the time. It’s my favorite. But what’s it called again?” My mom does the same thing, dude. She clicks every ad in my newsletter. She’s like, “I clicked your ads today to help you.” I’m like, “Mom, I don’t know I don’t think that that’s not going to count. It’s not going to do anything.” She’s like, “No, no, no. You said you get paid if they click, right?” I’m like, “Well, kind of. You know, you got to like go buy the thing.” And then she’s like, “Oh, I’m not going to buy it.” I’m like, “Yeah, you also don’t need to click it. In fact, you don’t even need to read it. I don’t think you’re very interested in this subject, Mom.” That’s hilarious. That is so funny. Uh God, it’s so funny. You should have seen them walking around just like putting around this conference like saying like, “Oh, Sammy, come look at let’s look at this booth.” And it’s just I don’t even know what it is. Like I don’t even know what it is. You know what I mean? And it’s like procurement. I’m like, “I don’t I don’t even know what that means, Dad. Neither do you. You definitely don’t know what that means.” Yeah, dude, that’s so funny. He said procurement. So so Romine, who runs like I I he’s my basically my partner in my fund. And Romine’s got this company that’s like a kind of like a old school but baller company in uh based out of like um Georgia, right? Yeah, so he lives in Georgia. Um so he’s like in the tech scene, but he kind of lives in Georgia and runs kind of like a bit of an old school, more more service-based company that like, I think his wife’s dad or something started and he like took it over and like grew it a bunch and is doing great with it. So I think the business does like 50 million a year or something like that. It’s like a sizable business and so I’m I’ve asked him, I think no less than 15 times, like, so yo, yo, so what does your business do again? And he’d be like, “Yeah, we do procurement for uh for SMBs and for whatever enterprise companies.” And I’m like, “Like you get office supplies?” I can’t I can’t wrap my head around what procurement is. And he’s like, he’s like, “You know what the word procurement means, right?” And I’m like, “Yeah, he’s like, so it’s that.” And I’m like, “But this, see, I guess I don’t know what the word means then because I still don’t know.” Yeah, I don’t know like like does does anyone use staples anymore? Like I I don’t yeah, like And it’s like he’s like he’s like, “It’s not office supplies. It’s like, you know, you need a vendor for something.” But I’m like, so then why wouldn’t you just Google and get the vendor? He’s like, “Yeah, but like bigger companies, they just do it differently. They need like this middleman who’s going to basically like help them get the things that they need.” And I’m like, “You get paid for that?” And he’s like, “Yeah.” Is this like someone who just like knows all the people who do blank and they just it talks to them on the phone? Yeah, it’s like you need vendors. I think I still fucking don’t know, dude. Like I’m on explanation number 17. In fact, I just feel bad now every time I I ask him or I try to tell somebody else what he does because I’m like, I I clearly don’t know. It’s almost like a you know, like there’s like a spot in my brain where there’s just like if you did a scan, it would just be like, “Oh, there’s some dark cloud here.” Yeah, that’s the part of my brain that’s trying to understand procurement and it’s just never happening. It’s just like a a fuzzy region. So I’ve got a story related to this. So, uh two days ago, Saturday night, I went out to dinner at at like the a fancy place in St. Louis. And we get to dinner and my dad goes, or I or uh yeah, my dad goes, “Hey, the the president of NASCAR, I guess NASCAR like performed or raced, whatever you call it, yesterday, Sunday, in St. Louis.” And he goes, my dad likes NASCAR. He goes, “That’s the president uh of NASCAR, like Jim Nance or I don’t forget his name.” And uh and uh The football commentator? Yeah, the football. I think it it was Nance something, not Jim Nance, yeah, not Jim Nance. And uh he uh and I was like, “Oh yeah, you know, he’s sitting with this guy named David Stewart. He’s like the second richest black man in the world.” And that like and it’s like it’s pretty funny how like I knew exactly who that rich guy was because he’s he’s worth like four or five billion dollars and and I start researching him and I was like, “Yeah, I’ve seen that guy before. I’ve seen him in articles because he’s like the second or third richest black man and he’s from St. Louis. He’s like the richest guy in St. Louis.” And he’s got this company called Worldwide Systems. You’ve never heard of that, have you? No. So, it does uh $14 billion a year, uh and it’s like the fourth or eighth, like in the top 10 largest privately held companies in the world. And him and his partner just own own the whole thing outright. And what they do is they’re a systems integrator. And that’s one of those words like procurement. I heard that and I’m like, “What does that mean?” And so I went on this deep dive. I’m like, “I got to figure out exactly what they do.” I I I don’t understand this. And then like it it says they’re a Cisco systems integrator. And I went to Cisco’s website and I’m like, “What does Cisco do?” Yeah, I’m like, I they’re like networking, hardware and networking or like networking hardware. And I like read those words and I’m like Oh no, like the website would just be like “Networking Redefined.” And you’re like, “I didn’t I didn’t know the first definition.” Now it’s redefined. Great. Yeah, I didn’t Yeah, we I didn’t know we had to change the definition. And then like they talk about like switches and stuff and I’m like, “I don’t know what like a switch is.” I guess that’s to do with electronics. Like I just I didn’t have have any idea what this stuff did. Uh and but I Google it and like I I know that Cisco is like one of the largest companies in the world, but I’m just I like I don’t know what it is. And so I had to research it. It took me forever to figure out what a systems integrator is. Do you know what it is? Dude, no, I don’t know any I don’t know what I don’t know what SAP does. I’ve been on a mission also to understand what SAP does for a long ass time. And I don’t know what that does. They’re they’re a European though. They got a different word for everything. We’d never be able to figure that out. And I feel like sometimes I’m watching TV and it’ll just pop up SAP and I think it means like closed captioning or Spanish or something like that. I’m like, “Oh, hey, this is different. Now I’m now I’m super confused about SAP.” Yeah, well, I don’t even know why they named their company after their stock ticker either. It’s kind of weird. But um they uh so so a systems integrator basically, so what my father-in-law does for a living is if you’re like Chase and you have 100 employees working on floor 18 and you’re like, “Hey, we got to move these 100 employees up to floor 43 in the same building.” He studies it for a few weeks and then you go to home for work on Friday and you come back on the floor 47 and you sit down at your desk that’s already set up and everything just works. And there’s no downtime. And I think system integrators kind of do that, but like if you’re a $20 billion company and you’re selling like a $3 billion division to this other thing, like they have to go to work one day and like all their computers are new and like this new setup exists. Or if you’re like a a hospital and you’re like, “We need an app.” And it’s like, “Well, it’s not as simple. It’s just like checking into your lobby and saying you’re there.” Like you got to like integrate all this crap into it. And I think that’s what they do. But I don’t know why they don’t just call it like an agency. You know what I mean? So Yeah. Yeah, I I don’t know either. But I I do know like, you know, I guess like jokes aside, you know, there’s basically things that are like uh like you know, Net suite, Net suite’s another one of these where you’re like I don’t know what what is Net suite? Is that like QuickBooks but different? It’s basically like um I mean I’ll butcher the thing but like I mean people use it for like inventory management for example. So it’s basically like a database that’s like usable for um like it’s usable in a couple different ways. It tells you what you got, it tells you what’s like running out, it tells you um what you need, it’ll tell you kind of like it’ll help generate a purchase order, it’ll do things like that. Um by the way, if you go to Net suite’s website, I just went to it. It says complete procure to pay purchasing. Oh no, procurement. It has to do with this too. But basically there’s there’s entire companies, I think this is what um you know, like the P word. What Deloitte and other other consulting companies do a lot of, which is basically they teach your company like these these businesses, they’re these programs are so uh unintuitive that there’s entire consulting businesses that generate billions of dollars a year that just go to a company like, “Oh, um like right here on their website, LoveSac uses them.” So it’s like, you go to LoveSac, you’re like, “Great, you guys sell giant bean bags, huh?” They’re like, “Yeah, like you know, these things are getting a little out of hand, getting a little willy-nilly now that it’s growing so much.” Like, “Yeah, it is. Sure is.” Don’t you wish there was just a way to have everything organized in one place and a system that just all talk to each other and everyone of your employees can log in and interface with it? They’re like, “That sounds pretty good.” So I I just go set it up on my own. I just go to the website and they’re like, “No, no, no. We do that for you. It takes 12 months and we will we will add Net suite to your thing. We will add Oracle, we will add these different services to your We will we will integrate them into your current business and we’ll train your employees on how to actually use it. Is that what service revenue in a SAS line? So if you go to like Atlassian and look at their annual report, there’s a huge amount of services revenue. So do they charge in a I don’t know what the service how they what what they bucket in services. I would have thought like, does that mean just the software? But I I think it’s different for different companies, but at the same time, uh this is sort of like if you were like, “Hey Sean, you know, uh what does it mean to blanch a vegetable?” I’d be like, “You know, I think it uses hot and cold water in some way.” It’s like, you know, like I just don’t know, right? Like if you’re asking me about like what are these like giant enterprise companies that are like B2B service/software companies, like these are like again, I don’t know the first thing about the first thing about these. Dude, the the craziest thing to me is when I think about these, is to understand how someone came up with this idea. So for example, uh there’s Okta. Do you know Okta? That’s what we use for like logging into like websites and shit like that. Or there’s um what’s that one Snowflake? You know Snowflake? Yeah, like a data warehouse. So like those are all companies that are founded relatively recently, like in the 2005, 2015 era. And I’m like, “How did a person know that this was a problem and had to get built?” You know what I mean? Well, you just work in a big company, right? Like okay, so for example, um we were talking the other day about uh what what is it called? The um or like like we have like you you run a chain for companies. Yeah, exactly. Uh what was the name of it again? I forgot I can’t remember the name off the top of my head. Uh I just committed to invest into it. But um but basically we’re when we ran a company or like you ran a a a, you know, like a email-based company. And so if I asked you, you know, like, what does ConvertKit do? You’re like, if you’re very well versed on like what ConvertKit does because you’re like, “Well, like here’s a scenario. You get a bunch of people coming to your website, but you, you know, you want to grab their email because you’re going to be able to market to them later. So you so ConvertKit lets you put up a little web page that grabs their email.” And then once you have it, you want to be able to like tag them or segment them based on like if they’ve paid for your thing or if they’re free. And then like, wouldn’t it be cool instead of like waking up every day and like writing the same email over and over again, you could like automate a a a sequence of emails. One that goes out on day one, one goes out on day three, one goes out on day 10. And it’s like, you saw a problem in your business and therefore, you know, you kind of understand what the solutions are and you can even create them. Well, there’s another one that’s like uh like, you know, that this is basically what happens when you’re when you work inside of a large company, you’re like, “Oh man, there needs to be a solution for X.” You just see a problem and you’re like, “There needs to be a solution for X,” but you understand that context because it’s like the like we spent basically 15 years just starting companies from scratch. You started media companies, I started more like software social networking type companies. Um and we’ve done content a bunch, so we can tell you all about content. Like we just don’t have that that same frame of reference to that like somebody who’s been like, you know, somebody who’s used Salesforce every single day for like 10 years, then they understand why you need this like Salesforce add-on or app. Which All the time I’m like, “Damn, I wish I knew how to do this stuff that people charge a million dollars a year in subscription revenue.” I’m like, “Damn, I just got to talk to some stupid freaking guy about starting a newsletter and give the same spiel constantly. I don’t want to talk about how to get a your first thousand subscribers on Substack. You know, I’d rather get paid like a million dollars a year to do X, Y and Z and you know, get 100,000 customers.” Yeah, I mean, yeah, exactly. And this is why like when I was at Twitch, when we got acquired, I had like I had wrote down, “I’m going to walk out of here with like 10 ideas,” and I I used that import-export framework, which is like, “What are five ideas that Twitch would import a solution for?” Like we need some like in a country need something, they import it, you know, like the US needs oil, we import it from whatever Iraq or whatever Afghanistan, wherever it needs to come from. Um, Saudi Arabia. And so uh in the same way, companies have these pain points and you’re like, when you’re sitting there and you’re like, “Oh damn, if somebody had us if somebody had a magic way to do this, we would pay $100,000 a month for this. You know, we would pay X dollars for this.” Like for example, when I was there, uh I I I’ve talked about this idea way back in the day, but like all hands. It’s like, at our company, you know, if I needed to say something to the whole company as a startup, I would just like literally fucking stand up at my desk and be like, “Hey, hey, yo, headphones. Um, we’re doing this now. The company we’ve pivoted to this, okay?” Good. Uh or like, you know, we’d be at lunch and I’d just like stand up and say something. Um, but like at a at a company like Twitch, 2,000 people, you know, there was like this organize every Thursday, there’s an all hands, it happens at lunch. They do it at lunch because that’s where they have like a captive audience of people that will actually sit there and pay attention because they’re eating. And like, and they would do the thing and it had like a presentation and there was like a whole there was like a conductor of the whole ceremony and then there’s like a Q&A and they needed like this question and answer thing, then they needed to stream it to remote employees. There was like all these things they had to think about. And we were just stitching together like these four different tools. It’s like, “We use this for the Q&A, we use this for streaming, we use this for the presentation, we use this for new employees, whatever.” And I was like, “Oh, if somebody just made like a really good like uh all hands software, I’m pretty sure you could get a company like Twitch to pay like $25 to $50,000 a year uh for your software.” And it would need to be secure, it would need to be, you know, easy to stream on your phone, it would need to have the Q&A integrated, like etc, etc. And um I believe that to be true and like I could go validate that. I could have just gone and talked to like, you know, the head of the all-in the the all hands thing and be like, “Hey, if this existed, would you buy this?” And like I saw that problem because I was there. Before that, I didn’t even see that problem. Yeah, and we had talked about it. It was like a high school newspaper, but for your company. Yeah, and by the way, Workshop is the name of it that came to me now. So What’s the URL? Useworkshop.com. So it’s pretty sick. We talked about this before, which is in inside like we all have like MailChimp or you have like SendGrid, you have a ton of different services to send mass marketing emails to customers. But like there’s actually internal marketing, too, that happens all the time. Like a company is like a small like, you know, tribe, and like you constantly need like information and sort of propaganda from the top that needs to get to your employees, and whether it’s like, “Hey, remember this Friday we’re doing casual Friday,” like, you know, whatever. Don’t wear underwear this Friday. But you have to like get some message across about like what’s going on. Or it’s like, “Hey, uh we had these wins in the company, like congrats to this team for launching this safety feature that saved us whatever.” Um, and so what use Workshop does is basically creates like a a I think a giant workforce force of overseas people that will label your images for you. And so like if you’re a self-driving car company, if you’re uh Waymo or or Tesla or whatever, you get like tons and tons of footage, and then now those need to be labeled as like, “Yep, that was a dog crossing the street. Yep, that’s a stop sign,” even though it’s partially obstructed. And so how does that happen? That’s like a human intervention. Humans go and do that. And so Scale started off as like a it was labeling as a service. I’m sure they do a lot more stuff now, but it’s pretty crazy. That’s like a $10 billion company now. And this guy, I think he started it when he was 19 or something. What? Um, so Is he cool?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, he was cool. Uh, like I didn’t know him for long because as soon as they’re, it’s pretty funny. It’s like, I’m in this group chat that’s like four founders, um, yeah, four four a bunch of founders, and it’s like, “Oh, this is kind of like the underground founders hangout, like we we chill here.” And everybody’s trying to do big things. But then when one guy actually started doing big things, he’s like, “I’m busy. I need to leave this now.” And so it’s like the the ultimate signal. It’s like, “Oh, when it really takes off, you don’t stay in these chats. You just sort of like go do your billionaire thing now.” Meaning like you go do your like, “I’m actually on a rocket ship. I don’t have time to socialize anymore.” Um, which, you know, respect to him.
Sam Parr: Dude, I was going to show you something that I thought was like a major good find, and now it seems like achievable given that you just set the baseline at to 26-year-olds who are now worth $10 billion. This one’s a little this one’s much smaller, but still oddly interesting. Uh, go to the the MFM or the uh million dollar brainstorm document.
Shaan Puri: Okay. That we have. And scroll down, and so you can kind of see that like this is truthful. The guy sent me a picture of his QuickBooks. So, you see that?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, looking at it.
Sam Parr: All right, so this guy named Matt Paulson. So you remember when my Twitter got hacked?
Shaan Puri: Yes.
Sam Parr: So, uh, there was the basically people hacked my Twitter and they tweeted out like, “I’m giving away a PS5 or whatever the number is, and just like send me $400 and I’m donating the money to St. Jude’s.” And this guy Matt, I when I got back in my Twitter, I saw that he sent two times the asked amount. He was like, “He’s like, I just want to set it went ahead and sent you $1,000, just, you know, so St. Jude’s has a little extra money.” And I I was like, “Oh my god, dude, that that sucks. I’m so sorry about this.” And he was like, “Oh, no big deal.” And I was like, “All right, well, who who are you that you’re this nice?” And I clicked out, and he runs this website called MarketBeat. Have you ever heard of MarketBeat?
Shaan Puri: Only when you uh you you shared this in the Treds group. So I did a little bit of stalking at that time because I was like, “What is that?” You know, your tweet was intriguing you because you had said something like, “I met a guy who runs a company that does $25 million a year in revenue, only 13 employees, and it was like $17 million of the 25 was profit.” And I was like, Yes. All right. I’m fully aroused. Tell me more. What is this company, you know?
Sam Parr: Got him. Uh, yeah. Uh, and so he sent me a picture of his QuickBooks, and he was like, “Here’s the profit.” And keep in mind, this doesn’t include my huge salary, my huge salary is it part of the expenses, but we actually do $17 million in profit. The P&L that he sent me, it’s like, I think $13 million in profit. So it’s called MarketBeat, marketbeat.com. And, um, for the first two years, it was just him. And you go to MarketBeat Explain what it is. Yeah, like what what is this? Yeah, you you go to marketbeat.com, like I always Google like “HubSpot price targets” because I’m curious what HubSpot’s what analysts think the the the stock might be in one year, and he shows up early in Google, one, two, three, if you Google “Amazon price targets,” “Target price targets,” whatever, like any company. And it’s he calls it a web portal, but if you didn’t know better, you’d look at it and just call it a media company. So you you see different headlines and different news. It’s kind of like Wall Street Journal, but really even more niche and just for stocks, just for dividend stocks, and it’s just a way to really quickly see headlines of what’s coming up. So it’s kind of like a um uh a portal or a data aggregator where you could just like see like, “All right, um this stock has an earnings call on this date.” So it’s basically just a place to get information, but it’s also part um media company because they have they published 250 articles a year, or sorry, a month, and they have contractors who they pay $150 per article to write these. But he told me, he goes, “Regardless, if the articles don’t actually add to any of our revenue. People come to the website mostly just to see like the stock prices and things like that.” And so right now, the guy uh has 11 employees, and I actually have a list of, sorry, 13 employees. I have a list of what they all do. He’s got he’s got four developers, four support people, one ad guy, one accountant, one content manager, one marketing assistant, and him. And, uh, they make money through subscription and through advertising, most of which comes through advertising. They’ve got 15,000 subscribers who pay between $20 and $40,000 $20 and $40 a month depending on whichever one they get. So let’s call it 30, so that’s five and five and a half million uh from the subscription, from the premium subscription. And then the rest being ad revenue. 20 million of ads. Okay, wow. Crazy, right? And there’s only one ad sales person. He doesn’t have a team of ad sales guys. And he’ll they’ll sell directly to large like uh maybe like the Motley Fool or some other like uh stock picking newsletter or some other financial brand or some company looking to promote their stock or different financial brokers, uh financial products like wealth advisors, things like that. But if an advertiser is too small, they just work with an agency and and they just say, “Hey, agency, you know, we’ve got some leftover inventory. You want to put your ads in here?” And it’s just one guy doing the whole thing. Doing all the uh Unbelievable. Unbelievable. So it seems like the the trick for them, and by trick I mean hard work and strategy, was Look at the guy. Yeah, by the way, they’ve been around I think they’ve been around for 15 years. Right. And it was SEO. It’s SEO that drives the bulk of the traffic. Is that the idea?
Sam Parr: I think early on. Now it has a little bit of a brand. Before I even knew the guy, I would actually go to it all the time just to look because they’re their interface It’s really nicely organized. Like I’m on like the Amazon one right now, and it’s basically like it has just like a bunch of stuff put together. It’s like, “Oh, here’s the exacts. Here’s the CEO, here’s their age, here’s their pay.” It’s like, “Here’s the, um, you know, here’s the percent shareholding, you know, amongst these different groups. Here’s the analyst targets,” etc. Yeah, it’s like It’s kind of ugly by traditional web, you know, 2.0 standards, like it doesn’t meet any of the design requirements that like Airbnb would approve of, but it in my mind, it’s perfect. It actually is designed beautifully, like it works wonderfully. And so it’s like a cluttered website. It kind of looks like Drudge Report or Craigslist or something or eBay. Like it’s this messy website, but I think it’s quite good.
Shaan Puri: We need to put together a compilation of what I’m calling “Sam’s Ugly Ducklings.” And this is an example of Sam’s Ugly Ducklings, which is a website that like, who the fuck even heard of this? It doesn’t look super fancy. It’s kind of been around for a while. It’s got this like niche passionate audience. Drudge Report is one, this is another. You’ve showed me like 10 of these in the last year, and I think people are I think people really dig these, and so we should do an episode that just highlights each one of these, and it doesn’t have to be like a podcast. It’s almost like a screen share, uh maybe it’s just for YouTube. Or like there’s this guy reaching out. He’s trying to turn our podcast into like a e-book or whatever, like a really nicely designed PDF. Um, we should have him do it on your Ugly Ducklings, because he’s got extensive notes on what you talk about in each episode. Really, who? Uh, this guy in India. I I forgot his name, but I’m talking to him right now, uh to get one of these made for us because I think it’d be dope, right? Like That’d be sick. Dude, it’s embarrassing. Like I I get some people who are like, now there’s people who are like, I would say, kind of like a little more successful in the tech industry that are getting into our podcast, whereas I feel like before we were kind of like a different audience for whatever reason, like Like kids, almost like kids. Well, not not kids. It was more like just like entrepreneurial, I would say, is definitely a big component of it. Uh, which might be K’s, but might be like somebody in their 30s that wants to make a change or whatever. Or it’s just like, “Yeah, I own this awesome business. I’m based out of, you know, Peoria, Illinois,” and it’s like, “What the fuck? Who are you, and how did you find us?” And but like that was more of our main target. And now I’m getting people that are like kind of in the heart of Silicon Valley that are like, “Dude, I kind of got hooked to the podcast.” And I’m like, “Dude, I’ve been telling you about this for like two years.” And they’re like, “Yeah, it’s actually good.” And they’re like, “What are like the best episodes? You got like 200.” And I was like, “Uh, I don’t really know.” He’s like, “Well, what’s like a good place to find the most popular ones?” I was like, “Uh, I don’t have it.” He’s like, “Is there a place with summaries?” I was like, “Nah, not really.” He’s like, “Well, you have all these ideas. Is there a compilation of all the ideas?” I was like, “Ah, there should be. Someone I think made one once.” It’s like all the obvious like kind of like growth things that you would do or like onboarding things you would do, we’ve done none of. And so I’m like kind of embarrassed about that. But I’m not embarrassed. Who cares? It’s working.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, I know. I just think it would help us. Like I think I think I would want that if I was getting into a podcast. And let me, this is funny. Let me tell you how I found out about MarketBeat. I was reading Starter Story. I like that website, Starter Story, and one of the questions is, “What books and podcasts do you read?” And he said, “On the podcast front, I really enjoy listening to My First Million, which breaks down unique ways that business owners are using uh unique ways business owners are generating massive profits.” That’s how I found out about about this guy because he said he listens to us as his only podcast.
Shaan Puri: Oh, nice. Uh, that’s great. Um Who told you that they’re listening?
Shaan Puri: Uh, I don’t want to say their name, but uh you know, someone cool.
Sam Parr: That’s cool. That’s always funny when people listen. Dude, I was with my dad when I took my took my parents to Europe, and I brought my parents to this conference, and my parents are like, you know, in their 60s from Missouri, and they were walking around this conference, and they were like, “Oh, we love swag.” They call it swag. I think it’s like I think it’s supposed to be swag. They go, “We love swag,” which means free stuff. And they’re like, “Oh, let’s go to this company and get this.” And it’s like some like European sales marketing company. I’m like, you know, Dad, like no one gives a shit about like, you know, sales.io. Like I don’t know what they do. Yeah, the long tail. Yeah, yeah, and he was like, he’s like, “Oh, let’s go talk to them.” I’m like, “Dude, I don’t like you don’t even know what that means. I can tell you what it They go, “What do they do?” I’m like, “I can use words to explain it, but you won’t understand.” And so he’s like, “Well, let’s go get some swag. They’re giving away like free uh bouncy ball.” Bouncy ball. He thinks it’s like shawarma, but it’s just Yeah. And he’s like, he’s like, “Let’s go get a ball. We’re going to bring it back for for the kids,” their grandkids. They go, “Let’s go, oh, like, oh, they have envelope openers. Like, let’s go get one for the kids. Oh, they got candy.” I’m like, “Mom, this is a Snickers.” Like you could this is That’s awesome, dude. He’s just going to give it to you in the hotel. He’s like, “Hey kid, I got you this bouncy ball.” And you’re going to be like, “Sweet.” Well, and they’re bringing like they’re bringing like Kinder chocolate. You know like Kinder, like the I’m like, “You guys realize that you can get that at 7-Eleven down the street from your house. Like this isn’t special.” And they’re just grabbing all this stuff. And they brought an empty suitcase because they knew they were going to find swag and just to buy it. And so like I come home I come home and my four-year-old nephew is like wearing a t-shirt that says like, “Hi, we’re here to help with customer solutions.” Like it is and it’s like and the kids are bragging that they got that from Europe. I’m like, “Oh my god.” Anyway. Yeah, it’s European. It’s European fashion. Yeah. They’re like, “What’s this brand Gideon?” Uh It’s just it’s just yeah, they’re just like crazy. And then they’re at this conference and they’re like they’re talking to people and they go to people, I hear like I went I was hard for me to stand next to them and I hear them talking to people, they go, “Hey, do you like podcasts?” And they just like, “Do you like podcasts?” Do you love podcasts? Uh and the guy be like, “Yeah, you know, I listen.” He goes, my dad calls and he goes, “Sam, he says he listens to eight podcasts. I’ll tell him to listen to yours. What’s the name of it again?” And I’m like, “Uh, Dad, like how do you you don’t know you don’t know the name. It’s called it’s called My First Million.” And he goes, “Oh, okay, I’ll tell him. Hey, so it’s called My First Million.” And then he’ll come back and goes, “Hey, I got you another listener. I made him click subscribe.” And and he’s just going after people saying like, “You like podcasts? Oh, great. I got you a I’ll get you I’m going to have you subscribe.” And he and he doesn’t know the name of the podcast. Every single time he goes, “What’s it called? Million dollar podcast?” Uh he’s like, “I listen to it all the time. It’s my favorite. But what’s it called again?” My mom does the same thing, dude. She clicks every ad in my newsletter. She’s like, “I clicked your ads today to help you.” I’m like, “Mom, I don’t know I don’t think that that’s not going to count. It’s not going to do anything.” She’s like, “No, no, no. You said you get paid if they click, right?” I’m like, “Well, kind of. You know, you got to like go buy the thing.” And then she’s like, “Oh, I’m not going to buy it.” I’m like, “Yeah, you also don’t need to click it. In fact, you don’t even need to read it. I don’t think you’re very interested in this subject, Mom.” That’s hilarious. That is so funny. Uh God, it’s so funny. You should have seen them walking around just like putting around this conference like saying like, “Oh, Sammy, come look at let’s look at this booth.” And it’s just I don’t even know what it is. Like I don’t even know what it is. You know what I mean? And it’s like procurement. I’m like, “I don’t I don’t even know what that means, Dad. Neither do you. You definitely don’t know what that means.” Yeah, dude, that’s so funny. He said procurement. So so Romine, who runs like I I he’s my basically my partner in my fund. And Romine’s got this company that’s like a kind of like a old school but baller company in uh based out of like um Georgia, right? Yeah, so he lives in Georgia. Um so he’s like in the tech scene, but he kind of lives in Georgia and runs kind of like a bit of an old school, more more service-based company that like, I think his wife’s dad or something started and he like took it over and like grew it a bunch and is doing great with it. So I think the business does like 50 million a year or something like that. It’s like a sizable business and so I’m I’ve asked him, I think no less than 15 times, like, so yo, yo, so what does your business do again? And he’d be like, “Yeah, we do procurement for uh for SMBs and for whatever enterprise companies.” And I’m like, “Like you get office supplies?” I can’t I can’t wrap my head around what procurement is. And he’s like, he’s like, “You know what the word procurement means, right?” And I’m like, “Yeah, he’s like, so it’s that.” And I’m like, “But this, see, I guess I don’t know what the word means then because I still don’t know.” Yeah, I don’t know like like does does anyone use staples anymore? Like I I don’t yeah, like And it’s like he’s like he’s like, “It’s not office supplies. It’s like, you know, you need a vendor for something.” But I’m like, so then why wouldn’t you just Google and get the vendor? He’s like, “Yeah, but like bigger companies, they just do it differently. They need like this middleman who’s going to basically like help them get the things that they need.” And I’m like, “You get paid for that?” And he’s like, “Yeah.” Is this like someone who just like knows all the people who do blank and they just it talks to them on the phone? Yeah, it’s like you need vendors. I think I still fucking don’t know, dude. Like I’m on explanation number 17. In fact, I just feel bad now every time I I ask him or I try to tell somebody else what he does because I’m like, I I clearly don’t know. It’s almost like a you know, like there’s like a spot in my brain where there’s just like if you did a scan, it would just be like, “Oh, there’s some dark cloud here.” Yeah, that’s the part of my brain that’s trying to understand procurement and it’s just never happening. It’s just like a a fuzzy region. So I’ve got a story related to this. So, uh two days ago, Saturday night, I went out to dinner at at like the a fancy place in St. Louis. And we get to dinner and my dad goes, or I or uh yeah, my dad goes, “Hey, the the president of NASCAR, I guess NASCAR like performed or raced, whatever you call it, yesterday, Sunday, in St. Louis.” And he goes, my dad likes NASCAR. He goes, “That’s the president uh of NASCAR, like Jim Nance or I don’t forget his name.” And uh and uh The football commentator? Yeah, the football. I think it it was Nance something, not Jim Nance, yeah, not Jim Nance. And uh he uh and I was like, “Oh yeah, you know, he’s sitting with this guy named David Stewart. He’s like the second richest black man in the world.” And that like and it’s like it’s pretty funny how like I knew exactly who that rich guy was because he’s he’s worth like four or five billion dollars and and I start researching him and I was like, “Yeah, I’ve seen that guy before. I’ve seen him in articles because he’s like the second or third richest black man and he’s from St. Louis. He’s like the richest guy in St. Louis.” And he’s got this company called Worldwide Systems. You’ve never heard of that, have you? No. So, it does uh $14 billion a year, uh and it’s like the fourth or eighth, like in the top 10 largest privately held companies in the world. And him and his partner just own own the whole thing outright. And what they do is they’re a systems integrator. And that’s one of those words like procurement. I heard that and I’m like, “What does that mean?” And so I went on this deep dive. I’m like, “I got to figure out exactly what they do.” I I I don’t understand this. And then like it it says they’re a Cisco systems integrator. And I went to Cisco’s website and I’m like, “What does Cisco do?” Yeah, I’m like, I they’re like networking, hardware and networking or like networking hardware. And I like read those words and I’m like Oh no, like the website would just be like “Networking Redefined.” And you’re like, “I didn’t I didn’t know the first definition.” Now it’s redefined. Great. Yeah, I didn’t Yeah, we I didn’t know we had to change the definition. And then like they talk about like switches and stuff and I’m like, “I don’t know what like a switch is.” I guess that’s to do with electronics. Like I just I didn’t have have any idea what this stuff did. Uh and but I Google it and like I I know that Cisco is like one of the largest companies in the world, but I’m just I like I don’t know what it is. And so I had to research it. It took me forever to figure out what a systems integrator is. Do you know what it is? Dude, no, I don’t know any I don’t know what I don’t know what SAP does. I’ve been on a mission also to understand what SAP does for a long ass time. And I don’t know what that does. They’re they’re a European though. They got a different word for everything. We’d never be able to figure that out. And I feel like sometimes I’m watching TV and it’ll just pop up SAP and I think it means like closed captioning or Spanish or something like that. I’m like, “Oh, hey, this is different. Now I’m now I’m super confused about SAP.” Yeah, well, I don’t even know why they named their company after their stock ticker either. It’s kind of weird. But um they uh so so a systems integrator basically, so what my father-in-law does for a living is if you’re like Chase and you have 100 employees working on floor 18 and you’re like, “Hey, we got to move these 100 employees up to floor 43 in the same building.” He studies it for a few weeks and then you go to home for work on Friday and you come back on the floor 47 and you sit down at your desk that’s already set up and everything just works. And there’s no downtime. And I think system integrators kind of do that, but like if you’re a $20 billion company and you’re selling like a $3 billion division to this other thing, like they have to go to work one day and like all their computers are new and like this new setup exists. Or if you’re like a a hospital and you’re like, “We need an app.” And it’s like, “Well, it’s not as simple. It’s just like checking into your lobby and saying you’re there.” Like you got to like integrate all this crap into it. And I think that’s what they do. But I don’t know why they don’t just call it like an agency. You know what I mean? So Yeah. Yeah, I I don’t know either. But I I do know like, you know, I guess like jokes aside, you know, there’s basically things that are like uh like you know, Net suite, Net suite’s another one of these where you’re like I don’t know what what is Net suite? Is that like QuickBooks but different? It’s basically like um I mean I’ll butcher the thing but like I mean people use it for like inventory management for example. So it’s basically like a database that’s like usable for um like it’s usable in a couple different ways. It tells you what you got, it tells you what’s like running out, it tells you um what you need, it’ll tell you kind of like it’ll help generate a purchase order, it’ll do things like that. Um by the way, if you go to Net suite’s website, I just went to it. It says complete procure to pay purchasing. Oh no, procurement. It has to do with this too. But basically there’s there’s entire companies, I think this is what um you know, like the P word. What Deloitte and other other consulting companies do a lot of, which is basically they teach your company like these these businesses, they’re these programs are so uh unintuitive that there’s entire consulting businesses that generate billions of dollars a year that just go to a company like, “Oh, um like right here on their website, LoveSac uses them.” So it’s like, you go to LoveSac, you’re like, “Great, you guys sell giant bean bags, huh?” They’re like, “Yeah, like you know, these things are getting a little out of hand, getting a little willy-nilly now that it’s growing so much.” Like, “Yeah, it is. Sure is.” Don’t you wish there was just a way to have everything organized in one place and a system that just all talk to each other and everyone of your employees can log in and interface with it? They’re like, “That sounds pretty good.” So I I just go set it up on my own. I just go to the website and they’re like, “No, no, no. We do that for you. It takes 12 months and we will we will add Net suite to your thing. We will add Oracle, we will add these different services to your We will we will integrate them into your current business and we’ll train your employees on how to actually use it. Is that what service revenue in a SAS line? So if you go to like Atlassian and look at their annual report, there’s a huge amount of services revenue. So do they charge in a I don’t know what the service how they what what they bucket in services. I would have thought like, does that mean just the software? But I I think it’s different for different companies, but at the same time, uh this is sort of like if you were like, “Hey Sean, you know, uh what does it mean to blanch a vegetable?” I’d be like, “You know, I think it uses hot and cold water in some way.” It’s like, you know, like I just don’t know, right? Like if you’re asking me about like what are these like giant enterprise companies that are like B2B service/software companies, like these are like again, I don’t know the first thing about the first thing about these. Dude, the the craziest thing to me is when I think about these, is to understand how someone came up with this idea. So for example, uh there’s Okta. Do you know Okta? That’s what we use for like logging into like websites and shit like that. Or there’s um what’s that one Snowflake? You know Snowflake? Yeah, like a data warehouse. So like those are all companies that are founded relatively recently, like in the 2005, 2015 era. And I’m like, “How did a person know that this was a problem and had to get built?” You know what I mean? Well, you just work in a big company, right? Like okay, so for example, um we were talking the other day about uh what what is it called? The um or like like we have like you you run a chain for companies. Yeah, exactly. Uh what was the name of it again? I forgot I can’t remember the name off the top of my head. Uh I just committed to invest into it. But um but basically we’re when we ran a company or like you ran a a a, you know, like a email-based company. And so if I asked you, you know, like, what does ConvertKit do? You’re like, if you’re very well versed on like what ConvertKit does because you’re like, “Well, like here’s a scenario. You get a bunch of people coming to your website, but you, you know, you want to grab their email because you’re going to be able to market to them later. So you so ConvertKit lets you put up a little web page that grabs their email.” And then once you have it, you want to be able to like tag them or segment them based on like if they’ve paid for your thing or if they’re free. And then like, wouldn’t it be cool instead of like waking up every day and like writing the same email over and over again, you could like automate a a a sequence of emails. One that goes out on day one, one goes out on day three, one goes out on day 10. And it’s like, you saw a problem in your business and therefore, you know, you kind of understand what the solutions are and you can even create them. Well, there’s another one that’s like uh like, you know, that this is basically what happens when you’re when you work inside of a large company, you’re like, “Oh man, there needs to be a solution for X.” You just see a problem and you’re like, “There needs to be a solution for X,” but you understand that context because it’s like the like we spent basically 15 years just starting companies from scratch. You started media companies, I started more like software social networking type companies. Um and we’ve done content a bunch, so we can tell you all about content. Like we just don’t have that that same frame of reference to that like somebody who’s been like, you know, somebody who’s used Salesforce every single day for like 10 years, then they understand why you need this like Salesforce add-on or app. Which All the time I’m like, “Damn, I wish I knew how to do this stuff that people charge a million dollars a year in subscription revenue.” I’m like, “Damn, I just got to talk to some stupid freaking guy about starting a newsletter and give the same spiel constantly. I don’t want to talk about how to get a your first thousand subscribers on Substack. You know, I’d rather get paid like a million dollars a year to do X, Y and Z and you know, get 100,000 customers.” Yeah, I mean, yeah, exactly. And this is why like when I was at Twitch, when we got acquired, I had like I had wrote down, “I’m going to walk out of here with like 10 ideas,” and I I used that import-export framework, which is like, “What are five ideas that Twitch would import a solution for?” Like we need some like in a country need something, they import it, you know, like the US needs oil, we import it from whatever Iraq or whatever Afghanistan, wherever it needs to come from. Um, Saudi Arabia. And so uh in the same way, companies have these pain points and you’re like, when you’re sitting there and you’re like, “Oh damn, if somebody had us if somebody had a magic way to do this, we would pay $100,000 a month for this. You know, we would pay X dollars for this.” Like for example, when I was there, uh I I I’ve talked about this idea way back in the day, but like all hands. It’s like, at our company, you know, if I needed to say something to the whole company as a startup, I would just like literally fucking stand up at my desk and be like, “Hey, hey, yo, headphones. Um, we’re doing this now. The company we’ve pivoted to this, okay?” Good. Uh or like, you know, we’d be at lunch and I’d just like stand up and say something. Um, but like at a at a company like Twitch, 2,000 people, you know, there was like this organize every Thursday, there’s an all hands, it happens at lunch. They do it at lunch because that’s where they have like a captive audience of people that will actually sit there and pay attention because they’re eating. And like, and they would do the thing and it had like a presentation and there was like a whole there was like a conductor of the whole ceremony and then there’s like a Q&A and they needed like this question and answer thing, then they needed to stream it to remote employees. There was like all these things they had to think about. And we were just stitching together like these four different tools. It’s like, “We use this for the Q&A, we use this for streaming, we use this for the presentation, we use this for new employees, whatever.” And I was like, “Oh, if somebody just made like a really good like uh all hands software, I’m pretty sure you could get a company like Twitch to pay like $25 to $50,000 a year uh for your software.” And it would need to be secure, it would need to be, you know, easy to stream on your phone, it would need to have the Q&A integrated, like etc, etc. And um I believe that to be true and like I could go validate that. I could have just gone and talked to like, you know, the head of the all-in the the all hands thing and be like, “Hey, if this existed, would you buy this?” And like I saw that problem because I was there. Before that, I didn’t even see that problem. Yeah, and we had talked about it. It was like a high school newspaper, but for your company. Yeah, and by the way, Workshop is the name of it that came to me now. So What’s the URL? Useworkshop.com. So it’s pretty sick. We talked about this before, which is in inside like we all have like MailChimp or you have like SendGrid, you have a ton of different services to send mass marketing emails to customers. But like there’s actually internal marketing, too, that happens all the time. Like a company is like a small like, you know, tribe, and like you constantly need like information and sort of propaganda from the top that needs to get to your employees, and whether it’s like, “Hey, remember this Friday we’re doing casual Friday,” like, you know, whatever. Don’t wear underwear this Friday. But you have to like get some message across about like what’s going on. Or it’s like, “Hey, uh we had these wins in the company, like congrats to this team for launching this safety feature that saved us whatever.” Um, and so what use Workshop does is basically creates like a a I think a giant workforce force of overseas people that will label your images for you. And so like if you’re a self-driving car company, if you’re uh Waymo or or Tesla or whatever, you get like tons and tons of footage, and then now those need to be labeled as like, “Yep, that was a dog crossing the street. Yep, that’s a stop sign,” even though it’s partially obstructed. And so how does that happen? That’s like a human intervention. Humans go and do that. And so Scale started off as like a it was labeling as a service. I’m sure they do a lot more stuff now, but it’s pretty crazy. That’s like a $10 billion company now. And this guy, I think he started it when he was 19 or something. What? Um, so Is he cool?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, he was cool. Uh, like I didn’t know him for long because as soon as they’re, it’s pretty funny. It’s like, I’m in this group chat that’s like four founders, um, yeah, four four a bunch of founders, and it’s like, “Oh, this is kind of like the underground founders hangout, like we we chill here.” And everybody’s trying to do big things. But then when one guy actually started doing big things, he’s like, “I’m busy. I need to leave this now.” And so it’s like the the ultimate signal. It’s like, “Oh, when it really takes off, you don’t stay in these chats. You just sort of like go do your billionaire thing now.” Meaning like you go do your like, “I’m actually on a rocket ship. I don’t have time to socialize anymore.” Um, which, you know, respect to him.
Sam Parr: Dude, I was going to show you something that I thought was like a major good find, and now it seems like achievable given that you just set the baseline at to 26-year-olds who are now worth $10 billion. This one’s a little this one’s much smaller, but still oddly interesting. Uh, go to the the MFM or the uh million dollar brainstorm document.
Shaan Puri: Okay. That we have. And scroll down, and so you can kind of see that like this is truthful. The guy sent me a picture of his QuickBooks. So, you see that?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, looking at it.
Sam Parr: All right, so this guy named Matt Paulson. So you remember when my Twitter got hacked?
Shaan Puri: Yes.
Sam Parr: So, uh, there was the basically people hacked my Twitter and they tweeted out like, “I’m giving away a PS5 or whatever the number is, and just like send me $400 and I’m donating the money to St. Jude’s.” And this guy Matt, I when I got back in my Twitter, I saw that he sent two times the asked amount. He was like, “He’s like, I just want to set it went ahead and sent you $1,000, just, you know, so St. Jude’s has a little extra money.” And I I was like, “Oh my god, dude, that that sucks. I’m so sorry about this.” And he was like, “Oh, no big deal.” And I was like, “All right, well, who who are you that you’re this nice?” And I clicked out, and he runs this website called MarketBeat. Have you ever heard of MarketBeat?
Shaan Puri: Only when you uh you you shared this in the Treds group. So I did a little bit of stalking at that time because I was like, “What is that?” You know, your tweet was intriguing you because you had said something like, “I met a guy who runs a company that does $25 million a year in revenue, only 13 employees, and it was like $17 million of the 25 was profit.” And I was like, Yes. All right. I’m fully aroused. Tell me more. What is this company, you know?
Sam Parr: Got him. Uh, yeah. Uh, and so he sent me a picture of his QuickBooks, and he was like, “Here’s the profit.” And keep in mind, this doesn’t include my huge salary, my huge salary is it part of the expenses, but we actually do $17 million in profit. The P&L that he sent me, it’s like, I think $13 million in profit. So it’s called MarketBeat, marketbeat.com. And, um, for the first two years, it was just him. And you go to MarketBeat Explain what it is. Yeah, like what what is this? Yeah, you you go to marketbeat.com, like I always Google like “HubSpot price targets” because I’m curious what HubSpot’s what analysts think the the the stock might be in one year, and he shows up early in Google, one, two, three, if you Google “Amazon price targets,” “Target price targets,” whatever, like any company. And it’s he calls it a web portal, but if you didn’t know better, you’d look at it and just call it a media company. So you you see different headlines and different news. It’s kind of like Wall Street Journal, but really even more niche and just for stocks, just for dividend stocks, and it’s just a way to really quickly see headlines of what’s coming up. So it’s kind of like a um uh a portal or a data aggregator where you could just like see like, “All right, um this stock has an earnings call on this date.” So it’s basically just a place to get information, but it’s also part um media company because they have they published 250 articles a year, or sorry, a month, and they have contractors who they pay $150 per article to write these. But he told me, he goes, “Regardless, if the articles don’t actually add to any of our revenue. People come to the website mostly just to see like the stock prices and things like that.” And so right now, the guy uh has 11 employees, and I actually have a list of, sorry, 13 employees. I have a list of what they all do. He’s got he’s got four developers, four support people, one ad guy, one accountant, one content manager, one marketing assistant, and him. And, uh, they make money through subscription and through advertising, most of which comes through advertising. They’ve got 15,000 subscribers who pay between $20 and $40,000 $20 and $40 a month depending on whichever one they get. So let’s call it 30, so that’s five and five and a half million uh from the subscription, from the premium subscription. And then the rest being ad revenue. 20 million of ads. Okay, wow. Crazy, right? And there’s only one ad sales person. He doesn’t have a team of ad sales guys. And he’ll they’ll sell directly to large like uh maybe like the Motley Fool or some other like uh stock picking newsletter or some other financial brand or some company looking to promote their stock or different financial brokers, uh financial products like wealth advisors, things like that. But if an advertiser is too small, they just work with an agency and and they just say, “Hey, agency, you know, we’ve got some leftover inventory. You want to put your ads in here?” And it’s just one guy doing the whole thing. Doing all the uh Unbelievable. Unbelievable. So it seems like the the trick for them, and by trick I mean hard work and strategy, was Look at the guy. Yeah, by the way, they’ve been around I think they’ve been around for 15 years. Right. And it was SEO. It’s SEO that drives the bulk of the traffic. Is that the idea?
Sam Parr: I think early on. Now it has a little bit of a brand. Before I even knew the guy, I would actually go to it all the time just to look because they’re their interface It’s really nicely organized. Like I’m on like the Amazon one right now, and it’s basically like it has just like a bunch of stuff put together. It’s like, “Oh, here’s the exacts. Here’s the CEO, here’s their age, here’s their pay.” It’s like, “Here’s the, um, you know, here’s the percent shareholding, you know, amongst these different groups. Here’s the analyst targets,” etc. Yeah, it’s like It’s kind of ugly by traditional web, you know, 2.0 standards, like it doesn’t meet any of the design requirements that like Airbnb would approve of, but it in my mind, it’s perfect. It actually is designed beautifully, like it works wonderfully. And so it’s like a cluttered website. It kind of looks like Drudge Report or Craigslist or something or eBay. Like it’s this messy website, but I think it’s quite good.
Shaan Puri: We need to put together a compilation of what I’m calling “Sam’s Ugly Ducklings.” And this is an example of Sam’s Ugly Ducklings, which is a website that like, who the fuck even heard of this? It doesn’t look super fancy. It’s kind of been around for a while. It’s got this like niche passionate audience. Drudge Report is one, this is another. You’ve showed me like 10 of these in the last year, and I think people are I think people really dig these, and so we should do an episode that just highlights each one of these, and it doesn’t have to be like a podcast. It’s almost like a screen share, uh maybe it’s just for YouTube. Or like there’s this guy reaching out. He’s trying to turn our podcast into like a e-book or whatever, like a really nicely designed PDF. Um, we should have him do it on your Ugly Ducklings, because he’s got extensive notes on what you talk about in each episode. Really, who? Uh, this guy in India. I I forgot his name, but I’m talking to him right now, uh to get one of these made for us because I think it’d be dope, right? Like That’d be sick. Dude, it’s embarrassing. Like I I get some people who are like, now there’s people who are like, I would say, kind of like a little more successful in the tech industry that are getting into our podcast, whereas I feel like before we were kind of like a different audience for whatever reason, like Like kids, almost like kids. Well, not not kids. It was more like just like entrepreneurial, I would say, is definitely a big component of it. Uh, which might be K’s, but might be like somebody in their 30s that wants to make a change or whatever. Or it’s just like, “Yeah, I own this awesome business. I’m based out of, you know, Peoria, Illinois,” and it’s like, “What the fuck? Who are you, and how did you find us?” And but like that was more of our main target. And now I’m getting people that are like kind of in the heart of Silicon Valley that are like, “Dude, I kind of got hooked to the podcast.” And I’m like, “Dude, I’ve been telling you about this for like two years.” And they’re like, “Yeah, it’s actually good.” And they’re like, “What are like the best episodes? You got like 200.” And I was like, “Uh, I don’t really know.” He’s like, “Well, what’s like a good place to find the most popular ones?” I was like, “Uh, I don’t have it.” He’s like, “Is there a place with summaries?” I was like, “Nah, not really.” He’s like, “Well, you have all these ideas. Is there a compilation of all the ideas?” I was like, “Ah, there should be. Someone I think made one once.” It’s like all the obvious like kind of like growth things that you would do or like onboarding things you would do, we’ve done none of. And so I’m like kind of embarrassed about that. But I’m not embarrassed. Who cares? It’s working.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, I know. I just think it would help us. Like I think I think I would want that if I was getting into a podcast. And let me, this is funny. Let me tell you how I found out about MarketBeat. I was reading Starter Story. I like that website, Starter Story, and one of the questions is, “What books and podcasts do you read?” And he said, “On the podcast front, I really enjoy listening to My First Million, which breaks down unique ways that business owners are using uh unique ways business owners are generating massive profits.” That’s how I found out about about this guy because he said he listens to us as his only podcast.
Shaan Puri: Oh, nice. Uh, that’s great. Um Who told you that they’re listening?
Shaan Puri: Uh, I don’t want to say their name, but uh you know, someone cool.
Sam Parr: That’s cool. That’s always funny when people listen. Dude, I was with my dad when I took my took my parents to Europe, and I brought my parents to this conference, and my parents are like, you know, in their 60s from Missouri, and they were walking around this conference, and they were like, “Oh, we love swag.” They call it swag. I think it’s like I think it’s supposed to be swag. They go, “We love swag,” which means free stuff. And they’re like, “Oh, let’s go to this company and get this.” And it’s like some like European sales marketing company. I’m like, you know, Dad, like no one gives a shit about like, you know, sales.io. Like I don’t know what they do. Yeah, the long tail. Yeah, yeah, and he was like, he’s like, “Oh, let’s go talk to them.” I’m like, “Dude, I don’t like you don’t even know what that means. I can tell you what it They go, “What do they do?” I’m like, “I can use words to explain it, but you won’t understand.” And so he’s like, “Well, let’s go get some swag. They’re giving away like free uh bouncy ball.” Bouncy ball. He thinks it’s like shawarma, but it’s just Yeah. And he’s like, he’s like, “Let’s go get a ball. We’re going to bring it back for for the kids,” their grandkids. They go, “Let’s go, oh, like, oh, they have envelope openers. Like, let’s go get one for the kids. Oh, they got candy.” I’m like, “Mom, this is a Snickers.” Like you could this is That’s awesome, dude. He’s just going to give it to you in the hotel. He’s like, “Hey kid, I got you this bouncy ball.” And you’re going to be like, “Sweet.” Well, and they’re bringing like they’re bringing like Kinder chocolate. You know like Kinder, like the I’m like, “You guys realize that you can get that at 7-Eleven down the street from your house. Like this isn’t special.” And they’re just grabbing all this stuff. And they brought an empty suitcase because they knew they were going to find swag and just to buy it. And so like I come home I come home and my four-year-old nephew is like wearing a t-shirt that says like, “Hi, we’re here to help with customer solutions.” Like it is and it’s like and the kids are bragging that they got that from Europe. I’m like, “Oh my god.” Anyway. Yeah, it’s European. It’s European fashion. Yeah. They’re like, “What’s this brand Gideon?” Uh It’s just it’s just yeah, they’re just like crazy. And then they’re at this conference and they’re like they’re talking to people and they go to people, I hear like I went I was hard for me to stand next to them and I hear them talking to people, they go, “Hey, do you like podcasts?” And they just like, “Do you like podcasts?” Do you love podcasts? Uh and the guy be like, “Yeah, you know, I listen.” He goes, my dad calls and he goes, “Sam, he says he listens to eight podcasts. I’ll tell him to listen to yours. What’s the name of it again?” And I’m like, “Uh, Dad, like how do you you don’t know you don’t know the name. It’s called it’s called My First Million.” And he goes, “Oh, okay, I’ll tell him. Hey, so it’s called My First Million.” And then he’ll come back and goes, “Hey, I got you another listener. I made him click subscribe.” And and he’s just going after people saying like, “You like podcasts? Oh, great. I got you a I’ll get you I’m going to have you subscribe.” And he and he doesn’t know the name of the podcast. Every single time he goes, “What’s it called? Million dollar podcast?” Uh he’s like, “I listen to it all the time. It’s my favorite. But what’s it called again?” My mom does the same thing, dude. She clicks every ad in my newsletter. She’s like, “I clicked your ads today to help you.” I’m like, “Mom, I don’t know I don’t think that that’s not going to count. It’s not going to do anything.” She’s like, “No, no, no. You said you get paid if they click, right?” I’m like, “Well, kind of. You know, you got to like go buy the thing.” And then she’s like, “Oh, I’m not going to buy it.” I’m like, “Yeah, you also don’t need to click it. In fact, you don’t even need to read it. I don’t think you’re very interested in this subject, Mom.” That’s hilarious. That is so funny. Uh God, it’s so funny. You should have seen them walking around just like putting around this conference like saying like, “Oh, Sammy, come look at let’s look at this booth.” And it’s just I don’t even know what it is. Like I don’t even know what it is. You know what I mean? And it’s like procurement. I’m like, “I don’t I don’t even know what that means, Dad. Neither do you. You definitely don’t know what that means.” Yeah, dude, that’s so funny. He said procurement. So so Romine, who runs like I I he’s my basically my partner in my fund. And Romine’s got this company that’s like a kind of like a old school but baller company in uh based out of like um Georgia, right? Yeah, so he lives in Georgia. Um so he’s like in the tech scene, but he kind of lives in Georgia and runs kind of like a bit of an old school, more more service-based company that like, I think his wife’s dad or something started and he like took it over and like grew it a bunch and is doing great with it. So I think the business does like 50 million a year or something like that. It’s like a sizable business and so I’m I’ve asked him, I think no less than 15 times, like, so yo, yo, so what does your business do again? And he’d be like, “Yeah, we do procurement for uh for SMBs and for whatever enterprise companies.” And I’m like, “Like you get office supplies?” I can’t I can’t wrap my head around what procurement is. And he’s like, he’s like, “You know what the word procurement means, right?” And I’m like, “Yeah, he’s like, so it’s that.” And I’m like, “But this, see, I guess I don’t know what the word means then because I still don’t know.” Yeah, I don’t know like like does does anyone use staples anymore? Like I I don’t yeah, like And it’s like he’s like he’s like, “It’s not office supplies. It’s like, you know, you need a vendor for something.” But I’m like, so then why wouldn’t you just Google and get the vendor? He’s like, “Yeah, but like bigger companies, they just do it differently. They need like this middleman who’s going to basically like help them get the things that they need.” And I’m like, “You get paid for that?” And he’s like, “Yeah.” Is this like someone who just like knows all the people who do blank and they just it talks to them on the phone? Yeah, it’s like you need vendors. I think I still fucking don’t know, dude. Like I’m on explanation number 17. In fact, I just feel bad now every time I I ask him or I try to tell somebody else what he does because I’m like, I I clearly don’t know. It’s almost like a you know, like there’s like a spot in my brain where there’s just like if you did a scan, it would just be like, “Oh, there’s some dark cloud here.” Yeah, that’s the part of my brain that’s trying to understand procurement and it’s just never happening. It’s just like a a fuzzy region. So I’ve got a story related to this. So, uh two days ago, Saturday night, I went out to dinner at at like the a fancy place in St. Louis. And we get to dinner and my dad goes, or I or uh yeah, my dad goes, “Hey, the the president of NASCAR, I guess NASCAR like performed or raced, whatever you call it, yesterday, Sunday, in St. Louis.” And he goes, my dad likes NASCAR. He goes, “That’s the president uh of NASCAR, like Jim Nance or I don’t forget his name.” And uh and uh The football commentator? Yeah, the football. I think it it was Nance something, not Jim Nance, yeah, not Jim Nance. And uh he uh and I was like, “Oh yeah, you know, he’s sitting with this guy named David Stewart. He’s like the second richest black man in the world.” And that like and it’s like it’s pretty funny how like I knew exactly who that rich guy was because he’s he’s worth like four or five billion dollars and and I start researching him and I was like, “Yeah, I’ve seen that guy before. I’ve seen him in articles because he’s like the second or third richest black man and he’s from St. Louis. He’s like the richest guy in St. Louis.” And he’s got this company called Worldwide Systems. You’ve never heard of that, have you? No. So, it does uh $14 billion a year, uh and it’s like the fourth or eighth, like in the top 10 largest privately held companies in the world. And him and his partner just own own the whole thing outright. And what they do is they’re a systems integrator. And that’s one of those words like procurement. I heard that and I’m like, “What does that mean?” And so I went on this deep dive. I’m like, “I got to figure out exactly what they do.” I I I don’t understand this. And then like it it says they’re a Cisco systems integrator. And I went to Cisco’s website and I’m like, “What does Cisco do?” Yeah, I’m like, I they’re like networking, hardware and networking or like networking hardware. And I like read those words and I’m like Oh no, like the website would just be like “Networking Redefined.” And you’re like, “I didn’t I didn’t know the first definition.” Now it’s redefined. Great. Yeah, I didn’t Yeah, we I didn’t know we had to change the definition. And then like they talk about like switches and stuff and I’m like, “I don’t know what like a switch is.” I guess that’s to do with electronics. Like I just I didn’t have have any idea what this stuff did. Uh and but I Google it and like I I know that Cisco is like one of the largest companies in the world, but I’m just I like I don’t know what it is. And so I had to research it. It took me forever to figure out what a systems integrator is. Do you know what it is? Dude, no, I don’t know any I don’t know what I don’t know what SAP does. I’ve been on a mission also to understand what SAP does for a long ass time. And I don’t know what that does. They’re they’re a European though. They got a different word for everything. We’d never be able to figure that out. And I feel like sometimes I’m watching TV and it’ll just pop up SAP and I think it means like closed captioning or Spanish or something like that. I’m like, “Oh, hey, this is different. Now I’m now I’m super confused about SAP.” Yeah, well, I don’t even know why they named their company after their stock ticker either. It’s kind of weird. But um they uh so so a systems integrator basically, so what my father-in-law does for a living is if you’re like Chase and you have 100 employees working on floor 18 and you’re like, “Hey, we got to move these 100 employees up to floor 43 in the same building.” He studies it for a few weeks and then you go to home for work on Friday and you come back on the floor 47 and you sit down at your desk that’s already set up and everything just works. And there’s no downtime. And I think system integrators kind of do that, but like if you’re a $20 billion company and you’re selling like a $3 billion division to this other thing, like they have to go to work one day and like all their computers are new and like this new setup exists. Or if you’re like a a hospital and you’re like, “We need an app.” And it’s like, “Well, it’s not as simple. It’s just like checking into your lobby and saying you’re there.” Like you got to like integrate all this crap into it. And I think that’s what they do. But I don’t know why they don’t just call it like an agency. You know what I mean? So Yeah. Yeah, I I don’t know either. But I I do know like, you know, I guess like jokes aside, you know, there’s basically things that are like uh like you know, Net suite, Net suite’s another one of these where you’re like I don’t know what what is Net suite? Is that like QuickBooks but different? It’s basically like um I mean I’ll butcher the thing but like I mean people use it for like inventory management for example. So it’s basically like a database that’s like usable for um like it’s usable in a couple different ways. It tells you what you got, it tells you what’s like running out, it tells you um what you need, it’ll tell you kind of like it’ll help generate a purchase order, it’ll do things like that. Um by the way, if you go to Net suite’s website, I just went to it. It says complete procure to pay purchasing. Oh no, procurement. It has to do with this too. But basically there’s there’s entire companies, I think this is what um you know, like the P word. What Deloitte and other other consulting companies do a lot of, which is basically they teach your company like these these businesses, they’re these programs are so uh unintuitive that there’s entire consulting businesses that generate billions of dollars a year that just go to a company like, “Oh, um like right here on their website, LoveSac uses them.” So it’s like, you go to LoveSac, you’re like, “Great, you guys sell giant bean bags, huh?” They’re like, “Yeah, like you know, these things are getting a little out of hand, getting a little willy-nilly now that it’s growing so much.” Like, “Yeah, it is. Sure is.” Don’t you wish there was just a way to have everything organized in one place and a system that just all talk to each other and everyone of your employees can log in and interface with it? They’re like, “That sounds pretty good.” So I I just go set it up on my own. I just go to the website and they’re like, “No, no, no. We do that for you. It takes 12 months and we will we will add Net suite to your thing. We will add Oracle, we will add these different services to your We will we will integrate them into your current business and we’ll train your employees on how to actually use it. Is that what service revenue in a SAS line? So if you go to like Atlassian and look at their annual report, there’s a huge amount of services revenue. So do they charge in a I don’t know what the service how they what what they bucket in services. I would have thought like, does that mean just the software? But I I think it’s different for different companies, but at the same time, uh this is sort of like if you were like, “Hey Sean, you know, uh what does it mean to blanch a vegetable?” I’d be like, “You know, I think it uses hot and cold water in some way.” It’s like, you know, like I just don’t know, right? Like if you’re asking me about like what are these like giant enterprise companies that are like B2B service/software companies, like these are like again, I don’t know the first thing about the first thing about these. Dude, the the craziest thing to me is when I think about these, is to understand how someone came up with this idea. So for example, uh there’s Okta. Do you know Okta? That’s what we use for like logging into like websites and shit like that. Or there’s um what’s that one Snowflake? You know Snowflake? Yeah, like a data warehouse. So like those are all companies that are founded relatively recently, like in the 2005, 2015 era. And I’m like, “How did a person know that this was a problem and had to get built?” You know what I mean? Well, you just work in a big company, right? Like okay, so for example, um we were talking the other day about uh what what is it called? The um or like like we have like you you run a chain for companies. Yeah, exactly. Uh what was the name of it again? I forgot I can’t remember the name off the top of my head. Uh I just committed to invest into it. But um but basically we’re when we ran a company or like you ran a a a, you know, like a email-based company. And so if I asked you, you know, like, what does ConvertKit do? You’re like, if you’re very well versed on like what ConvertKit does because you’re like, “Well, like here’s a scenario. You get a bunch of people coming to your website, but you, you know, you want to grab their email because you’re going to be able to market to them later. So you so ConvertKit lets you put up a little web page that grabs their email.” And then once you have it, you want to be able to like tag them or segment them based on like if they’ve paid for your thing or if they’re free. And then like, wouldn’t it be cool instead of like waking up every day and like writing the same email over and over again, you could like automate a a a sequence of emails. One that goes out on day one, one goes out on day three, one goes out on day 10. And it’s like, you saw a problem in your business and therefore, you know, you kind of understand what the solutions are and you can even create them. Well, there’s another one that’s like uh like, you know, that this is basically what happens when you’re when you work inside of a large company, you’re like, “Oh man, there needs to be a solution for X.” You just see a problem and you’re like, “There needs to be a solution for X,” but you understand that context because it’s like the like we spent basically 15 years just starting companies from scratch. You started media companies, I started more like software social networking type companies. Um and we’ve done content a bunch, so we can tell you all about content. Like we just don’t have that that same frame of reference to that like somebody who’s been like, you know, somebody who’s used Salesforce every single day for like 10 years, then they understand why you need this like Salesforce add-on or app. Which All the time I’m like, “Damn, I wish I knew how to do this stuff that people charge a million dollars a year in subscription revenue.” I’m like, “Damn, I just got to talk to some stupid freaking guy about starting a newsletter and give the same spiel constantly. I don’t want to talk about how to get a your first thousand subscribers on Substack. You know, I’d rather get paid like a million dollars a year to do X, Y and Z and you know, get 100,000 customers.” Yeah, I mean, yeah, exactly. And this is why like when I was at Twitch, when we got acquired, I had like I had wrote down, “I’m going to walk out of here with like 10 ideas,” and I I used that import-export framework, which is like, “What are five ideas that Twitch would import a solution for?” Like we need some like in a country need something, they import it, you know, like the US needs oil, we import it from whatever Iraq or whatever Afghanistan, wherever it needs to come from. Um, Saudi Arabia. And so uh in the same way, companies have these pain points and you’re like, when you’re sitting there and you’re like, “Oh damn, if somebody had us if somebody had a magic way to do this, we would pay $100,000 a month for this. You know, we would pay X dollars for this.” Like for example, when I was there, uh I I I’ve talked about this idea way back in the day, but like all hands. It’s like, at our company, you know, if I needed to say something to the whole company as a startup, I would just like literally fucking stand up at my desk and be like, “Hey, hey, yo, headphones. Um, we’re doing this now. The company we’ve pivoted to this, okay?” Good. Uh or like, you know, we’d be at lunch and I’d just like stand up and say something. Um, but like at a at a company like Twitch, 2,000 people, you know, there was like this organize every Thursday, there’s an all hands, it happens at lunch. They do it at lunch because that’s where they have like a captive audience of people that will actually sit there and pay attention because they’re eating. And like, and they would do the thing and it had like a presentation and there was like a whole there was like a conductor of the whole ceremony and then there’s like a Q&A and they needed like this question and answer thing, then they needed to stream it to remote employees. There was like all these things they had to think about. And we were just stitching together like these four different tools. It’s like, “We use this for the Q&A, we use this for streaming, we use this for the presentation, we use this for new employees, whatever.” And I was like, “Oh, if somebody just made like a really good like uh all hands software, I’m pretty sure you could get a company like Twitch to pay like $25 to $50,000 a year uh for your software.” And it would need to be secure, it would need to be, you know, easy to stream on your phone, it would need to have the Q&A integrated, like etc, etc. And um I believe that to be true and like I could go validate that. I could have just gone and talked to like, you know, the head of the all-in the the all hands thing and be like, “Hey, if this existed, would you buy this?” And like I saw that problem because I was there. Before that, I didn’t even see that problem. Yeah, and we had talked about it. It was like a high school newspaper, but for your company. Yeah, and by the way, Workshop is the name of it that came to me now. So What’s the URL? Useworkshop.com. So it’s pretty sick. We talked about this before, which is in inside like we all have like MailChimp or you have like SendGrid, you have a ton of different services to send mass marketing emails to customers. But like there’s actually internal marketing, too, that happens all the time. Like a company is like a small like, you know, tribe, and like you constantly need like information and sort of propaganda from the top that needs to get to your employees, and whether it’s like, “Hey, remember this Friday we’re doing casual Friday,” like, you know, whatever. Don’t wear underwear this Friday. But you have to like get some message across about like what’s going on. Or it’s like, “Hey, uh we had these wins in the company, like congrats to this team for launching this safety feature that saved us whatever.” Um, and so what use Workshop does is basically creates like a a I think a giant workforce force of overseas people that will label your images for you. And so like if you’re a self-driving car company, if you’re uh Waymo or or Tesla or whatever, you get like tons and tons of footage, and then now those need to be labeled as like, “Yep, that was a dog crossing the street. Yep, that’s a stop sign,” even though it’s partially obstructed. And so how does that happen? That’s like a human intervention. Humans go and do that. And so Scale started off as like a it was labeling as a service. I’m sure they do a lot more stuff now, but it’s pretty crazy. That’s like a $10 billion company now. And this guy, I think he started it when he was 19 or something. What? Um, so Is he cool?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, he was cool. Uh, like I didn’t know him for long because as soon as they’re, it’s pretty funny. It’s like, I’m in this group chat that’s like four founders, um, yeah, four four a bunch of founders, and it’s like, “Oh, this is kind of like the underground founders hangout, like we we chill here.” And everybody’s trying to do big things. But then when one guy actually started doing big things, he’s like, “I’m busy. I need to leave this now.” And so it’s like the the ultimate signal. It’s like, “Oh, when it really takes off, you don’t stay in these chats. You just sort of like go do your billionaire thing now.” Meaning like you go do your like, “I’m actually on a rocket ship. I don’t have time to socialize anymore.” Um, which, you know, respect to him.
Sam Parr: Dude, I was going to show you something that I thought was like a major good find, and now it seems like achievable given that you just set the baseline at to 26-year-olds who are now worth $10 billion. This one’s a little this one’s much smaller, but still oddly interesting. Uh, go to the the MFM or the uh million dollar brainstorm document.
Shaan Puri: Okay. That we have. And scroll down, and so you can kind of see that like this is truthful. The guy sent me a picture of his QuickBooks. So, you see that?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, looking at it.
Sam Parr: All right, so this guy named Matt Paulson. So you remember when my Twitter got hacked?
Shaan Puri: Yes.
Sam Parr: So, uh, there was the basically people hacked my Twitter and they tweeted out like, “I’m giving away a PS5 or whatever the number is, and just like send me $400 and I’m donating the money to St. Jude’s.” And this guy Matt, I when I got back in my Twitter, I saw that he sent two times the asked amount. He was like, “He’s like, I just want to set it went ahead and sent you $1,000, just, you know, so St. Jude’s has a little extra money.” And I I was like, “Oh my god, dude, that that sucks. I’m so sorry about this.” And he was like, “Oh, no big deal.” And I was like, “All right, well, who who are you that you’re this nice?” And I clicked out, and he runs this website called MarketBeat. Have you ever heard of MarketBeat?
Shaan Puri: Only when you uh you you shared this in the Treds group. So I did a little bit of stalking at that time because I was like, “What is that?” You know, your tweet was intriguing you because you had said something like, “I met a guy who runs a company that does $25 million a year in revenue, only 13 employees, and it was like $17 million of the 25 was profit.” And I was like, Yes. All right. I’m fully aroused. Tell me more. What is this company, you know?
Sam Parr: Got him. Uh, yeah. Uh, and so he sent me a picture of his QuickBooks, and he was like, “Here’s the profit.” And keep in mind, this doesn’t include my huge salary, my huge salary is it part of the expenses, but we actually do $17 million in profit. The P&L that he sent me, it’s like, I think $13 million in profit. So it’s called MarketBeat, marketbeat.com. And, um, for the first two years, it was just him. And you go to MarketBeat Explain what it is. Yeah, like what what is this? Yeah, you you go to marketbeat.com, like I always Google like “HubSpot price targets” because I’m curious what HubSpot’s what analysts think the the the stock might be in one year, and he shows up early in Google, one, two, three, if you Google “Amazon price targets,” “Target price targets,” whatever, like any company. And it’s he calls it a web portal, but if you didn’t know better, you’d look at it and just call it a media company. So you you see different headlines and different news. It’s kind of like Wall Street Journal, but really even more niche and just for stocks, just for dividend stocks, and it’s just a way to really quickly see headlines of what’s coming up. So it’s kind of like a um uh a portal or a data aggregator where you could just like see like, “All right, um this stock has an earnings call on this date.” So it’s basically just a place to get information, but it’s also part um media company because they have they published 250 articles a year, or sorry, a month, and they have contractors who they pay $150 per article to write these. But he told me, he goes, “Regardless, if the articles don’t actually add to any of our revenue. People come to the website mostly just to see like the stock prices and things like that.” And so right now, the guy uh has 11 employees, and I actually have a list of, sorry, 13 employees. I have a list of what they all do. He’s got he’s got four developers, four support people, one ad guy, one accountant, one content manager, one marketing assistant, and him. And, uh, they make money through subscription and through advertising, most of which comes through advertising. They’ve got 15,000 subscribers who pay between $20 and $40,000 $20 and $40 a month depending on whichever one they get. So let’s call it 30, so that’s five and five and a half million uh from the subscription, from the premium subscription. And then the rest being ad revenue. 20 million of ads. Okay, wow. Crazy, right? And there’s only one ad sales person. He doesn’t have a team of ad sales guys. And he’ll they’ll sell directly to large like uh maybe like the Motley Fool or some other like uh stock picking newsletter or some other financial brand or some company looking to promote their stock or different financial brokers, uh financial products like wealth advisors, things like that. But if an advertiser is too small, they just work with an agency and and they just say, “Hey, agency, you know, we’ve got some leftover inventory. You want to put your ads in here?” And it’s just one guy doing the whole thing. Doing all the uh Unbelievable. Unbelievable. So it seems like the the trick for them, and by trick I mean hard work and strategy, was Look at the guy. Yeah, by the way, they’ve been around I think they’ve been around for 15 years. Right. And it was SEO. It’s SEO that drives the bulk of the traffic. Is that the idea?
Sam Parr: I think early on. Now it has a little bit of a brand. Before I even knew the guy, I would actually go to it all the time just to look because they’re their interface It’s really nicely organized. Like I’m on like the Amazon one right now, and it’s basically like it has just like a bunch of stuff put together. It’s like, “Oh, here’s the exacts. Here’s the CEO, here’s their age, here’s their pay.” It’s like, “Here’s the, um, you know, here’s the percent shareholding, you know, amongst these different groups. Here’s the analyst targets,” etc. Yeah, it’s like It’s kind of ugly by traditional web, you know, 2.0 standards, like it doesn’t meet any of the design requirements that like Airbnb would approve of, but it in my mind, it’s perfect. It actually is designed beautifully, like it works wonderfully. And so it’s like a cluttered website. It kind looks like Drudge Report or Craigslist or something or eBay. Like it’s this messy website, but I think it’s quite good.
Shaan Puri: We need to put together a compilation of what I’m calling “Sam’s Ugly Ducklings.” And this is an example of Sam’s Ugly Ducklings, which is a website that like, who the fuck even heard of this? It doesn’t look super fancy. It’s kind of been around for a while. It’s got this like niche passionate audience. Drudge Report is one, this is another. You’ve showed me like 10 of these in the last year, and I think people are I think people really dig these, and so we should do an episode that just highlights each one of these, and it doesn’t have to be like a podcast. It’s almost like a screen share, uh maybe it’s just for YouTube. Or like there’s this guy reaching out. He’s trying to turn our podcast into like a e-book or whatever, like a really nicely designed PDF. Um, we should have him do it on your Ugly Ducklings, because he’s got extensive notes on what you talk about in each episode. Really, who? Uh, this guy in India. I I forgot his name, but I’m talking to him right now, uh to get one of these made for us because I think it’d be dope, right? Like That’d be sick. Dude, it’s embarrassing. Like I I get some people who are like, now there’s people who are like, I would say, kind of like a little more successful in the tech industry that are getting into our podcast, whereas I feel like before we were kind of like a different audience for whatever reason, like Like kids, almost like kids. Well, not not kids. It was more like just like entrepreneurial, I would say, is definitely a big component of it. Uh, which might be K’s, but might be like somebody in their 30s that wants to make a change or whatever. Or it’s just like, “Yeah, I own this awesome business. I’m based out of, you know, Peoria, Illinois,” and it’s like, “What the fuck? Who are you, and how did you find us?” And but like that was more of our main target. And now I’m getting people that are like kind of in the heart of Silicon Valley that are like, “Dude, I kind of got hooked to the podcast.” And I’m like, “Dude, I’ve been telling you about this for like two years.” And they’re like, “Yeah, it’s actually good.” And they’re like, “What are like the best episodes? You got like 200.” And I was like, “Uh, I don’t really know.” He’s like, “Well, what’s like a good place to find the most popular ones?” I was like, “Uh, I don’t have it.” He’s like, “Is there a place with summaries?” I was like, “Nah, not really.” He’s like, “Well, you have all these ideas. Is there a compilation of all the ideas?” I was like, “Ah, there should be. Someone I think made one once.” It’s like all the obvious like kind of like growth things that you would do or like onboarding things you would do, we’ve done none of. And so I’m like kind of embarrassed about that. But I’m not embarrassed. Who cares? It’s working.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, I know. I just think it would help us. Like I think I think I would want that if I was getting into a podcast. And let me, this is funny. Let me tell you how I found out about MarketBeat. I was reading Starter Story. I like that website, Starter Story, and one of the questions is, “What books and podcasts do you read?” And he said, “On the podcast front, I really enjoy listening to My First Million, which breaks down unique ways that business owners are using uh unique ways business owners are generating massive profits.” That’s how I found out about about this guy because he said he listens to us as his only podcast.
Shaan Puri: Oh, nice. Uh, that’s great. Um Who told you that they’re listening?
Shaan Puri: Uh, I don’t want to say their name, but uh you know, someone cool.
Sam Parr: That’s cool. That’s always funny when people listen. Dude, I was with my dad when I took my took my parents to Europe, and I brought my parents to this conference, and my parents are like, you know, in their 60s from Missouri, and they were walking around this conference, and they were like, “Oh, we love swag.” They call it swag. I think it’s like I think it’s supposed to be swag. They go, “We love swag,” which means free stuff. And they’re like, “Oh, let’s go to this company and get this.” And it’s like some like European sales marketing company. I’m like, you know, Dad, like no one gives a shit about like, you know, sales.io. Like I don’t know what they do. Yeah, the long tail. Yeah, yeah, and he was like, he’s like, “Oh, let’s go talk to them.” I’m like, “Dude, I don’t like you don’t even know what that means. I can tell you what it They go, “What do they do?” I’m like, “I can use words to explain it, but you won’t understand.” And so he’s like, “Well, let’s go get some swag. They’re giving away like free uh bouncy ball.” Bouncy ball. He thinks it’s like shawarma, but it’s just Yeah. And he’s like, he’s like, “Let’s go get a ball. We’re going to bring it back for for the kids,” their grandkids. They go, “Let’s go, oh, like, oh, they have envelope openers. Like, let’s go get one for the kids. Oh, they got candy.” I’m like, “Mom, this is a Snickers.” Like you could this is That’s awesome, dude. He’s just going to give it to you in the hotel. He’s like, “Hey kid, I got you this bouncy ball.” And you’re going to be like, “Sweet.” Well, and they’re bringing like they’re bringing like Kinder chocolate. You know like Kinder, like the I’m like, “You guys realize that you can get that at 7-Eleven down the street from your house. Like this isn’t special.” And they’re just grabbing all this stuff. And they brought an empty suitcase because they knew they were going to find swag and just to buy it. And so like I come home I come home and my four-year-old nephew is like wearing a t-shirt that says like, “Hi, we’re here to help with customer solutions.” Like it is and it’s like and the kids are bragging that they got that from Europe. I’m like, “Oh my god.” Anyway. Yeah, it’s European. It’s European fashion. Yeah. They’re like, “What’s this brand Gideon?” Uh It’s just it’s just yeah, they’re just like crazy. And then they’re at this conference and they’re like they’re talking to people and they go to people, I hear like I went I was hard for me to stand next to them and I hear them talking to people, they go, “Hey, do you like podcasts?” And they just like, “Do you like podcasts?” Do you love podcasts? Uh and the guy be like, “Yeah, you know, I listen.” He goes, my dad calls and he goes, “Sam, he says he listens to eight podcasts. I’ll tell him to listen to yours. What’s the name of it again?” And I’m like, “Uh, Dad, like how do you you don’t know you don’t know the name. It’s called it’s called My First Million.” And he goes, “Oh, okay, I’ll tell him. Hey, so it’s called My First Million.” And then he’ll come back and goes, “Hey, I got you another listener. I made him click subscribe.” And and he’s just going after people saying like, “You like podcasts? Oh, great. I got you a I’ll get you I’m going to have you subscribe.” And he and he doesn’t know the name of the podcast. Every single time he goes, “What’s it called? Million dollar podcast?” Uh he’s like, “I listen to it all the time. It’s my favorite. But what’s it called again?” My mom does the same thing, dude. She clicks every ad in my newsletter. She’s like, “I clicked your ads today to help you.” I’m like, “Mom, I don’t know I don’t think that that’s not going to count. It’s not going to do anything.” She’s like, “No, no, no. You said you get paid if they click, right?” I’m like, “Well, kind of. You know, you got to like go buy the thing.” And then she’s like, “Oh, I’m not going to buy it.” I’m like, “Yeah, you also don’t need to click it. In fact, you don’t even need to read it. I don’t think you’re very interested in this subject, Mom.” That’s hilarious. That is so funny. Uh God, it’s so funny. You should have seen them walking around just like putting around this conference like saying like, “Oh, Sammy, come look at let’s look at this booth.” And it’s just I don’t even know what it is. Like I don’t even know what it is. You know what I mean? And it’s like procurement. I’m like, “I don’t I don’t even know what that means, Dad. Neither do you. You definitely don’t know what that means.” Yeah, dude, that’s so funny. He said procurement. So so Romine, who runs like I I he’s my basically my partner in my fund. And Romine’s got this company that’s like a kind of like a old school but baller company in uh based out of like um Georgia, right? Yeah, so he lives in Georgia. Um so he’s like in the tech scene, but he kind of lives in Georgia and runs kind of like a bit of an old school, more more service-based company that like, I think his wife’s dad or something started and he like took it over and like grew it a bunch and is doing great with it. So I think the business does like 50 million a year or something like that. It’s like a sizable business and so I’m I’ve asked him, I think no less than 15 times, like, so yo, yo, so what does your business do again? And he’d be like, “Yeah, we do procurement for uh for SMBs and for whatever enterprise companies.” And I’m like, “Like you get office supplies?” I can’t I can’t wrap my head around what procurement is. And he’s like, he’s like, “You know what the word procurement means, right?” And I’m like, “Yeah, he’s like, so it’s that.” And I’m like, “But this, see, I guess I don’t know what the word means then because I still don’t know.” Yeah, I don’t know like like does does anyone use staples anymore? Like I I don’t yeah, like And it’s like he’s like he’s like, “It’s not office supplies. It’s like, you know, you need a vendor for something.” But I’m like, so then why wouldn’t you just Google and get the vendor? He’s like, “Yeah, but like bigger companies, they just do it differently. They need like this middleman who’s going to basically like help them get the things that they need.” And I’m like, “You get paid for that?” And he’s like, “Yeah.” Is this like someone who just like knows all the people who do blank and they just it talks to them on the phone? Yeah, it’s like you need vendors. I think I still fucking don’t know, dude. Like I’m on explanation number 17. In fact, I just feel bad now every time I I ask him or I try to tell somebody else what he does because I’m like, I I clearly don’t know. It’s almost like a you know, like there’s like a spot in my brain where there’s just like if you did a scan, it would just be like, “Oh, there’s some dark cloud here.” Yeah, that’s the part of my brain that’s trying to understand procurement and it’s just never happening. It’s just like a a fuzzy region. So I’ve got a story related to this. So, uh two days ago, Saturday night, I went out to dinner at at like the a fancy place in St. Louis. And we get to dinner and my dad goes, or I or uh yeah, my dad goes, “Hey, the the president of NASCAR, I guess NASCAR like performed or raced, whatever you call it, yesterday, Sunday, in St. Louis.” And he goes, my dad likes NASCAR. He goes, “That’s the president uh of NASCAR, like Jim Nance or I don’t forget his name.” And uh and uh The football commentator? Yeah, the football. I think it it was Nance something, not Jim Nance, yeah, not Jim Nance. And uh he uh and I was like, “Oh yeah, you know, he’s sitting with this guy named David Stewart. He’s like the second richest black man in the world.” And that like and it’s like it’s pretty funny how like I knew exactly who that rich guy was because he’s he’s worth like four or five billion dollars and and I start researching him and I was like, “Yeah, I’ve seen that guy before. I’ve seen him in articles because he’s like the second or third richest black man and he’s from St. Louis. He’s like the richest guy in St. Louis.” And he’s got this company called Worldwide Systems. You’ve never heard of that, have you? No. So, it does uh $14 billion a year, uh and it’s like the fourth or eighth, like in the top 10 largest privately held companies in the world. And him and his partner just own own the whole thing outright. And what they do is they’re a systems integrator. And that’s one of those words like procurement. I heard that and I’m like, “What does that mean?” And so I went on this deep dive. I’m like, “I got to figure out exactly what they do.” I I I don’t understand this. And then like it it says they’re a Cisco systems integrator. And I went to Cisco’s website and I’m like, “What does Cisco do?” Yeah, I’m like, I they’re like networking, hardware and networking or like networking hardware. And I like read those words and I’m like Oh no, like the website would just be like “Networking Redefined.” And you’re like, “I didn’t I didn’t know the first definition.” Now it’s redefined. Great. Yeah, I didn’t Yeah, we I didn’t know we had to change the definition. And then like they talk about like switches and stuff and I’m like, “I don’t know what like a switch is.” I guess that’s to do with electronics. Like I just I didn’t have have any idea what this stuff did. Uh and but I Google it and like I I know that Cisco is like one of the largest companies in the world, but I’m just I like I don’t know what it is. And so I had to research it. It took me forever to figure out what a systems integrator is. Do you know what it is? Dude, no, I don’t know any I don’t know what I don’t know what SAP does. I’ve been on a mission also to understand what SAP does for a long ass time. And I don’t know what that does. They’re they’re a European though. They got a different word for everything. We’d never be able to figure that out. And I feel like sometimes I’m watching TV and it’ll just pop up SAP and I think it means like closed captioning or Spanish or something like that. I’m like, “Oh, hey, this is different. Now I’m now I’m super confused about SAP.” Yeah, well, I don’t even know why they named their company after their stock ticker either. It’s kind of weird. But um they uh so so a systems integrator basically, so what my father-in-law does for a living is if you’re like Chase and you have 100 employees working on floor 18 and you’re like, “Hey, we got to move these 100 employees up to floor 43 in the same building.” He studies it for a few weeks and then you go to home for work on Friday and you come back on the floor 47 and you sit down at your desk that’s already set up and everything just works. And there’s no downtime. And I think system integrators kind of do that, but like if you’re a $20 billion company and you’re selling like a $3 billion division to this other thing, like they have to go to work one day and like all their computers are new and like this new setup exists. Or if you’re like a a hospital and you’re like, “We need an app.” And it’s like, “Well, it’s not as simple. It’s just like checking into your lobby and saying you’re there.” Like you got to like integrate all this crap into it. And I think that’s what they do. But I don’t know why they don’t just call it like an agency. You know what I mean? So Yeah. Yeah, I I don’t know either. But I I do know like, you know, I guess like jokes aside, you know, there’s basically things that are like uh like you know, Net suite, Net suite’s another one of these where you’re like I don’t know what what is Net suite? Is that like QuickBooks but different? It’s basically like um I mean I’ll butcher the thing but like I mean people use it for like inventory management for example. So it’s basically like a database that’s like usable for um like it’s usable in a couple different ways. It tells you what you got, it tells you what’s like running out, it tells you um what you need, it’ll tell you kind of like it’ll help generate a purchase order, it’ll do things like that. Um by the way, if you go to Net suite’s website, I just went to it. It says complete procure to pay purchasing. Oh no, procurement. It has to do with this too. But basically there’s there’s entire companies, I think this is what um you know, like the P word. What Deloitte and other other consulting companies do a lot of, which is basically they teach your company like these these businesses, they’re these programs are so uh unintuitive that there’s entire consulting businesses that generate billions of dollars a year that just go to a company like, “Oh, um like right here on their website, LoveSac uses them.” So it’s like, you go to LoveSac, you’re like, “Great, you guys sell giant bean bags, huh?” They’re like, “Yeah, like you know, these things are getting a little out of hand, getting a little willy-nilly now that it’s growing so much.” Like, “Yeah, it is. Sure is.” Don’t you wish there was just a way to have everything organized in one place and a system that just all talk to each other and everyone of your employees can log in and interface with it? They’re like, “That sounds pretty good.” So I I just go set it up on my own. I just go to the website and they’re like, “No, no, no. We do that for you. It takes 12 months and we will we will add Net suite to your thing. We will add Oracle, we will add these different services to your We will we will integrate them into your current business and we’ll train your employees on how to actually use it. Is that what service revenue in a SAS line? So if you go to like Atlassian and look at their annual report, there’s a huge amount of services revenue. So do they charge in a I don’t know what the service how they what what they bucket in services. I would have thought like, does that mean just the software? But I I think it’s different for different companies, but at the same time, uh this is sort of like if you were like, “Hey Sean, you know, uh what does it mean to blanch a vegetable?” I’d be like, “You know, I think it uses hot and cold water in some way.” It’s like, you know, like I just don’t know, right? Like if you’re asking me about like what are these like giant enterprise companies that are like B2B service/software companies, like these are like again, I don’t know the first thing about the first thing about these. Dude, the the craziest thing to me is when I think about these, is to understand how someone came up with this idea. So for example, uh there’s Okta. Do you know Okta? That’s what we use for like logging into like websites and shit like that. Or there’s um what’s that one Snowflake? You know Snowflake? Yeah, like a data warehouse. So like those are all companies that are founded relatively recently, like in the 2005, 2015 era. And I’m like, “How did a person know that this was a problem and had to get built?” You know what I mean? Well, you just work in a big company, right? Like okay, so for example, um we were talking the other day about uh what what is it called? The um or like like we have like you you run a chain for companies. Yeah, exactly. Uh what was the name of it again? I forgot I can’t remember the name off the top of my head. Uh I just committed to invest into it. But um but basically we’re when we ran a company or like you ran a a a, you know, like a email-based company. And so if I asked you, you know, like, what does ConvertKit do? You’re like, if you’re very well versed on like what ConvertKit does because you’re like, “Well, like here’s a scenario. You get a bunch of people coming to your website, but you, you know, you want to grab their email because you’re going to be able to market to them later. So you so ConvertKit lets you put up a little web page that grabs their email.” And then once you have it, you want to be able to like tag them or segment them based on like if they’ve paid for your thing or if they’re free. And then like, wouldn’t it be cool instead of like waking up every day and like writing the same email over and over again, you could like automate a a a sequence of emails. One that goes out on day one, one goes out on day three, one goes out on day 10. And it’s like, you saw a problem in your business and therefore, you know, you kind of understand what the solutions are and you can even create them. Well, there’s another one that’s like uh like, you know, that this is basically what happens when you’re when you work inside of a large company, you’re like, “Oh man, there needs to be a solution for X.” You just see a problem and you’re like, “There needs to be a solution for X,” but you understand that context because it’s like the like we spent basically 15 years just starting companies from scratch. You started media companies, I started more like software social networking type companies. Um and we’ve done content a bunch, so we can tell you all about content. Like we just don’t have that that same frame of reference to that like somebody who’s been like, you know, somebody who’s used Salesforce every single day for like 10 years, then they understand why you need this like Salesforce add-on or app. Which All the time I’m like, “Damn, I wish I knew how to do this stuff that people charge a million dollars a year in subscription revenue.” I’m like, “Damn, I just got to talk to some stupid freaking guy about starting a newsletter and give the same spiel constantly. I don’t want to talk about how to get a your first thousand subscribers on Substack. You know, I’d rather get paid like a million dollars a year to do X, Y and Z and you know, get 100,000 customers.” Yeah, I mean, yeah, exactly. And this is why like when I was at Twitch, when we got acquired, I had like I had wrote down, “I’m going to walk out of here with like 10 ideas,” and I I used that import-export framework, which is like, “What are five ideas that Twitch would import a solution for?” Like we need some like in a country need something, they import it, you know, like the US needs oil, we import it from whatever Iraq or whatever Afghanistan, wherever it needs to come from. Um, Saudi Arabia. And so uh in the same way, companies have these pain points and you’re like, when you’re sitting there and you’re like, “Oh damn, if somebody had us if somebody had a magic way to do this, we would pay $100,000 a month for this. You know, we would pay X dollars for this.” Like for example, when I was there, uh I I I’ve talked about this idea way back in the day, but like all hands. It’s like, at our company, you know, if I needed to say something to the whole company as a startup, I would just like literally fucking stand up at my desk and be like, “Hey, hey, yo, headphones. Um, we’re doing this now. The company we’ve pivoted to this, okay?” Good. Uh or like, you know, we’d be at lunch and I’d just like stand up and say something. Um, but like at a at a company like Twitch, 2,000 people, you know, there was like this organize every Thursday, there’s an all hands, it happens at lunch. They do it at lunch because that’s where they have like a captive audience of people that will actually sit there and pay attention because they’re eating. And like, and they would do the thing and it had like a presentation and there was like a whole there was like a conductor of the whole ceremony and then there’s like a Q&A and they needed like this question and answer thing, then they needed to stream it to remote employees. There was like all these things they had to think about. And we were just stitching together like these four different tools. It’s like, “We use this for the Q&A, we use this for streaming, we use this for the presentation, we use this for new employees, whatever.” And I was like, “Oh, if somebody just made like a really good like uh all hands software, I’m pretty sure you could get a company like Twitch to pay like $25 to $50,000 a year uh for your software.” And it would need to be secure, it would need to be, you know, easy to stream on your phone, it would need to have the Q&A integrated, like etc, etc. And um I believe that to be true and like I could go validate that. I could have just gone and talked to like, you know, the head of the all-in the the all hands thing and be like, “Hey, if this existed, would you buy this?” And like I saw that problem because I was there. Before that, I didn’t even see that problem. Yeah, and we had talked about it. It was like a high school newspaper, but for your company. Yeah, and by the way, Workshop is the name of it that came to me now. So What’s the URL? Useworkshop.com. So it’s pretty sick. We talked about this before, which is in inside like we all have like MailChimp or you have like SendGrid, you have a ton of different services to send mass marketing emails to customers. But like there’s actually internal marketing, too, that happens all the time. Like a company is like a small like, you know, tribe, and like you constantly need like information and sort of propaganda from the top that needs to get to your employees, and whether it’s like, “Hey, remember this Friday we’re doing casual Friday,” like, you know, whatever. Don’t wear underwear this Friday. But you have to like get some message across about like what’s going on. Or it’s like, “Hey, uh we had these wins in the company, like congrats to this team for launching this safety feature that saved us whatever.” Um, and so what use Workshop does is basically creates like a a I think a giant workforce force of overseas people that will label your images for you. And so like if you’re a self-driving car company, if you’re uh Waymo or or Tesla or whatever, you get like tons and tons of footage, and then now those need to be labeled as like, “Yep, that was a dog crossing the street. Yep, that’s a stop sign,” even though it’s partially obstructed. And so how does that happen? That’s like a human intervention. Humans go and do that. And so Scale started off as like a it was labeling as a service. I’m sure they do a lot more stuff now, but it’s pretty crazy. That’s like a $10 billion company now. And this guy, I think he started it when he was 19 or something. What? Um, so Is he cool?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, he was cool. Uh, like I didn’t know him for long because as soon as they’re, it’s pretty funny. It’s like, I’m in this group chat that’s like four founders, um, yeah, four four a bunch of founders, and it’s like, “Oh, this is kind of like the underground founders hangout, like we we chill here.” And everybody’s trying to do big things. But then when one guy actually started doing big things, he’s like, “I’m busy. I need to leave this now.” And so it’s like the the ultimate signal. It’s like, “Oh, when it really takes off, you don’t stay in these chats. You just sort of like go do your billionaire thing now.” Meaning like you go do your like, “I’m actually on a rocket ship. I don’t have time to socialize anymore.” Um, which, you know, respect to him.
Sam Parr: Dude, I was going to show you something that I thought was like a major good find, and now it seems like achievable given that you just set the baseline at to 26-year-olds who are now worth $10 billion. This one’s a little this one’s much smaller, but still oddly interesting. Uh, go to the the MFM or the uh million dollar brainstorm document.
Shaan Puri: Okay. That we have. And scroll down, and so you can kind of see that like this is truthful. The guy sent me a picture of his QuickBooks. So, you see that?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, looking at it.
Sam Parr: All right, so this guy named Matt Paulson. So you remember when my Twitter got hacked?
Shaan Puri: Yes.
Sam Parr: So, uh, there was the basically people hacked my Twitter and they tweeted out like, “I’m giving away a PS5 or whatever the number is, and just like send me $400 and I’m donating the money to St. Jude’s.” And this guy Matt, I when I got back in my Twitter, I saw that he sent two times the asked amount. He was like, “He’s like, I just want to set it went ahead and sent you $1,000, just, you know, so St. Jude’s has a little extra money.” And I I was like, “Oh my god, dude, that that sucks. I’m so sorry about this.” And he was like, “Oh, no big deal.” And I was like, “All right, well, who who are you that you’re this nice?” And I clicked out, and he runs this website called MarketBeat. Have you ever heard of MarketBeat?
Shaan Puri: Only when you uh you you shared this in the Treds group. So I did a little bit of stalking at that time because I was like, “What is that?” You know, your tweet was intriguing you because you had said something like, “I met a guy who runs a company that does $25 million a year in revenue, only 13 employees, and it was like $17 million of the 25 was profit.” And I was like, Yes. All right. I’m fully aroused. Tell me more. What is this company, you know?
Sam Parr: Got him. Uh, yeah. Uh, and so he sent me a picture of his QuickBooks, and he was like, “Here’s the profit.” And keep in mind, this doesn’t include my huge salary, my huge salary is it part of the expenses, but we actually do $17 million in profit. The P&L that he sent me, it’s like, I think $13 million in profit. So it’s called MarketBeat, marketbeat.com. And, um, for the first two years, it was just him. And you go to MarketBeat Explain what it is. Yeah, like what what is this? Yeah, you you go to marketbeat.com, like I always Google like “HubSpot price targets” because I’m curious what HubSpot’s what analysts think the the the stock might be in one year, and he shows up early in Google, one, two, three, if you Google “Amazon price targets,” “Target price targets,” whatever, like any company. And it’s he calls it a web portal, but if you didn’t know better, you’d look at it and just call it a media company. So you you see different headlines and different news. It’s kind of like Wall Street Journal, but really even more niche and just for stocks, just for dividend stocks, and it’s just a way to really quickly see headlines of what’s coming up. So it’s kind of like a um uh a portal or a data aggregator where you could just like see like, “All right, um this stock has an earnings call on this date.” So it’s basically just a place to get information, but it’s also part um media company because they have they published 250 articles a year, or sorry, a month, and they have contractors who they pay $150 per article to write these. But he told me, he goes, “Regardless, if the articles don’t actually add to any of our revenue. People come to the website mostly just to see like the stock prices and things like that.” And so right now, the guy uh has 11 employees, and I actually have a list of, sorry, 13 employees. I have a list of what they all do. He’s got he’s got four developers, four support people, one ad guy, one accountant, one content manager, one marketing assistant, and him. And, uh, they make money through subscription and through advertising, most of which comes through advertising. They’ve got 15,000 subscribers who pay between $20 and $40,000 $20 and $40 a month depending on whichever one they get. So let’s call it 30, so that’s five and five and a half million uh from the subscription, from the premium subscription. And then the rest being ad revenue. 20 million of ads. Okay, wow. Crazy, right? And there’s only one ad sales person. He doesn’t have a team of ad sales guys. And he’ll they’ll sell directly to large like uh maybe like the Motley Fool or some other like uh stock picking newsletter or some other financial brand or some company looking to promote their stock or different financial brokers, uh financial products like wealth advisors, things like that. But if an advertiser is too small, they just work with an agency and and they just say, “Hey, agency, you know, we’ve got some leftover inventory. You want to put your ads in here?” And it’s just one guy doing the whole thing. Doing all the uh Unbelievable. Unbelievable. So it seems like the the trick for them, and by trick I mean hard work and strategy, was Look at the guy. Yeah, by the way, they’ve been around I think they’ve been around for 15 years. Right. And it was SEO. It’s SEO that drives the bulk of the traffic. Is that the idea?
Sam Parr: I think early on. Now it has a little bit of a brand. Before I even knew the guy, I would actually go to it all the time just to look because they’re their interface It’s really nicely organized. Like I’m on like the Amazon one right now, and it’s basically like it has just like a bunch of stuff put together. It’s like, “Oh, here’s the exacts. Here’s the CEO, here’s their age, here’s their pay.” It’s like, “Here’s the, um, you know, here’s the percent shareholding, you know, amongst these different groups. Here’s the analyst targets,” etc. Yeah, it’s like It’s kind of ugly by traditional web, you know, 2.0 standards, like it doesn’t meet any of the design requirements that like Airbnb would approve of, but it in my mind, it’s perfect. It actually is designed beautifully, like it works wonderfully. And so it’s like a cluttered website. It kind looks like Drudge Report or Craigslist or something or eBay. Like it’s this messy website, but I think it’s quite good.
Shaan Puri: We need to put together a compilation of what I’m calling “Sam’s Ugly Ducklings.” And this is an example of Sam’s Ugly Ducklings, which is a website that like, who the fuck even heard of this? It doesn’t look super fancy. It’s kind of been around for a while. It’s got this like niche passionate audience. Drudge Report is one, this is another. You’ve showed me like 10 of these in the last year, and I think people are I think people really dig these, and so we should do an episode that just highlights each one of these, and it doesn’t have to be like a podcast. It’s almost like a screen share, uh maybe it’s just for YouTube. Or like there’s this guy reaching out. He’s trying to turn our podcast into like a e-book or whatever, like a really nicely designed PDF. Um, we should have him do it on your Ugly Ducklings, because he’s got extensive notes on what you talk about in each episode. Really, who? Uh, this guy in India. I I forgot his name, but I’m talking to him right now, uh to get one of these made for us because I think it’d be dope, right? Like That’d be sick. Dude, it’s embarrassing. Like I I get some people who are like, now there’s people who are like, I would say, kind of like a little more successful in the tech industry that are getting into our podcast, whereas I feel like before we were kind of like a different audience for whatever reason, like Like kids, almost like kids. Well, not not kids. It was more like just like entrepreneurial, I would say, is definitely a big component of it. Uh, which might be K’s, but might be like somebody in their 30s that wants to make a change or whatever. Or it’s just like, “Yeah, I own this awesome business. I’m based out of, you know, Peoria, Illinois,” and it’s like, “What the fuck? Who are you, and how did you find us?” And but like that was more of our main target. And now I’m getting people that are like kind of in the heart of Silicon Valley that are like, “Dude, I kind of got hooked to the podcast.” And I’m like, “Dude, I’ve been telling you about this for like two years.” And they’re like, “Yeah, it’s actually good.” And they’re like, “What are like the best episodes? You got like 200.” And I was like, “Uh, I don’t really know.” He’s like, “Well, what’s like a good place to find the most popular ones?” I was like, “Uh, I don’t have it.” He’s like, “Is there a place with summaries?” I was like, “Nah, not really.” He’s like, “Well, you have all these ideas. Is there a compilation of all the ideas?” I was like, “Ah, there should be. Someone I think made one once.” It’s like all the obvious like kind of like growth things that you would do or like onboarding things you would do, we’ve done none of. And so I’m like kind of embarrassed about that. But I’m not embarrassed. Who cares? It’s working.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, I know. I just think it would help us. Like I think I think I would want that if I was getting into a podcast. And let me, this is funny. Let me tell you how I found out about MarketBeat. I was reading Starter Story. I like that website, Starter Story, and one of the questions is, “What books and podcasts do you read?” And he said, “On the podcast front, I really enjoy listening to My First Million, which breaks down unique ways that business owners are using uh unique ways business owners are generating massive profits.” That’s how I found out about about this guy because he said he listens to us as his only podcast.
Shaan Puri: Oh, nice. Uh, that’s great. Um Who told you that they’re listening?
Shaan Puri: Uh, I don’t want to say their name, but uh you know, someone cool.
Sam Parr: That’s cool. That’s always funny when people listen. Dude, I was with my dad when I took my took my parents to Europe, and I brought my parents to this conference, and my parents are like, you know, in their 60s from Missouri, and they were walking around this conference, and they were like, “Oh, we love swag.” They call it swag. I think it’s like I think it’s supposed to be swag. They go, “We love swag,” which means free stuff. And they’re like, “Oh, let’s go to this company and get this.” And it’s like some like European sales marketing company. I’m like, you know, Dad, like no one gives a shit about like, you know, sales.io. Like I don’t know what they do. Yeah, the long tail. Yeah, yeah, and he was like, he’s like, “Oh, let’s go talk to them.” I’m like, “Dude, I don’t like you don’t even know what that means. I can tell you what it They go, “What do they do?” I’m like, “I can use words to explain it, but you won’t understand.” And so he’s like, “Well, let’s go get some swag. They’re giving away like free uh bouncy ball.” Bouncy ball. He thinks it’s like shawarma, but it’s just Yeah. And he’s like, he’s like, “Let’s go get a ball. We’re going to bring it back for for the kids,” their grandkids. They go, “Let’s go, oh, like, oh, they have envelope openers. Like, let’s go get one for the kids. Oh, they got candy.” I’m like, “Mom, this is a Snickers.” Like you could this is That’s awesome, dude. He’s just going to give it to you in the hotel. He’s like, “Hey kid, I got you this bouncy ball.” And you’re going to be like, “Sweet.” Well, and they’re bringing like they’re bringing like Kinder chocolate. You know like Kinder, like the I’m like, “You guys realize that you can get that at 7-Eleven down the street from your house. Like this isn’t special.” And they’re just grabbing all this stuff. And they brought an empty suitcase because they knew they were going to find swag and just to buy it. And so like I come home I come home and my four-year-old nephew is like wearing a t-shirt that says like, “Hi, we’re here to help with customer solutions.” Like it is and it’s like and the kids are bragging that they got that from Europe. I’m like, “Oh my god.” Anyway. Yeah, it’s European. It’s European fashion. Yeah. They’re like, “What’s this brand Gideon?” Uh It’s just it’s just yeah, they’re just like crazy. And then they’re at this conference and they’re like they’re talking to people and they go to people, I hear like I went I was hard for me to stand next to them and I hear them talking to people, they go, “Hey, do you like podcasts?” And they just like, “Do you like podcasts?” Do you love podcasts? Uh and the guy be like, “Yeah, you know, I listen.” He goes, my dad calls and he goes, “Sam, he says he listens to eight podcasts. I’ll tell him to listen to yours. What’s the name of it again?” And I’m like, “Uh, Dad, like how do you you don’t know you don’t know the name. It’s called it’s called My First Million.” And he goes, “Oh, okay, I’ll tell him. Hey, so it’s called My First Million.” And then he’ll come back and goes, “Hey, I got you another listener. I made him click subscribe.” And and he’s just going after people saying like, “You like podcasts? Oh, great. I got you a I’ll get you I’m going to have you subscribe.” And he and he doesn’t know the name of the podcast. Every single time he goes, “What’s it called? Million dollar podcast?” Uh he’s like, “I listen to it all the time. It’s my favorite. But what’s it called again?” My mom does the same thing, dude. She clicks every ad in my newsletter. She’s like, “I clicked your ads today to help you.” I’m like, “Mom, I don’t know I don’t think that that’s not going to count. It’s not going to do anything.” She’s like, “No, no, no. You said you get paid if they click, right?” I’m like, “Well, kind of. You know, you got to like go buy the thing.” And then she’s like, “Oh, I’m not going to buy it.” I’m like, “Yeah, you also don’t need to click it. In fact, you don’t even need to read it. I don’t think you’re very interested in this subject, Mom.” That’s hilarious. That is so funny. Uh God, it’s so funny. You should have seen them walking around just like putting around this conference like saying like, “Oh, Sammy, come look at let’s look at this booth.” And it’s just I don’t even know what it is. Like I don’t even know what it is. You know what I mean? And it’s like procurement. I’m like, “I don’t I don’t even know what that means, Dad. Neither do you. You definitely don’t know what that means.” Yeah, dude, that’s so funny. He said procurement. So so Romine, who runs like I I he’s my basically my partner in my fund. And Romine’s got this company that’s like a kind of like a old school but baller company in uh based out of like um Georgia, right? Yeah, so he lives in Georgia. Um so he’s like in the tech scene, but he kind of lives in Georgia and runs kind of like a bit of an old school, more more service-based company that like, I think his wife’s dad or something started and he like took it over and like grew it a bunch and is doing great with it. So I think the business does like 50 million a year or something like that. It’s like a sizable business and so I’m I’ve asked him, I think no less than 15 times, like, so yo, yo, so what does your business do again? And he’d be like, “Yeah, we do procurement for uh for SMBs and for whatever enterprise companies.” And I’m like, “Like you get office supplies?” I can’t I can’t wrap my head around what procurement is. And he’s like, he’s like, “You know what the word procurement means, right?” And I’m like, “Yeah, he’s like, so it’s that.” And I’m like, “But this, see, I guess I don’t know what the word means then because I still don’t know.” Yeah, I don’t know like like does does anyone use staples anymore? Like I I don’t yeah, like And it’s like he’s like he’s like, “It’s not office supplies. It’s like, you know, you need a vendor for something.” But I’m like, so then why wouldn’t you just Google and get the vendor? He’s like, “Yeah, but like bigger companies, they just do it differently. They need like this middleman who’s going to basically like help them get the things that they need.” And I’m like, “You get paid for that?” And he’s like, “Yeah.” Is this like someone who just like knows all the people who do blank and they just it talks to them on the phone? Yeah, it’s like you need vendors. I think I still fucking don’t know, dude. Like I’m on explanation number 17. In fact, I just feel bad now every time I I ask him or I try to tell somebody else what he does because I’m like, I I clearly don’t know. It’s almost like a you know, like there’s like a spot in my brain where there’s just like if you did a scan, it would just be like, “Oh, there’s some dark cloud here.” Yeah, that’s the part of my brain that’s trying to understand procurement and it’s just never happening. It’s just like a a fuzzy region. So I’ve got a story related to this. So, uh two days ago, Saturday night, I went out to dinner at at like the a fancy place in St. Louis. And we get to dinner and my dad goes, or I or uh yeah, my dad goes, “Hey, the the president of NASCAR, I guess NASCAR like performed or raced, whatever you call it, yesterday, Sunday, in St. Louis.” And he goes, my dad likes NASCAR. He goes, “That’s the president uh of NASCAR, like Jim Nance or I don’t forget his name.” And uh and uh The football commentator? Yeah, the football. I think it it was Nance something, not Jim Nance, yeah, not Jim Nance. And uh he uh and I was like, “Oh yeah, you know, he’s sitting with this guy named David Stewart. He’s like the second richest black man in the world.” And that like and it’s like it’s pretty funny how like I knew exactly who that rich guy was because he’s he’s worth like four or five billion dollars and and I start researching him and I was like, “Yeah, I’ve seen that guy before. I’ve seen him in articles because he’s like the second or third richest black man and he’s from St. Louis. He’s like the richest guy in St. Louis.” And he’s got this company called Worldwide Systems. You’ve never heard of that, have you? No. So, it does uh $14 billion a year, uh and it’s like the fourth or eighth, like in the top 10 largest privately held companies in the world. And him and his partner just own own the whole thing outright. And what they do is they’re a systems integrator. And that’s one of those words like procurement. I heard that and I’m like, “What does that mean?” And so I went on this deep dive. I’m like, “I got to figure out exactly what they do.” I I I don’t understand this. And then like it it says they’re a Cisco systems integrator. And I went to Cisco’s website and I’m like, “What does Cisco do?” Yeah, I’m like, I they’re like networking, hardware and networking or like networking hardware. And I like read those words and I’m like Oh no, like the website would just be like “Networking Redefined.” And you’re like, “I didn’t I didn’t know the first definition.” Now it’s redefined. Great. Yeah, I didn’t Yeah, we I didn’t know we had to change the definition. And then like they talk about like switches and stuff and I’m like, “I don’t know what like a switch is.” I guess that’s to do with electronics. Like I just I didn’t have have any idea what this stuff did. Uh and but I Google it and like I I know that Cisco is like one of the largest companies in the world, but I’m just I like I don’t know what it is. And so I had to research it. It took me forever to figure out what a systems integrator is. Do you know what it is? Dude, no, I don’t know any I don’t know what I don’t know what SAP does. I’ve been on a mission also to understand what SAP does for a long ass time. And I don’t know what that does. They’re they’re a European though. They got a different word for everything. We’d never be able to figure that out. And I feel like sometimes I’m watching TV and it’ll just pop up SAP and I think it means like closed captioning or Spanish or something like that. I’m like, “Oh, hey, this is different. Now I’m now I’m super confused about SAP.” Yeah, well, I don’t even know why they named their company after their stock ticker either. It’s kind of weird. But um they uh so so a systems integrator basically, so what my father-in-law does for a living is if you’re like Chase and you have 100 employees working on floor 18 and you’re like, “Hey, we got to move these 100 employees up to floor 43 in the same building.” He studies it for a few weeks and then you go to home for work on Friday and you come back on the floor 47 and you sit down at your desk that’s already set up and everything just works. And there’s no downtime. And I think system integrators kind of do that, but like if you’re a $20 billion company and you’re selling like a $3 billion division to this other thing, like they have to go to work one day and like all their computers are new and like this new setup exists. Or if you’re like a a hospital and you’re like, “We need an app.” And it’s like, “Well, it’s not as simple. It’s just like checking into your lobby and saying you’re there.” Like you got to like integrate all this crap into it. And I think that’s what they do. But I don’t know why they don’t just call it like an agency. You know what I mean? So Yeah. Yeah, I I don’t know either. But I I do know like, you know, I guess like jokes aside, you know, there’s basically things that are like uh like you know, Net suite, Net suite’s another one of these where you’re like I don’t know what what is Net suite? Is that like QuickBooks but different? It’s basically like um I mean I’ll butcher the thing but like I mean people use it for like inventory management for example. So it’s basically like a database that’s like usable for um like it’s usable in a couple different ways. It tells you what you got, it tells you what’s like running out, it tells you um what you need, it’ll tell you kind of like it’ll help generate a purchase order, it’ll do things like that. Um by the way, if you go to Net suite’s website, I just went to it. It says complete procure to pay purchasing. Oh no, procurement. It has to do with this too. But basically there’s there’s entire companies, I think this is what um you know, like the P word. What Deloitte and other other consulting companies do a lot of, which is basically they teach your company like these these businesses, they’re these programs are so uh unintuitive that there’s entire consulting businesses that generate billions of dollars a year that just go to a company like, “Oh, um like right here on their website, LoveSac uses them.” So it’s like, you go to LoveSac, you’re like, “Great, you guys sell giant bean bags, huh?” They’re like, “Yeah, like you know, these things are getting a little out of hand, getting a little willy-nilly now that it’s growing so much.” Like, “Yeah, it is. Sure is.” Don’t you wish there was just a way to have everything organized in one place and a system that just all talk to each other and everyone of your employees can log in and interface with it? They’re like, “That sounds pretty good.” So I I just go set it up on my own. I just go to the website and they’re like, “No, no, no. We do that for you. It takes 12 months and we will we will add Net suite to your thing. We will add Oracle, we will add these different services to your We will we will integrate them into your current business and we’ll train your employees on how to actually use it. Is that what service revenue in a SAS line? So if you go to like Atlassian and look at their annual report, there’s a huge amount of services revenue. So do they charge in a I don’t know what the service how they what what they bucket in services. I would have thought like, does that mean just the software? But I I think it’s different for different companies, but at the same time, uh this is sort of like if you were like, “Hey Sean, you know, uh what does it mean to blanch a vegetable?” I’d be like, “You know, I think it uses hot and cold water in some way.” It’s like, you know, like I just don’t know, right? Like if you’re asking me about like what are these like giant enterprise companies that are like B2B service/software companies, like these are like again, I don’t know the first thing about the first thing about these. Dude, the the craziest thing to me is when I think about these, is to understand how someone came up with this idea. So for example, uh there’s Okta. Do you know Okta? That’s what we use for like logging into like websites and shit like that. Or there’s um what’s that one Snowflake? You know Snowflake? Yeah, like a data warehouse. So like those are all companies that are founded relatively recently, like in the 2005, 2015 era. And I’m like, “How did a person know that this was a problem and had to get built?” You know what I mean? Well, you just work in a big company, right? Like okay, so for example, um we were talking the other day about uh what what is it called? The um or like like we have like you you run a chain for companies. Yeah, exactly. Uh what was the name of it again? I forgot I can’t remember the name off the top of my head. Uh I just committed to invest into it. But um but basically we’re when we ran a company or like you ran a a a, you know, like a email-based company. And so if I asked you, you know, like, what does ConvertKit do? You’re like, if you’re very well versed on like what ConvertKit does because you’re like, “Well, like here’s a scenario. You get a bunch of people coming to your website, but you, you know, you want to grab their email because you’re going to be able to market to them later. So you so ConvertKit lets you put up a little web page that grabs their email.” And then once you have it, you want to be able to like tag them or segment them based on like if they’ve paid for your thing or if they’re free. And then like, wouldn’t it be cool instead of like waking up every day and like writing the same email over and over again, you could like automate a a a sequence of emails. One that goes out on day one, one goes out on day three, one goes out on day 10. And it’s like, you saw a problem in your business and therefore, you know, you kind of understand what the solutions are and you can even create them. Well, there’s another one that’s like uh like, you know, that this is basically what happens when you’re when you work inside of a large company, you’re like, “Oh man, there needs to be a solution for X.” You just see a problem and you’re like, “There needs to be a solution for X,” but you understand that context because it’s like the like we spent basically 15 years just starting companies from scratch. You started media companies, I started more like software social networking type companies. Um and we’ve done content a bunch, so we can tell you all about content. Like we just don’t have that that same frame of reference to that like somebody who’s been like, you know, somebody who’s used Salesforce every single day for like 10 years, then they understand why you need this like Salesforce add-on or app. Which All the time I’m like, “Damn, I wish I knew how to do this stuff that people charge a million dollars a year in subscription revenue.” I’m like, “Damn, I just got to talk to some stupid freaking guy about starting a newsletter and give the same spiel constantly. I don’t want to talk about how to get a your first thousand subscribers on Substack. You know, I’d rather get paid like a million dollars a year to do X, Y and Z and you know, get 100,000 customers.” Yeah, I mean, yeah, exactly. And this is why like when I was at Twitch, when we got acquired, I had like I had wrote down, “I’m going to walk out of here with like 10 ideas,” and I I used that import-export framework, which is like, “What are five ideas that Twitch would import a solution for?” Like we need some like in a country need something, they import it, you know, like the US needs oil, we import it from whatever Iraq or whatever Afghanistan, wherever it needs to come from. Um, Saudi Arabia. And so uh in the same way, companies have these pain points and you’re like, when you’re sitting there and you’re like, “Oh damn, if somebody had us if somebody had a magic way to do this, we would pay $100,000 a month for this. You know, we would pay X dollars for this.” Like for example, when I was there, uh I I I’ve talked about this idea way back in the day, but like all hands. It’s like, at our company, you know, if I needed to say something to the whole company as a startup, I would just like literally fucking stand up at my desk and be like, “Hey, hey, yo, headphones. Um, we’re doing this now. The company we’ve pivoted to this, okay?” Good. Uh or like, you know, we’d be at lunch and I’d just like stand up and say something. Um, but like at a at a company like Twitch, 2,000 people, you know, there was like this organize every Thursday, there’s an all hands, it happens at lunch. They do it at lunch because that’s where they have like a captive audience of people that will actually sit there and pay attention because they’re eating. And like, and they would do the thing and it had like a presentation and there was like a whole there was like a conductor of the whole ceremony and then there’s like a Q&A and they needed like this question and answer thing, then they needed to stream it to remote employees. There was like all these things they had to think about. And we were just stitching together like these four different tools. It’s like, “We use this for the Q&A, we use this for streaming, we use this for the presentation, we use this for new employees, whatever.” And I was like, “Oh, if somebody just made like a really good like uh all hands software, I’m pretty sure you could get a company like Twitch to pay like $25 to $50,000 a year uh for your software.” And it would need to be secure, it would need to be, you know, easy to stream on your phone, it would need to have the Q&A integrated, like etc, etc. And um I believe that to be true and like I could go validate that. I could have just gone and talked to like, you know, the head of the all-in the the all hands thing and be like, “Hey, if this existed, would you buy this?” And like I saw that problem because I was there. Before that, I didn’t even see that problem. Yeah, and we had talked about it. It was like a high school newspaper, but for your company. Yeah, and by the way, Workshop is the name of it that came to me now. So What’s the URL? Useworkshop.com. So it’s pretty sick. We talked about this before, which is in inside like we all have like MailChimp or you have like SendGrid, you have a ton of different services to send mass marketing emails to customers. But like there’s actually internal marketing, too, that happens all the time. Like a company is like a small like, you know, tribe, and like you constantly need like information and sort of propaganda from the top that needs to get to your employees, and whether it’s like, “Hey, remember this Friday we’re doing casual Friday,” like, you know, whatever. Don’t wear underwear this Friday. But you have to like get some message across about like what’s going on. Or it’s like, “Hey, uh we had these wins in the company, like congrats to this team for launching this safety feature that saved us whatever.” Um, and so what use Workshop does is basically creates like a a I think a giant workforce force of overseas people that will label your images for you. And so like if you’re a self-driving car company, if you’re uh Waymo or or Tesla or whatever, you get like tons and tons of footage, and then now those need to be labeled as like, “Yep, that was a dog crossing the street. Yep, that’s a stop sign,” even though it’s partially obstructed. And so how does that happen? That’s like a human intervention. Humans go and do that. And so Scale started off as like a it was labeling as a service. I’m sure they do a lot more stuff now, but it’s pretty crazy. That’s like a $10 billion company now. And this guy, I think he started it when he was 19 or something. What? Um, so Is he cool?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, he was cool. Uh, like I didn’t know him for long because as soon as they’re, it’s pretty funny. It’s like, I’m in this group chat that’s like four founders, um, yeah, four four a bunch of founders, and it’s like, “Oh, this is kind of like the underground founders hangout, like we we chill here.” And everybody’s trying to do big things. But then when one guy actually started doing big things, he’s like, “I’m busy. I need to leave this now.” And so it’s like the the ultimate signal. It’s like, “Oh, when it really takes off, you don’t stay in these chats. You just sort of like go do your billionaire thing now.” Meaning like you go do your like, “I’m actually on a rocket ship. I don’t have time to socialize anymore.” Um, which, you know, respect to him.
Sam Parr: Dude, I was going to show you something that I thought was like a major good find, and now it seems like achievable given that you just set the baseline at to 26-year-olds who are now worth $10 billion. This one’s a little this one’s much smaller, but still oddly interesting. Uh, go to the the MFM or the uh million dollar brainstorm document.
Shaan Puri: Okay. That we have. And scroll down, and so you can kind of see that like this is truthful. The guy sent me a picture of his QuickBooks. So, you see that?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, looking at it.
Sam Parr: All right, so this guy named Matt Paulson. So you remember when my Twitter got hacked?
Shaan Puri: Yes.
Sam Parr: So, uh, there was the basically people hacked my Twitter and they tweeted out like, “I’m giving away a PS5 or whatever the number is, and just like send me $400 and I’m donating the money to St. Jude’s.” And this guy Matt, I when I got back in my Twitter, I saw that he sent two times the asked amount. He was like, “He’s like, I just want to set it went ahead and sent you $1,000, just, you know, so St. Jude’s has a little extra money.” And I I was like, “Oh my god, dude, that that sucks. I’m so sorry about this.” And he was like, “Oh, no big deal.” And I was like, “All right, well, who who are you that you’re this nice?” And I clicked out, and he runs this website called MarketBeat. Have you ever heard of MarketBeat?
Shaan Puri: Only when you uh you you shared this in the Treds group. So I did a little bit of stalking at that time because I was like, “What is that?” You know, your tweet was intriguing you because you had said something like, “I met a guy who runs a company that does $25 million a year in revenue, only 13 employees, and it was like $17 million of the 25 was profit.” And I was like, Yes. All right. I’m fully aroused. Tell me more. What is this company, you know?
Sam Parr: Got him. Uh, yeah. Uh, and so he sent me a picture of his QuickBooks, and he was like, “Here’s the profit.” And keep in mind, this doesn’t include my huge salary, my huge salary is it part of the expenses, but we actually do $17 million in profit. The P&L that he sent me, it’s like, I think $13 million in profit. So it’s called MarketBeat, marketbeat.com. And, um, for the first two years, it was just him. And you go to MarketBeat Explain what it is. Yeah, like what what is this? Yeah, you you go to marketbeat.com, like I always Google like “HubSpot price targets” because I’m curious what HubSpot’s what analysts think the the the stock might be in one year, and he shows up early in Google, one, two, three, if you Google “Amazon price targets,” “Target price targets,” whatever, like any company. And it’s he calls it a web portal, but if you didn’t know better, you’d look at it and just call it a media company. So you you see different headlines and different news. It’s kind of like Wall Street Journal, but really even more niche and just for stocks, just for dividend stocks, and it’s just a way to really quickly see headlines of what’s coming up. So it’s kind of like a um uh a portal or a data aggregator where you could just like see like, “All right, um this stock has an earnings call on this date.” So it’s basically just a place to get information, but it’s also part um media company because they have they published 250 articles a year, or sorry, a month, and they have contractors who they pay $150 per article to write these. But he told me, he goes, “Regardless, if the articles don’t actually add to any of our revenue. People come to the website mostly just to see like the stock prices and things like that.” And so right now, the guy uh has 11 employees, and I actually have a list of, sorry, 13 employees. I have a list of what they all do. He’s got he’s got four developers, four support people, one ad guy, one accountant, one content manager, one marketing assistant, and him. And, uh, they make money through subscription and through advertising, most of which comes through advertising. They’ve got 15,000 subscribers who pay between $20 and $40,000 $20 and $40 a month depending on whichever one they get. So let’s call it 30, so that’s five and five and a half million uh from the subscription, from the premium subscription. And then the rest being ad revenue. 20 million of ads. Okay, wow. Crazy, right? And there’s only one ad sales person. He doesn’t have a team of ad sales guys. And he’ll they’ll sell directly to large like uh maybe like the Motley Fool or some other like uh stock picking newsletter or some other financial brand or some company looking to promote their stock or different financial brokers, uh financial products like wealth advisors, things like that. But if an advertiser is too small, they just work with an agency and and they just say, “Hey, agency, you know, we’ve got some leftover inventory. You want to put your ads in here?” And it’s just one guy doing the whole thing. Doing all the uh Unbelievable. Unbelievable. So it seems like the the trick for them, and by trick I mean hard work and strategy, was Look at the guy. Yeah, by the way, they’ve been around I think they’ve been around for 15 years. Right. And it was SEO. It’s SEO that drives the bulk of the traffic. Is that the idea?
Sam Parr: I think early on. Now it has a little bit of a brand. Before I even knew the guy, I would actually go to it all the time just to look because they’re their interface It’s really nicely organized. Like I’m on like the Amazon one right now, and it’s basically like it has just like a bunch of stuff put together. It’s like, “Oh, here’s the exacts. Here’s the CEO, here’s their age, here’s their pay.” It’s like, “Here’s the, um, you know, here’s the percent shareholding, you know, amongst these different groups. Here’s the analyst targets,” etc. Yeah, it’s like It’s kind of ugly by traditional web, you know, 2.0 standards, like it doesn’t meet any of the design requirements that like Airbnb would approve of, but it in my mind, it’s perfect. It actually is designed beautifully, like it works wonderfully. And so it’s like a cluttered website. It kind looks like Drudge Report or Craigslist or something or eBay. Like it’s this messy website, but I think it’s quite good.
Shaan Puri: We need to put together a compilation of what I’m calling “Sam’s Ugly Ducklings.” And this is an example of Sam’s Ugly Ducklings, which is a website that like, who the fuck even heard of this? It doesn’t look super fancy. It’s kind of been around for a while. It’s got this like niche passionate audience. Drudge Report is one, this is another. You’ve showed me like 10 of these in the last year, and I think people are I think people really dig these, and so we should do an episode that just highlights each one of these, and it doesn’t have to be like a podcast. It’s almost like a screen share, uh maybe it’s just for YouTube. Or like there’s this guy reaching out. He’s trying to turn our podcast into like a e-book or whatever, like a really nicely designed PDF. Um, we should have him do it on your Ugly Ducklings, because he’s got extensive notes on what you talk about in each episode. Really, who? Uh, this guy in India. I I forgot his name, but I’m talking to him right now, uh to get one of these made for us because I think it’d be dope, right? Like That’d be sick. Dude, it’s embarrassing. Like I I get some people who are like, now there’s people who are like, I would say, kind of like a little more successful in the tech industry that are getting into our podcast, whereas I feel like before we were kind of like a different audience for whatever reason, like Like kids, almost like kids. Well, not not kids. It was more like just like entrepreneurial, I would say, is definitely a big component of it. Uh, which might be K’s, but might be like somebody in their 30s that wants to make a change or whatever. Or it’s just like, “Yeah, I own this awesome business. I’m based out of, you know, Peoria, Illinois,” and it’s like, “What the fuck? Who are you, and how did you find us?” And but like that was more of our main target. And now I’m getting people that are like kind of in the heart of Silicon Valley that are like, “Dude, I kind of got hooked to the podcast.” And I’m like, “Dude, I’ve been telling you about this for like two years.” And they’re like, “Yeah, it’s actually good.” And they’re like, “What are like the best episodes? You got like 200.” And I was like, “Uh, I don’t really know.” He’s like, “Well, what’s like a good place to find the most popular ones?” I was like, “Uh, I don’t have it.” He’s like, “Is there a place with summaries?” I was like, “Nah, not really.” He’s like, “Well, you have all these ideas. Is there a compilation of all the ideas?” I was like, “Ah, there should be. Someone I think made one once.” It’s like all the obvious like kind of like growth things that you would do or like onboarding things you would do, we’ve done none of. And so I’m like kind of embarrassed about that. But I’m not embarrassed. Who cares? It’s working.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, I know. I just think it would help us. Like I think I think I would want that if I was getting into a podcast. And let me, this is funny. Let me tell you how I found out about MarketBeat. I was reading Starter Story. I like that website, Starter Story, and one of the questions is, “What books and podcasts do you read?” And he said, “On the podcast front, I really enjoy listening to My First Million, which breaks down unique ways that business owners are using uh unique ways business owners are generating massive profits.” That’s how I found out about about this guy because he said he listens to us as his only podcast.
Shaan Puri: Oh, nice. Uh, that’s great. Um Who told you that they’re listening?
Shaan Puri: Uh, I don’t want to say their name, but uh you know, someone cool.
Sam Parr: That’s cool. That’s always funny when people listen. Dude, I was with my dad when I took my took my parents to Europe, and I brought my parents to this conference, and my parents are like, you know, in their 60s from Missouri, and they were walking around this conference, and they were like, “Oh, we love swag.” They call it swag. I think it’s like I think it’s supposed to be swag. They go, “We love swag,” which means free stuff. And they’re like, “Oh, let’s go to this company and get this.” And it’s like some like European sales marketing company. I’m like, you know, Dad, like no one gives a shit about like, you know, sales.io. Like I don’t know what they do. Yeah, the long tail. Yeah, yeah, and he was like, he’s like, “Oh, let’s go talk to them.” I’m like, “Dude, I don’t like you don’t even know what that means. I can tell you what it They go, “What do they do?” I’m like, “I can use words to explain it, but you won’t understand.” And so he’s like, “Well, let’s go get some swag. They’re giving away like free uh bouncy ball.” Bouncy ball. He thinks it’s like shawarma, but it’s just Yeah. And he’s like, he’s like, “Let’s go get a ball. We’re going to bring it back for for the kids,” their grandkids. They go, “Let’s go, oh, like, oh, they have envelope openers. Like, let’s go get one for the kids. Oh, they got candy.” I’m like, “Mom, this is a Snickers.” Like you could this is That’s awesome, dude. He’s just going to give it to you in the hotel. He’s like, “Hey kid, I got you this bouncy ball.” And you’re going to be like, “Sweet.” Well, and they’re bringing like they’re bringing like Kinder chocolate. You know like Kinder, like the I’m like, “You guys realize that you can get that at 7-Eleven down the street from your house. Like this isn’t special.” And they’re just grabbing all this stuff. And they brought an empty suitcase because they knew they were going to find swag and just to buy it. And so like I come home I come home and my four-year-old nephew is like wearing a t-shirt that says like, “Hi, we’re here to help with customer solutions.” Like it is and it’s like and the kids are bragging that they got that from Europe. I’m like, “Oh my god.” Anyway. Yeah, it’s European. It’s European fashion. Yeah. They’re like, “What’s this brand Gideon?” Uh It’s just it’s just yeah, they’re just like crazy. And then they’re at this conference and they’re like they’re talking to people and they go to people, I hear like I went I was hard for me to stand next to them and I hear them talking to people, they go, “Hey, do you like podcasts?” And they just like, “Do you like podcasts?” Do you love podcasts? Uh and the guy be like, “Yeah, you know, I listen.” He goes, my dad calls and he goes, “Sam, he says he listens to eight podcasts. I’ll tell him to listen to yours. What’s the name of it again?” And I’m like, “Uh, Dad, like how do you you don’t know you don’t know the name. It’s called it’s called My First Million.” And he goes, “Oh, okay, I’ll tell him. Hey, so it’s called My First Million.” And then he’ll come back and goes, “Hey, I got you another listener. I made him click subscribe.” And and he’s just going after people saying like, “You like podcasts? Oh, great. I got you a I’ll get you I’m going to have you subscribe.” And he and he doesn’t know the name of the podcast. Every single time he goes, “What’s it called? Million dollar podcast?” Uh he’s like, “I listen to it all the time. It’s my favorite. But what’s it called again?” My mom does the same thing, dude. She clicks every ad in my newsletter. She’s like, “I clicked your ads today to help you.” I’m like, “Mom, I don’t know I don’t think that that’s not going to count. It’s not going to do anything.” She’s like, “No, no, no. You said you get paid if they click, right?” I’m like, “Well, kind of. You know, you got to like go buy the thing.” And then she’s like, “Oh, I’m not going to buy it.” I’m like, “Yeah, you also don’t need to click it. In fact, you don’t even need to read it. I don’t think you’re very interested in this subject, Mom.” That’s hilarious. That is so funny. Uh God, it’s so funny. You should have seen them walking around just like putting around this conference like saying like, “Oh, Sammy, come look at let’s look at this booth.” And it’s just I don’t even know what it is. Like I don’t even know what it is. You know what I mean? And it’s like procurement. I’m like, “I don’t I don’t even know what that means, Dad. Neither do you. You definitely don’t know what that means.” Yeah, dude, that’s so funny. He said procurement. So so Romine, who runs like I I he’s my basically my partner in my fund. And Romine’s got this company that’s like a kind of like a old school but baller company in uh based out of like um Georgia, right? Yeah, so he lives in Georgia. Um so he’s like in the tech scene, but he kind of lives in Georgia and runs kind of like a bit of an old school, more more service-based company that like, I think his wife’s dad or something started and he like took it over and like grew it a bunch and is doing great with it. So I think the business does like 50 million a year or something like that. It’s like a sizable business and so I’m I’ve asked him, I think no less than 15 times, like, so yo, yo, so what does your business do again? And he’d be like, “Yeah, we do procurement for uh for SMBs and for whatever enterprise companies.” And I’m like, “Like you get office supplies?” I can’t I can’t wrap my head around what procurement is. And he’s like, he’s like, “You know what the word procurement means, right?” And I’m like, “Yeah, he’s like, so it’s that.” And I’m like, “But this, see, I guess I don’t know what the word means then because I still don’t know.” Yeah, I don’t know like like does does anyone use staples anymore? Like I I don’t yeah, like And it’s like he’s like he’s like, “It’s not office supplies. It’s like, you know, you need a vendor for something.” But I’m like, so then why wouldn’t you just Google and get the vendor? He’s like, “Yeah, but like bigger companies, they just do it differently. They need like this middleman who’s going to basically like help them get the things that they need.” And I’m like, “You get paid for that?” And he’s like, “Yeah.” Is this like someone who just like knows all the people who do blank and they just it talks to them on the phone? Yeah, it’s like you need vendors. I think I still fucking don’t know, dude. Like I’m on explanation number 17. In fact, I just feel bad now every time I I ask him or I try to tell somebody else what he does because I’m like, I I clearly don’t know. It’s almost like a you know, like there’s like a spot in my brain where there’s just like if you did a scan, it would just be like, “Oh, there’s some dark cloud here.” Yeah, that’s the part of my brain that’s trying to understand procurement and it’s just never happening. It’s just like a a fuzzy region. So I’ve got a story related to this. So, uh two days ago, Saturday night, I went out to dinner at at like the a fancy place in St. Louis. And we get to dinner and my dad goes, or I or uh yeah, my dad goes, “Hey, the the president of NASCAR, I guess NASCAR like performed or raced, whatever you call it, yesterday, Sunday, in St. Louis.” And he goes, my dad likes NASCAR. He goes, “That’s the president uh of NASCAR, like Jim Nance or I don’t forget his name.” And uh and uh The football commentator? Yeah, the football. I think it it was Nance something, not Jim Nance, yeah, not Jim Nance. And uh he uh and I was like, “Oh yeah, you know, he’s sitting with this guy named David Stewart. He’s like the second richest black man in the world.” And that like and it’s like it’s pretty funny how like I knew exactly who that rich guy was because he’s he’s worth like four or five billion dollars and and I start researching him and I was like, “Yeah, I’ve seen that guy before. I’ve seen him in articles because he’s like the second or third richest black man and he’s from St. Louis. He’s like the richest guy in St. Louis.” And he’s got this company called Worldwide Systems. You’ve never heard of that, have you? No. So, it does uh $14 billion a year, uh and it’s like the fourth or eighth, like in the top 10 largest privately held companies in the world. And him and his partner just own own the whole thing outright. And what they do is they’re a systems integrator. And that’s one of those words like procurement. I heard that and I’m like, “What does that mean?” And so I went on this deep dive. I’m like, “I got to figure out exactly what they do.” I I I don’t understand this. And then like it it says they’re a Cisco systems integrator. And I went to Cisco’s website and I’m like, “What does Cisco do?” Yeah, I’m like, I they’re like networking, hardware and networking or like networking hardware. And I like read those words and I’m like Oh no, like the website would just be like “Networking Redefined.” And you’re like, “I didn’t I didn’t know the first definition.” Now it’s redefined. Great. Yeah, I didn’t Yeah, we I didn’t know we had to change the definition. And then like they talk about like switches and stuff and I’m like, “I don’t know what like a switch is.” I guess that’s to do with electronics. Like I just I didn’t have have any idea what this stuff did. Uh and but I Google it and like I I know that Cisco is like one of the largest companies in the world, but I’m just I like I don’t know what it is. And so I had to research it. It took me forever to figure out what a systems integrator is. Do you know what it is? Dude, no, I don’t know any I don’t know what I don’t know what SAP does. I’ve been on a mission also to understand what SAP does for a long ass time. And I don’t know what that does. They’re they’re a European though. They got a different word for everything. We’d never be able to figure that out. And I feel like sometimes I’m watching TV and it’ll just pop up SAP and I think it means like closed captioning or Spanish or something like that. I’m like, “Oh, hey, this is different. Now I’m now I’m super confused about SAP.” Yeah, well, I don’t even know why they named their company after their stock ticker either. It’s kind of weird. But um they uh so so a systems integrator basically, so what my father-in-law does for a living is if you’re like Chase and you have 100 employees working on floor 18 and you’re like, “Hey, we got to move these 100 employees up to floor 43 in the same building.” He studies it for a few weeks and then you go to home for work on Friday and you come back on the floor 47 and you sit down at your desk that’s already set up and everything just works. And there’s no downtime. And I think system integrators kind of do that, but like if you’re a $20 billion company and you’re selling like a $3 billion division to this other thing, like they have to go to work one day and like all their computers are new and like this new setup exists. Or if you’re like a a hospital and you’re like, “We need an app.” And it’s like, “Well, it’s not as simple. It’s just like checking into your lobby and saying you’re there.” Like you got to like integrate all this crap into it. And I think that’s what they do. But I don’t know why they don’t just call it like an agency. You know what I mean? So Yeah. Yeah, I I don’t know either. But I I do know like, you know, I guess like jokes aside, you know, there’s basically things that are like uh like you know, Net suite, Net suite’s another one of these where you’re like I don’t know what what is Net suite? Is that like QuickBooks but different? It’s basically like um I mean I’ll butcher the thing but like I mean people use it for like inventory management for example. So it’s basically like a database that’s like usable for um like it’s usable in a couple different ways. It tells you what you got, it tells you what’s like running out, it tells you um what you need, it’ll tell you kind of like it’ll help generate a purchase order, it’ll do things like that. Um by the way, if you go to Net suite’s website, I just went to it. It says complete procure to pay purchasing. Oh no, procurement. It has to do with this too. But basically there’s there’s entire companies, I think this is what um you know, like the P word. What Deloitte and other other consulting companies do a lot of, which is basically they teach your company like these these businesses, they’re these programs are so uh unintuitive that there’s entire consulting businesses that generate billions of dollars a year that just go to a company like, “Oh, um like right here on their website, LoveSac uses them.” So it’s like, you go to LoveSac, you’re like, “Great, you guys sell giant bean bags, huh?” They’re like, “Yeah, like you know, these things are getting a little out of hand, getting a little willy-nilly now that it’s growing so much.” Like, “Yeah, it is. Sure is.” Don’t you wish there was just a way to have everything organized in one place and a system that just all talk to each other and everyone of your employees can log in and interface with it? They’re like, “That sounds pretty good.” So I I just go set it up on my own. I just go to the website and they’re like, “No, no, no. We do that for you. It takes 12 months and we will we will add Net suite to your thing. We will add Oracle, we will add these different services to your We will we will integrate them into your current business and we’ll train your employees on how to actually use it. Is that what service revenue in a SAS line? So if you go to like Atlassian and look at their annual report, there’s a huge amount of services revenue. So do they charge in a I don’t know what the service how they what what they bucket in services. I would have thought like, does that mean just the software? But I I think it’s different for different companies, but at the same time, uh this is sort of like if you were like, “Hey Sean, you know, uh what does it mean to blanch a vegetable?” I’d be like, “You know, I think it uses hot and cold water in some way.” It’s like, you know, like I just don’t know, right? Like if you’re asking me about like what are these like giant enterprise companies that are like B2B service/software companies, like these are like again, I don’t know the first thing about the first thing about these. Dude, the the craziest thing to me is when I think about these, is to understand how someone came up with this idea. So for example, uh there’s Okta. Do you know Okta? That’s what we use for like logging into like websites and shit like that. Or there’s um what’s that one Snowflake? You know Snowflake? Yeah, like a data warehouse. So like those are all companies that are founded relatively recently, like in the 2005, 2015 era. And I’m like, “How did a person know that this was a problem and had to get built?” You know what I mean? Well, you just work in a big company, right? Like okay, so for example, um we were talking the other day about uh what what is it called? The um or like like we have like you you run a chain for companies. Yeah, exactly. Uh what was the name of it again? I forgot I can’t remember the name off the top of my head. Uh I just committed to invest into it. But um but basically we’re when we ran a company or like you ran a a a, you know, like a email-based company. And so if I asked you, you know, like, what does ConvertKit do? You’re like, if you’re very well versed on like what ConvertKit does because you’re like, “Well, like here’s a scenario. You get a bunch of people coming to your website, but you, you know, you want to grab their email because you’re going to be able to market to them later. So you so ConvertKit lets you put up a little web page that grabs their email.” And then once you have it, you want to be able to like tag them or segment them based on like if they’ve paid for your thing or if they’re free. And then like, wouldn’t it be cool instead of like waking up every day and like writing the same email over and over again, you could like automate a a a sequence of emails. One that goes out on day one, one goes out on day three, one goes out on day 10. And it’s like, you saw a problem in your business and therefore, you know, you kind of understand what the solutions are and you can even create them. Well, there’s another one that’s like uh like, you know, that this is basically what happens when you’re when you work inside of a large company, you’re like, “Oh man, there needs to be a solution for X.” You just see a problem and you’re like, “There needs to be a solution for X,” but you understand that context because it’s like the like we spent basically 15 years just starting companies from scratch. You started media companies, I started more like software social networking type companies. Um and we’ve done content a bunch, so we can tell you all about content. Like we just don’t have that that same frame of reference to that like somebody who’s been like, you know, somebody who’s used Salesforce every single day for like 10 years, then they understand why you need this like Salesforce add-on or app. Which All the time I’m like, “Damn, I wish I knew how to do this stuff that people charge a million dollars a year in subscription revenue.” I’m like, “Damn, I just got to talk to some stupid freaking guy about starting a newsletter and give the same spiel constantly. I don’t want to talk about how to get a your first thousand subscribers on Substack. You know, I’d rather get paid like a million dollars a year to do X, Y and Z and you know, get 100,000 customers.” Yeah, I mean, yeah, exactly. And this is why like when I was at Twitch, when we got acquired, I had like I had wrote down, “I’m going to walk out of here with like 10 ideas,” and I I used that import-export framework, which is like, “What are five ideas that Twitch would import a solution for?” Like we need some like in a country need something, they import it, you know, like the US needs oil, we import it from whatever Iraq or whatever Afghanistan, wherever it needs to come from. Um, Saudi Arabia. And so uh in the same way, companies have these pain points and you’re like, when you’re sitting there and you’re like, “Oh damn, if somebody had us if somebody had a magic way to do this, we would pay $100,000 a month for this. You know, we would pay X dollars for this.” Like for example, when I was there, uh I I I’ve talked about this idea way back in the day, but like all hands. It’s like, at our company, you know, if I needed to say something to the whole company as a startup, I would just like literally fucking stand up at my desk and be like, “Hey, hey, yo, headphones. Um, we’re doing this now. The company we’ve pivoted to this, okay?” Good. Uh or like, you know, we’d be at lunch and I’d just like stand up and say something. Um, but like at a at a company like Twitch, 2,000 people, you know, there was like this organize every Thursday, there’s an all hands, it happens at lunch. They do it at lunch because that’s where they have like a captive audience of people that will actually sit there and pay attention because they’re eating. And like, and they would do the thing and it had like a presentation and there was like a whole there was like a conductor of the whole ceremony and then there’s like a Q&A and they needed like this question and answer thing, then they needed to stream it to remote employees. There was like all these things they had to think about. And we were just stitching together like these four different tools. It’s like, “We use this for the Q&A, we use this for streaming, we use this for the presentation, we use this for new employees, whatever.” And I was like, “Oh, if somebody just made like a really good like uh all hands software, I’m pretty sure you could get a company like Twitch to pay like $25 to $50,000 a year uh for your software.” And it would need to be secure, it would need to be, you know, easy to stream on your phone, it would need to have the Q&A integrated, like etc, etc. And um I believe that to be true and like I could go validate that. I could have just gone and talked to like, you know, the head of the all-in the the all hands thing and be like, “Hey, if this existed, would you buy this?” And like I saw that problem because I was there. Before that, I didn’t even see that problem. Yeah, and we had talked about it. It was like a high school newspaper, but for your company. Yeah, and by the way, Workshop is the name of it that came to me now. So What’s the URL? Useworkshop.com. So it’s pretty sick. We talked about this before, which is in inside like we all have like MailChimp or you have like SendGrid, you have a ton of different services to send mass marketing emails to customers. But like there’s actually internal marketing, too, that happens all the time. Like a company is like a small like, you know, tribe, and like you constantly need like information and sort of propaganda from the top that needs to get to your employees, and whether it’s like, “Hey, remember this Friday we’re doing casual Friday,” like, you know, whatever. Don’t wear underwear this Friday. But you have to like get some message across about like what’s going on. Or it’s like, “Hey, uh we had these wins in the company, like congrats to this team for launching this safety feature that saved us whatever.” Um, and so what use Workshop does is basically creates like a a I think a giant workforce force of overseas people that will label your images for you. And so like if you’re a self-driving car company, if you’re uh Waymo or or Tesla or whatever, you get like tons and tons of footage, and then now those need to be labeled as like, “Yep, that was a dog crossing the street. Yep, that’s a stop sign,” even though it’s partially obstructed. And so how does that happen? That’s like a human intervention. Humans go and do that. And so Scale started off as like a it was labeling as a service. I’m sure they do a lot more stuff now, but it’s pretty crazy. That’s like a $10 billion company now. And this guy, I think he started it when he was 19 or something. What? Um, so Is he cool?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, he was cool. Uh, like I didn’t know him for long because as soon as they’re, it’s pretty funny. It’s like, I’m in this group chat that’s like four founders, um, yeah, four four a bunch of founders, and it’s like, “Oh,