In this episode, Sam Parr and Shaan Puri discuss various business ideas and trends, including privacy-focused startups, the art of “IKEA hacking,” and the importance of investing in high-quality engagement rings. They also explore the concept of “micro-SaaS” tools and share personal anecdotes about their own experiences with business and life decisions.
Topics: Privacy, Startups, IKEA Hacking, Micro-SaaS, Business Strategy, Personal Finance, Engagement Rings
Privacy and Data Tracking [01:36]
Sam Parr: I’m going to talk to you about something, but first I want to show you. So, all right, go to your iPhone, go to Settings, type in privacy and click privacy.
Shaan Puri: Type in privacy, all right.
Sam Parr: All right, and if you’re following along on an iPhone, do this for me. This isn’t like a trick. This is like a real thing. All right, click Location Services and then scroll all the way to the bottom where it says System Services.
Shaan Puri: Yep.
Sam Parr: All right. After you click that, scroll halfway down to where it says Significant Locations. Do you see that?
Shaan Puri: Yeah.
Sam Parr: Click that.
Shaan Puri: And it asks you for your password, probably.
Sam Parr: It just Face ID’d me, all right.
Shaan Puri: All right. Now, your latest your latest location, it might say Vegas or Nevada or something. Click it.
Sam Parr: Yep. So what you’re going to see is my precise location. Your precise location is tracked forever. So since you use your phone, and you can clear your history, but you you see how it’s like tracking all your stuff.
Shaan Puri: By the way, I I clicked it. It says arrived via a 27-minute drive. It’s like it knows exactly when I arrived and how I arrived.
Sam Parr: Because it used Apple Maps or like it uses a bunch of stuff. It’ll tell you like how you got there, it’ll tell you what apps you were using when you were getting there, it’ll tell you all types of interesting stuff. Now, the reason I’m talking about this is I want to tell you a story about privacy and I wanted to show you like why this is crazy because you like knew that like if I told you like intellectually you’d be like, yeah, of course they’re tracking me.
Shaan Puri: You said, “Oh, your iPhone tracks you.” Yeah, of course, duh.
Sam Parr: So I just wanted to show you. But it is weird to see it like that.
Shaan Puri: It’s weird to see it. And the reason I’m bringing this up is I read this story about this guy named Kyle McDonald and in 2011, he basically did this story where he, well, actually, let me tell you this first. So he was interested in in privacy and he thought he read this line and it said, “Can you imagine living a life without any private information where with no private bank statements, no private files on your computer?” Um, it’s hard to understand, right? But what if you actually asked that question a little bit differently? So, do you trust the government? Do you trust large banks? Do you trust Facebook? Do you trust Google? Do you trust these large entities with your information? Because that’s kind of like the same thing. We just asked a little bit differently. And so he did this first test where he created this thing called Key Tweeter and every 140 characters on his keyboard automatically tweeted. Uh, so like there there was no privacy because he wanted to see what was the world like without privacy. And he took it a step further and so he went to an Apple Store in Brooklyn and they had 50 computers and he installed an app on all 50 computers that automatically took a picture every like 30 or 60 seconds. And anytime it detected a face, it would send him the pictures and he published it as like an art exposit uh an art thing of like, look at what people look like when they’re looking in computers at a laptop in Apple. And after publishing that, the Secret Service raided his home. Uh and Apple Apple contacted the Secret Service. They raided his home, they took his computers, they did a thorough investigation. They declined to prosecute, but they definitely could have done something. And I thought that that was amazing. When I started thinking about that, I’m like, isn’t that crazy that I am I would be I would be upset too. If someone took my picture, I wouldn’t be upset to call the police, but I would be upset. I wouldn’t like it. Isn’t that crazy that I’m upset about that, but I like type in all my information uh throughout the web and I let someone track me and it’s quite an interesting way and I thought, what’s another way? And so I discovered this little hack. I’m like, when I see that, it actually changed my perception. And so there’s this issue going on where I actually think these privacy startups are going to be huge in 10, 20, 30 years. Now, my problem that I’m having personally is I’m actually struggling to find different solutions that need to like different ways to solve or different problems that need to be solved. But I agree with this general premise of like when I just did that experiment where I showed you your tracking stuff and when I just like read this guy’s uh art story, I was like, yeah, I’m totally not okay with that. I don’t like that.
Shaan Puri: Right. And you tweeted something out that that was like this, you go, uh say say your tweet, you go, “Imagine if you walked into, go ahead.”
Sam Parr: Yeah, so let’s just say that you’re walking around the street and a company walks you into their office and they go, uh, “Check this out,” and they give you a file cabinet. You open this file cabinet and there’s 10,000 pictures of you and your family taken throughout the last five years and you had no idea that those pictures were being taken. How would you feel about that? Of course, you’d feel violated. Now, they would say, they would say, “Look, you were in public.” And I would say, “Yeah, I know. I I was in public. I can’t be too angry, but I still don’t feel right about this.” Now, that’s exactly how what happens with your data. Uh, you know that you’re opting into things, you know you’re you’re consenting, but sometimes you don’t realize what you’re getting into and you if you actually truly knew what was happening, you might regret it. And I think that the next generations of humans, uh like the guys who are 5 and 10 years old now, I actually think that they’re not going to like this stuff and we’re going to see a lot of products that come out that fight it because I think that like when you think of like, “Oh wow, used to be able to smoke in a restaurant in the 1990s.” I mean, I remember when I was a kid, I could smoke in a restaurant or you you’d be smoking in a restaurant. Now we think that’s asinine. I think that the privacy stuff now, we’re actually going to look back in 20 years and be like, “I can’t believe that that was you were able to do that.” So anyway, I wanted to start it off with that uh that experiment.
Privacy-Focused Startups [06:45]
Shaan Puri: I like that. Uh I like that story a lot and I’m with you. We’ve talked about different quote-unquote privacy-focused startups ranging from like privacy.com to DuckDuckGo and how that’s actually like become like a real kind of like sort of competitor to to Google in a in a obviously in a niche, but hey, it made it. It made it out after, you know, 10 years against Google. Um, and we’ve talked about different different versions of this, whether it’s browsers, uh phones. A lot of the crypto stuff is based on these these same principles, right? Like you own your data, um, and you decide you custody it yourself rather than trusting this like kind of central company to do to to hold it for you. And um, so I’m definitely with you that I think that some really big companies are going to be there because people really give a shit about this. And you could tell people give a shit about this. Like it’s ironic you were saying, “Go to your Apple iPhone settings,” because if you walk if you go down the street in San Francisco, you’re going to see huge billboards and it just says, “Privacy.” And it’s just Apple and there’s a phone blocking out your face, like it’s like somebody holding a phone and you can’t see their face. And that’s their whole ad and that’s their differentiation, that’s their stick about like what they care about. At the Super Bowl, they had that ad of somebody just looking at their phone like typing it like kind of like a text message to somebody and they’re just laughing uncontrollably, but they never explain what it is because it’s like, “Hey, that’s your information.” And um, and so Apple is like basically bet the farm on privacy as like their core attribute that they’re going to be providing to customers, um, like the number one value prop now. And um, but you know, here you go. You go into you go into your phone settings and it’s like, “Hey, yeah, we’ve tracked your location and you can share that.” And here’s here’s all the different services you’ve shared that with, um, you know, here. And they are trying to fight back. Like you’ve you’ve probably heard the Facebook stuff that happened, but if you’re not advertising on Facebook, you probably don’t realize how big of a deal it was.
Sam Parr: You should explain what’s going on because even I, I don’t own an advertising business anymore, but I did. And even I was a little bit under under educated, but it’s actually a an incredibly big deal and this is an incredibly big deal for a consumer, but also as business people. Last week, we talked about this inflection with the NCAA athlete thing. This is actually a a new inflection. It it actually helps guys like me who owned an advertising business, but I don’t not anymore.
Shaan Puri: Right. Yeah. So so basically Facebook’s this, you know, obviously it’s the advertising juggernaut. It’s Facebook and Google. And with Facebook, Facebook relied on having obviously detailed targeting information about you. People always said, “Oh, it’s creepy.” Um, you know, your iPhone, “My iPhone’s listening to me.” And uh and by the way, do you know the explanation the the the real explanation of why of how that works? It’s like, “Dude, I was just talking to my friend about this and then, you know, and now it’s showing up in my my Facebook ads.” And like the reason why is because your your friend has searched for a thing or interacted with a product and then they know that you were close to your friend, your phones were in close proximity and so they start showing you ads that have been like your friends that your friends have been interested in because they know that that works and there’s a chance that you had talked about it. And then, you know, out of 30 times that that you didn’t talk about it, you just saw an ad and it just you went by you. And then the one time it’s the thing you guys were talking about, it stands out and you remember that and you think Facebook’s listening to you. But nonetheless, um, Facebook basically had the biggest targeting machine in the world, right? You could segment by state, by religion, by whatever. And then they’ve slowly stripped away some of those things as they got in trouble for, you know, like privacy with the election, about what what sorts of things you can target on. But fundamentally, Facebook knew more about you than you knew about yourself. Facebook knows before you’re pregnant, right? Facebook knows you’re pregnant before you know you’re pregnant. And it knows based on your behaviors. It knows based on your interests, it knows based on many things uh you know, a lot of stuff about you. And so what happened is Apple basically stripped the one thing Facebook needed. Um, it lets you it Facebook basically lets you opt out of data tracking. So when you update to the new iOS, or say Apple did, when you update to the new iOS system, it says, “Hey, do you want to share all your data?” And you’re just like, “No.” And that one no took away Facebook’s entire like kind of like knowledge about you as a customer. And so you’ve opted out of of this tracking. And so now when you go visit websites, Facebook doesn’t get that data back to it, or it doesn’t get that that information back. And so as a Facebook advertiser, if you’re in e-commerce right now, all the numbers just sort of changed overnight. Uh like even when you send it show a Facebook ad to somebody, they click it and they go buy a product from you, Facebook’s only catching like 60% of those conversions. It doesn’t know about the other 40% because they’ve opted out of tracking or it didn’t work. And so uh Facebook all of a sudden is kind of like scrambling to figure out, all right, how the heck are we going to like deliver the same value to our advertisers, which is our main business model, without the it’s like, you know, fighting with one hand tied behind your back now, uh halfway through the fight. And so that’s that’s sort of what Apple did to Facebook and Facebook tried to fight it in court and they tried to do all this PR where they’re like, “You’re hurting small businesses.” And in in reality, they are hurting small businesses.
Sam Parr: You are. You are, yeah.
Shaan Puri: But you know, net net, it’s good for the consumer to not have Facebook just build this like super rich profile of your every move and your every taste and your every tendency, uh just so that businesses can advertise to you better.
Engagement Rings [11:55]
Sam Parr: So, if you’re listening and you got a privacy or or something like related to this idea, I would love to learn about it.
Shaan Puri: Privacy startup, reach out to us.
Sam Parr: I’m I’m interested. Um, I got a I got a few more ideas. You want to go you want to you want to go after one?
Shaan Puri: Uh yeah, go for it. You you do one.
Sam Parr: All right, I’m going to tell you one interesting one. I’ll tell you two. Um, the first is called Ghost, ghost.org. Have you heard of ghost.org?
Shaan Puri: I’ve used Ghost, yeah.
Sam Parr: Okay, so I’m interested in this. Ghost, it’s a WordPress meets Substack is the best maybe explanation. So it’s a WordPress site uh it’s its own platform, so it’s a WordPress competitor, but they offer a a handful of features, like you can accept money for a paywall uh article. They have a few more features. I I actually don’t know all the features that they have and why people love it.
Shaan Puri: So let’s say the use case is you want to spin up a website for yourself, you can use Ghost. You want to spin up an email newsletter that’s either free or paid or both, you can use Ghost instead of Substack.
Sam Parr: Or you can want to spin up a community, a paid community, you can use Ghost. And so basically Ghost is this open-source version of Substack. It’s this low-cost, instead of let’s say Substack that take 10% of all your revenue, Ghost just says, “Hey, pay us 10 bucks a month and we’re happy.” And so they don’t take they don’t take a percentage of your revenue. So for a lot of people, that could be thousands of dollars a month that you’re saving if you use Ghost.
Shaan Puri: And they have different tiers, so $10 a month, $30 a month, 80 to $200 a month. And so there’s a few interesting things about it. But first, like the guy behind it is intriguing. So he launched it as a a nonprofit, which I actually think is stupid, but it probably was good for like PR and a lot of people actually worked on it for free to help him. I think definitely he should switch. But it’s actually making $3.5 million a year and he uses a ton of people like free labor, like people who just want to contribute and I think he actually has um staff. But what he does is if you go to ghost.org/about, you can he actually reveals all of his revenue and I think that’s interesting because I was going through this and I uh I’m a an investor in a in a in a in a company called ConvertKit. Maybe you are too, I don’t remember. But um this company called ConvertKit, they do something like $30 million in recurring revenue right now. They’re in the value of I like you you could say that maybe they’re worth $200 to $300 million based off of like public comps, so 10 times um revenue-ish. And I was looking through ghost.org’s numbers, they’re very similar to what ConvertKit was about four years ago when they just got started. And so my prediction, and I want to go on record by saying this is, A, I think this is awesome and B, I actually think that this could be a multi-hundred million dollar company in the making and you could watch this guy build it in public and I think it’s interesting. Also, he had one major quote. So typically people who build these types of things, they’re kind of like nerdy and engineer-like and which means they’re sometimes like reserved and held back and I which I which I like, but he had a great quote that I read. He goes, someone goes, “What’s your major advice for people getting started?” He goes, “Honestly, my single biggest piece of advice would probably be stop looking for so much advice and shut the fuck up and go build something.”
Shaan Puri: So, what do you think about this company? Do you agree in my prediction that this could actually could be a multi-hundred million dollar business?
Sam Parr: Okay, kind of boring, but I agree, right? It’s more entertaining when we disagree, but I I totally agree. I I used Ghost for many of the reasons you talked about. A, I was intrigued. I thought their story was interesting. I liked that they’re kind of like kind of like pirates. They were sort of like just go going against the grain on a bunch of stuff that they were doing. Product is good, uh not super simple to use. It’s kind of like like I also find, you know, frankly, I find WordPress to be a little bit confusing if you want to actually WordPress is in is incredibly confusing. Yeah, like it’s kind of like easy to get the first thing going and then to get it to do what you want takes like a lot of stuff. Um, I’m surprised this is as small as it is. So 3.7 million annual run rate. I’m surprised it’s that small because Ghost has been around for a while. Four years. So so so I don’t think that’s I don’t think it’s that impressive where it is, but it’s sort of like a DuckDuckGo uh where I’m like, I believe I first I believe that these guys are not going to quit. So I think that’s like, you know, the first thing. These guys aren’t going away and when they don’t go away, they are very differentiated and uniquely positioned where they’re going to pick up like 10% or so of this entire wave of like like self-publishing that’s going on with Substack and others. Um, and I I like I’m more excited about this business than I am about Substack.
Sam Parr: Uh, 100%. I completely agree with you. And I I I the the reason I’m bringing this up to listeners is not necessarily that this is a new idea that they can go and do, but if you want to go and watch this person build, uh he updates the blog every month and he reveals most all their revenue. And I think that’s interesting because I was going through this and I uh I’m a an investor in a in a in a company called ConvertKit. Maybe you are too, I don’t remember. But um this company called ConvertKit, they do something like $30 million in recurring revenue right now. They’re in the value of I like you you could say that maybe they’re worth $200 to $300 million based off of like public comps, so 10 times um revenue-ish. And I was looking through ghost.org’s numbers, they’re very similar to what ConvertKit was about four years ago when they just got started. And so my prediction, and I want to go on record by saying this is, A, I think this is awesome and B, I actually think that this could be a multi-hundred million dollar company in the making and you could watch this guy build it in public and I think it’s interesting. Also, he had one major quote. So typically people who build these types of things, they’re kind of like nerdy and engineer-like and which means they’re sometimes like reserved and held back and I which I which I like, but he had a great quote that I read. He goes, someone goes, “What’s your major advice for people getting started?” He goes, “Honestly, my single biggest piece of advice would probably be stop looking for so much advice and shut the fuck up and go build something.”
IKEA Hacking [16:45]
Shaan Puri: So, so another example of this, by the way, have you used or or probably not used, but you’re familiar with them, I’m assuming, Teachers Pay Teachers?
Sam Parr: No, what’s that?
Shaan Puri: You’ve never heard of Teachers Pay Teachers?
Sam Parr: No. Why? I mean, I don’t have kids.
Shaan Puri: That doesn’t doesn’t matter. This is just like one of those things that you know about because it’s just awesome and uh so Google Teachers Pay Teachers. So what this is is Oh my god. If you if you remember like a teacher spends a huge amount of time, every teacher spends a huge amount of time like creating their lesson plans and quizzes and tests and they have to like keep recreating like content basically for their little classroom of 30 people. It’s pretty inefficient, right? So you go you you teach kids all day, already kind of an exhausting thing. Now you go home and you um you have to grade papers, you have to come up with tomorrow’s lesson plan, and then you have to design the quiz for Thursday’s quiz, and then you have next Friday’s test. So you have all this stuff, you’re just constantly this content treadmill. And what Teachers Pay Teachers did, that was genius, was they said, “Look, that’s a lot of effort and you may not be the best person at coming up with a lesson plan or the quiz for this science topic. So why don’t we just create a marketplace where any teacher can list their lesson plans, their quizzes, their tests, and you can just find, go instead of just making your own, go on here for 10 bucks and go buy the best science thing for a fourth grader trying to learn about, you know, geology right now. And you just go buy the thing for 10 bucks and you saved four hours of time. And so it’s like a great trade. So Teachers Pay Teachers is a marketplace doing this. Some teachers were making millions of dollars just creating their uh putting their content up for sale here. The business itself does I think $300 plus million dollars a year in revenue. It was bought about by PE. In gross In gross revenue, yeah. Yeah, it was bought by a private equity firm and like just look at their traffic on this thing, man. It’s like over 30 million hits a month or something. Yeah. Holy fuck. So it’s an insane business. Um, beautiful business too because it’s like, wow, you turned some teachers who created amazing lessons and amazing tests and quizzes, you turned them into stars and millionaires, which is fantastic. I think the best teachers should be millionaires in the age of the internet. Uh there’s there’s no reason not that they shouldn’t be. On the other side, you saved a bunch of money uh and a bunch of sorry, you saved a bunch of time for all the other teachers so that they’re more rested and uh can go into class and perform instead of being, you know, like kind of falling behind constantly on the content treadmill. And so I thought this is like, you know, an amazing idea. Same it reminds me of the baby quip thing. Obviously this is much bigger, much more successful, but it’s like these niche kind of like pain points turned into, you know, marketplaces, solutions.
Sam Parr: This is badass. Maybe you could also do this for speeches. I uh I remember doing the uh my brother John um gave a really good wedding speeches. He gave a great best man speech and three people three people uh paid him money to write their speech. Uh and I think that you could do that for a I think you could start with just wedding speeches, but eventually do all other types of speeches.
Shaan Puri: Dude, that is hilarious. Somebody should absolutely do that because there’s a ton of Googling, right? Like when you have to give your speech, you’re like, “Oh god, pressure super high. Rep like how many reps have I had doing this? Zero. Um, okay, let me go to Google and let me try to get some inspiration. I’m going to try to get the ball rolling. Let me go and people go to YouTube and they try to watch like, you know, best best man speech ever, right? Best bridesmaid speech ever. And then you’re like, “Okay, like what am I going to do? Copy this? Not quite.” But if somebody created these templates, um, that could be pretty good. I I like that.
Sam Parr: Yeah, I actually think you could do that. There’s this company called Book in a Box, started by Tucker Max, who’s one of my investors. Before it was uh when they did Book in a Box, they would you’d pay them any number from $20 to $100,000 on a bunch of different options and they would write a book about your life. So you could like get speaking gigs or you could give to your kids or like whatever for any different reasons. You look like an expert, be a thought leader. And then a lot of their authors started getting speech offers, you know, they would someone would pay $10, $20, $30,000 to have someone come and talk about like best practices in meetings because some guy had wrote a book on how meetings suck and how to make them better. And then they created a new subsidiary that would write your do your PowerPoint and presentation for you and you’d pay more money for that. And I was like, “That’s cool. That should probably be the business more so than just the book thing.”
Shaan Puri: Right. Yeah, I like the the the micro-SaaS tool that does one simple thing that helps you win on a platform you’re already like trying to win on. That’s the key, right? So like I’m already trying to win on Twitter, I’m trying to win on Instagram, I’m trying to win on Reddit, whatever. And if you could build a micro-SaaS tool, it’s like here’s you know, other examples of them. Uh there’s uh what’s it called? Jungle Scout, which is for Amazon. So let’s say you’re trying to win as an FBA seller on on Amazon, so you’re selling a product on Amazon. Jungle Scout is this app you can use and it basically when you’re searching any Amazon like search search result, you can use you can open up Jungle Scout and it’ll basically tell you how much that product is worth, how much how much search volume there is for it, how competitive it is to be in that niche, and how much money they think that product is making so that you can find winning products that are like high demand, low competition, and then you could build a, you know, an FBA business in that niche. And so it’s a simple SaaS tool. I think Jungle Scout does some stupid amount of revenue too because they’re pretty expensive. They were recently um partially acquired by PE in the hundreds of millions of dollars valuation. Greg Mercer uh is is good friends with Neville and in Austin and uh he like uh this is I guess public. I mean, he’s got like a plane and shit. Uh so whatever it was sold for, like Neville will post pictures going to like Telluride in a private jet and I’m like, “Dude, whose jet was that?” He goes, “It’s Greg’s.”
Shaan Puri: But he’s the PE guy or he’s the Jungle Scout guy?
Sam Parr: The guy who sold part of the company, who started it.
Shaan Puri: Gotcha. Yeah, so so super simple tool that just helped you win there and they just built they just kind of like dominate that one niche of like FBA, you know, FBA selling or in this case, Twitter automations, right? So, oh, somebody and so I like this a lot. I need something like this uh for me because I’m trying to basically grow my audience on Twitter and then cool, the less work I can do, the better, right? Like I love digital sales people. All right, a digital salesperson. That’s what I think about when I think about landing pages or like this like little like automations. That’s a digital salesperson. That’s somebody who’s going to work 24/7 for me for zero cost or, you know, in this case, whatever it was, $29 a month. Um, that’s their salary and they’re going to do exactly what I say every single time, predictably and uh they’re just going to generate more value for me. And so I look at my landing page like a digital salesperson. I look at my automations like ConvertKit, things like that, as digital sales people. And uh yeah, this is a really cool one. I like this a lot. Now, I can see this getting really annoying. I mean, people hate getting these auto DMs, but uh it still will work.
Sam Parr: Yeah, yeah. It it it might be annoying, but I actually just made mine. It just says, “Hey, exclamation point, thanks for following.” Now, here’s the problem that I already found. So I it’s already sent out a couple hundred messages for me. I guess I get maybe 500 to 1,000 new followers a day. This uh I feel like a douche saying that. This a couple women replied. Yeah, so a couple like really attractive women replied and or replied saying like, “Hey, what’s going on? You know, like your work.” Basically they replied actually. Yeah, so like these like attractive women replied and I was like, “Fuck, I don’t want like anyone to get the wrong idea and to think that I’m hollering just at them or that I’m hollering at all, you know, and and so I didn’t reply to them, but I was like, “Oh my gosh, like this actually might be able to this could definitely get me in trouble a little bit. I could totally see it, right? When that when that kind of I sent you that message, it was kind of weird, right?
Shaan Puri: It was hilarious. Um, yeah, I could see, you know, same thing with somebody else pointed this out too, which is like, let’s say you write a thread that goes viral, you might get 5,000 followers. You’re going to send out what, 5,000 auto DMs and then get like 2,000 random replies back. It’s going to like kind of ruin your inbox and maybe get you banned from Twitter, I don’t know, because it’ll just rate limit you. So, so I think there’s some problems with it. Maybe, maybe this guy’s built in some rules. Like for me, I would only want to do this. I would only want to DM somebody who has over X followers or that I, you know, I already follow or something like that. So then it kind of like limits the number of people this does it to. Or like I think you can. You need it to be like, hey, you know, only if it’s a, you know, farmer looking white boy, then send this so I don’t get in trouble with my wife, you know, like I I need it to be like this guy needs to have like, you know, Patel or Gupta in his last name if it’s going to send this auto DM so my Indian fanboys can uh can get these messages from me but not everybody else.
Sam Parr: Yeah, it it I could see it getting me in trouble. Um, all right, you want to do another one?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, let’s do one. Uh, okay, a little idea that I think is kind of interesting. Um, I don’t have a ton to say about the business, but it’s more like this is a a cool way to get ideas. So, this is my first time traveling with uh with babies and uh traveling with babies is like, you know, all the things you would expect, like on the plane, you know, kid pooped through his clothes, had to change it, you know, like on a tray table because we couldn’t stand up because the fast and seatbelt sign, the person next to us looking at us like we’re gross and what you’re supposed to do. Oh, that is disgusting. I mean, you are gross. Exactly. I know. I know. I agree. Um, but there’s a a bunch of problems. So like we had to take our car seats, right? Because you can’t just like be like, “Oh, I’ll get there.” You know, I used to pack light. I used to be like, “Cool, I’ll get there. I just need my phone, I’ll call an Uber, get to my hotel. If I’m missing something, I’ll just buy it there.” And with this, with kids, it’s like the opposite. It’s like can’t even get in an Uber because you have to like have a car seat, all that stuff. So I saw this business called BabyQuip. I thought it was kind of cool. It’s again, one of our like telltale signs is any business that shows up at the top of a Google popular Google search, but the website looks like it was last updated in like 1996, um, those are businesses that print money. And so it’s like, “Congratulations, you’ve identified a money printer.” And so I don’t know how successful BabyQuip is, but I would suspect it’s pretty good as a bootstrap business. And what it does is it’s basically a marketplace. So I could say, “Hey, I just landed in Las Vegas. I need two car seats.” I don’t want to lug two car seats, check them in, uh, you know, like on the floor like, you know, drag them to the airport, check them in, take them home, like just meet me at the airport with a car seat that I can just install into a rental car, or I can install into to to an Uber or whatever. Uh, and then like let me rent it for four days and then when I’m leaving, come pick it back up from the airport. And so that’s what BabyQuip is. It’s a baby equipment, but it’s a marketplace where people will bring you what you need. You need a stroller? I got a stroller for you. Don’t lug that heavy thing around. Just use mine when I’m here. Um, and I think people are making a lot of money. Just Google searching. I was like, I was Google searching and again, it’s a very good content play. I was Google searching “baby travel packing list.” So I was like, “Oh, what do I even what am I forgetting here?” And so they had a blog post. I was like, “Here’s all the things you need to pack for your baby.” And then at the bottom, it’s like, “By the way, if you don’t want to pack your stroller and car seats because they’re heavy as hell, like, you know, you could just use BabyQuip and get it when you’re there.” And I was like, click through and I was like, “This is cool.” And so I just thought this is like a very clever business that is a look for problems, look for annoyances, look for inconveniences, and then those become your opportunities if you can design a solution around them. So I just thought it was a clever little business.
Sam Parr: This is awesome. So BabyQuip is actually, it’s a peer-to-peer marketplace. So I don’t think you actually said that. I thought it was the company that would give you stuff. No, it’s just like Jane whose kid outgrew her car seat and she realizes she can make, you know, $200 a month just renting it out to people if she’s as long as she’s willing to go drop it off and pick it up from the airport.
Shaan Puri: I have they been around for a while and they haven’t it doesn’t look like they’ve raised money. Um, but yeah, they, you know, they are basically like just a kind of like a uh looks like a bootstrap business from everything I could tell. It launched in 2016. They’ve had over 30,000 orders. Uh I think they did a crowdfunding campaign at some point. So maybe there’s more data. And they’re on Shark Tank. This is kind of interesting. Now, I I’m not convinced that this is going this can be a huge, huge thing. But what what is actually what is actually interesting is let’s go to New York. It tells you how many reservations someone has ever had. I bet you that there could be like some mom who’s just dominated like a LA or a New York scene, like can just rank really high on all the uh all the big cities and lend out all their stuff. And so what it does is it it tells you how much it So what basically what happens is you land in New York, you but before you land, you tell BabyQuip, you hire Camila Shannon, who’s the top in New York. She’s rented it her stuff out 773 times and she’ll bring you any gear that you need and you can see all the gear that she has and she costs $40 to $60 to deliver the stuff to you, plus there’s gear for there’s a a car seat for $10 a day, there’s a playpen for $40 a day, there’s 15 pound dumbbells for $5 a day, there’s a This is crazy. This is awesome. This is awesome. This is a great find.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, so so another example of this, by the way, have you used or or probably not used, but you’re familiar with them, I’m assuming, Teachers Pay Teachers?
Sam Parr: No, what’s that?
Shaan Puri: You’ve never heard of Teachers Pay Teachers?
Sam Parr: No. Why? I mean, I don’t have kids.
Shaan Puri: That doesn’t doesn’t matter. This is just like one of those things that you know about because it’s just awesome and uh so Google Teachers Pay Teachers. So what this is is Oh my god. If you if you remember like a teacher spends a huge amount of time, every teacher spends a huge amount of time like creating their lesson plans and quizzes and tests and they have to like keep recreating like content basically for their little classroom of 30 people. It’s pretty inefficient, right? So you go you you teach kids all day, already kind of an exhausting thing. Now you go home and you um you have to grade papers, you have to come up with tomorrow’s lesson plan, and then you have to design the quiz for Thursday’s quiz, and then you have next Friday’s test. So you have all this stuff, you’re just constantly this content treadmill. And what Teachers Pay Teachers did, that was genius, was they said, “Look, that’s a lot of effort and you may not be the best person at coming up with a lesson plan or the quiz for this science topic. So why don’t we just create a marketplace where any teacher can list their lesson plans, their quizzes, their tests, and you can just find, go instead of just making your own, go on here for 10 bucks and go buy the best science thing for a fourth grader trying to learn about, you know, geology right now. And you just go buy the thing for 10 bucks and you saved four hours of time. And so it’s like a great trade. So Teachers Pay Teachers is a marketplace doing this. Some teachers were making millions of dollars just creating their uh putting their content up for sale here. The business itself does I think $300 plus million dollars a year in revenue. It was bought about by PE. In gross In gross revenue, yeah. Yeah, it was bought by a private equity firm and like just look at their traffic on this thing, man. It’s like over 30 million hits a month or something. Yeah. Holy fuck. So it’s an insane business. Um, beautiful business too because it’s like, wow, you turned some teachers who created amazing lessons and amazing tests and quizzes, you turned them into stars and millionaires, which is fantastic. I think the best teachers should be millionaires in the age of the internet. Uh there’s there’s no reason not that they shouldn’t be. On the other side, you saved a bunch of money uh and a bunch of sorry, you saved a bunch of time for all the other teachers so that they’re more rested and uh can go into class and perform instead of being, you know, like kind of falling behind constantly on the content treadmill. And so I thought this is like, you know, an amazing idea. Same it reminds me of the baby quip thing. Obviously this is much bigger, much more successful, but it’s like these niche kind of like pain points turned into, you know, marketplaces, solutions.
Sam Parr: This is badass. Maybe you could also do this for speeches. I uh I remember doing the uh my brother John um gave a really good wedding speeches. He gave a great best man speech and three people three people uh paid him money to write their speech. Uh and I think that you could do that for a I think you could start with just wedding speeches, but eventually do all other types of speeches.
Shaan Puri: Dude, that is hilarious. Somebody should absolutely do that because there’s a ton of Googling, right? Like when you have to give your speech, you’re like, “Oh god, pressure super high. Rep like how many reps have I had doing this? Zero. Um, okay, let me go to Google and let me try to get some inspiration. I’m going to try to get the ball rolling. Let me go and people go to YouTube and they try to watch like, you know, best best man speech ever, right? Best bridesmaid speech ever. And then you’re like, “Okay, like what am I going to do? Copy this? Not quite.” But if somebody created these templates, um, that could be pretty good. I I like that.
Sam Parr: Yeah, I actually think you could do that. There’s this company called Book in a Box, started by Tucker Max, who’s one of my investors. Before it was uh when they did Book in a Box, they would you’d pay them any number from $20 to $100,000 on a bunch of different options and they would write a book about your life. So you could like get speaking gigs or you could give to your kids or like whatever for any different reasons. You look like an expert, be a thought leader. And then a lot of their authors started getting speech offers, you know, they would someone would pay $10, $20, $30,000 to have someone come and talk about like best practices in meetings because some guy had wrote a book on how meetings suck and how to make them better. And then they created a new subsidiary that would write your do your PowerPoint and presentation for you and you’d pay more money for that. And I was like, “That’s cool. That should probably be the business more so than just the book thing.”
Shaan Puri: Right. Yeah, I like the the the micro-SaaS tool that does one simple thing that helps you win on a platform you’re already like trying to win on. That’s the key, right? So like I’m already trying to win on Twitter, I’m trying to win on Instagram, I’m trying to win on Reddit, whatever. And if you could build a micro-SaaS tool, it’s like here’s you know, other examples of them. Uh there’s uh what’s it called? Jungle Scout, which is for Amazon. So let’s say you’re trying to win as an FBA seller on on Amazon, so you’re selling a product on Amazon. Jungle Scout is this app you can use and it basically when you’re searching any Amazon like search search result, you can use you can open up Jungle Scout and it’ll basically tell you how much that product is worth, how much how much search volume there is for it, how competitive it is to be in that niche, and how much money they think that product is making so that you can find winning products that are like high demand, low competition, and then you could build a, you know, an FBA business in that niche. And so it’s a simple SaaS tool. I think Jungle Scout does some stupid amount of revenue too because they’re pretty expensive. They were recently um partially acquired by PE in the hundreds of millions of dollars valuation. Greg Mercer uh is is good friends with Neville and in Austin and uh he like uh this is I guess public. I mean, he’s got like a plane and shit. Uh so whatever it was sold for, like Neville will post pictures going to like Telluride in a private jet and I’m like, “Dude, whose jet was that?” He goes, “It’s Greg’s.”
Shaan Puri: But he’s the PE guy or he’s the Jungle Scout guy?
Sam Parr: The guy who sold part of the company, who started it.
Shaan Puri: Gotcha. Yeah, so so super simple tool that just helped you win there and they just built they just kind of like dominate that one niche of like FBA, you know, FBA selling or in this case, Twitter automations, right? So, oh, somebody and so I like this a lot. I need something like this uh for me because I’m trying to basically grow my audience on Twitter and then cool, the less work I can do, the better, right? Like I love digital sales people. All right, a digital salesperson. That’s what I think about when I think about landing pages or like this like little like automations. That’s a digital salesperson. That’s somebody who’s going to work 24/7 for me for zero cost or, you know, in this case, whatever it was, $29 a month. Um, that’s their salary and they’re going to do exactly what I say every single time, predictably and uh they’re just going to generate more value for me. And so I look at my landing page like a digital salesperson. I look at my automations like ConvertKit, things like that, as digital sales people. And uh yeah, this is a really cool one. I like this a lot. Now, I can see this getting really annoying. I mean, people hate getting these auto DMs, but uh it still will work.
Sam Parr: Yeah, yeah. It it it might be annoying, but I actually just made mine. It just says, “Hey, exclamation point, thanks for following.” Now, here’s the problem that I already found. So I it’s already sent out a couple hundred messages for me. I guess I get maybe 500 to 1,000 new followers a day. This uh I feel like a douche saying that. This a couple women replied. Yeah, so a couple like really attractive women replied and or replied saying like, “Hey, what’s going on? You know, like your work.” Basically they replied actually. Yeah, so like these like attractive women replied and I was like, “Fuck, I don’t want like anyone to get the wrong idea and to think that I’m hollering just at them or that I’m hollering at all, you know, and and so I didn’t reply to them, but I was like, “Oh my gosh, like this actually might be able to this could definitely get me in trouble a little bit. I could totally see it, right? When that when that kind of I sent you that message, it was kind of weird, right?
Shaan Puri: It was hilarious. Um, yeah, I could see, you know, same thing with somebody else pointed this out too, which is like, let’s say you write a thread that goes viral, you might get 5,000 followers. You’re going to send out what, 5,000 auto DMs and then get like 2,000 random replies back. It’s going to like kind of ruin your inbox and maybe get you banned from Twitter, I don’t know, because it’ll just rate limit you. So, so I think there’s some problems with it. Maybe, maybe this guy’s built in some rules. Like for me, I would only want to do this. I would only want to DM somebody who has over X followers or that I, you know, I already follow or something like that. So then it kind of like limits the number of people this does it to. Or like I think you can. You need it to be like, hey, you know, only if it’s a, you know, farmer looking white boy, then send this so I don’t get in trouble with my wife, you know, like I I need it to be like this guy needs to have like, you know, Patel or Gupta in his last name if it’s going to send this auto DM so my Indian fanboys can uh can get these messages from me but not everybody else.
Sam Parr: Yeah, it it I could see it getting me in trouble. Um, all right, you want to do another one?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, let’s do one. Uh, okay, a little idea that I think is kind of interesting. Um, I don’t have a ton to say about the business, but it’s more like this is a a cool way to get ideas. So, this is my first time traveling with uh with babies and uh traveling with babies is like, you know, all the things you would expect, like on the plane, you know, kid pooped through his clothes, had to change it, you know, like on a tray table because we couldn’t stand up because the fast and seatbelt sign, the person next to us looking at us like we’re gross and what you’re supposed to do. Oh, that is disgusting. I mean, you are gross. Exactly. I know. I know. I agree. Um, but there’s a a bunch of problems. So like we had to take our car seats, right? Because you can’t just like be like, “Oh, I’ll get there.” You know, I used to pack light. I used to be like, “Cool, I’ll get there. I just need my phone, I’ll call an Uber, get to my hotel. If I’m missing something, I’ll just buy it there.” And with this, with kids, it’s like the opposite. It’s like can’t even get in an Uber because you have to like have a car seat, all that stuff. So I saw this business called BabyQuip. I thought it was kind of cool. It’s again, one of our like telltale signs is any business that shows up at the top of a Google popular Google search, but the website looks like it was last updated in like 1996, um, those are businesses that print money. And so it’s like, “Congratulations, you’ve identified a money printer.” And so I don’t know how successful BabyQuip is, but I would suspect it’s pretty good as a bootstrap business. And what it does is it’s basically a marketplace. So I could say, “Hey, I just landed in Las Vegas. I need two car seats.” I don’t want to lug two car seats, check them in, uh, you know, like on the floor like, you know, drag them to the airport, check them in, take them home, like just meet me at the airport with a car seat that I can just install into a rental car, or I can install into to to an Uber or whatever. Uh, and then like let me rent it for four days and then when I’m leaving, come pick it back up from the airport. And so that’s what BabyQuip is. It’s a baby equipment, but it’s a marketplace where people will bring you what you need. You need a stroller? I got a stroller for you. Don’t lug that heavy thing around. Just use mine when I’m here. Um, and I think people are making a lot of money. Just Google searching. I was like, I was Google searching and again, it’s a very good content play. I was Google searching “baby travel packing list.” So I was like, “Oh, what do I even what am I forgetting here?” And so they had a blog post. I was like, “Here’s all the things you need to pack for your baby.” And then at the bottom, it’s like, “By the way, if you don’t want to pack your stroller and car seats because they’re heavy as hell, like, you know, you could just use BabyQuip and get it when you’re there.” And I was like, click through and I was like, “This is cool.” And so I just thought this is like a very clever business that is a look for problems, look for annoyances, look for inconveniences, and then those become your opportunities if you can design a solution around them. So I just thought it was a clever little business.
Sam Parr: This is awesome. So BabyQuip is actually, it’s a peer-to-peer marketplace. So I don’t think you actually said that. I thought it was the company that would give you stuff. No, it’s just like Jane whose kid outgrew her car seat and she realizes she can make, you know, $200 a month just renting it out to people if she’s as long as she’s willing to go drop it off and pick it up from the airport.
Shaan Puri: I have they been around for a while and they haven’t it doesn’t look like they’ve raised money. Um, but yeah, they, you know, they are basically like just a kind of like a uh looks like a bootstrap business from everything I could tell. It launched in 2016. They’ve had over 30,000 orders. Uh I think they did a crowdfunding campaign at some point. So maybe there’s more data. And they’re on Shark Tank. This is kind of interesting. Now, I I’m not convinced that this is going this can be a huge, huge thing. But what what is actually what is actually interesting is let’s go to New York. It tells you how many reservations someone has ever had. I bet you that there could be like some mom who’s just dominated like a LA or a New York scene, like can just rank really high on all the uh all the big cities and lend out all their stuff. And so what it does is it it tells you how much it So what basically what happens is you land in New York, you but before you land, you tell BabyQuip, you hire Camila Shannon, who’s the top in New York. She’s rented it her stuff out 773 times and she’ll bring you any gear that you need and you can see all the gear that she has and she costs $40 to $60 to deliver the stuff to you, plus there’s gear for there’s a a car seat for $10 a day, there’s a playpen for $40 a day, there’s 15 pound dumbbells for $5 a day, there’s a This is crazy. This is awesome. This is a great find.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, so so another example of this, by the way, have you used or or probably not used, but you’re familiar with them, I’m assuming, Teachers Pay Teachers?
Sam Parr: No, what’s that?
Shaan Puri: You’ve never heard of Teachers Pay Teachers?
Sam Parr: No. Why? I mean, I don’t have kids.
Shaan Puri: That doesn’t doesn’t matter. This is just like one of those things that you know about because it’s just awesome and uh so Google Teachers Pay Teachers. So what this is is Oh my god. If you if you remember like a teacher spends a huge amount of time, every teacher spends a huge amount of time like creating their lesson plans and quizzes and tests and they have to like keep recreating like content basically for their little classroom of 30 people. It’s pretty inefficient, right? So you go you you teach kids all day, already kind of an exhausting thing. Now you go home and you um you have to grade papers, you have to come up with tomorrow’s lesson plan, and then you have to design the quiz for Thursday’s quiz, and then you have next Friday’s test. So you have all this stuff, you’re just constantly this content treadmill. And what Teachers Pay Teachers did, that was genius, was they said, “Look, that’s a lot of effort and you may not be the best person at coming up with a lesson plan or the quiz for this science topic. So why don’t we just create a marketplace where any teacher can list their lesson plans, their quizzes, their tests, and you can just find, go instead of just making your own, go on here for 10 bucks and go buy the best science thing for a fourth grader trying to learn about, you know, geology right now. And you just go buy the thing for 10 bucks and you saved four hours of time. And so it’s like a great trade. So Teachers Pay Teachers is a marketplace doing this. Some teachers were making millions of dollars just creating their uh putting their content up for sale here. The business itself does I think $300 plus million dollars a year in revenue. It was bought about by PE. In gross In gross revenue, yeah. Yeah, it was bought by a private equity firm and like just look at their traffic on this thing, man. It’s like over 30 million hits a month or something. Yeah. Holy fuck. So it’s an insane business. Um, beautiful business too because it’s like, wow, you turned some teachers who created amazing lessons and amazing tests and quizzes, you turned them into stars and millionaires, which is fantastic. I think the best teachers should be millionaires in the age of the internet. Uh there’s there’s no reason not that they shouldn’t be. On the other side, you saved a bunch of money uh and a bunch of sorry, you saved a bunch of time for all the other teachers so that they’re more rested and uh can go into class and perform instead of being, you know, like kind of falling behind constantly on the content treadmill. And so I thought this is like, you know, an amazing idea. Same it reminds me of the baby quip thing. Obviously this is much bigger, much more successful, but it’s like these niche kind of like pain points turned into, you know, marketplaces, solutions.
Sam Parr: This is badass. Maybe you could also do this for speeches. I uh I remember doing the uh my brother John um gave a really good wedding speeches. He gave a great best man speech and three people three people uh paid him money to write their speech. Uh and I think that you could do that for a I think you could start with just wedding speeches, but eventually do all other types of speeches.
Shaan Puri: Dude, that is hilarious. Somebody should absolutely do that because there’s a ton of Googling, right? Like when you have to give your speech, you’re like, “Oh god, pressure super high. Rep like how many reps have I had doing this? Zero. Um, okay, let me go to Google and let me try to get some inspiration. I’m going to try to get the ball rolling. Let me go and people go to YouTube and they try to watch like, you know, best best man speech ever, right? Best bridesmaid speech ever. And then you’re like, “Okay, like what am I going to do? Copy this? Not quite.” But if somebody created these templates, um, that could be pretty good. I I like that.
Sam Parr: Yeah, I actually think you could do that. There’s this company called Book in a Box, started by Tucker Max, who’s one of my investors. Before it was uh when they did Book in a Box, they would you’d pay them any number from $20 to $100,000 on a bunch of different options and they would write a book about your life. So you could like get speaking gigs or you could give to your kids or like whatever for any different reasons. You look like an expert, be a thought leader. And then a lot of their authors started getting speech offers, you know, they would someone would pay $10, $20, $30,000 to have someone come and talk about like best practices in meetings because some guy had wrote a book on how meetings suck and how to make them better. And then they created a new subsidiary that would write your do your PowerPoint and presentation for you and you’d pay more money for that. And I was like, “That’s cool. That should probably be the business more so than just the book thing.”
Shaan Puri: Right. Yeah, I like the the the micro-SaaS tool that does one simple thing that helps you win on a platform you’re already like trying to win on. That’s the key, right? So like I’m already trying to win on Twitter, I’m trying to win on Instagram, I’m trying to win on Reddit, whatever. And if you could build a micro-SaaS tool, it’s like here’s you know, other examples of them. Uh there’s uh what’s it called? Jungle Scout, which is for Amazon. So let’s say you’re trying to win as an FBA seller on on Amazon, so you’re selling a product on Amazon. Jungle Scout is this app you can use and it basically when you’re searching any Amazon like search search result, you can use you can open up Jungle Scout and it’ll basically tell you how much that product is worth, how much how much search volume there is for it, how competitive it is to be in that niche, and how much money they think that product is making so that you can find winning products that are like high demand, low competition, and then you could build a, you know, an FBA business in that niche. And so it’s a simple SaaS tool. I think Jungle Scout does some stupid amount of revenue too because they’re pretty expensive. They were recently um partially acquired by PE in the hundreds of millions of dollars valuation. Greg Mercer uh is is good friends with Neville and in Austin and uh he like uh this is I guess public. I mean, he’s got like a plane and shit. Uh so whatever it was sold for, like Neville will post pictures going to like Telluride in a private jet and I’m like, “Dude, whose jet was that?” He goes, “It’s Greg’s.”
Shaan Puri: But he’s the PE guy or he’s the Jungle Scout guy?
Sam Parr: The guy who sold part of the company, who started it.
Shaan Puri: Gotcha. Yeah, so so super simple tool that just helped you win there and they just built they just kind of like dominate that one niche of like FBA, you know, FBA selling or in this case, Twitter automations, right? So, oh, somebody and so I like this a lot. I need something like this uh for me because I’m trying to basically grow my audience on Twitter and then cool, the less work I can do, the better, right? Like I love digital sales people. All right, a digital salesperson. That’s what I think about when I think about landing pages or like this like little like automations. That’s a digital salesperson. That’s somebody who’s going to work 24/7 for me for zero cost or, you know, in this case, whatever it was, $29 a month. Um, that’s their salary and they’re going to do exactly what I say every single time, predictably and uh they’re just going to generate more value for me. And so I look at my landing page like a digital salesperson. I look at my automations like ConvertKit, things like that, as digital sales people. And uh yeah, this is a really cool one. I like this a lot. Now, I can see this getting really annoying. I mean, people hate getting these auto DMs, but uh it still will work.
Sam Parr: Yeah, yeah. It it it might be annoying, but I actually just made mine. It just says, “Hey, exclamation point, thanks for following.” Now, here’s the problem that I already found. So I it’s already sent out a couple hundred messages for me. I guess I get maybe 500 to 1,000 new followers a day. This uh I feel like a douche saying that. This a couple women replied. Yeah, so a couple like really attractive women replied and or replied saying like, “Hey, what’s going on? You know, like your work.” Basically they replied actually. Yeah, so like these like attractive women replied and I was like, “Fuck, I don’t want like anyone to get the wrong idea and to think that I’m hollering just at them or that I’m hollering at all, you know, and and so I didn’t reply to them, but I was like, “Oh my gosh, like this actually might be able to this could definitely get me in trouble a little bit. I could totally see it, right? When that when that kind of I sent you that message, it was kind of weird, right?
Shaan Puri: It was hilarious. Um, yeah, I could see, you know, same thing with somebody else pointed this out too, which is like, let’s say you write a thread that goes viral, you might get 5,000 followers. You’re going to send out what, 5,000 auto DMs and then get like 2,000 random replies back. It’s going to like kind of ruin your inbox and maybe get you banned from Twitter, I don’t know, because it’ll just rate limit you. So, so I think there’s some problems with it. Maybe, maybe this guy’s built in some rules. Like for me, I would only want to do this. I would only want to DM somebody who has over X followers or that I, you know, I already follow or something like that. So then it kind of like limits the number of people this does it to. Or like I think you can. You need it to be like, hey, you know, only if it’s a, you know, farmer looking white boy, then send this so I don’t get in trouble with my wife, you know, like I I need it to be like this guy needs to have like, you know, Patel or Gupta in his last name if it’s going to send this auto DM so my Indian fanboys can uh can get these messages from me but not everybody else.
Sam Parr: Yeah, it it I could see it getting me in trouble. Um, all right, you want to do another one?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, let’s do one. Uh, okay, a little idea that I think is kind of interesting. Um, I don’t have a ton to say about the business, but it’s more like this is a a cool way to get ideas. So, this is my first time traveling with uh with babies and uh traveling with babies is like, you know, all the things you would expect, like on the plane, you know, kid pooped through his clothes, had to change it, you know, like on a tray table because we couldn’t stand up because the fast and seatbelt sign, the person next to us looking at us like we’re gross and what you’re supposed to do. Oh, that is disgusting. I mean, you are gross. Exactly. I know. I know. I agree. Um, but there’s a a bunch of problems. So like we had to take our car seats, right? Because you can’t just like be like, “Oh, I’ll get there.” You know, I used to pack light. I used to be like, “Cool, I’ll get there. I just need my phone, I’ll call an Uber, get to my hotel. If I’m missing something, I’ll just buy it there.” And with this, with kids, it’s like the opposite. It’s like can’t even get in an Uber because you have to like have a car seat, all that stuff. So I saw this business called BabyQuip. I thought it was kind of cool. It’s again, one of our like telltale signs is any business that shows up at the top of a Google popular Google search, but the website looks like it was last updated in like 1996, um, those are businesses that print money. And so it’s like, “Congratulations, you’ve identified a money printer.” And so I don’t know how successful BabyQuip is, but I would suspect it’s pretty good as a bootstrap business. And what it does is it’s basically a marketplace. So I could say, “Hey, I just landed in Las Vegas. I need two car seats.” I don’t want to lug two car seats, check them in, uh, you know, like on the floor like, you know, drag them to the airport, check them in, take them home, like just meet me at the airport with a car seat that I can just install into a rental car, or I can install into to to an Uber or whatever. Uh, and then like let me rent it for four days and then when I’m leaving, come pick it back up from the airport. And so that’s what BabyQuip is. It’s a baby equipment, but it’s a marketplace where people will bring you what you need. You need a stroller? I got a stroller for you. Don’t lug that heavy thing around. Just use mine when I’m here. Um, and I think people are making a lot of money. Just Google searching. I was like, I was Google searching and again, it’s a very good content play. I was Google searching “baby travel packing list.” So I was like, “Oh, what do I even what am I forgetting here?” And so they had a blog post. I was like, “Here’s all the things you need to pack for your baby.” And then at the bottom, it’s like, “By the way, if you don’t want to pack your stroller and car seats because they’re heavy as hell, like, you know, you could just use BabyQuip and get it when you’re there.” And I was like, click through and I was like, “This is cool.” And so I just thought this is like a very clever business that is a look for problems, look for annoyances, look for inconveniences, and then those become your opportunities if you can design a solution around them. So I just thought it was a clever little business.
Sam Parr: This is awesome. So BabyQuip is actually, it’s a peer-to-peer marketplace. So I don’t think you actually said that. I thought it was the company that would give you stuff. No, it’s just like Jane whose kid outgrew her car seat and she realizes she can make, you know, $200 a month just renting it out to people if she’s as long as she’s willing to go drop it off and pick it up from the airport.
Shaan Puri: I have they been around for a while and they haven’t it doesn’t look like they’ve raised money. Um, but yeah, they, you know, they are basically like just a kind of like a uh looks like a bootstrap business from everything I could tell. It launched in 2016. They’ve had over 30,000 orders. Uh I think they did a crowdfunding campaign at some point. So maybe there’s more data. And they’re on Shark Tank. This is kind of interesting. Now, I I’m not convinced that this is going this can be a huge, huge thing. But what what is actually what is actually interesting is let’s go to New York. It tells you how many reservations someone has ever had. I bet you that there could be like some mom who’s just dominated like a LA or a New York scene, like can just rank really high on all the uh all the big cities and lend out all their stuff. And so what it does is it it tells you how much it So what basically what happens is you land in New York, you but before you land, you tell BabyQuip, you hire Camila Shannon, who’s the top in New York. She’s rented it her stuff out 773 times and she’ll bring you any gear that you need and you can see all the gear that she has and she costs $40 to $60 to deliver the stuff to you, plus there’s gear for there’s a a car seat for $10 a day, there’s a playpen for $40 a day, there’s 15 pound dumbbells for $5 a day, there’s a This is crazy. This is awesome. This is a great find.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, so so another example of this, by the way, have you used or or probably not used, but you’re familiar with them, I’m assuming, Teachers Pay Teachers?
Sam Parr: No, what’s that?
Shaan Puri: You’ve never heard of Teachers Pay Teachers?
Sam Parr: No. Why? I mean, I don’t have kids.
Shaan Puri: That doesn’t doesn’t matter. This is just like one of those things that you know about because it’s just awesome and uh so Google Teachers Pay Teachers. So what this is is Oh my god. If you if you remember like a teacher spends a huge amount of time, every teacher spends a huge amount of time like creating their lesson plans and quizzes and tests and they have to like keep recreating like content basically for their little classroom of 30 people. It’s pretty inefficient, right? So you go you you teach kids all day, already kind of an exhausting thing. Now you go home and you um you have to grade papers, you have to come up with tomorrow’s lesson plan, and then you have to design the quiz for Thursday’s quiz, and then you have next Friday’s test. So you have all this stuff, you’re just constantly this content treadmill. And what Teachers Pay Teachers did, that was genius, was they said, “Look, that’s a lot of effort and you may not be the best person at coming up with a lesson plan or the quiz for this science topic. So why don’t we just create a marketplace where any teacher can list their lesson plans, their quizzes, their tests, and you can just find, go instead of just making your own, go on here for 10 bucks and go buy the best science thing for a fourth grader trying to learn about, you know, geology right now. And you just go buy the thing for 10 bucks and you saved four hours of time. And so it’s like a great trade. So Teachers Pay Teachers is a marketplace doing this. Some teachers were making millions of dollars just creating their uh putting their content up for sale here. The business itself does I think $300 plus million dollars a year in revenue. It was bought about by PE. In gross In gross revenue, yeah. Yeah, it was bought by a private equity firm and like just look at their traffic on this thing, man. It’s like over 30 million hits a month or something. Yeah. Holy fuck. So it’s an insane business. Um, beautiful business too because it’s like, wow, you turned some teachers who created amazing lessons and amazing tests and quizzes, you turned them into stars and millionaires, which is fantastic. I think the best teachers should be millionaires in the age of the internet. Uh there’s there’s no reason not that they shouldn’t be. On the other side, you saved a bunch of money uh and a bunch of sorry, you saved a bunch of time for all the other teachers so that they’re more rested and uh can go into class and perform instead of being, you know, like kind of falling behind constantly on the content treadmill. And so I thought this is like, you know, an amazing idea. Same it reminds me of the baby quip thing. Obviously this is much bigger, much more successful, but it’s like these niche kind of like pain points turned into, you know, marketplaces, solutions.
Sam Parr: This is badass. Maybe you could also do this for speeches. I uh I remember doing the uh my brother John um gave a really good wedding speeches. He gave a great best man speech and three people three people uh paid him money to write their speech. Uh and I think that you could do that for a I think you could start with just wedding speeches, but eventually do all other types of speeches.
Shaan Puri: Dude, that is hilarious. Somebody should absolutely do that because there’s a ton of Googling, right? Like when you have to give your speech, you’re like, “Oh god, pressure super high. Rep like how many reps have I had doing this? Zero. Um, okay, let me go to Google and let me try to get some inspiration. I’m going to try to get the ball rolling. Let me go and people go to YouTube and they try to watch like, you know, best best man speech ever, right? Best bridesmaid speech ever. And then you’re like, “Okay, like what am I going to do? Copy this? Not quite.” But if somebody created these templates, um, that could be pretty good. I I like that.
Sam Parr: Yeah, I actually think you could do that. There’s this company called Book in a Box, started by Tucker Max, who’s one of my investors. Before it was uh when they did Book in a Box, they would you’d pay them any number from $20 to $100,000 on a bunch of different options and they would write a book about your life. So you could like get speaking gigs or you could give to your kids or like whatever for any different reasons. You look like an expert, be a thought leader. And then a lot of their authors started getting speech offers, you know, they would someone would pay $10, $20, $30,000 to have someone come and talk about like best practices in meetings because some guy had wrote a book on how meetings suck and how to make them better. And then they created a new subsidiary that would write your do your PowerPoint and presentation for you and you’d pay more money for that. And I was like, “That’s cool. That should probably be the business more so than just the book thing.”
Shaan Puri: Right. Yeah, I like the the the micro-SaaS tool that does one simple thing that helps you win on a platform you’re already like trying to win on. That’s the key, right? So like I’m already trying to win on Twitter, I’m trying to win on Instagram, I’m trying to win on Reddit, whatever. And if you could build a micro-SaaS tool, it’s like here’s you know, other examples of them. Uh there’s uh what’s it called? Jungle Scout, which is for Amazon. So let’s say you’re trying to win as an FBA seller on on Amazon, so you’re selling a product on Amazon. Jungle Scout is this app you can use and it basically when you’re searching any Amazon like search search result, you can use you can open up Jungle Scout and it’ll basically tell you how much that product is worth, how much how much search volume there is for it, how competitive it is to be in that niche, and how much money they think that product is making so that you can find winning products that are like high demand, low competition, and then you could build a, you know, an FBA business in that niche. And so it’s a simple SaaS tool. I think Jungle Scout does some stupid amount of revenue too because they’re pretty expensive. They were recently um partially acquired by PE in the hundreds of millions of dollars valuation. Greg Mercer uh is is good friends with Neville and in Austin and uh he like uh this is I guess public. I mean, he’s got like a plane and shit. Uh so whatever it was sold for, like Neville will post pictures going to like Telluride in a private jet and I’m like, “Dude, whose jet was that?” He goes, “It’s Greg’s.”
Shaan Puri: But he’s the PE guy or he’s the Jungle Scout guy?
Sam Parr: The guy who sold part of the company, who started it.
Shaan Puri: Gotcha. Yeah, so so super simple tool that just helped you win there and they just built they just kind of like dominate that one niche of like FBA, you know, FBA selling or in this case, Twitter automations, right? So, oh, somebody and so I like this a lot. I need something like this uh for me because I’m trying to basically grow my audience on Twitter and then cool, the less work I can do, the better, right? Like I love digital sales people. All right, a digital salesperson. That’s what I think about when I think about landing pages or like this like little like automations. That’s a digital salesperson. That’s somebody who’s going to work 24/7 for me for zero cost or, you know, in this case, whatever it was, $29 a month. Um, that’s their salary and they’re going to do exactly what I say every single time, predictably and uh they’re just going to generate more value for me. And so I look at my landing page like a digital salesperson. I look at my automations like ConvertKit, things like that, as digital sales people. And uh yeah, this is a really cool one. I like this a lot. Now, I can see this getting really annoying. I mean, people hate getting these auto DMs, but uh it still will work.
Sam Parr: Yeah, yeah. It it it might be annoying, but I actually just made mine. It just says, “Hey, exclamation point, thanks for following.” Now, here’s the problem that I already found. So I it’s already sent out a couple hundred messages for me. I guess I get maybe 500 to 1,000 new followers a day. This uh I feel like a douche saying that. This a couple women replied. Yeah, so a couple like really attractive women replied and or replied saying like, “Hey, what’s going on? You know, like your work.” Basically they replied actually. Yeah, so like these like attractive women replied and I was like, “Fuck, I don’t want like anyone to get the wrong idea and to think that I’m hollering just at them or that I’m hollering at all, you know, and and so I didn’t reply to them, but I was like, “Oh my gosh, like this actually might be able to this could definitely get me in trouble a little bit. I could totally see it, right? When that when that kind of I sent you that message, it was kind of weird, right?
Shaan Puri: It was hilarious. Um, yeah, I could see, you know, same thing with somebody else pointed this out too, which is like, let’s say you write a thread that goes viral, you might get 5,000 followers. You’re going to send out what, 5,000 auto DMs and then get like 2,000 random replies back. It’s going to like kind of ruin your inbox and maybe get you banned from Twitter, I don’t know, because it’ll just rate limit you. So, so I think there’s some problems with it. Maybe, maybe this guy’s built in some rules. Like for me, I would only want to do this. I would only want to DM somebody who has over X followers or that I, you know, I already follow or something like that. So then it kind of like limits the number of people this does it to. Or like I think you can. You need it to be like, hey, you know, only if it’s a, you know, farmer looking white boy, then send this so I don’t get in trouble with my wife, you know, like I I need it to be like this guy needs to have like, you know, Patel or Gupta in his last name if it’s going to send this auto DM so my Indian fanboys can uh can get these messages from me but not everybody else.
Sam Parr: Yeah, it it I could see it getting me in trouble. Um, all right, you want to do another one?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, let’s do one. Uh, okay, a little idea that I think is kind of interesting. Um, I don’t have a ton to say about the business, but it’s more like this is a a cool way to get ideas. So, this is my first time traveling with uh with babies and uh traveling with babies is like, you know, all the things you would expect, like on the plane, you know, kid pooped through his clothes, had to change it, you know, like on a tray table because we couldn’t stand up because the fast and seatbelt sign, the person next to us looking at us like we’re gross and what you’re supposed to do. Oh, that is disgusting. I mean, you are gross. Exactly. I know. I know. I agree. Um, but there’s a a bunch of problems. So like we had to take our car seats, right? Because you can’t just like be like, “Oh, I’ll get there.” You know, I used to pack light. I used to be like, “Cool, I’ll get there. I just need my phone, I’ll call an Uber, get to my hotel. If I’m missing something, I’ll just buy it there.” And with this, with kids, it’s like the opposite. It’s like can’t even get in an Uber because you have to like have a car seat, all that stuff. So I saw this business called BabyQuip. I thought it was kind of cool. It’s again, one of our like telltale signs is any business that shows up at the top of a Google popular Google search, but the website looks like it was last updated in like 1996, um, those are businesses that print money. And so it’s like, “Congratulations, you’ve identified a money printer.” And so I don’t know how successful BabyQuip is, but I would suspect it’s pretty good as a bootstrap business. And what it does is it’s basically a marketplace. So I could say, “Hey, I just landed in Las Vegas. I need two car seats.” I don’t want to lug two car seats, check them in, uh, you know, like on the floor like, you know, drag them to the airport, check them in, take them home, like just meet me at the airport with a car seat that I can just install into a rental car, or I can install into to to an Uber or whatever. Uh, and then like let me rent it for four days and then when I’m leaving, come pick it back up from the airport. And so that’s what BabyQuip is. It’s a baby equipment, but it’s a marketplace where people will bring you what you need. You need a stroller? I got a stroller for you. Don’t lug that heavy thing around. Just use mine when I’m here. Um, and I think people are making a lot of money. Just Google searching. I was like, I was Google searching and again, it’s a very good content play. I was Google searching “baby travel packing list.” So I was like, “Oh, what do I even what am I forgetting here?” And so they had a blog post. I was like, “Here’s all the things you need to pack for your baby.” And then at the bottom, it’s like, “By the way, if you don’t want to pack your stroller and car seats because they’re heavy as hell, like, you know, you could just use BabyQuip and get it when you’re there.” And I was like, click through and I was like, “This is cool.” And so I just thought this is like a very clever business that is a look for problems, look for annoyances, look for inconveniences, and then those become your opportunities if you can design a solution around them. So I just thought it was a clever little business.
Sam Parr: This is awesome. So BabyQuip is actually, it’s a peer-to-peer marketplace. So I don’t think you actually said that. I thought it was the company that would give you stuff. No, it’s just like Jane whose kid outgrew her car seat and she realizes she can make, you know, $200 a month just renting it out to people if she’s as long as she’s willing to go drop it off and pick it up from the airport.
Shaan Puri: I have they been around for a while and they haven’t it doesn’t look like they’ve raised money. Um, but yeah, they, you know, they are basically like just a kind of like a uh looks like a bootstrap business from everything I could tell. It launched in 2016. They’ve had over 30,000 orders. Uh I think they did a crowdfunding campaign at some point. So maybe there’s more data. And they’re on Shark Tank. This is kind of interesting. Now, I I’m not convinced that this is going this can be a huge, huge thing. But what what is actually what is actually interesting is let’s go to New York. It tells you how many reservations someone has ever had. I bet you that there could be like some mom who’s just dominated like a LA or a New York scene, like can just rank really high on all the uh all the big cities and lend out all their stuff. And so what it does is it it tells you how much it So what basically what happens is you land in New York, you but before you land, you tell BabyQuip, you hire Camila Shannon, who’s the top in New York. She’s rented it her stuff out 773 times and she’ll bring you any gear that you need and you can see all the gear that she has and she costs $40 to $60 to deliver the stuff to you, plus there’s gear for there’s a a car seat for $10 a day, there’s a playpen for $40 a day, there’s 15 pound dumbbells for $5 a day, there’s a This is crazy. This is awesome. This is a great find.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, so so another example of this, by the way, have you used or or probably not used, but you’re familiar with them, I’m assuming, Teachers Pay Teachers?
Sam Parr: No, what’s that?
Shaan Puri: You’ve never heard of Teachers Pay Teachers?
Sam Parr: No. Why? I mean, I don’t have kids.
Shaan Puri: That doesn’t doesn’t matter. This is just like one of those things that you know about because it’s just awesome and uh so Google Teachers Pay Teachers. So what this is is Oh my god. If you if you remember like a teacher spends a huge amount of time, every teacher spends a huge amount of time like creating their lesson plans and quizzes and tests and they have to like keep recreating like content basically for their little classroom of 30 people. It’s pretty inefficient, right? So you go you you teach kids all day, already kind of an exhausting thing. Now you go home and you um you have to grade papers, you have to come up with tomorrow’s lesson plan, and then you have to design the quiz for Thursday’s quiz, and then you have next Friday’s test. So you have all this stuff, you’re just constantly this content treadmill. And what Teachers Pay Teachers did, that was genius, was they said, “Look, that’s a lot of effort and you may not be the best person at coming up with a lesson plan or the quiz for this science topic. So why don’t we just create a marketplace where any teacher can list their lesson plans, their quizzes, their tests, and you can just find, go instead of just making your own, go on here for 10 bucks and go buy the best science thing for a fourth grader trying to learn about, you know, geology right now. And you just go buy the thing for 10 bucks and you saved four hours of time. And so it’s like a great trade. So Teachers Pay Teachers is a marketplace doing this. Some teachers were making millions of dollars just creating their uh putting their content up for sale here. The business itself does I think $300 plus million dollars a year in revenue. It was bought about by PE. In gross In gross revenue, yeah. Yeah, it was bought by a private equity firm and like just look at their traffic on this thing, man. It’s like over 30 million hits a month or something. Yeah. Holy fuck. So it’s an insane business. Um, beautiful business too because it’s like, wow, you turned some teachers who created amazing lessons and amazing tests and quizzes, you turned them into stars and millionaires, which is fantastic. I think the best teachers should be millionaires in the age of the internet. Uh there’s there’s no reason not that they shouldn’t be. On the other side, you saved a bunch of money uh and a bunch of sorry, you saved a bunch of time for all the other teachers so that they’re more rested and uh can go into class and perform instead of being, you know, like kind of falling behind constantly on the content treadmill. And so I thought this is like, you know, an amazing idea. Same it reminds me of the baby quip thing. Obviously this is much bigger, much more successful, but it’s like these niche kind of like pain points turned into, you know, marketplaces, solutions.
Sam Parr: This is badass. Maybe you could also do this for speeches. I uh I remember doing the uh my brother John um gave a really good wedding speeches. He gave a great best man speech and three people three people uh paid him money to write their speech. Uh and I think that you could do that for a I think you could start with just wedding speeches, but eventually do all other types of speeches.
Shaan Puri: Dude, that is hilarious. Somebody should absolutely do that because there’s a ton of Googling, right? Like when you have to give your speech, you’re like, “Oh god, pressure super high. Rep like how many reps have I had doing this? Zero. Um, okay, let me go to Google and let me try to get some inspiration. I’m going to try to get the ball rolling. Let me go and people go to YouTube and they try to watch like, you know, best best man speech ever, right? Best bridesmaid speech ever. And then you’re like, “Okay, like what am I going to do? Copy this? Not quite.” But if somebody created these templates, um, that could be pretty good. I I like that.
Sam Parr: Yeah, I actually think you could do that. There’s this company called Book in a Box, started by Tucker Max, who’s one of my investors. Before it was uh when they did Book in a Box, they would you’d pay them any number from $20 to $100,000 on a bunch of different options and they would write a book about your life. So you could like get speaking gigs or you could give to your kids or like whatever for any different reasons. You look like an expert, be a thought leader. And then a lot of their authors started getting speech offers, you know, they would someone would pay $10, $20, $30,000 to have someone come and talk about like best practices in meetings because some guy had wrote a book on how meetings suck and how to make them better. And then they created a new subsidiary that would write your do your PowerPoint and presentation for you and you’d pay more money for that. And I was like, “That’s cool. That should probably be the business more so than just the book thing.”
Shaan Puri: Right. Yeah, I like the the the micro-SaaS tool that does one simple thing that helps you win on a platform you’re already like trying to win on. That’s the key, right? So like I’m already trying to win on Twitter, I’m trying to win on Instagram, I’m trying to win on Reddit, whatever. And if you could build a micro-SaaS tool, it’s like here’s you know, other examples of them. Uh there’s uh what’s it called? Jungle Scout, which is for Amazon. So let’s say you’re trying to win as an FBA seller on on Amazon, so you’re selling a product on Amazon. Jungle Scout is this app you can use and it basically when you’re searching any Amazon like search search result, you can use you can open up Jungle Scout and it’ll basically tell you how much that product is worth, how much how much search volume there is for it, how competitive it is to be in that niche, and how much money they think that product is making so that you can find winning products that are like high demand, low competition, and then you could build a, you know, an FBA business in that niche. And so it’s a simple SaaS tool. I think Jungle Scout does some stupid amount of revenue too because they’re pretty expensive. They were recently um partially acquired by PE in the hundreds of millions of dollars valuation. Greg Mercer uh is is good friends with Neville and in Austin and uh he like uh this is I guess public. I mean, he’s got like a plane and shit. Uh so whatever it was sold for, like Neville will post pictures going to like Telluride in a private jet and I’m like, “Dude, whose jet was that?” He goes, “It’s Greg’s.”
Shaan Puri: But he’s the PE guy or he’s the Jungle Scout guy?
Sam Parr: The guy who sold part of the company, who started it.
Shaan Puri: Gotcha. Yeah, so so super simple tool that just helped you win there and they just built they just kind of like dominate that one niche of like FBA, you know, FBA selling or in this case, Twitter automations, right? So, oh, somebody and so I like this a lot. I need something like this uh for me because I’m trying to basically grow my audience on Twitter and then cool, the less work I can do, the better, right? Like I love digital sales people. All right, a digital salesperson. That’s what I think about when I think about landing pages or like this like little like automations. That’s a digital salesperson. That’s somebody who’s going to work 24/7 for me for zero cost or, you know, in this case, whatever it was, $29 a month. Um, that’s their salary and they’re going to do exactly what I say every single time, predictably and uh they’re just going to generate more value for me. And so I look at my landing page like a digital salesperson. I look at my automations like ConvertKit, things like that, as digital sales people. And uh yeah, this is a really cool one. I like this a lot. Now, I can see this getting really annoying. I mean, people hate getting these auto DMs, but uh it still will work.
Sam Parr: Yeah, yeah. It it it might be annoying, but I actually just made mine. It just says, “Hey, exclamation point, thanks for following.” Now, here’s the problem that I already found. So I it’s already sent out a couple hundred messages for me. I guess I get maybe 500 to 1,000 new followers a day. This uh I feel like a douche saying that. This a couple women replied. Yeah, so a couple like really attractive women replied and or replied saying like, “Hey, what’s going on? You know, like your work.” Basically they replied actually. Yeah, so like these like attractive women replied and I was like, “Fuck, I don’t want like anyone to get the wrong idea and to think that I’m hollering just at them or that I’m hollering at all, you know, and and so I didn’t reply to them, but I was like, “Oh my gosh, like this actually might be able to this could definitely get me in trouble a little bit. I could totally see it, right? When that when that kind of I sent you that message, it was kind of weird, right?
Shaan Puri: It was hilarious. Um, yeah, I could see, you know, same thing with somebody else pointed this out too, which is like, let’s say you write a thread that goes viral, you might get 5,000 followers. You’re going to send out what, 5,000 auto DMs and then get like 2,000 random replies back. It’s going to like kind of ruin your inbox and maybe get you banned from Twitter, I don’t know, because it’ll just rate limit you. So, so I think there’s some problems with it. Maybe, maybe this guy’s built in some rules. Like for me, I would only want to do this. I would only want to DM somebody who has over X followers or that I, you know, I already follow or something like that. So then it kind of like limits the number of people this does it to. Or like I think you can. You need it to be like, hey, you know, only if it’s a, you know, farmer looking white boy, then send this so I don’t get in trouble with my wife, you know, like I I need it to be like this guy needs to have like, you know, Patel or Gupta in his last name if it’s going to send this auto DM so my Indian fanboys can uh can get these messages from me but not everybody else.
Sam Parr: Yeah, it it I could see it getting me in trouble. Um, all right, you want to do another one?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, let’s do one. Uh, okay, a little idea that I think is kind of interesting. Um, I don’t have a ton to say about the business, but it’s more like this is a a cool way to get ideas. So, this is my first time traveling with uh with babies and uh traveling with babies is like, you know, all the things you would expect, like on the plane, you know, kid pooped through his clothes, had to change it, you know, like on a tray table because we couldn’t stand up because the fast and seatbelt sign, the person next to us looking at us like we’re gross and what you’re supposed to do. Oh, that is disgusting. I mean, you are gross. Exactly. I know. I know. I agree. Um, but there’s a a bunch of problems. So like we had to take our car seats, right? Because you can’t just like be like, “Oh, I’ll get there.” You know, I used to pack light. I used to be like, “Cool, I’ll get there. I just need my phone, I’ll call an Uber, get to my hotel. If I’m missing something, I’ll just buy it there.” And with this, with kids, it’s like the opposite. It’s like can’t even get in an Uber because you have to like have a car seat, all that stuff. So I saw this business called BabyQuip. I thought it was kind of cool. It’s again, one of our like telltale signs is any business that shows up at the top of a Google popular Google search, but the website looks like it was last updated in like 1996, um, those are businesses that print money. And so it’s like, “Congratulations, you’ve identified a money printer.” And so I don’t know how successful BabyQuip is, but I would suspect it’s pretty good as a bootstrap business. And what it does is it’s basically a marketplace. So I could say, “Hey, I just landed in Las Vegas. I need two car seats.” I don’t want to lug two car seats, check them in, uh, you know, like on the floor like, you know, drag them to the airport, check them in, take them home, like just meet me at the airport with a car seat that I can just install into a rental car, or I can install into to to an Uber or whatever. Uh, and then like let me rent it for four days and then when I’m leaving, come pick it back up from the airport. And so that’s what BabyQuip is. It’s a baby equipment, but it’s a marketplace where people will bring you what you need. You need a stroller? I got a stroller for you. Don’t lug that heavy thing around. Just use mine when I’m here. Um, and I think people are making a lot of money. Just Google searching. I was like, I was Google searching and again, it’s a very good content play. I was Google searching “baby travel packing list.” So I was like, “Oh, what do I even what am I forgetting here?” And so they had a blog post. I was like, “Here’s all the things you need to pack for your baby.” And then at the bottom, it’s like, “By the way, if you don’t want to pack your stroller and car seats because they’re heavy as hell, like, you know, you could just use BabyQuip and get it when you’re there.” And I was like, click through and I was like, “This is cool.” And so I just thought this is like a very clever business that is a look for problems, look for annoyances, look for inconveniences, and then those become your opportunities if you can design a solution around them. So I just thought it was a clever little business.
Sam Parr: This is awesome. So BabyQuip is actually, it’s a peer-to-peer marketplace. So I don’t think you actually said that. I thought it was the company that would give you stuff. No, it’s just like Jane whose kid outgrew her car seat and she realizes she can make, you know, $200 a month just renting it out to people if she’s as long as she’s willing to go drop it off and pick it up from the airport.
Shaan Puri: I have they been around for a while and they haven’t it doesn’t look like they’ve raised money. Um, but yeah, they, you know, they are basically like just a kind of like a uh looks like a bootstrap business from everything I could tell. It launched in 2016. They’ve had over 30,000 orders. Uh I think they did a crowdfunding campaign at some point. So maybe there’s more data. And they’re on Shark Tank. This is kind of interesting. Now, I I’m not convinced that this is going this can be a huge, huge thing. But what what is actually what is actually interesting is let’s go to New York. It tells you how many reservations someone has ever had. I bet you that there could be like some mom who’s just dominated like a LA or a New York scene, like can just rank really high on all the uh all the big cities and lend out all their stuff. And so what it does is it it tells you how much it So what basically what happens is you land in New York, you but before you land, you tell BabyQuip, you hire Camila Shannon, who’s the top in New York. She’s rented it her stuff out 773 times and she’ll bring you any gear that you need and you can see all the gear that she has and she costs $40 to $60 to deliver the stuff to you, plus there’s gear for there’s a a car seat for $10 a day, there’s a playpen for $40 a day, there’s 15 pound dumbbells for $5 a day, there’s a This is crazy. This is awesome. This is a great find.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, so so another example of this, by the way, have you used or or probably not used, but you’re familiar with them, I’m assuming, Teachers Pay Teachers?
Sam Parr: No, what’s that?
Shaan Puri: You’ve never heard of Teachers Pay Teachers?
Sam Parr: No. Why? I mean, I don’t have kids.
Shaan Puri: That doesn’t doesn’t matter. This is just like one of those things that you know about because it’s just awesome and uh so Google Teachers Pay Teachers. So what this is is Oh my god. If you if you remember like a teacher spends a huge amount of time, every teacher spends a huge amount of time like creating their lesson plans and quizzes and tests and they have to like keep recreating like content basically for their little classroom of 30 people. It’s pretty inefficient, right? So you go you you teach kids all day, already kind of an exhausting thing. Now you go home and you um you have to grade papers, you have to come up with tomorrow’s lesson plan, and then you have to design the quiz for Thursday’s quiz, and then you have next Friday’s test. So you have all this stuff, you’re just constantly this content treadmill. And what Teachers Pay Teachers did, that was genius, was they said, “Look, that’s a lot of effort and you may not be the best person at coming up with a lesson plan or the quiz for this science topic. So why don’t we just create a marketplace where any teacher can list their lesson plans, their quizzes, their tests, and you can just find, go instead of just making your own, go on here for 10 bucks and go buy the best science thing for a fourth grader trying to learn about, you know, geology right now. And you just go buy the thing for 10 bucks and you saved four hours of time. And so it’s like a great trade. So Teachers Pay Teachers is a marketplace doing this. Some teachers were making millions of dollars just creating their uh putting their content up for sale here. The business itself does I think $300 plus million dollars a year in revenue. It was bought about by PE. In gross In gross revenue, yeah. Yeah, it was bought by a private equity firm and like just look at their traffic on this thing, man. It’s like over 30 million hits a month or something. Yeah. Holy fuck. So it’s an insane business. Um, beautiful business too because it’s like, wow, you turned some teachers who created amazing lessons and amazing tests and quizzes, you turned them into stars and millionaires, which is fantastic. I think the best teachers should be millionaires in the age of the internet. Uh there’s there’s no reason not that they shouldn’t be. On the other side, you saved a bunch of money uh and a bunch of sorry, you saved a bunch of time for all the other teachers so that they’re more rested and uh can go into class and perform instead of being, you know, like kind of falling behind constantly on the content treadmill. And so I thought this is like, you know, an amazing idea. Same it reminds me of the baby quip thing. Obviously this is much bigger, much more successful, but it’s like these niche kind of like pain points turned into, you know, marketplaces, solutions.
Sam Parr: This is badass. Maybe you could also do this for speeches. I uh I remember doing the uh my brother John um gave a really good wedding speeches. He gave a great best man speech and three people three people uh paid him money to write their speech. Uh and I think that you could do that for a I think you could start with just wedding speeches, but eventually do all other types of speeches.
Shaan Puri: Dude, that is hilarious. Somebody should absolutely do that because there’s a ton of Googling, right? Like when you have to give your speech, you’re like, “Oh god, pressure super high. Rep like how many reps have I had doing this? Zero. Um, okay, let me go to Google and let me try to get some inspiration. I’m going to try to get the ball rolling. Let me go and people go to YouTube and they try to watch like, you know, best best man speech ever, right? Best bridesmaid speech ever. And then you’re like, “Okay, like what am I going to do? Copy this? Not quite.” But if somebody created these templates, um, that could be pretty good. I I like that.
Sam Parr: Yeah, I actually think you could do that. There’s this company called Book in a Box, started by Tucker Max, who’s one of my investors. Before it was uh when they did Book in a Box, they would you’d pay them any number from $20 to $100,000 on a bunch of different options and they would write a book about your life. So you could like get speaking gigs or you could give to your kids or like whatever for any different reasons. You look like an expert, be a thought leader. And then a lot of their authors started getting speech offers, you know, they would someone would pay $10, $20, $30,000 to have someone come and talk about like best practices in meetings because some guy had wrote a book on how meetings suck and how to make them better. And then they created a new subsidiary that would write your do your PowerPoint and presentation for you and you’d pay more money for that. And I was like, “That’s cool. That should probably be the business more so than just the book thing.”
Shaan Puri: Right. Yeah, I like the the the micro-SaaS tool that does one simple thing that helps you win on a platform you’re already like trying to win on. That’s the key, right? So like I’m already trying to win on Twitter, I’m trying to win on Instagram, I’m trying to win on Reddit, whatever. And if you could build a micro-SaaS tool, it’s like here’s you know, other examples of them. Uh there’s uh what’s it called? Jungle Scout, which is for Amazon. So let’s say you’re trying to win as an FBA seller on on Amazon, so you’re selling a product on Amazon. Jungle Scout is this app you can use and it basically when you’re searching any Amazon like search search result, you can use you can open up Jungle Scout and it’ll basically tell you how much that product is worth, how much how much search volume there is for it, how competitive it is to be in that niche, and how much money they think that product is making so that you can find winning products that are like high demand, low competition, and then you could build a, you know, an FBA business in that niche. And so it’s a simple SaaS tool. I think Jungle Scout does some stupid amount of revenue too because they’re pretty expensive. They were recently um partially acquired by PE in the hundreds of millions of dollars valuation. Greg Mercer uh is is good friends with Neville and in Austin and uh he like uh this is I guess public. I mean, he’s got like a plane and shit. Uh so whatever it was sold for, like Neville will post pictures going to like Telluride in a private jet and I’m like, “Dude, whose jet was that?” He goes, “It’s Greg’s.”
Shaan Puri: But he’s the PE guy or he’s the Jungle Scout guy?
Sam Parr: The guy who sold part of the company, who started it.
Shaan Puri: Gotcha. Yeah, so so super simple tool that just helped you win there and they just built they just kind of like dominate that one niche of like FBA, you know, FBA selling or in this case, Twitter automations, right? So, oh, somebody and so I like this a lot. I need something like this uh for me because I’m trying to basically grow my audience on Twitter and then cool, the less work I can do, the better, right? Like I love digital sales people. All right, a digital salesperson. That’s what I think about when I think about landing pages or like this like little like automations. That’s a digital salesperson. That’s somebody who’s going to work 24/7 for me for zero cost or, you know, in this case, whatever it was, $29 a month. Um, that’s their salary and they’re going to do exactly what I say every single time, predictably and uh they’re just going to generate more value for me. And so I look at my landing page like a digital salesperson. I look at my automations like ConvertKit, things like that, as digital sales people. And uh yeah, this is a really cool one. I like this a lot. Now, I can see this getting really annoying. I mean, people hate getting these auto DMs, but uh it still will work.
Sam Parr: Yeah, yeah. It it it might be annoying, but I actually just made mine. It just says, “Hey, exclamation point, thanks for following.” Now, here’s the problem that I already found. So I it’s already sent out a couple hundred messages for me. I guess I get maybe 500 to 1,000 new followers a day. This uh I feel like a douche saying that. This a couple women replied. Yeah, so a couple like really attractive women replied and or replied saying like, “Hey, what’s going on? You know, like your work.” Basically they replied actually. Yeah, so like these like attractive women replied and I was like, “Fuck, I don’t want like anyone to get the wrong idea and to think that I’m hollering just at them or that I’m hollering at all, you know, and and so I didn’t reply to them, but I was like, “Oh my gosh, like this actually might be able to this could definitely get me in trouble a little bit. I could totally see it, right? When that when that kind of I sent you that message, it was kind of weird, right?
Shaan Puri: It was hilarious. Um, yeah, I could see, you know, same thing with somebody else pointed this out too, which is like, let’s say you write a thread that goes viral, you might get 5,000 followers. You’re going to send out what, 5,000 auto DMs and then get like 2,000 random replies back. It’s going to like kind of ruin your inbox and maybe get you banned from Twitter, I don’t know, because it’ll just rate limit you. So, so I think there’s some problems with it. Maybe, maybe this guy’s built in some rules. Like for me, I would only want to do this. I would only want to DM somebody who has over X followers or that I, you know, I already follow or something like that. So then it kind of like limits the number of people this does it to. Or like I think you can. You need it to be like, hey, you know, only if it’s a, you know, farmer looking white boy, then send this so I don’t get in trouble with my wife, you know, like I I need it to be like this guy needs to have like, you know, Patel or Gupta in his last name if it’s going to send this auto DM so my Indian fanboys can uh can get these messages from me but not everybody else.
Sam Parr: Yeah, it it I could see it getting me in trouble. Um, all right, you want to do another one?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, let’s do one. Uh, okay, a little idea that I think is kind of interesting. Um, I don’t have a ton to say about the business, but it’s more like this is a a cool way to get ideas. So, this is my first time traveling with uh with babies and uh traveling with babies is like, you know, all the things you would expect, like on the plane, you know, kid pooped through his clothes, had to change it, you know, like on a tray table because we couldn’t stand up because the fast and seatbelt sign, the person next to us looking at us like we’re gross and what you’re supposed to do. Oh, that is disgusting. I mean, you are gross. Exactly. I know. I know. I agree. Um, but there’s a a bunch of problems. So like we had to take our car seats, right? Because you can’t just like be like, “Oh, I’ll get there.” You know, I used to pack light. I used to be like, “Cool, I’ll get there. I just need my phone, I’ll call an Uber, get to my hotel. If I’m missing something, I’ll just buy it there.” And with this, with kids, it’s like the opposite. It’s like can’t even get in an Uber because you have to like have a car seat, all that stuff. So I saw this business called BabyQuip. I thought it was kind of cool. It’s again, one of our like telltale signs is any business that shows up at the top of a Google popular Google search, but the website looks like it was last updated in like 1996, um, those are businesses that print money. And so it’s like, “Congratulations, you’ve identified a money printer.” And so I don’t know how successful BabyQuip is, but I would suspect it’s pretty good as a bootstrap business. And what it does is it’s basically a marketplace. So I could say, “Hey, I just landed in Las Vegas. I need two car seats.” I don’t want to lug two car seats, check them in, uh, you know, like on the floor like, you know, drag them to the airport, check them in, take them home, like just meet me at the airport with a car seat that I can just install into a rental car, or I can install into to to an Uber or whatever. Uh, and then like let me rent it for four days and then when I’m leaving, come pick it back up from the airport. And so that’s what BabyQuip is. It’s a baby equipment, but it’s a marketplace where people will bring you what you need. You need a stroller? I got a stroller for you. Don’t lug that heavy thing around. Just use mine when I’m here. Um, and I think people are making a lot of money. Just Google searching. I was like, I was Google searching and again, it’s a very good content play. I was Google searching “baby travel packing list.” So I was like, “Oh, what do I even what am I forgetting here?” And so they had a blog post. I was like, “Here’s all the things you need to pack for your baby.” And then at the bottom, it’s like, “By the way, if you don’t want to pack your stroller and car seats because they’re heavy as hell, like, you know, you could just use BabyQuip and get it when you’re there.” And I was like, click through and I was like, “This is cool.” And so I just thought this is like a very clever business that is a look for problems, look for annoyances, look for inconveniences, and then those become your opportunities if you can design a solution around them. So I just thought it was a clever little business.
Sam Parr: This is awesome. So BabyQuip is actually, it’s a peer-to-peer marketplace. So I don’t think you actually said that. I thought it was the company that would give you stuff. No, it’s just like Jane whose kid outgrew her car seat and she realizes she can make, you know, $200 a month just renting it out to people if she’s as long as she’s willing to go drop it off and pick it up from the airport.
Shaan Puri: I have they been around for a while and they haven’t it doesn’t look like they’ve raised money. Um, but yeah, they, you know, they are basically like just a kind of like a uh looks like a bootstrap business from everything I could tell. It launched in 2016. They’ve had over 30,000 orders. Uh I think they did a crowdfunding campaign at some point. So maybe there’s more data. And they’re on Shark Tank. This is kind of interesting. Now, I I’m not convinced that this is going this can be a huge, huge thing. But what what is actually what is actually interesting is let’s go to New York. It tells you how many reservations someone has ever had. I bet you that there could be like some mom who’s just dominated like a LA or a New York scene, like can just rank really high on all the uh all the big cities and lend out all their stuff. And so what it does is it it tells you how much it So what basically what happens is you land in New York, you but before you land, you tell BabyQuip, you hire Camila Shannon, who’s the top in New York. She’s rented it her stuff out 773 times and she’ll bring you any gear that you need and you can see all the gear that she has and she costs $40 to $60 to deliver the stuff to you, plus there’s gear for there’s a a car seat for $10 a day, there’s a playpen for $40 a day, there’s 15 pound dumbbells for $5 a day, there’s a This is crazy. This is awesome. This is a great find.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, so so another example of this, by the way, have you used or or probably not used, but you’re familiar with them, I’m assuming, Teachers Pay Teachers?
Sam Parr: No, what’s that?
Shaan Puri: You’ve never heard of Teachers Pay Teachers?
Sam Parr: No. Why? I mean, I don’t have kids.
Shaan Puri: That doesn’t doesn’t matter. This is just like one of those things that you know about because it’s just awesome and uh so Google Teachers Pay Teachers. So what this is is Oh my god. If you if you remember like a teacher spends a huge amount of time, every teacher spends a huge amount of time like creating their lesson plans and quizzes and tests and they have to like keep recreating like content basically for their little classroom of 30 people. It’s pretty inefficient, right? So you go you you teach kids all day, already kind of an exhausting thing. Now you go home and you um you have to grade papers, you have to come up with tomorrow’s lesson plan, and then you have to design the quiz for Thursday’s quiz, and then you have next Friday’s test. So you have all this stuff, you’re just constantly this content treadmill. And what Teachers Pay Teachers did, that was genius, was they said, “Look, that’s a lot of effort and you may not be the best person at coming up with a lesson plan or the quiz for this science topic. So why don’t we just create a marketplace where any teacher can list their lesson plans, their quizzes, their tests, and you can just find, go instead of just making your own, go on here for 10 bucks and go buy the best science thing for a fourth grader trying to learn about, you know, geology right now. And you just go buy the thing for 10 bucks and you saved four hours of time. And so it’s like a great trade. So Teachers Pay Teachers is a marketplace doing this. Some teachers were making millions of dollars just creating their uh putting their content up for sale here. The business itself does I think $300 plus million dollars a year in revenue. It was bought about by PE. In gross In gross revenue, yeah. Yeah, it was bought by a private equity firm and like just look at their traffic on this thing, man. It’s like over 30 million hits a month or something. Yeah. Holy fuck. So it’s an insane business. Um, beautiful business too because it’s like, wow, you turned some teachers who created amazing lessons and amazing tests and quizzes, you turned them into stars and millionaires, which is fantastic. I think the best teachers should be millionaires in the age of the internet. Uh there’s there’s no reason not that they shouldn’t be. On the other side, you saved a bunch of money uh and a bunch of sorry, you saved a bunch of time for all the other teachers so that they’re more rested and uh can go into class and perform instead of being, you know, like kind of falling behind constantly on the content treadmill. And so I thought this is like, you know, an amazing idea. Same it reminds me of the baby quip thing. Obviously this is much bigger, much more successful, but it’s like these niche kind of like pain points turned into, you know, marketplaces, solutions.
Sam Parr: This is badass. Maybe you could also do this for speeches. I uh I remember doing the uh my brother John um gave a really good wedding speeches. He gave a great best man speech and three people three people uh paid him money to write their speech. Uh and I think that you could do that for a I think you could start with just wedding speeches, but eventually do all other types of speeches.
Shaan Puri: Dude, that is hilarious. Somebody should absolutely do that because there’s a ton of Googling, right? Like when you have to give your speech, you’re like, “Oh god, pressure super high. Rep like how many reps have I had doing this? Zero. Um, okay, let me go to Google and let me try to get some inspiration. I’m going to try to get the ball rolling. Let me go and people go to YouTube and they try to watch like, you know, best best man speech ever, right? Best bridesmaid speech ever. And then you’re like, “Okay, like what am I going to do? Copy this? Not quite.” But if somebody created these templates, um, that could be pretty good. I I like that.
Sam Parr: Yeah, I actually think you could do that. There’s this company called Book in a Box, started by Tucker Max, who’s one of my investors. Before it was uh when they did Book in a Box, they would you’d pay them any number from $20 to $100,000 on a bunch of different options and they would write a book about your life. So you could like get speaking gigs or you could give to your kids or like whatever for any different reasons. You look like an expert, be a thought leader. And then a lot of their authors started getting speech offers, you know, they would someone would pay $10, $20, $30,000 to have someone come and talk about like best practices in meetings because some guy had wrote a book on how meetings suck and how to make them better. And then they created a new subsidiary that would write your do your PowerPoint and presentation for you and you’d pay more money for that. And I was like, “That’s cool. That should probably be the business more so than just the book thing.”
Shaan Puri: Right. Yeah, I like the the the micro-SaaS tool that does one simple thing that helps you win on a platform you’re already like trying to win on. That’s the key, right? So like I’m already trying to win on Twitter, I’m trying to win on Instagram, I’m trying to win on Reddit, whatever. And if you could build a micro-SaaS tool, it’s like here’s you know, other examples of them. Uh there’s uh what’s it called? Jungle Scout, which is for Amazon. So let’s say you’re trying to win as an FBA seller on on Amazon, so you’re selling a product on Amazon. Jungle Scout is this app you can use and it basically when you’re searching any Amazon like search search result, you can use you can open up Jungle Scout and it’ll basically tell you how much that product is worth, how much how much search volume there is for it, how competitive it is to be in that niche, and how much money they think that product is making so that you can find winning products that are like high demand, low competition, and then you could build a, you know, an FBA business in that niche. And so it’s a simple SaaS tool. I think Jungle Scout does some stupid amount of revenue too because they’re pretty expensive. They were recently um partially acquired by PE in the hundreds of millions of dollars valuation. Greg Mercer uh is is good friends with Neville and in Austin and uh he like uh this is I guess public. I mean, he’s got like a plane and shit. Uh so whatever it was sold for, like Neville will post pictures going to like Telluride in a private jet and I’m like, “Dude, whose jet was that?” He goes, “It’s Greg’s.”
Shaan Puri: But he’s the PE guy or he’s the Jungle Scout guy?
Sam Parr: The guy who sold part of the company, who started it.
Shaan Puri: Gotcha. Yeah, so so super simple tool that just helped you win there and they just built they just kind of like dominate that one niche of like FBA, you know, FBA selling or in this case, Twitter automations, right? So, oh, somebody and so I like this a lot. I need something like this uh for me because I’m trying to basically grow my audience on Twitter and then cool, the less work I can do, the better, right? Like I love digital sales people. All right, a digital salesperson. That’s what I think about when I think about landing pages or like this like little like automations. That’s a digital salesperson. That’s somebody who’s going to work 24/7 for me for zero cost or, you know, in this case, whatever it was, $29 a month. Um, that’s their salary and they’re going to do exactly what I say every single time, predictably and uh they’re just going to generate more value for me. And so I look at my landing page like a digital salesperson. I look at my automations like ConvertKit, things like that, as digital sales people. And uh yeah, this is a really cool one. I like this a lot. Now, I can see this getting really annoying. I mean, people hate getting these auto DMs, but uh it still will work.
Sam Parr: Yeah, yeah. It it it might be annoying, but I actually just made mine. It just says, “Hey, exclamation point, thanks for following.” Now, here’s the problem that I already found. So I it’s already sent out a couple hundred messages for me. I guess I get maybe 500 to 1,000 new followers a day. This uh I feel like a douche saying that. This a couple women replied. Yeah, so a couple like really attractive women replied and or replied saying like, “Hey, what’s going on? You know, like your work.” Basically they replied actually. Yeah, so like these like attractive women replied and I was like, “Fuck, I don’t want like anyone to get the wrong idea and to think that I’m hollering just at them or that I’m hollering at all, you know, and and so I didn’t reply to them, but I was like, “Oh my gosh, like this actually might be able to this could definitely get me in trouble a little bit. I could totally see it, right? When that when that kind of I sent you that message, it was kind of weird, right?
Shaan Puri: It was hilarious. Um, yeah, I could see, you know, same thing with somebody else pointed this out too, which is like, let’s say you write a thread that goes viral, you might get 5,000 followers. You’re going to send out what, 5,000 auto DMs and then get like 2,000 random replies back. It’s going to like kind of ruin your inbox and maybe get you banned from Twitter, I don’t know, because it’ll just rate limit you. So, so I think there’s some problems with it. Maybe, maybe this guy’s built in some rules. Like for me, I would only want to do this. I would only want to DM somebody who has over X followers or that I, you know, I already follow or something like that. So then it kind of like limits the number of people this does it to. Or like I think you can. You need it to be like, hey, you know, only if it’s a, you know, farmer looking white boy, then send this so I don’t get in trouble with my wife, you know, like I I need it to be like this guy needs to have like, you know, Patel or Gupta in his last name if it’s going to send this auto DM so my Indian fanboys can uh can get these messages from me but not everybody else.
Sam Parr: Yeah, it it I could see it getting me in trouble. Um, all right, you want to do another one?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, let’s do one. Uh, okay, a little idea that I think is kind of interesting. Um, I don’t have a ton to say about the business, but it’s more like this is a a cool way to get ideas. So, this is my first time traveling with uh with babies and uh traveling with babies is like, you know, all the things you would expect, like on the plane, you know, kid pooped through his clothes, had to change it, you know, like on a tray table because we couldn’t stand up because the fast and seatbelt sign, the person next to us looking at us like we’re gross and what you’re supposed to do. Oh, that is disgusting. I mean, you are gross. Exactly. I know. I know. I agree. Um, but there’s a a bunch of problems. So like we had to take our car seats, right? Because you can’t just like be like, “Oh, I’ll get there.” You know, I used to pack light. I used to be like, “Cool, I’ll get there. I just need my phone, I’ll call an Uber, get to my hotel. If I’m missing something, I’ll just buy it there.” And with this, with kids, it’s like the opposite. It’s like can’t even get in an Uber because you have to like have a car seat, all that stuff. So I saw this business called BabyQuip. I thought it was kind of cool. It’s again, one of our like telltale signs is any business that shows up at the top of a Google popular Google search, but the website looks like it was last updated in like 1996, um, those are businesses that print money. And so it’s like, “Congratulations, you’ve identified a money printer.” And so I don’t know how successful BabyQuip is, but I would suspect it’s pretty good as a bootstrap business. And what it does is it’s basically a marketplace. So I could say, “Hey, I just landed in Las Vegas. I need two car seats.” I don’t want to lug two car seats, check them in, uh, you know, like on the floor like, you know, drag them to the airport, check them in, take them home, like just meet me at the airport with a car seat that I can just install into a rental car, or I can install into to to an Uber or whatever. Uh, and then like let me rent it for four days and then when I’m leaving, come pick it back up from the airport. And so that’s what BabyQuip is. It’s a baby equipment, but it’s a marketplace where people will bring you what you need. You need a stroller? I got a stroller for you. Don’t lug that heavy thing around. Just use mine when I’m here. Um, and I think people are making a lot of money. Just Google searching. I was like, I was Google searching and again, it’s a very good content play. I was Google searching “baby travel packing list.” So I was like, “Oh, what do I even what am I forgetting here?” And so they had a blog post. I was like, “Here’s all the things you need to pack for your baby.” And then at the bottom, it’s like, “By the way, if you don’t want to pack your stroller and car seats because they’re heavy as hell, like, you know, you could just use BabyQuip and get it when you’re there.” And I was like, click through and I was like, “This is cool.” And so I just thought this is like a very clever business that is a look for problems, look for annoyances, look for inconveniences, and then those become your opportunities if you can design a solution around them. So I just thought it was a clever little business.
Sam Parr: This is awesome. So BabyQuip is actually, it’s a peer-to-peer marketplace. So I don’t think you actually said that. I thought it was the company that would give you stuff. No, it’s just like Jane whose kid outgrew her car seat and she realizes she can make, you know, $200 a month just renting it out to people if she’s as long as she’s willing to go drop it off and pick it up from the airport.
Shaan Puri: I have they been around for a while and they haven’t it doesn’t look like they’ve raised money. Um, but yeah, they, you know, they are basically like just a kind of like a uh looks like a bootstrap business from everything I could tell. It launched in 2016. They’ve had over 30,000 orders. Uh I think they did a crowdfunding campaign at some point. So maybe there’s more data. And they’re on Shark Tank. This is kind of interesting. Now, I I’m not convinced that this is going this can be a huge, huge thing. But what what is actually what is actually interesting is let’s go to New York. It tells you how many reservations someone has ever had. I bet you that there could be like some mom who’s just dominated like a LA or a New York scene, like can just rank really high on all the uh all the big cities and lend out all their stuff. And so what it does is it it tells you how much it So what basically what happens is you land in New York, you but before you land, you tell BabyQuip, you hire Camila Shannon, who’s the top in New York. She’s rented it her stuff out 773 times and she’ll bring you any gear that you need and you can see all the gear that she has and she costs $40 to $60 to deliver the stuff to you, plus there’s gear for there’s a a car seat for $10 a day, there’s a playpen for $40 a day, there’s 15 pound dumbbells for $5 a day, there’s a This is crazy. This is awesome. This is a great find.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, so so another example of this, by the way, have you used or or probably not used, but you’re familiar with them, I’m assuming, Teachers Pay Teachers?
Sam Parr: No, what’s that?
Shaan Puri: You’ve never heard of Teachers Pay Teachers?
Sam Parr: No. Why? I mean, I don’t have kids.
Shaan Puri: That doesn’t doesn’t matter. This is just like one of those things that you know about because it’s just awesome and uh so Google Teachers Pay Teachers. So what this is is Oh my god. If you if you remember like a teacher spends a huge amount of time, every teacher spends a huge amount of time like creating their lesson plans and quizzes and tests and they have to like keep recreating like content basically for their little classroom of 30 people. It’s pretty inefficient, right? So you go you you teach kids all day, already kind of an exhausting thing. Now you go home and you um you have to grade papers, you have to come up with tomorrow’s lesson plan, and then you have to design the quiz for Thursday’s quiz, and then you have next Friday’s test. So you have all this stuff, you’re just constantly this content treadmill. And what Teachers Pay Teachers did, that was genius, was they said, “Look, that’s a lot of effort and you may not be the best person at coming up with a lesson plan or the quiz for this science topic. So why don’t we just create a marketplace where any teacher can list their lesson plans, their quizzes, their tests, and you can just find, go instead of just making your own, go on here for 10 bucks and go buy the best science thing for a fourth grader trying to learn about, you know, geology right now. And you just go buy the thing for 10 bucks and you saved four hours of time. And so it’s like a great trade. So Teachers Pay Teachers is a marketplace doing this. Some teachers were making millions of dollars just creating their uh putting their content up for sale here. The business itself does I think $300 plus million dollars a year in revenue. It was bought about by PE. In gross In gross revenue, yeah. Yeah, it was bought by a private equity firm and like just look at their traffic on this thing, man. It’s like over 30 million hits a month or something. Yeah. Holy fuck. So it’s an insane business. Um, beautiful business too because it’s like, wow, you turned some teachers who created amazing lessons and amazing tests and quizzes, you turned them into stars and millionaires, which is fantastic. I think the best teachers should be millionaires in the age of the internet. Uh there’s there’s no reason not that they shouldn’t be. On the other side, you saved a bunch of money uh and a bunch of sorry, you saved a bunch of time for all the other teachers so that they’re more rested and uh can go into class and perform instead of being, you know, like kind of falling behind constantly on the content treadmill. And so I thought this is like, you know, an amazing idea. Same it reminds me of the baby quip thing. Obviously this is much bigger, much more successful, but it’s like these niche kind of like pain points turned into, you know, marketplaces, solutions.
Sam Parr: This is badass. Maybe you could also do this for speeches. I uh I remember doing the uh my brother John um gave a really good wedding speeches. He gave a great best man speech and three people three people uh paid him money to write their speech. Uh and I think that you could do that for a I think you could start with just wedding speeches, but eventually do all other types of speeches.
Shaan Puri: Dude, that is hilarious. Somebody should absolutely do that because there’s a ton of Googling, right? Like when you have to give your speech, you’re like, “Oh god, pressure super high. Rep like how many reps have I had doing this? Zero. Um, okay, let me go to Google and let me try to get some inspiration. I’m going to try to get the ball rolling. Let me go and people go to YouTube and they try to watch like, you know, best best man speech ever, right? Best bridesmaid speech ever. And then you’re like, “Okay, like what am I going to do? Copy this? Not quite.” But if somebody created these templates, um, that could be pretty good. I I like that.
Sam Parr: Yeah, I actually think you could do that. There’s this company called Book in a Box, started by Tucker Max, who’s one of my investors. Before it was uh when they did Book in a Box, they would you’d pay them any number from $20 to $100,000 on a bunch of different options and they would write a book about your life. So you could like get speaking gigs or you could give to your kids or like whatever for any different reasons. You look like an expert, be a thought leader. And then a lot of their authors started getting speech offers, you know, they would someone would pay $10, $20, $30,000 to have someone come and talk about like best practices in meetings because some guy had wrote a book on how meetings suck and how to make them better. And then they created a new subsidiary that would write your do your PowerPoint and presentation for you and you’d pay more money for that. And I was like, “That’s cool. That should probably be the business more so than just the book thing.”
Shaan Puri: Right. Yeah, I like the the the micro-SaaS tool that does one simple thing that helps you win on a platform you’re already like trying to win on. That’s the key, right? So like I’m already trying to win on Twitter, I’m trying to win on Instagram, I’m trying to win on Reddit, whatever. And if you could build a micro-SaaS tool, it’s like here’s you know, other examples of them. Uh there’s uh what’s it called? Jungle Scout, which is for Amazon. So let’s say you’re trying to win as an FBA seller on on Amazon, so you’re selling a product on Amazon. Jungle Scout is this app you can use and it basically when you’re searching any Amazon like search search result, you can use you can open up Jungle Scout and it’ll basically tell you how much that product is worth, how much how much search volume there is for it, how competitive it is to be in that niche, and how much money they think that product is making so that you can find winning products that are like high demand, low competition, and then you could build a, you know, an FBA business in that niche. And so it’s a simple SaaS tool. I think Jungle Scout does some stupid amount of revenue too because they’re pretty expensive. They were recently um partially acquired by PE in the hundreds of millions of dollars valuation. Greg Mercer uh is is good friends with Neville and in Austin and uh he like uh this is I guess public. I mean, he’s got like a plane and shit. Uh so whatever it was sold for, like Neville will post pictures going to like Telluride in a private jet and I’m like, “Dude, whose jet was that?” He goes, “It’s Greg’s.”
Shaan Puri: But he’s the PE guy or he’s the Jungle Scout guy?
Sam Parr: The guy who sold part of the company, who started it.
Shaan Puri: Gotcha. Yeah, so so super simple tool that just helped you win there and they just built they just kind of like dominate that one niche of like FBA, you know, FBA selling or in this case, Twitter automations, right? So, oh, somebody and so I like this a lot. I need something like this uh for me because I’m trying to basically grow my audience on Twitter and then cool, the less work I can do, the better, right? Like I love digital sales people. All right, a digital salesperson. That’s what I think about when I think about landing pages or like this like little like automations. That’s a digital salesperson. That’s somebody who’s going to work 24/7 for me for zero cost or, you know, in this case, whatever it was, $29 a month. Um, that’s their salary and they’re going to do exactly what I say every single time, predictably and uh they’re just going to generate more value for me. And so I look at my landing page like a digital salesperson. I look at my automations like ConvertKit, things like that, as digital sales people. And uh yeah, this is a really cool one. I like this a lot. Now, I can see this getting really annoying. I mean, people hate getting these auto DMs, but uh it still will work.
Sam Parr: Yeah, yeah. It it it might be annoying, but I actually just made mine. It just says, “Hey, exclamation point, thanks for following.” Now, here’s the problem that I already found. So I it’s already sent out a couple hundred messages for me. I guess I get maybe 500 to 1,000 new followers a day. This uh I feel like a douche saying that. This a couple women replied. Yeah, so a couple like really attractive women replied and or replied saying like, “Hey, what’s going on? You know, like your work.” Basically they replied actually. Yeah, so like these like attractive women replied and I was like, “Fuck, I don’t want like anyone to get the wrong idea and to think that I’m hollering just at them or that I’m hollering at all, you know, and and so I didn’t reply to them, but I was like, “Oh my gosh, like this actually might be able to this could definitely get me in trouble a little bit. I could totally see it, right? When that when that kind of I sent you that message, it was kind of weird, right?
Shaan Puri: It was hilarious. Um, yeah, I could see, you know, same thing with somebody else pointed this out too, which is like, let’s say you write a thread that goes viral, you might get 5,000 followers. You’re going to send out what, 5,000 auto DMs and then get like 2,000 random replies back. It’s going to like kind of ruin your inbox and maybe get you banned from Twitter, I don’t know, because it’ll just rate limit you. So, so I think there’s some problems with it. Maybe, maybe this guy’s built in some rules. Like for me, I would only want to do this. I would only want to DM somebody who has over X followers or that I, you know, I already follow or something like that. So then it kind of like limits the number of people this does it to. Or like I think you can. You need it to be like, hey, you know, only if it’s a, you know, farmer looking white boy, then send this so I don’t get in trouble with my wife, you know, like I I need it to be like this guy needs to have like, you know, Patel or Gupta in his last name if it’s going to send this auto DM so my Indian fanboys can uh can get these messages from me but not everybody else.
Sam Parr: Yeah, it it I could see it getting me in trouble. Um, all right, you want to do another one?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, let’s do one. Uh, okay, a little idea that I think is kind of interesting. Um, I don’t have a ton to say about the business, but it’s more like this is a a cool way to get ideas. So, this is my first time traveling with uh with babies and uh traveling with babies is like, you know, all the things you would expect, like on the plane, you know, kid pooped through his clothes, had to change it, you know, like on a tray table because we couldn’t stand up because the fast and seatbelt sign, the person next to us looking at us like we’re gross and what you’re supposed to do. Oh, that is disgusting. I mean, you are gross. Exactly. I know. I know. I agree. Um, but there’s a a bunch of problems. So like we had to take our car seats, right? Because you can’t just like be like, “Oh, I’ll get there.” You know, I used to pack light. I used to be like, “Cool, I’ll get there. I just need my phone, I’ll call an Uber, get to my hotel. If I’m missing something, I’ll just buy it there.” And with this, with kids, it’s like the opposite. It’s like can’t even get in an Uber because you have to like have a car seat, all that stuff. So I saw this business called BabyQuip. I thought it was kind of cool. It’s again, one of our like telltale signs is any business that shows up at the top of a Google popular Google search, but the website looks like it was last updated in like 1996, um, those are businesses that print money. And so it’s like, “Congratulations, you’ve identified a money printer.” And so I don’t know how successful BabyQuip is, but I would suspect it’s pretty good as a bootstrap business. And what it does is it’s basically a marketplace. So I could say, “Hey, I just landed in Las Vegas. I need two car seats.” I don’t want to lug two car seats, check them in, uh, you know, like on the floor like, you know, drag them to the airport, check them in, take them home, like just meet me at the airport with a car seat that I can just install into a rental car, or I can install into to to an Uber or whatever. Uh, and then like let me rent it for four days and then when I’m leaving, come pick it back up from the airport. And so that’s what BabyQuip is. It’s a baby equipment, but it’s a marketplace where people will bring you what you need. You need a stroller? I got a stroller for you. Don’t lug that heavy thing around. Just use mine when I’m here. Um, and I think people are making a lot of money. Just Google searching. I was like, I was Google searching and again, it’s a very good content play. I was Google searching “baby travel packing list.” So I was like, “Oh, what do I even what am I forgetting here?” And so they had a blog post. I was like, “Here’s all the things you need to pack for your baby.” And then at the bottom, it’s like, “By the way, if you don’t want to pack your stroller and car seats because they’re heavy as hell, like, you know, you could just use BabyQuip and get it when you’re there.” And I was like, click through and I was like, “This is cool.” And so I just thought this is like a very clever business that is a look for problems, look for annoyances, look for inconveniences, and then those become your opportunities if you can design a solution around them. So I just thought it was a clever little business.
Sam Parr: This is awesome. So BabyQuip is actually, it’s a peer-to-peer marketplace. So I don’t think you actually said that. I thought it was the company that would give you stuff. No, it’s just like Jane whose kid outgrew her car seat and she realizes she can make, you know, $200 a month just renting it out to people if she’s as long as she’s willing to go drop it off and pick it up from the airport.
Shaan Puri: I have they been around for a while and they haven’t it doesn’t look like they’ve raised money. Um, but yeah, they, you know, they are basically like just a kind of like a uh looks like a bootstrap business from everything I could tell. It launched in 2016. They’ve had over 30,000 orders. Uh I think they did a crowdfunding campaign at some point. So maybe there’s more data. And they’re on Shark Tank. This is kind of interesting. Now, I I’m not convinced that this is going this can be a huge, huge thing. But what what is actually what is actually interesting is let’s go to New York. It tells you how many reservations someone has ever had. I bet you that there could be like some mom who’s just dominated like a LA or a New York scene, like can just rank really high on all the uh all the big cities and lend out all their stuff. And so what it does is it it tells you how much it So what basically what happens is you land in New York, you but before you land, you tell BabyQuip, you hire Camila Shannon, who’s the top in New York. She’s rented it her stuff out 773 times and she’ll bring you any gear that you need and you can see all the gear that she has and she costs $40 to $60 to deliver the stuff to you, plus there’s gear for there’s a a car seat for $10 a day, there’s a playpen for $40 a day, there’s 15 pound dumbbells for $5 a day, there’s a This is crazy. This is awesome. This is a great find.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, so so another example of this, by the way, have you used or or probably not used, but you’re familiar with them, I’m assuming, Teachers Pay Teachers?
Sam Parr: No, what’s that?
Shaan Puri: You’ve never heard of Teachers Pay Teachers?
Sam Parr: No. Why? I mean, I don’t have kids.
Shaan Puri: That doesn’t doesn’t matter. This is just like one of those things that you know about because it’s just awesome and uh so Google Teachers Pay Teachers. So what this is is Oh my god. If you if you remember like a teacher spends a huge amount of time, every teacher spends a huge amount of time like creating their lesson plans and quizzes and tests and they have to like keep recreating like content basically for their little classroom of 30 people. It’s pretty inefficient, right? So you go you you teach kids all day, already kind of an exhausting thing. Now you go home and you um you have to grade papers, you have to come up with tomorrow’s lesson plan, and then you have to design the quiz for Thursday’s quiz, and then you have next Friday’s test. So you have all this stuff, you’re just constantly this content treadmill. And what Teachers Pay Teachers did, that was genius, was they said, “Look, that’s a lot of effort and you may not be the best person at coming up with a lesson plan or the quiz for this science topic. So why don’t we just create a marketplace where any teacher can list their lesson plans, their quizzes, their tests, and you can just find, go instead of just making your own, go on here for 10 bucks and go buy the best science thing for a fourth grader trying to learn about, you know, geology right now. And you just go buy the thing for 10 bucks and you saved four hours of time. And so it’s like a great trade. So Teachers Pay Teachers is a marketplace doing this. Some teachers were making millions of dollars just creating their uh putting their content up for sale here. The business itself does I think $300 plus million dollars a year in revenue. It was bought about by PE. In gross In gross revenue, yeah. Yeah, it was bought by a private equity firm and like just look at their traffic on this thing, man. It’s like over 30 million hits a month or something. Yeah. Holy fuck. So it’s an insane business. Um, beautiful business too because it’s like, wow, you turned some teachers who created amazing lessons and amazing tests and quizzes, you turned them into stars and millionaires, which is fantastic. I think the best teachers should be millionaires in the age of the internet. Uh there’s there’s no reason not that they shouldn’t be. On the other side, you saved a bunch of money uh and a bunch of sorry, you saved a bunch of time for all the other teachers so that they’re more rested and uh can go into class and perform instead of being, you know, like kind of falling behind constantly on the content treadmill. And so I thought this is like, you know, an amazing idea. Same it reminds me of the baby quip thing. Obviously this is much bigger, much more successful, but it’s like these niche kind of like pain points turned into, you know, marketplaces, solutions.
Sam Parr: This is badass. Maybe you could also do this for speeches. I uh I remember doing the uh my brother John um gave a really good wedding speeches. He gave a great best man speech and three people three people uh paid him money to write their speech. Uh and I think that you could do that for a I think you could start with just wedding speeches, but eventually do all other types of speeches.
Shaan Puri: Dude, that is hilarious. Somebody should absolutely do that because there’s a ton of Googling, right? Like when you have to give your speech, you’re like, “Oh god, pressure super high. Rep like how many reps have I had doing this? Zero. Um, okay, let me go to Google and let me try to get some inspiration. I’m going to try to get the ball rolling. Let me go and people go to YouTube and they try to watch like, you know, best best man speech ever, right? Best bridesmaid speech ever. And then you’re like, “Okay, like what am I going to do? Copy this? Not quite.” But if somebody created these templates, um, that could be pretty good. I I like that.
Sam Parr: Yeah, I actually think you could do that. There’s this company called Book in a Box, started by Tucker Max, who’s one of my investors. Before it was uh when they did Book in a Box, they would you’d pay them any number from $20 to $100,000 on a bunch of different options and they would write a book about your life. So you could like get speaking gigs or you could give to your kids or like whatever for any different reasons. You look like an expert, be a thought leader. And then a lot of their authors started getting speech offers, you know, they would someone would pay $10, $20, $30,000 to have someone come and talk about like best practices in meetings because some guy had wrote a book on how meetings suck and how to make them better. And then they created a new subsidiary that would write your do your PowerPoint and presentation for you and you’d pay more money for that. And I was like, “That’s cool. That should probably be the business more so than just the book thing.”
Shaan Puri: Right. Yeah, I like the the the micro-SaaS tool that does one simple thing that helps you win on a platform you’re already like trying to win on. That’s the key, right? So like I’m already trying to win on Twitter, I’m trying to win on Instagram, I’m trying to win on Reddit, whatever. And if you could build a micro-SaaS tool, it’s like here’s you know, other examples of them. Uh there’s uh what’s it called? Jungle Scout, which is for Amazon. So let’s say you’re trying to win as an FBA seller on on Amazon, so you’re selling a product on Amazon. Jungle Scout is this app you can use and it basically when you’re searching any Amazon like search search result, you can use you can open up Jungle Scout and it’ll basically tell you how much that product is worth, how much how much search volume there is for it, how competitive it is to be in that niche, and how much money they think that product is making so that you can find winning products that are like high demand, low competition, and then you could build a, you know, an FBA business in that niche. And so it’s a simple SaaS tool. I think Jungle Scout does some stupid amount of revenue too because they’re pretty expensive. They were recently um partially acquired by PE in the hundreds of millions of dollars valuation. Greg Mercer uh is is good friends with Neville and in Austin and uh he like uh this is I guess public. I mean, he’s got like a plane and shit. Uh so whatever it was sold for, like Neville will post pictures going to like Telluride in a private jet and I’m like, “Dude, whose jet was that?” He goes, “It’s Greg’s.”
Shaan Puri: But he’s the PE guy or he’s the Jungle Scout guy?
Sam Parr: The guy who sold part of the company, who started it.
Shaan Puri: Gotcha. Yeah, so so super simple tool that just helped you win there and they just built they just kind of like dominate that one niche of like FBA, you know, FBA selling or in this case, Twitter automations, right? So, oh, somebody and so I like this a lot. I need something like this uh for me because I’m trying to basically grow my audience on Twitter and then cool, the less work I can do, the better, right? Like I love digital sales people. All right, a digital salesperson. That’s what I think about when I think about landing pages or like this like little like automations. That’s a digital salesperson. That’s somebody who’s going to work 24/7 for me for zero cost or, you know, in this case, whatever it was, $29 a month. Um, that’s their salary and they’re going to do exactly what I say every single time, predictably and uh they’re just going to generate more value for me. And so I look at my landing page like a digital salesperson. I look at my automations like ConvertKit, things like that, as digital sales people. And uh yeah, this is a really cool one. I like this a lot. Now, I can see this getting really annoying. I mean, people hate getting these auto DMs, but uh it still will work.
Sam Parr: Yeah, yeah. It it it might be annoying, but I actually just made mine. It just says, “Hey, exclamation point, thanks for following.” Now, here’s the problem that I already found. So I it’s already sent out a couple hundred messages for me. I guess I get maybe 500 to 1,000 new followers a day. This uh I feel like a douche saying that. This a couple women replied. Yeah, so a couple like really attractive women replied and or replied saying like, “Hey, what’s going on? You know, like your work.” Basically they replied actually. Yeah, so like these like attractive women replied and I was like, “Fuck, I don’t want like anyone to get the wrong idea and to think that I’m hollering just at them or that I’m hollering at all, you know, and and so I didn’t reply to them, but I was like, “Oh my gosh, like this actually might be able to this could definitely get me in trouble a little bit. I could totally see it, right? When that when that kind of I sent you that message, it was kind of weird, right?
Shaan Puri: It was hilarious. Um, yeah, I could see, you know, same thing with somebody else pointed this out too, which is like, let’s say you write a thread that goes viral, you might get 5,000 followers. You’re going to send out what, 5,000 auto DMs and then get like 2,000 random replies back. It’s going to like kind of ruin your inbox and maybe get you banned from Twitter, I don’t know, because it’ll just rate limit you. So, so I think there’s some problems with it. Maybe, maybe this guy’s built in some rules. Like for me, I would only want to do this. I would only want to DM somebody who has over X followers or that I, you know, I already follow or something like that. So then it kind of like limits the number of people this does it to. Or like I think you can. You need it to be like, hey, you know, only if it’s a, you know, farmer looking white boy, then send this so I don’t get in trouble with my wife, you know, like I I need it to be like this guy needs to have like, you know, Patel or Gupta in his last name if it’s going to send this auto DM so my Indian fanboys can uh can get these messages from me but not everybody else.
Sam Parr: Yeah, it it I could see it getting me in trouble. Um, all right, you want to do another one?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, let’s do one. Uh, okay, a little idea that I think is kind of interesting. Um, I don’t have a ton to say about the business, but it’s more like this is a a cool way to get ideas. So, this is my first time traveling with uh with babies and uh traveling with babies is like, you know, all the things you would expect, like on the plane, you know, kid pooped through his clothes, had to change it, you know, like on a tray table because we couldn’t stand up because the fast and seatbelt sign, the person next to us looking at us like we’re gross and what you’re supposed to do. Oh, that is disgusting. I mean, you are gross. Exactly. I know. I know. I agree. Um, but there’s a a bunch of problems. So like we had to take our car seats, right? Because you can’t just like be like, “Oh, I’ll get there.” You know, I used to pack light. I used to be like, “Cool, I’ll get there. I just need my phone, I’ll call an Uber, get to my hotel. If I’m missing something, I’ll just buy it there.” And with this, with kids, it’s like the opposite. It’s like can’t even get in an Uber because you have to like have a car seat, all that stuff. So I saw this business called BabyQuip. I thought it was kind of cool. It’s again, one of our like telltale signs is any business that shows up at the top of a Google popular Google search, but the website looks like it was last updated in like 1996, um, those are businesses that print money. And so it’s like, “Congratulations, you’ve identified a money printer.” And so I don’t know how successful BabyQuip is, but I would suspect it’s pretty good as a bootstrap business. And what it does is it’s basically a marketplace. So I could say, “Hey, I just landed in Las Vegas. I need two car seats.” I don’t want to lug two car seats, check them in, uh, you know, like on the floor like, you know, drag them to the airport, check them in, take them home, like just meet me at the airport with a car seat that I can just install into a rental car, or I can install into to to an Uber or whatever. Uh, and then like let me rent it for four days and then when I’m leaving, come pick it back up from the airport. And so that’s what BabyQuip is. It’s a baby equipment, but it’s a marketplace where people will bring you what you need. You need a stroller? I got a stroller for you. Don’t lug that heavy thing around. Just use mine when I’m here. Um, and I think people are making a lot of money. Just Google searching. I was like, I was Google searching and again, it’s a very good content play. I was Google searching “baby travel packing list.” So I was like, “Oh, what do I even what am I forgetting here?” And so they had a blog post. I was like, “Here’s all the things you need to pack for your baby.” And then at the bottom, it’s like, “By the way, if you don’t want to pack your stroller and car seats because they’re heavy as hell, like, you know, you could just use BabyQuip and get it when you’re there.” And I was like, click through and I was like, “This is cool.” And so I just thought this is like a very clever business that is a look for problems, look for annoyances, look for inconveniences, and then those become your opportunities if you can design a solution around them. So I just thought it was a clever little business.
Sam Parr: This is awesome. So BabyQuip is actually, it’s a peer-to-peer marketplace. So I don’t think you actually said that. I thought it was the company that would give you stuff. No, it’s just like Jane whose kid outgrew her car seat and she realizes she can make, you know, $200 a month just renting it out to people if she’s as long as she’s willing to go drop it off and pick it up from the airport.
Shaan Puri: I have they been around for a while and they haven’t it doesn’t look like they’ve raised money. Um, but yeah, they, you know, they are basically like just a kind of like a uh looks like a bootstrap business from everything I could tell. It launched in 2016. They’ve had over 30,000 orders. Uh I think they did a crowdfunding campaign at some point. So maybe there’s more data. And they’re on Shark Tank. This is kind of interesting. Now, I I’m not convinced that this is going this can be a huge, huge thing. But what what is actually what is actually interesting is let’s go to New York. It tells you how many reservations someone has ever had. I bet you that there could be like some mom who’s just dominated like a LA or a New York scene, like can just rank really high on all the uh all the big cities and lend out all their stuff. And so what it does is it it tells you how much it So what basically what happens is you land in New York, you but before you land, you tell BabyQuip, you hire Camila Shannon, who’s the top in New York. She’s rented it her stuff out 773 times and she’ll bring you any gear that you need and you can see all the gear that she has and she costs $40 to $60 to deliver the stuff to you, plus there’s gear for there’s a a car seat for $10 a day, there’s a playpen for $40 a day, there’s 15 pound dumbbells for $5 a day, there’s a This is crazy. This is awesome. This is a great find.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, so so another example of this, by the way, have you used or or probably not used, but you’re familiar with them, I’m assuming, Teachers Pay Teachers?
Sam Parr: No, what’s that?
Shaan Puri: You’ve never heard of Teachers Pay Teachers?
Sam Parr: No. Why? I mean, I don’t have kids.
Shaan Puri: That doesn’t doesn’t matter. This is just like one of those things that you know about because it’s just awesome and uh so Google Teachers Pay Teachers. So what this is is Oh my god. If you if you remember like a teacher spends a huge amount of time, every teacher spends a huge amount of time like creating their lesson plans and quizzes and tests and they have to like keep recreating like content basically for their little classroom of 30 people. It’s pretty inefficient, right? So you go you you teach kids all day, already kind of an exhausting thing. Now you go home and you um you have to grade papers, you have to come up with tomorrow’s lesson plan, and then you have to design the quiz for Thursday’s quiz, and then you have next Friday’s test. So you have all this stuff, you’re just constantly this content treadmill. And what Teachers Pay Teachers did, that was genius, was they said, “Look, that’s a lot of effort and you may not be the best person at coming up with a lesson plan or the quiz for this science topic. So why don’t we just create a marketplace where any teacher can list their lesson plans, their quizzes, their tests, and you can just find, go instead of just making your own, go on here for 10 bucks and go buy the best science thing for a fourth grader trying to learn about, you know, geology right now. And you just go buy the thing for 10 bucks and you saved four hours of time. And so it’s like a great trade. So Teachers Pay Teachers is a marketplace doing this. Some teachers were making millions of dollars just creating their uh putting their content up for sale here. The business itself does I think $300 plus million dollars a year in revenue. It was bought about by PE. In gross In gross revenue, yeah. Yeah, it was bought by a private equity firm and like just look at their traffic on this thing, man. It’s like over 30 million hits a month or something. Yeah. Holy fuck. So it’s an insane business. Um, beautiful business too because it’s like, wow, you turned some teachers who created amazing lessons and amazing tests and quizzes, you turned them into stars and millionaires, which is fantastic. I think the best teachers should be millionaires in the age of the internet. Uh there’s there’s no reason not that they shouldn’t be. On the other side, you saved a bunch of money uh and a bunch of sorry, you saved a bunch of time for all the other teachers so that they’re more rested and uh can go into class and perform instead of being, you know, like kind of falling behind constantly on the content treadmill. And so I thought this is like, you know, an amazing idea. Same it reminds me of the baby quip thing. Obviously this is much bigger, much more successful, but it’s like these niche kind of like pain points turned into, you know, marketplaces, solutions.
Sam Parr: This is badass. Maybe you could also do this for speeches. I uh I remember doing the uh my brother John um gave a really good wedding speeches. He gave a great best man speech and three people three people uh paid him money to write their speech. Uh and I think that you could do that for a I think you could start with just wedding speeches, but eventually do all other types of speeches.
Shaan Puri: Dude, that is hilarious. Somebody should absolutely do that because there’s a ton of Googling, right? Like when you have to give your speech, you’re like, “Oh god, pressure super high. Rep like how many reps have I had doing this? Zero. Um, okay, let me go to Google and let me try to get some inspiration. I’m going to try to get the ball rolling. Let me go and people go to YouTube and they try to watch like, you know, best best man speech ever, right? Best bridesmaid speech ever. And then you’re like, “Okay, like what am I going to do? Copy this? Not quite.” But if somebody created these templates, um, that could be pretty good. I I like that.
Sam Parr: Yeah, I actually think you could do that. There’s this company called Book in a Box, started by Tucker Max, who’s one of my investors. Before it was uh when they did Book in a Box, they would you’d pay them any number from $20 to $100,000 on a bunch of different options and they would write a book about your life. So you could like get speaking gigs or you could give to your kids or like whatever for any different reasons. You look like an expert, be a thought leader. And then a lot of their authors started getting speech offers, you know, they would someone would pay $10, $20, $30,000 to have someone come and talk about like best practices in meetings because some guy had wrote a book on how meetings suck and how to make them better. And then they created a new subsidiary that would write your do your PowerPoint and presentation for you and you’d pay more money for that. And I was like, “That’s cool. That should probably be the business more so than just the book thing.”
Shaan Puri: Right. Yeah, I like the the the micro-SaaS tool that does one simple thing that helps you win on a platform you’re already like trying to win on. That’s the key, right? So like I’m already trying to win on Twitter, I’m trying to win on Instagram, I’m trying to win on Reddit, whatever. And if you could build a micro-SaaS tool, it’s like here’s you know, other examples of them. Uh there’s uh what’s it called? Jungle Scout, which is for Amazon. So let’s say you’re trying to win as an FBA seller on on Amazon, so you’re selling a product on Amazon. Jungle Scout is this app you can use and it basically when you’re searching any Amazon like search search result, you can use you can open up Jungle Scout and it’ll basically tell you how much that product is worth, how much how much search volume there is for it, how competitive it is to be in that niche, and how much money they think that product is making so that you can find winning products that are like high demand, low competition, and then you could build a, you know, an FBA business in that niche. And so it’s a simple SaaS tool. I think Jungle Scout does some stupid amount of revenue too because they’re pretty expensive. They were recently um partially acquired by PE in the hundreds of millions of dollars valuation. Greg Mercer uh is is good friends with Neville and in Austin and uh he like uh this is I guess public. I mean, he’s got like a plane and shit. Uh so whatever it was sold for, like Neville will post pictures going to like Telluride in a private jet and I’m like, “Dude, whose jet was that?” He goes, “It’s Greg’s.”
Shaan Puri: But he’s the PE guy or he’s the Jungle Scout guy?
Sam Parr: The guy who sold part of the company, who started it.
Shaan Puri: Gotcha. Yeah, so so super simple tool that just helped you win there and they just built they just kind of like dominate that one niche of like FBA, you know, FBA selling or in this case, Twitter automations, right? So, oh, somebody and so I like this a lot. I need something like this uh for me because I’m trying to basically grow my audience on Twitter and then cool, the less work I can do, the better, right? Like I love digital sales people. All right, a digital salesperson. That’s what I think about when I think about landing pages or like this like little like automations. That’s a digital salesperson. That’s somebody who’s going to work 24/7 for me for zero cost or, you know, in this case, whatever it was, $29 a month. Um, that’s their salary and they’re going to do exactly what I say every single time, predictably and uh they’re just going to generate more value for me. And so I look at my landing page like a digital salesperson. I look at my automations like ConvertKit, things like that, as digital sales people. And uh yeah, this is a really cool one. I like this a lot. Now, I can see this getting really annoying. I mean, people hate getting these auto DMs, but uh it still will work.
Sam Parr: Yeah, yeah. It it it might be annoying, but I actually just made mine. It just says, “Hey, exclamation point, thanks for following.” Now, here’s the problem that I already found. So I it’s already sent out a couple hundred messages for me. I guess I get maybe 500 to 1,000 new followers a day. This uh I feel like a douche saying that. This a couple women replied. Yeah, so a couple like really attractive women replied and or replied saying like, “Hey, what’s going on? You know, like your work.” Basically they replied actually. Yeah, so like these like attractive women replied and I was like, “Fuck, I don’t want like anyone to get the wrong idea and to think that I’m hollering just at them or that I’m hollering at all, you know, and and so I didn’t reply to them, but I was like, “Oh my gosh, like this actually might be able to this could definitely get me in trouble a little bit. I could totally see it, right? When that when that kind of I sent you that message, it was kind of weird, right?
Shaan Puri: It was hilarious. Um, yeah, I could see, you know, same thing with somebody else pointed this out too, which is like, let’s say you write a thread that goes viral, you might get 5,000 followers. You’re going to send out what, 5,000 auto DMs and then get like 2,000 random replies back. It’s going to like kind of ruin your inbox and maybe get you banned from Twitter, I don’t know, because it’ll just rate limit you. So, so I think there’s some problems with it. Maybe, maybe this guy’s built in some rules. Like for me, I would only want to do this. I would only want to DM somebody who has over X followers or that I, you know, I already follow or something like that. So then it kind of like limits the number of people this does it to. Or like I think you can. You need it to be like, hey, you know, only if it’s a, you know, farmer looking white boy, then send this so I don’t get in trouble with my wife, you know, like I I need it to be like this guy needs to have like, you know, Patel or Gupta in his last name if it’s going to send this auto DM so my Indian fanboys can uh can get these messages from me but not everybody else.
Sam Parr: Yeah, it it I could see it getting me in trouble. Um, all right, you want to do another one?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, let’s do one. Uh, okay, a little idea that I think is kind of interesting. Um, I don’t have a ton to say about the business, but it’s more like this is a a cool way to get ideas. So, this is my first time traveling with uh with babies and uh traveling with babies is like, you know, all the things you would expect, like on the plane, you know, kid pooped through his clothes, had to change it, you know, like on a tray table because we couldn’t stand up because the fast and seatbelt sign, the person next to us looking at us like we’re gross and what you’re supposed to do. Oh, that is disgusting. I mean, you are gross. Exactly. I know. I know. I agree. Um, but there’s a a bunch of problems. So like we had to take our car seats, right? Because you can’t just like be like, “Oh, I’ll get there.” You know, I used to pack light. I used to be like, “Cool, I’ll get there. I just need my phone, I’ll call an Uber, get to my hotel. If I’m missing something, I’ll just buy it there.” And with this, with kids, it’s like the opposite. It’s like can’t even get in an Uber because you have to like have a car seat, all that stuff. So I saw this business called BabyQuip. I thought it was kind of cool. It’s again, one of our like telltale signs is any business that shows up at the top of a Google popular Google search, but the website looks like it was last updated in like 1996, um, those are businesses that print money. And so it’s like, “Congratulations, you’ve identified a money printer.” And so I don’t know how successful BabyQuip is, but I would suspect it’s pretty good as a bootstrap business. And what it does is it’s basically a marketplace. So I could say, “Hey, I just landed in Las Vegas. I need two car seats.” I don’t want to lug two car seats, check them in, uh, you know, like on the floor like, you know, drag them to the airport, check them in, take them home, like just meet me at the airport with a car seat that I can just install into a rental car, or I can install into to to an Uber or whatever. Uh, and then like let me rent it for four days and then when I’m leaving, come pick it back up from the airport. And so that’s what BabyQuip is. It’s a baby equipment, but it’s a marketplace where people will bring you what you need. You need a stroller? I got a stroller for you. Don’t lug that heavy thing around. Just use mine when I’m here. Um, and I think people are making a lot of money. Just Google searching. I was like, I was Google searching and again, it’s a very good content play. I was Google searching “baby travel packing list.” So I was like, “Oh, what do I even what am I forgetting here?” And so they had a blog post. I was like, “Here’s all the things you need to pack for your baby.” And then at the bottom, it’s like, “By the way, if you don’t want to pack your stroller and car seats because they’re heavy as hell, like, you know, you could just use BabyQuip and get it when you’re there.” And I was like, click through and I was like, “This is cool.” And so I just thought this is like a very clever business that is a look for problems, look for annoyances, look for inconveniences, and then those become your opportunities if you can design a solution around them. So I just thought it was a clever little business.
Sam Parr: This is awesome. So BabyQuip is actually, it’s a peer-to-peer marketplace. So I don’t think you actually said that. I thought it was the company that would give you stuff. No, it’s just like Jane whose kid outgrew her car seat and she realizes she can make, you know, $200 a month just renting it out to people if she’s as long as she’s willing to go drop it off and pick it up from the airport.
Shaan Puri: I have they been around for a while and they haven’t it doesn’t look like they’ve raised money. Um, but yeah, they, you know, they are basically like just a kind of like a uh looks like a bootstrap business from everything I could tell. It launched in 2016. They’ve had over 30,000 orders. Uh I think they did a crowdfunding campaign at some point. So maybe there’s more data. And they’re on Shark Tank. This is kind of interesting. Now, I I’m not convinced that this is going this can be a huge, huge thing. But what what is actually what is actually interesting is let’s go to New York. It tells you how many reservations someone has ever had. I bet you that there could be like some mom who’s just dominated like a LA or a New York scene, like can just rank really high on all the uh all the big cities and lend out all their stuff. And so what it does is it it tells you how much it So what basically what happens is you land in New York, you but before you land, you tell BabyQuip, you hire Camila Shannon, who’s the top in New York. She’s rented it her stuff out 773 times and she’ll bring you any gear that you need and you can see all the gear that she has and she costs $40 to $60 to deliver the stuff to you, plus there’s gear for there’s a a car seat for $10 a day, there’s a playpen for $40 a day, there’s 15 pound dumbbells for $5 a day, there’s a This is crazy. This is awesome. This is a great find.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, so so another example of this, by the way, have you used or or probably not used, but you’re familiar with them, I’m assuming, Teachers Pay Teachers?
Sam Parr: No, what’s that?
Shaan Puri: You’ve never heard of Teachers Pay Teachers?
Sam Parr: No. Why? I mean, I don’t have kids.
Shaan Puri: That doesn’t doesn’t matter. This is just like one of those things that you know about because it’s just awesome and uh so Google Teachers Pay Teachers. So what this is is Oh my god. If you if you remember like a teacher spends a huge amount of time, every teacher spends a huge amount of time like creating their lesson plans and quizzes and tests and they have to like keep recreating like content basically for their little classroom of 30 people. It’s pretty inefficient, right? So you go you you teach kids all day, already kind of an exhausting thing. Now you go home and you um you have to grade papers, you have to come up with tomorrow’s lesson plan, and then you have to design the quiz for Thursday’s quiz, and then you have next Friday’s test. So you have all this stuff, you’re just constantly this content treadmill. And what Teachers Pay Teachers did, that was genius, was they said, “Look, that’s a lot of effort and you may not be the best person at coming up with a lesson plan or the quiz for this science topic. So why don’t we just create a marketplace where any teacher can list their lesson plans, their quizzes, their tests, and you can just find, go instead of just making your own, go on here for 10 bucks and go buy the best science thing for a fourth grader trying to learn about, you know, geology right now. And you just go buy the thing for 10 bucks and you saved four hours of time. And so it’s like a great trade. So Teachers Pay Teachers is a marketplace doing this. Some teachers were making millions of dollars just creating their uh putting their content up for sale here. The business itself does I think $300 plus million dollars a year in revenue. It was bought about by PE. In gross In gross revenue, yeah. Yeah, it was bought by a private equity firm and like just look at their traffic on this thing, man. It’s like over 30 million hits a month or something. Yeah. Holy fuck. So it’s an insane business. Um, beautiful business too because it’s like, wow, you turned some teachers who created amazing lessons and amazing tests and quizzes, you turned them into stars and millionaires, which is fantastic. I think the best teachers should be millionaires in the age of the internet. Uh there’s there’s no reason not that they shouldn’t be. On the other side, you saved a bunch of money uh and a bunch of sorry, you saved a bunch of time for all the other teachers so that they’re more rested and uh can go into class and perform instead of being, you know, like kind of falling behind constantly on the content treadmill. And so I thought this is like, you know, an amazing idea. Same it reminds me of the baby quip thing. Obviously this is much bigger, much more successful, but it’s like these niche kind of like pain points turned into, you know, marketplaces, solutions.
Sam Parr: This is badass. Maybe you could also do this for speeches. I uh I remember doing the uh my brother John um gave a really good wedding speeches. He gave a great best man speech and three people three people uh paid him money to write their speech. Uh and I think that you could do that for a I think you could start with just wedding speeches, but eventually do all other types of speeches.
Shaan Puri: Dude, that is hilarious. Somebody should absolutely do that because there’s a ton of Googling, right? Like when you have to give your speech, you’re like, “Oh god, pressure super high. Rep like how many reps have I had doing this? Zero. Um, okay, let me go to Google and let me try to get some inspiration. I’m going to try to get the ball rolling. Let me go and people go to YouTube and they try to watch like, you know, best best man speech ever, right? Best bridesmaid speech ever. And then you’re like, “Okay, like what am I going to do? Copy this? Not quite.” But if somebody created these templates, um, that could be pretty good. I I like that.
Sam Parr: Yeah, I actually think you could do that. There’s this company called Book in a Box, started by Tucker Max, who’s one of my investors. Before it was uh when they did Book in a Box, they would you’d pay them any number from $20 to $100,000 on a bunch of different options and they would write a book about your life. So you could like get speaking gigs or you could give to your kids or like whatever for any different reasons. You look like an expert, be a thought leader. And then a lot of their authors started getting speech offers, you know, they would someone would pay $10, $20, $30,000 to have someone come and talk about like best practices in meetings because some guy had wrote a book on how meetings suck and how to make them better. And then they created a new subsidiary that would write your do your PowerPoint and presentation for you and you’d pay more money for that. And I was like, “That’s cool. That should probably be the business more so than just the book thing.”
Shaan Puri: Right. Yeah, I like the the the micro-SaaS tool that does one simple thing that helps you win on a platform you’re already like trying to win on. That’s the key, right? So like I’m already trying to win on Twitter, I’m trying to win on Instagram, I’m trying to win on Reddit, whatever. And if you could build a micro-SaaS tool, it’s like here’s you know, other examples of them. Uh there’s uh what’s it called? Jungle Scout, which is for Amazon. So let’s say you’re trying to win as an FBA seller on on Amazon, so you’re selling a product on Amazon. Jungle Scout is this app you can use and it basically when you’re searching any Amazon like search search result, you can use you can open up Jungle Scout and it’ll basically tell you how much that product is worth, how much how much search volume there is for it, how competitive it is to be in that niche, and how much money they think that product is making so that you can find winning products that are like high demand, low competition, and then you could build a, you know, an FBA business in that niche. And so it’s a simple SaaS tool. I think Jungle Scout does some stupid amount of revenue too because they’re pretty expensive. They were recently um partially acquired by PE in the hundreds of millions of dollars valuation. Greg Mercer uh is is good friends with Neville and in Austin and uh he like uh this is I guess public. I mean, he’s got like a plane and shit. Uh so whatever it was sold for, like Neville will post pictures going to like Telluride in a private jet and I’m like, “Dude, whose jet was that?” He goes, “It’s Greg’s.”
Shaan Puri: But he’s the PE guy or he’s the Jungle Scout guy?
Sam Parr: The guy who sold part of the company, who started it.
Shaan Puri: Gotcha. Yeah, so so super simple tool that just helped you win there and they just built they just kind of like dominate that one niche of like FBA, you know, FBA selling or in this case, Twitter automations, right? So, oh, somebody and so I like this a lot. I need something like this uh for me because I’m trying to basically grow my audience on Twitter and then cool, the less work I can do, the better, right? Like I love digital sales people. All right, a digital salesperson. That’s what I think about when I think about landing pages or like this like little like automations. That’s a digital salesperson. That’s somebody who’s going to work 24/7 for me for zero cost or, you know, in this case, whatever it was, $29 a month. Um, that’s their salary and they’re going to do exactly what I say every single time, predictably and uh they’re just going to generate more value for me. And so I look at my landing page like a digital salesperson. I look at my automations like ConvertKit, things like that, as digital sales people. And uh yeah, this is a really cool one. I like this a lot. Now, I can see this getting really annoying. I mean, people hate getting these auto DMs, but uh it still will work.
Sam Parr: Yeah, yeah. It it it might be annoying, but I actually just made mine. It just says, “Hey, exclamation point, thanks for following.” Now, here’s the problem that I already found. So I it’s already sent out a couple hundred messages for me. I guess I get maybe 500 to 1,000 new followers a day. This uh I feel like a douche saying that. This a couple women replied. Yeah, so a couple like really attractive women replied and or replied saying like, “Hey, what’s going on? You know, like your work.” Basically they replied actually. Yeah, so like these like attractive women replied and I was like, “Fuck, I don’t want like anyone to get the wrong idea and to think that I’m hollering just at them or that I’m hollering at all, you know, and and so I didn’t reply to them, but I was like, “Oh my gosh, like this actually might be able to this could definitely get me in trouble a little bit. I could totally see it, right? When that when that kind of I sent you that message, it was kind of weird, right?
Shaan Puri: It was hilarious. Um, yeah, I could see, you know, same thing with somebody else pointed this out too, which is like, let’s say you write a thread that goes viral, you might get 5,000 followers. You’re going to send out what, 5,000 auto DMs and then get like 2,000 random replies back. It’s going to like kind of ruin your inbox and maybe get you banned from Twitter, I don’t know, because it’ll just rate limit you. So, so I think there’s some problems with it. Maybe, maybe this guy’s built in some rules. Like for me, I would only want to do this. I would only want to DM somebody who has over X followers or that I, you know, I already follow or something like that. So then it kind of like limits the number of people this does it to. Or like I think you can. You need it to be like, hey, you know, only if it’s a, you know, farmer looking white boy, then send this so I don’t get in trouble with my wife, you know, like I I need it to be like this guy needs to have like, you know, Patel or Gupta in his last name if it’s going to send this auto DM so my Indian fanboys can uh can get these messages from me but not everybody else.
Sam Parr: Yeah, it it I could see it getting me in trouble. Um, all right, you want to do another one?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, let’s do one. Uh, okay, a little idea that I think is kind of interesting. Um, I don’t have a ton to say about the business, but it’s more like this is a a cool way to get ideas. So, this is my first time traveling with uh with babies and uh traveling with babies is like, you know, all the things you would expect, like on the plane, you know, kid pooped through his clothes, had to change it, you know, like on a tray table because we couldn’t stand up because the fast and seatbelt sign, the person next to us looking at us like we’re gross and what you’re supposed to do. Oh, that is disgusting. I mean, you are gross. Exactly. I know. I know. I agree. Um, but there’s a a bunch of problems. So like we had to take our car seats, right? Because you can’t just like be like, “Oh, I’ll get there.” You know, I used to pack light. I used to be like, “Cool, I’ll get there. I just need my phone, I’ll call an Uber, get to my hotel. If I’m missing something, I’ll just buy it there.” And with this, with kids, it’s like the opposite. It’s like can’t even get in an Uber because you have to like have a car seat, all that stuff. So I saw this business called BabyQuip. I thought it was kind of cool. It’s again, one of our like telltale signs is any business that shows up at the top of a Google popular Google search, but the website looks like it was last updated in like 1996, um, those are businesses that print money. And so it’s like, “Congratulations, you’ve identified a money printer.” And so I don’t know how successful BabyQuip is, but I would suspect it’s pretty good as a bootstrap business. And what it does is it’s basically a marketplace. So I could say, “Hey, I just landed in Las Vegas. I need two car seats.” I don’t want to lug two car seats, check them in, uh, you know, like on the floor like, you know, drag them to the airport, check them in, take them home, like just meet me at the airport with a car seat that I can just install into a rental car, or I can install into to to an Uber or whatever. Uh, and then like let me rent it for four days and then when I’m leaving, come pick it back up from the airport. And so that’s what BabyQuip is. It’s a baby equipment, but it’s a marketplace where people will bring you what you need. You need a stroller? I got a stroller for you. Don’t lug that heavy thing around. Just use mine when I’m here. Um, and I think people are making a lot of money. Just Google searching. I was like, I was Google searching and again, it’s a very good content play. I was Google searching “baby travel packing list.” So I was like, “Oh, what do I even what am I forgetting here?” And so they had a blog post. I was like, “Here’s all the things you need to pack for your baby.” And then at the bottom, it’s like, “By the way, if you don’t want to pack your stroller and car seats because they’re heavy as hell, like, you know, you could just use BabyQuip and get it when you’re there.” And I was like, click through and I was like, “This is cool.” And so I just thought this is like a very clever business that is a look for problems, look for annoyances, look for inconveniences, and then those become your opportunities if you can design a solution around them. So I just thought it was a clever little business.
Sam Parr: This is awesome. So BabyQuip is actually, it’s a peer-to-peer marketplace. So I don’t think you actually said that. I thought it was the company that would give you stuff. No, it’s just like Jane whose kid outgrew her car seat and she realizes she can make, you know, $200 a month just renting it out to people if she’s as long as she’s willing to go drop it off and pick it up from the airport.
Shaan Puri: I have they been around for a while and they haven’t it doesn’t look like they’ve raised money. Um, but yeah, they, you know, they are basically like just a kind of like a uh looks like a bootstrap business from everything I could tell. It launched in 2016. They’ve had over 30,000 orders. Uh I think they did a crowdfunding campaign at some point. So maybe there’s more data. And they’re on Shark Tank. This is kind of interesting. Now, I I’m not convinced that this is going this can be a huge, huge thing. But what what is actually what is actually interesting is let’s go to New York. It tells you how many reservations someone has ever had. I bet you that there could be like some mom who’s just dominated like a LA or a New York scene, like can just rank really high on all the uh all the big cities and lend out all their stuff. And so what it does is it it tells you how much it So what basically what happens is you land in New York, you but before you land, you tell BabyQuip, you hire Camila Shannon, who’s the top in New York. She’s rented it her stuff out 773 times and she’ll bring you any gear that you need and you can see all the gear that she has and she costs $40 to $60 to deliver the stuff to you, plus there’s gear for there’s a a car seat for $10 a day, there’s a playpen for $40 a day, there’s 15 pound dumbbells for $5 a day, there’s a This is crazy. This is awesome. This is a great find.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, so so another example of this, by the way, have you used or or probably not used, but you’re familiar with them, I’m assuming, Teachers Pay Teachers?
Sam Parr: No, what’s that?
Shaan Puri: You’ve never heard of Teachers Pay Teachers?
Sam Parr: No. Why? I mean, I don’t have kids.
Shaan Puri: That doesn’t doesn’t matter. This is just like one of those things that you know about because it’s just awesome and uh so Google Teachers Pay Teachers. So what this is is Oh my god. If you if you remember like a teacher spends a huge amount of time, every teacher spends a huge amount of time like creating their lesson plans and quizzes and tests and they have to like keep recreating like content basically for their little classroom of 30 people. It’s pretty inefficient, right? So you go you you teach kids all day, already kind of an exhausting thing. Now you go home and you um you have to grade papers, you have to come up with tomorrow’s lesson plan, and then you have to design the quiz for Thursday’s quiz, and then you have next Friday’s test. So you have all this stuff, you’re just constantly this content treadmill. And what Teachers Pay Teachers did, that was genius, was they said, “Look, that’s a lot of effort and you may not be the best person at coming up with a lesson plan or the quiz for this science topic. So why don’t we just create a marketplace where any teacher can list their lesson plans, their quizzes, their tests, and you can just find, go instead of just making your own, go on here for 10 bucks and go buy the best science thing for a fourth grader trying to learn about, you know, geology right now. And you just go buy the thing for 10 bucks and you saved four hours of time. And so it’s like a great trade. So Teachers Pay Teachers is a marketplace doing this. Some teachers were making millions of dollars just creating their uh putting their content up for sale here. The business itself does I think $300 plus million dollars a year in revenue. It was bought about by PE. In gross In gross revenue, yeah. Yeah, it was bought by a private equity firm and like just look at their traffic on this thing, man. It’s like over 30 million hits a month or something. Yeah. Holy fuck. So it’s an insane business. Um, beautiful business too because it’s like, wow, you turned some teachers who created amazing lessons and amazing tests and quizzes, you turned them into stars and millionaires, which is fantastic. I think the best teachers should be millionaires in the age of the internet. Uh there’s there’s no reason not that they shouldn’t be. On the other side, you saved a bunch of money uh and a bunch of sorry, you saved a bunch of time for all the other teachers so that they’re more rested and uh can go into class and perform instead of being, you know, like kind of falling behind constantly on the content treadmill. And so I thought this is like, you know, an amazing idea. Same it reminds me of the baby quip thing. Obviously this is much bigger, much more successful, but it’s like these niche kind of like pain points turned into, you know, marketplaces, solutions.
Sam Parr: This is badass. Maybe you could also do this for speeches. I uh I remember doing the uh my brother John um gave a really good wedding speeches. He gave a great best man speech and three people three people uh paid him money to write their speech. Uh and I think that you could do that for a I think you could start with just wedding speeches, but eventually do all other types of speeches.
Shaan Puri: Dude, that is hilarious. Somebody should absolutely do that because there’s a ton of Googling, right? Like when you have to give your speech, you’re like, “Oh god, pressure super high. Rep like how many reps have I had doing this? Zero. Um, okay, let me go to Google and let me try to get some inspiration. I’m going to try to get the ball rolling. Let me go and people go to YouTube and they try to watch like, you know, best best man speech ever, right? Best bridesmaid speech ever. And then you’re like, “Okay, like what am I going to do? Copy this? Not quite.” But if somebody created these templates, um, that could be pretty good. I I like that.
Sam Parr: Yeah, I actually think you could do that. There’s this company called Book in a Box, started by Tucker Max, who’s one of my investors. Before it was uh when they did Book in a Box, they would you’d pay them any number from $20 to $100,000 on a bunch of different options and they would write a book about your life. So you could like get speaking gigs or you could give to your kids or like whatever for any different reasons. You look like an expert, be a thought leader. And then a lot of their authors started getting speech offers, you know, they would someone would pay $10, $20, $30,000 to have someone come and talk about like best practices in meetings because some guy had wrote a book on how meetings suck and how to make them better. And then they created a new subsidiary that would write your do your PowerPoint and presentation for you and you’d pay more money for that. And I was like, “That’s cool. That should probably be the business more so than just the book thing.”
Shaan Puri: Right. Yeah, I like the the the micro-SaaS tool that does one simple thing that helps you win on a platform you’re already like trying to win on. That’s the key, right? So like I’m already trying to win on Twitter, I’m trying to win on Instagram, I’m trying to win on Reddit, whatever. And if you could build a micro-SaaS tool, it’s like here’s you know, other examples of them. Uh there’s uh what’s it called? Jungle Scout, which is for Amazon. So let’s say you’re trying to win as an FBA seller on on Amazon, so you’re selling a product on Amazon. Jungle Scout is this app you can use and it basically when you’re searching any Amazon like search search result, you can use you can open up Jungle Scout and it’ll basically tell you how much that product is worth, how much how much search volume there is for it, how competitive it is to be in that niche, and how much money they think that product is making so that you can find winning products that are like high demand, low competition, and then you could build a, you know, an FBA business in that niche. And so it’s a simple SaaS tool. I think Jungle Scout does some stupid amount of revenue too because they’re pretty expensive. They were recently um partially acquired by PE in the hundreds of millions of dollars valuation. Greg Mercer uh is is good friends with Neville and in Austin and uh he like uh this is I guess public. I mean, he’s got like a plane and shit. Uh so whatever it was sold for, like Neville will post pictures going to like Telluride in a private jet and I’m like, “Dude, whose jet was that?” He goes, “It’s Greg’s.”
Shaan Puri: But he’s the PE guy or he’s the Jungle Scout guy?
Sam Parr: The guy who sold part of the company, who started it.
Shaan Puri: Gotcha. Yeah, so so super simple tool that just helped you win there and they just built they just kind of like dominate that one niche of like FBA, you know, FBA selling or in this case, Twitter automations, right? So, oh, somebody and so I like this a lot. I need something like this uh for me because I’m trying to basically grow my audience on Twitter and then cool, the less work I can do, the better, right? Like I love digital sales people. All right, a digital salesperson. That’s what I think about when I think about landing pages or like this like little like automations. That’s a digital salesperson. That’s somebody who’s going to work 24/7 for me for zero cost or, you know, in this case, whatever it was, $29 a month. Um, that’s their salary and they’re going to do exactly what I say every single time, predictably and uh they’re just going to generate more value for me. And so I look at my landing page like a digital salesperson. I look at my automations like ConvertKit, things like that, as digital sales people. And uh yeah, this is a really cool one. I like this a lot. Now, I can see this getting really annoying. I mean, people hate getting these auto DMs, but uh it still will work.
Sam Parr: Yeah, yeah. It it it might be annoying, but I actually just made mine. It just says, “Hey, exclamation point, thanks for following.” Now, here’s the problem that I already found. So I it’s already sent out a couple hundred messages for me. I guess I get maybe 500 to 1,000 new followers a day. This uh I feel like a douche saying that. This a couple women replied. Yeah, so a couple like really attractive women replied and or replied saying like, “Hey, what’s going on? You know, like your work.” Basically they replied actually. Yeah, so like these like attractive women replied and I was like, “Fuck, I don’t want like anyone to get the wrong idea and to think that I’m hollering just at them or that I’m hollering at all, you know, and and so I didn’t reply to them, but I was like, “Oh my gosh, like this actually might be able to this could definitely get me in trouble a little bit. I could totally see it, right? When that when that kind of I sent you that message, it was kind of weird, right?
Shaan Puri: It was hilarious. Um, yeah, I could see, you know, same thing with somebody else pointed this out too, which is like, let’s say you write a thread that goes viral, you might get 5,000 followers. You’re going to send out what, 5,000 auto DMs and then get like 2,000 random replies back. It’s going to like kind of ruin your inbox and maybe get you banned from Twitter, I don’t know, because it’ll just rate limit you. So, so I think there’s some problems with it. Maybe, maybe this guy’s built in some rules. Like for me, I would only want to do this. I would only want to DM somebody who has over X followers or that I, you know, I already follow or something like that. So then it kind of like limits the number of people this does it to. Or like I think you can. You need it to be like, hey, you know, only if it’s a, you know, farmer looking white boy, then send this so I don’t get in trouble with my wife, you know, like I I need it to be like this guy needs to have like, you know, Patel or Gupta in his last name if it’s going to send this auto DM so my Indian fanboys can uh can get these messages from me but not everybody else.
Sam Parr: Yeah, it it I could see it getting me in trouble. Um, all right, you want to do another one?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, let’s do one. Uh, okay, a little idea that I think is kind of interesting. Um, I don’t have a ton to say about the business, but it’s more like this is a a cool way to get ideas. So, this is my first time traveling with uh with babies and uh traveling with babies is like, you know, all the things you would expect, like on the plane, you know, kid pooped through his clothes, had to change it, you know, like on a tray table because we couldn’t stand up because the fast and seatbelt sign, the person next to us looking at us like we’re gross and what you’re supposed to do. Oh, that is disgusting. I mean, you are gross. Exactly. I know. I know. I agree. Um, but there’s a a bunch of problems. So like we had to take our car seats, right? Because you can’t just like be like, “Oh, I’ll get there.” You know, I used to pack light. I used to be like, “Cool, I’ll get there. I just need my phone, I’ll call an Uber, get to my hotel. If I’m missing something, I’ll just buy it there.” And with this, with kids, it’s like the opposite. It’s like can’t even get in an Uber because you have to like have a car seat, all that stuff. So I saw this business called BabyQuip. I thought it was kind of cool. It’s again, one of our like telltale signs is any business that shows up at the top of a Google popular Google search, but the website looks like it was last updated in like 1996, um, those are businesses that print money. And so it’s like, “Congratulations, you’ve identified a money printer.” And so I don’t know how successful BabyQuip is, but I would suspect it’s pretty good as a bootstrap business. And what it does is it’s basically a marketplace. So I could say, “Hey, I just landed in Las Vegas. I need two car seats.” I don’t want to lug two car seats, check them in, uh, you know, like on the floor like, you know, drag them to the airport, check them in, take them home, like just meet me at the airport with a car seat that I can just install into a rental car, or I can install into to to an Uber or whatever. Uh, and then like let me rent it for four days and then when I’m leaving, come pick it back up from the airport. And so that’s what BabyQuip is. It’s a baby equipment, but it’s a marketplace where people will bring you what you need. You need a stroller? I got a stroller for you. Don’t lug that heavy thing around. Just use mine when I’m here. Um, and I think people are making a lot of money. Just Google searching. I was like, I was Google searching and again, it’s a very good content play. I was Google searching “baby travel packing list.” So I was like, “Oh, what do I even what am I forgetting here?” And so they had a blog post. I was like, “Here’s all the things you need to pack for your baby.” And then at the bottom, it’s like, “By the way, if you don’t want to pack your stroller and car seats because they’re heavy as hell, like, you know, you could just use BabyQuip and get it when you’re there.” And I was like, click through and I was like, “This is cool.” And so I just thought this is like a very clever business that is a look for problems, look for annoyances, look for inconveniences, and then those become your opportunities if you can design a solution around them. So I just thought it was a clever little business.
Sam Parr: This is awesome. So BabyQuip is actually, it’s a peer-to-peer marketplace. So I don’t think you actually said that. I thought it was the company that would give you stuff. No, it’s just like Jane whose kid outgrew her car seat and she realizes she can make, you know, $200 a month just renting it out to people if she’s as long as she’s willing to go drop it off and pick it up from the airport.
Shaan Puri: I have they been around for a while and they haven’t it doesn’t look like they’ve raised money. Um, but yeah, they, you know, they are basically like just a kind of like a uh looks like a bootstrap business from everything I could tell. It launched in 2016. They’ve had over 30,000 orders. Uh I think they did a crowdfunding campaign at some point. So maybe there’s more data. And they’re on Shark Tank. This is kind of interesting. Now, I I’m not convinced that this is going this can be a huge, huge thing. But what what is actually what is actually interesting is let’s go to New York. It tells you how many reservations someone has ever had. I bet you that there could be like some mom who’s just dominated like a LA or a New York scene, like can just rank really high on all the uh all the big cities and lend out all their stuff. And so what it does is it it tells you how much it So what basically what happens is you land in New York, you but before you land, you tell BabyQuip, you hire Camila Shannon, who’s the top in New York. She’s rented it her stuff out 773 times and she’ll bring you any gear that you need and you can see all the gear that she has and she costs $40 to $60 to deliver the stuff to you, plus there’s gear for there’s a a car seat for $10 a day, there’s a playpen for $40 a day, there’s 15 pound dumbbells for $5 a day, there’s a This is crazy. This is awesome. This is a great find.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, so so another example of this, by the way, have you used or or probably not used, but you’re familiar with them, I’m assuming, Teachers Pay Teachers?
Sam Parr: No, what’s that?
Shaan Puri: You’ve never heard of Teachers Pay Teachers?
Sam Parr: No. Why? I mean, I don’t have kids.
Shaan Puri: That doesn’t doesn’t matter. This is just like one of those things that you know about because it’s just awesome and uh so Google Teachers Pay Teachers. So what this is is Oh my god. If you if you remember like a teacher spends a huge amount of time, every teacher spends a huge amount of time like creating their lesson plans and quizzes and tests and they have to like keep recreating like content basically for their little classroom of 30 people. It’s pretty inefficient, right? So you go you you teach kids all day, already kind of an exhausting thing. Now you go home and you um you have to grade papers, you have to come up with tomorrow’s lesson plan, and then you have to design the quiz for Thursday’s quiz, and then you have next Friday’s test. So you have all this stuff, you’re just constantly this content treadmill. And what Teachers Pay Teachers did, that was genius, was they said, “Look, that’s a lot of effort and you may not be the best person at coming up with a lesson plan or the quiz for this science topic. So why don’t we just create a marketplace where any teacher can list their lesson plans, their quizzes, their tests, and you can just find, go instead of just making your own, go on here for 10 bucks and go buy the best science thing for a fourth grader trying to learn about, you know, geology right now. And you just go buy the thing for 10 bucks and you saved four hours of time. And so it’s like a great trade. So Teachers Pay Teachers is a marketplace doing this. Some teachers were making millions of dollars just creating their uh putting their content up for sale here. The business itself does I think $300 plus million dollars a year in revenue. It was bought about by PE. In gross In gross revenue, yeah. Yeah, it was bought by a private equity firm and like just look at their traffic on this thing, man. It’s like over 30 million hits a month or something. Yeah. Holy fuck. So it’s an insane business. Um, beautiful business too because it’s like, wow, you turned some teachers who created amazing lessons and amazing tests and quizzes, you turned them into stars and millionaires, which is fantastic. I think the best teachers should be millionaires in the age of the internet. Uh there’s there’s no reason not that they shouldn’t be. On the other side, you saved a bunch of money uh and a bunch of sorry, you saved a bunch of time for all the other teachers so that they’re more rested and uh can go into class and perform instead of being, you know, like kind of falling behind constantly on the content treadmill. And so I thought this is like, you know, an amazing idea. Same it reminds me of the baby quip thing. Obviously this is much bigger, much more successful, but it’s like these niche kind of like pain points turned into, you know, marketplaces, solutions.
Sam Parr: This is badass. Maybe you could also do this for speeches. I uh I remember doing the uh my brother John um gave a really good wedding speeches. He gave a great best man speech and three people three people uh paid him money to write their speech. Uh and I think that you could do that for a I think you could start with just wedding speeches, but eventually do all other types of speeches.
Shaan Puri: Dude, that is hilarious. Somebody should absolutely do that because there’s a ton of Googling, right? Like when you have to give your speech, you’re like, “Oh god, pressure super high. Rep like how many reps have I had doing this? Zero. Um, okay, let me go to Google and let me try to get some inspiration. I’m going to try to get the ball rolling. Let me go and people go to YouTube and they try to watch like, you know, best best man speech ever, right? Best bridesmaid speech ever. And then you’re like, “Okay, like what am I going to do? Copy this? Not quite.” But if somebody created these templates, um, that could be pretty good. I I like that.
Sam Parr: Yeah, I actually think you could do that. There’s this company called Book in a Box, started by Tucker Max, who’s one of my investors. Before it was uh when they did Book in a Box, they would you’d pay them any number from $20 to $100,000 on a bunch of different options and they would write a book about your life. So you could like get speaking gigs or you could give to your kids or like whatever for any different reasons. You look like an expert, be a thought leader. And then a lot of their authors started getting speech offers, you know, they would someone would pay $10, $20, $30,000 to have someone come and talk about like best practices in meetings because some guy had wrote a book on how meetings suck and how to make them better. And then they created a new subsidiary that would write your do your PowerPoint and presentation for you and you’d pay more money for that. And I was like, “That’s cool. That should probably be the business more so than just the book thing.”
Shaan Puri: Right. Yeah, I like the the the micro-SaaS tool that does one simple thing that helps you win on a platform you’re already like trying to win on. That’s the key, right? So like I’m already trying to win on Twitter, I’m trying to win on Instagram, I’m trying to win on Reddit, whatever. And if you could build a micro-SaaS tool, it’s like here’s you know, other examples of them. Uh there’s uh what’s it called? Jungle Scout, which is for Amazon. So let’s say you’re trying to win as an FBA seller on on Amazon, so you’re selling a product on Amazon. Jungle Scout is this app you can use and it basically when you’re searching any Amazon like search search result, you can use you can open up Jungle Scout and it’ll basically tell you how much that product is worth, how much how much search volume there is for it, how competitive it is to be in that niche, and how much money they think that product is making so that you can find winning products that are like high demand, low competition, and then you could build a, you know, an FBA business in that niche. And so it’s a simple SaaS tool. I think Jungle Scout does some stupid amount of revenue too because they’re pretty expensive. They were recently um partially acquired by PE in the hundreds of millions of dollars valuation. Greg Mercer uh is is good friends with Neville and in Austin and uh he like uh this is I guess public. I mean, he’s got like a plane and shit. Uh so whatever it was sold for, like Neville will post pictures going to like Telluride in a private jet and I’m like, “Dude, whose jet was that?” He goes, “It’s Greg’s.”
Shaan Puri: But he’s the PE guy or he’s the Jungle Scout guy?
Sam Parr: The guy who sold part of the company, who started it.
Shaan Puri: Gotcha. Yeah, so so super simple tool that just helped you win there and they just built they just kind of like dominate that one niche of like FBA, you know, FBA selling or in this case, Twitter automations, right? So, oh, somebody and so I like this a lot. I need something like this uh for me because I’m trying to basically grow my audience on Twitter and then cool, the less work I can do, the better, right? Like I love digital sales people. All right, a digital salesperson. That’s what I think about when I think about landing pages or like this like little like automations. That’s a digital salesperson. That’s somebody who’s going to work 24/7 for me for zero cost or, you know, in this case, whatever it was, $29 a month. Um, that’s their salary and they’re going to do exactly what I say every single time, predictably and uh they’re just going to generate more value for me. And so I look at my landing page like a digital salesperson. I look at my automations like ConvertKit, things like that, as digital sales people. And uh yeah, this is a really cool one. I like this a lot. Now, I can see this getting really annoying. I mean, people hate getting these auto DMs, but uh it still will work.
Sam Parr: Yeah, yeah. It it it might be annoying, but I actually just made mine. It just says, “Hey, exclamation point, thanks for following.” Now, here’s the problem that I already found. So I it’s already sent out a couple hundred messages for me. I guess I get maybe 500 to 1,000 new followers a day. This uh I feel like a douche saying that. This a couple women replied. Yeah, so a couple like really attractive women replied and or replied saying like, “Hey, what’s going on? You know, like your work.” Basically they replied actually. Yeah, so like these like attractive women replied and I was like, “Fuck, I don’t want like anyone to get the wrong idea and to think that I’m hollering just at them or that I’m hollering at all, you know, and and so I didn’t reply to them, but I was like, “Oh my gosh, like this actually might be able to this could definitely get me in trouble a little bit. I could totally see it, right? When that when that kind of I sent you that message, it was kind of weird, right?
Shaan Puri: It was hilarious. Um, yeah, I could see, you know, same thing with somebody else pointed this out too, which is like, let’s say you write a thread that goes viral, you might get 5,000 followers. You’re going to send out what, 5,000 auto DMs and then get like 2,000 random replies back. It’s going to like kind of ruin your inbox and maybe get you banned from Twitter, I don’t know, because it’ll just rate limit you. So, so I think there’s some problems with it. Maybe, maybe this guy’s built in some rules. Like for me, I would only want to do this. I would only want to DM somebody who has over X followers or that I, you know, I already follow or something like that. So then it kind of like limits the number of people this does it to. Or like I think you can. You need it to be like, hey, you know, only if it’s a, you know, farmer looking white boy, then send this so I don’t get in trouble with my wife, you know, like I I need it to be like this guy needs to have like, you know, Patel or Gupta in his last name if it’s going to send this auto DM so my Indian fanboys can uh can get these messages from me but not everybody else.
Sam Parr: Yeah, it it I could see it getting me in trouble. Um, all right, you want to do another one?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, let’s do one. Uh, okay, a little idea that I think is kind of interesting. Um, I don’t have a ton to say about the business, but it’s more like this is a a cool way to get ideas. So, this is my first time traveling with uh with babies and uh traveling with babies is like, you know, all the things you would expect, like on the plane, you know, kid pooped through his clothes, had to change it, you know, like on a tray table because we couldn’t stand up because the fast and seatbelt sign, the person next to us looking at us like we’re gross and what you’re supposed to do. Oh, that is disgusting. I mean, you are gross. Exactly. I know. I know. I agree. Um, but there’s a a bunch of problems. So like we had to take our car seats, right? Because you can’t just like be like, “Oh, I’ll get there.” You know, I used to pack light. I used to be like, “Cool, I’ll get there. I just need my phone, I’ll call an Uber, get to my hotel. If I’m missing something, I’ll just buy it there.” And with this, with kids, it’s like the opposite. It’s like can’t even get in an Uber because you have to like have a car seat, all that stuff. So I saw this business called BabyQuip. I thought it was kind of cool. It’s again, one of our like telltale signs is any business that shows up at the top of a Google popular Google search, but the website looks like it was last updated in like 1996, um, those are businesses that print money. And so it’s like, “Congratulations, you’ve identified a money printer.” And so I don’t know how successful BabyQuip is, but I would suspect it’s pretty good as a bootstrap business. And what it does is it’s basically a marketplace. So I could say, “Hey, I just landed in Las Vegas. I need two car seats.” I don’t want to lug two car seats, check them in, uh, you know, like on the floor like, you know, drag them to the airport, check them in, take them home, like just meet me at the airport with a car seat that I can just install into a rental car, or I can install into to to an Uber or whatever. Uh, and then like let me rent it for four days and then when I’m leaving, come pick it back up from the airport. And so that’s what BabyQuip is. It’s a baby equipment, but it’s a marketplace where people will bring you what you need. You need a stroller? I got a stroller for you. Don’t lug that heavy thing around. Just use mine when I’m here. Um, and I think people are making a lot of money. Just Google searching. I was like, I was Google searching and again, it’s a very good content play. I was Google searching “baby travel packing list.” So I was like, “Oh, what do I even what am I forgetting here?” And so they had a blog post. I was like, “Here’s all the things you need to pack for your baby.” And then at the bottom, it’s like, “By the way, if you don’t want to pack your stroller and car seats because they’re heavy as hell, like, you know, you could just use BabyQuip and get it when you’re there.” And I was like, click through and I was like, “This is cool.” And so I just thought this is like a very clever business that is a look for problems, look for annoyances, look for inconveniences, and then those become your opportunities if you can design a solution around them. So I just thought it was a clever little business.
Sam Parr: This is awesome. So BabyQuip is actually, it’s a peer-to-peer marketplace. So I don’t think you actually said that. I thought it was the company that would give you stuff. No, it’s just like Jane whose kid outgrew her car seat and she realizes she can make, you know, $200 a month just renting it out to people if she’s as long as she’s willing to go drop it off and pick it up from the airport.
Shaan Puri: I have they been around for a while and they haven’t it doesn’t look like they’ve raised money. Um, but yeah, they, you know, they are basically like just a kind of like a uh looks like a bootstrap business from everything I could tell. It launched in 2016. They’ve had over 30,000 orders. Uh I think they did a crowdfunding campaign at some point. So maybe there’s more data. And they’re on Shark Tank. This is kind of interesting. Now, I I’m not convinced that this is going this can be a huge, huge thing. But what what is actually what is actually interesting is let’s go to New York. It tells you how many reservations someone has ever had. I bet you that there could be like some mom who’s just dominated like a LA or a New York scene, like can just rank really high on all the uh all the big cities and lend out all their stuff. And so what it does is it it tells you how much it So what basically what happens is you land in New York, you but before you land, you tell BabyQuip, you hire Camila Shannon, who’s the top in New York. She’s rented it her stuff out 773 times and she’ll bring you any gear that you need and you can see all the gear that she has and she costs $40 to $60 to deliver the stuff to you, plus there’s gear for there’s a a car seat for $10 a day, there’s a playpen for $40 a day, there’s 15 pound dumbbells for $5 a day, there’s a This is crazy. This is awesome. This is a great find.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, so so another example of this, by the way, have you used or or probably not used, but you’re familiar with them, I’m assuming, Teachers Pay Teachers?
Sam Parr: No, what’s that?
Shaan Puri: You’ve never heard of Teachers Pay Teachers?
Sam Parr: No. Why? I mean, I don’t have kids.
Shaan Puri: That doesn’t doesn’t matter. This is just like one of those things that you know about because it’s just awesome and uh so Google Teachers Pay Teachers. So what this is is Oh my god. If you if you remember like a teacher spends a huge amount of time, every teacher spends a huge amount of time like creating their lesson plans and quizzes and tests and they have to like keep recreating like content basically for their little classroom of 30 people. It’s pretty inefficient, right? So you go you you teach kids all day, already kind of an exhausting thing. Now you go home and you um you have to grade papers, you have to come up with tomorrow’s lesson plan, and then you have to design the quiz for Thursday’s quiz, and then you have next Friday’s test. So you have all this stuff, you’re just constantly this content treadmill. And what Teachers Pay Teachers did, that was genius, was they said, “Look, that’s a lot of effort and you may not be the best person at coming up with a lesson plan or the quiz for this science topic. So why don’t we just create a marketplace where any teacher can list their lesson plans, their quizzes, their tests, and you can just find, go instead of just making your own, go on here for 10 bucks and go buy the best science thing for a fourth grader trying to learn about, you know, geology right now. And you just go buy the thing for 10 bucks and you saved four hours of time. And so it’s like a great trade. So Teachers Pay Teachers is a marketplace doing this. Some teachers were making millions of dollars just creating their uh putting their content up for sale here. The business itself does I think $300 plus million dollars a year in revenue. It was bought about by PE. In gross In gross revenue, yeah. Yeah, it was bought by a private equity firm and like just look at their traffic on this thing, man. It’s like over 30 million hits a month or something. Yeah. Holy fuck. So it’s an insane business. Um, beautiful business too because it’s like, wow, you turned some teachers who created amazing lessons and amazing tests and quizzes, you turned them into stars and millionaires, which is fantastic. I think the best teachers should be millionaires in the age of the internet. Uh there’s there’s no reason not that they shouldn’t be. On the other side, you saved a bunch of money uh and a bunch of sorry, you saved a bunch of time for all the other teachers so that they’re more rested and uh can go into class and perform instead of being, you know, like kind of falling behind constantly on the content treadmill. And so I thought this is like, you know, an amazing idea. Same it reminds me of the baby quip thing. Obviously this is much bigger, much more successful, but it’s like these niche kind of like pain points turned into, you know, marketplaces, solutions.
Sam Parr: This is badass. Maybe you could also do this for speeches. I uh I remember doing the uh my brother John um gave a really good wedding speeches. He gave a great best man speech and three people three people uh paid him money to write their speech. Uh and I think that you could do that for a I think you could start with just wedding speeches, but eventually do all other types of speeches.
Shaan Puri: Dude, that is hilarious. Somebody should absolutely do that because there’s a ton of Googling, right? Like when you have to give your speech, you’re like, “Oh god, pressure super high. Rep like how many reps have I had doing this? Zero. Um, okay, let me go to Google and let me try to get some inspiration. I’m going to try to get the ball rolling. Let me go and people go to YouTube and they try to watch like, you know, best best man speech ever, right? Best bridesmaid speech ever. And then you’re like, “Okay, like what am I going to do? Copy this? Not quite.” But if somebody created these templates, um, that could be pretty good. I I like that.
Sam Parr: Yeah, I actually think you could do that. There’s this company called Book in a Box, started by Tucker Max, who’s one of my investors. Before it was uh when they did Book in a Box, they would you’d pay them any number from $20 to $100,000 on a bunch of different options and they would write a book about your life. So you could like get speaking gigs or you could give to your kids or like whatever for any different reasons. You look like an expert, be a thought leader. And then a lot of their authors started getting speech offers, you know, they would someone would pay $10, $20, $30,000 to have someone come and talk about like best practices in meetings because some guy had wrote a book on how meetings suck and how to make them better. And then they created a new subsidiary that would write your do your PowerPoint and presentation for you and you’d pay more money for that. And I was like, “That’s cool. That should probably be the business more so than just the book thing.”
Shaan Puri: Right. Yeah, I like the the the micro-SaaS tool that does one simple thing that helps you win on a platform you’re already like trying to win on. That’s the key, right? So like I’m already trying to win on Twitter, I’m trying to win on Instagram, I’m trying to win on Reddit, whatever. And if you could build a micro-SaaS tool, it’s like here’s you know, other examples of them. Uh there’s uh what’s it called? Jungle Scout, which is for Amazon. So let’s say you’re trying to win as an FBA seller on on Amazon, so you’re selling a product on Amazon. Jungle Scout is this app you can use and it basically when you’re searching any Amazon like search search result, you can use you can open up Jungle Scout and it’ll basically tell you how much that product is worth, how much how much search volume there is for it, how competitive it is to be in that niche, and how much money they think that product is making so that you can find winning products that are like high demand, low competition, and then you could build a, you know, an FBA business in that niche. And so it’s a simple SaaS tool. I think Jungle Scout does some stupid amount of revenue too because they’re pretty expensive. They were recently um partially acquired by PE in the hundreds of millions of dollars valuation. Greg Mercer uh is is good friends with Neville and in Austin and uh he like uh this is I guess public. I mean, he’s got like a plane and shit. Uh so whatever it was sold for, like Neville will post pictures going to like Telluride in a private jet and I’m like, “Dude, whose jet was that?” He goes, “It’s Greg’s.”
Shaan Puri: But he’s the PE guy or he’s the Jungle Scout guy?
Sam Parr: The guy who sold part of the company, who started it.
Shaan Puri: Gotcha. Yeah, so so super simple tool that just helped you win there and they just built they just kind of like dominate that one niche of like FBA, you know, FBA selling or in this case, Twitter automations, right? So, oh, somebody and so I like this a lot. I need something like this uh for me because I’m trying to basically grow my audience on Twitter and then cool, the less work I can do, the better, right? Like I love digital sales people. All right, a digital salesperson. That’s what I think about when I think about landing pages or like this like little like automations. That’s a digital salesperson. That’s somebody who’s going to work 24/7 for me for zero cost or, you know, in this case, whatever it was, $29 a month. Um, that’s their salary and they’re going to do exactly what I say every single time, predictably and uh they’re just going to generate more value for me. And so I look at my landing page like a digital salesperson. I look at my automations like ConvertKit, things like that, as digital sales people. And uh yeah, this is a really cool one. I like this a lot. Now, I can see this getting really annoying. I mean, people hate getting these auto DMs, but uh it still will work.
Sam Parr: Yeah, yeah. It it it might be annoying, but I actually just made mine. It just says, “Hey, exclamation point, thanks for following.” Now, here’s the problem that I already found. So I it’s already sent out a couple hundred messages for me. I guess I get maybe 500 to 1,000 new followers a day. This uh I feel like a douche saying that. This a couple women replied. Yeah, so a couple like really attractive women replied and or replied saying like, “Hey, what’s going on? You know, like your work.” Basically they replied actually. Yeah, so like these like attractive women replied and I was like, “Fuck, I don’t want like anyone to get the wrong idea and to think that I’m hollering just at them or that I’m hollering at all, you know, and and so I didn’t reply to them, but I was like, “Oh my gosh, like this actually might be able to this could definitely get me in trouble a little bit. I could totally see it, right? When that when that kind of I sent you that message, it was kind of weird, right?
Shaan Puri: It was hilarious. Um, yeah, I could see, you know, same thing with somebody else pointed this out too, which is like, let’s say you write a thread that goes viral, you might get 5,000 followers. You’re going to send out what, 5,000 auto DMs and then get like 2,000 random replies back. It’s going to like kind of ruin your inbox and maybe get you banned from Twitter, I don’t know, because it’ll just rate limit you. So, so I think there’s some problems with it. Maybe, maybe this guy’s built in some rules. Like for me, I would only want to do this. I would only want to DM somebody who has over X followers or that I, you know, I already follow or something like that. So then it kind of like limits the number of people this does it to. Or like I think you can. You need it to be like, hey, you know, only if it’s a, you know, farmer looking white boy, then send this so I don’t get in trouble with my wife, you know, like I I need it to be like this guy needs to have like, you know, Patel or Gupta in his last name if it’s going to send this auto DM so my Indian fanboys can uh can get these messages from me but not everybody else.
Sam Parr: Yeah, it it I could see it getting me in trouble. Um, all right, you want to do another one?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, let’s do one. Uh, okay, a little idea that I think is kind of interesting. Um, I don’t have a ton to say about the business, but it’s more like this is a a cool way to get ideas. So, this is my first time traveling with uh with babies and uh traveling with babies is like, you know, all the things you would expect, like on the plane, you know, kid pooped through his clothes, had to change it, you know, like on a tray table because we couldn’t stand up because the fast and seatbelt sign, the person next to us looking at us like we’re gross and what you’re supposed to do. Oh, that is disgusting. I mean, you are gross. Exactly. I know. I know. I agree. Um, but there’s a a bunch of problems. So like we had to take our car seats, right? Because you can’t just like be like, “Oh, I’ll get there.” You know, I used to pack light. I used to be like, “Cool, I’ll get there. I just need my phone, I’ll call an Uber, get to my hotel. If I’m missing something, I’ll just buy it there.” And with this, with kids, it’s like the opposite. It’s like can’t even get in an Uber because you have to like have a car seat, all that stuff. So I saw this business called BabyQuip. I thought it was kind of cool. It’s again, one of our like telltale signs is any business that shows up at the top of a Google popular Google search, but the website looks like it was last updated in like 1996, um, those are businesses that print money. And so it’s like, “Congratulations, you’ve identified a money printer.” And so I don’t know how successful BabyQuip is, but I would suspect it’s pretty good as a bootstrap business. And what it does is it’s basically a marketplace. So I could say, “Hey, I just landed in Las Vegas. I need two car seats.” I don’t want to lug two car seats, check them in, uh, you know, like on the floor like, you know, drag them to the airport, check them in, take them home, like just meet me at the airport with a car seat that I can just install into a rental car, or I can install into to to an Uber or whatever. Uh, and then like let me rent it for four days and then when I’m leaving, come pick it back up from the airport. And so that’s what BabyQuip is. It’s a baby equipment, but it’s a marketplace where people will bring you what you need. You need a stroller? I got a stroller for you. Don’t lug that heavy thing around. Just use mine when I’m here. Um, and I think people are making a lot of money. Just Google searching. I was like, I was Google searching and again, it’s a very good content play. I was Google searching “baby travel packing list.” So I was like, “Oh, what do I even what am I forgetting here?” And so they had a blog post. I was like, “Here’s all the things you need to pack for your baby.” And then at the bottom, it’s like, “By the way, if you don’t want to pack your stroller and car seats because they’re heavy as hell, like, you know, you could just use BabyQuip and get it when you’re there.” And I was like, click through and I was like, “This is cool.” And so I just thought this is like a very clever business that is a look for problems, look for annoyances, look for inconveniences, and then those become your opportunities if you can design a solution around them. So I just thought it was a clever little business.
Sam Parr: This is awesome. So BabyQuip is actually, it’s a peer-to-peer marketplace. So I don’t think you actually said that. I thought it was the company that would give you stuff. No, it’s just like Jane whose kid outgrew her car seat and she realizes she can make, you know, $200 a month just renting it out to people if she’s as long as she’s willing to go drop it off and pick it up from the airport.
Shaan Puri: I have they been around for a while and they haven’t it doesn’t look like they’ve raised money. Um, but yeah, they, you know, they are basically like just a kind of like a uh looks like a bootstrap business from everything I could tell. It launched in 2016. They’ve had over 30,000 orders. Uh I think they did a crowdfunding campaign at some point. So maybe there’s more data. And they’re on Shark Tank. This is kind of interesting. Now, I I’m not convinced that this is going this can be a huge, huge thing. But what what is actually what is actually interesting is let’s go to New York. It tells you how many reservations someone has ever had. I bet you that there could be like some mom who’s just dominated like a LA or a New York scene, like can just rank really high on all the uh all the big cities and lend out all their stuff. And so what it does is it it tells you how much it So what basically what happens is you land in New York, you but before you land, you tell BabyQuip, you hire Camila Shannon, who’s the top in New York. She’s rented it her stuff out 773 times and she’ll bring you any gear that you need and you can see all the gear that she has and she costs $40 to $60 to deliver the stuff to you, plus there’s gear for there’s a a car seat for $10 a day, there’s a playpen for $40 a day, there’s 15 pound dumbbells for $5 a day, there’s a This is crazy. This is awesome. This is a great find.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, so so another example of this, by the way, have you used or or probably not used, but you’re familiar with them, I’m assuming, Teachers Pay Teachers?
Sam Parr: No, what’s that?
Shaan Puri: You’ve never heard of Teachers Pay Teachers?
Sam Parr: No. Why? I mean, I don’t have kids.
Shaan Puri: That doesn’t doesn’t matter. This is just like one of those things that you know about because it’s just awesome and uh so Google Teachers Pay Teachers. So what this is is Oh my god. If you if you remember like a teacher spends a huge amount of time, every teacher spends a huge amount of time like creating their lesson plans and quizzes and tests and they have to like keep recreating like content basically for their little classroom of 30 people. It’s pretty inefficient, right? So you go you you teach kids all day, already kind of an exhausting thing. Now you go home and you um you have to grade papers, you have to come up with tomorrow’s lesson plan, and then you have to design the quiz for Thursday’s quiz, and then you have next Friday’s test. So you have all this stuff, you’re just constantly this content treadmill. And what Teachers Pay Teachers did, that was genius, was they said, “Look, that’s a lot of effort and you may not be the best person at coming up with a lesson plan or the quiz for this science topic. So why don’t we just create a marketplace where any teacher can list their lesson plans, their quizzes, their tests, and you can just find, go instead of just making your own, go on here for 10 bucks and go buy the best science thing for a fourth grader trying to learn about, you know, geology right now. And you just go buy the thing for 10 bucks and you saved four hours of time. And so it’s like a great trade. So Teachers Pay Teachers is a marketplace doing this. Some teachers were making millions of dollars just creating their uh putting their content up for sale here. The business itself does I think $300 plus million dollars a year in revenue. It was bought about by PE. In gross In gross revenue, yeah. Yeah, it was bought by a private equity firm and like just look at their traffic on this thing, man. It’s like over 30 million hits a month or something. Yeah. Holy fuck. So it’s an insane business. Um, beautiful business too because it’s like, wow, you turned some teachers who created amazing lessons and amazing tests and quizzes, you turned them into stars and millionaires, which is fantastic. I think the best teachers should be millionaires in the age of the internet. Uh there’s there’s no reason not that they shouldn’t be. On the other side, you saved a bunch of money uh and a bunch of sorry, you saved a bunch of time for all the other teachers so that they’re more rested and uh can go into class and perform instead of being, you know, like kind of falling behind constantly on the content treadmill. And so I thought this is like, you know, an amazing idea. Same it reminds me of the baby quip thing. Obviously this is much bigger, much more successful, but it’s like these niche kind of like pain points turned into, you know, marketplaces, solutions.
Sam Parr: This is badass. Maybe you could also do this for speeches. I uh I remember doing the uh my brother John um gave a really good wedding speeches. He gave a great best man speech and three people three people uh paid him money to write their speech. Uh and I think that you could do that for a I think you could start with just wedding speeches, but eventually do all other types of speeches.
Shaan Puri: Dude, that is hilarious. Somebody should absolutely do that because there’s a ton of Googling, right? Like when you have to give your speech, you’re like, “Oh god, pressure super high. Rep like how many reps have I had doing this? Zero. Um, okay, let me go to Google and let me try to get some inspiration. I’m going to try to get the ball rolling. Let me go and people go to YouTube and they try to watch like, you know, best best man speech ever, right? Best bridesmaid speech ever. And then you’re like, “Okay, like what am I going to do? Copy this? Not quite.” But if somebody created these templates, um, that could be pretty good. I I like that.
Sam Parr: Yeah, I actually think you could do that. There’s this company called Book in a Box, started by Tucker Max, who’s one of my investors. Before it was uh when they did Book in a Box, they would you’d pay them any number from $20 to $100,000 on a bunch of different options and they would write a book about your life. So you could like get speaking gigs or you could give to your kids or like whatever for any different reasons. You look like an expert, be a thought leader. And then a lot of their authors started getting speech offers, you know, they would someone would pay $10, $20, $30,000 to have someone come and talk about like best practices in meetings because some guy had wrote a book on how meetings suck and how to make them better. And then they created a new subsidiary that would write your do your PowerPoint and presentation for you and you’d pay more money for that. And I was like, “That’s cool. That should probably be the business more so than just the book thing.”
Shaan Puri: Right. Yeah, I like the the the micro-SaaS tool that does one simple thing that helps you win on a platform you’re already like trying to win on. That’s the key, right? So like I’m already trying to win on Twitter, I’m trying to win on Instagram, I’m trying to win on Reddit, whatever. And if you could build a micro-SaaS tool, it’s like here’s you know, other examples of them. Uh there’s uh what’s it called? Jungle Scout, which is for Amazon. So let’s say you’re trying to win as an FBA seller on on Amazon, so you’re selling a product on Amazon. Jungle Scout is this app you can use and it basically when you’re searching any Amazon like search search result, you can use you can open up Jungle Scout and it’ll basically tell you how much that product is worth, how much how much search volume there is for it, how competitive it is to be in that niche, and how much money they think that product is making so that you can find winning products that are like high demand, low competition, and then you could build a, you know, an FBA business in that niche. And so it’s a simple SaaS tool. I think Jungle Scout does some stupid amount of revenue too because they’re pretty expensive. They were recently um partially acquired by PE in the hundreds of millions of dollars valuation. Greg Mercer uh is is good friends with Neville and in Austin and uh he like uh this is I guess public. I mean, he’s got like a plane and shit. Uh so whatever it was sold for, like Neville will post pictures going to like Telluride in a private jet and I’m like, “Dude, whose jet was that?” He goes, “It’s Greg’s.”
Shaan Puri: But he’s the PE guy or he’s the Jungle Scout guy?
Sam Parr: The guy who sold part of the company, who started it.
Shaan Puri: Gotcha. Yeah, so so super simple tool that just helped you win there and they just built they just kind of like dominate that one niche of like FBA, you know, FBA selling or in this case, Twitter automations, right? So, oh, somebody and so I like this a lot. I need something like this uh for me because I’m trying to basically grow my audience on Twitter and then cool, the less work I can do, the better, right? Like I love digital sales people. All right, a digital salesperson. That’s what I think about when I think about landing pages or like this like little like automations. That’s a digital salesperson. That’s somebody who’s going to work 24/7 for me for zero cost or, you know, in this case, whatever it was, $29 a month. Um, that’s their salary and they’re going to do exactly what I say every single time, predictably and uh they’re just going to generate more value for me. And so I look at my landing page like a digital salesperson. I look at my automations like ConvertKit, things like that, as digital sales people. And uh yeah, this is a really cool one. I like this a lot. Now, I can see this getting really annoying. I mean, people hate getting these auto DMs, but uh it still will work.
Sam Parr: Yeah, yeah. It it it might be annoying, but I actually just made mine. It just says, “Hey, exclamation point, thanks for following.” Now, here’s the problem that I already found. So I it’s already sent out a couple hundred messages for me. I guess I get maybe 500 to 1,000 new followers a day. This uh I feel like a douche saying that. This a couple women replied. Yeah, so a couple like really attractive women replied and or replied saying like, “Hey, what’s going on? You know, like your work.” Basically they replied actually. Yeah, so like these like attractive women replied and I was like, “Fuck, I don’t want like anyone to get the wrong idea and to think that I’m hollering just at them or that I’m hollering at all, you know, and and so I didn’t reply to them, but I was like, “Oh my gosh, like this actually might be able to this could definitely get me in trouble a little bit. I could totally see it, right? When that when that kind of I sent you that message, it was kind of weird, right?
Shaan Puri: It was hilarious. Um, yeah, I could see, you know, same thing with somebody else pointed this out too, which is like, let’s say you write a thread that goes viral, you might get 5,000 followers. You’re going to send out what, 5,000 auto DMs and then get like 2,000 random replies back. It’s going to like kind of ruin your inbox and maybe get you banned from Twitter, I don’t know, because it’ll just rate limit you. So, so I think there’s some problems with it. Maybe, maybe this guy’s built in some rules. Like for me, I would only want to do this. I would only want to DM somebody who has over X followers or that I, you know, I already follow or something like that. So then it kind of like limits the number of people this does it to. Or like I think you can. You need it to be like, hey, you know, only if it’s a, you know, farmer looking white boy, then send this so I don’t get in trouble with my wife, you know, like I I need it to be like this guy needs to have like, you know, Patel or Gupta in his last name if it’s going to send this auto DM so my Indian fanboys can uh can get these messages from me but not everybody else.
Sam Parr: Yeah, it it I could see it getting me in trouble. Um, all right, you want to do another one?
Shaan Puri: Yeah, let’s do one. Uh, okay, a little idea that I think is kind of interesting. Um, I don’t have a ton to say about the business, but it’s more like this is a a cool way to get ideas. So, this is my first time traveling with uh with babies and uh traveling with babies is like, you know, all the things you would expect, like on the plane, you know, kid pooped through his clothes, had to change it, you know, like on a tray table because we couldn’t stand up because the fast and seatbelt sign, the person next to us looking at us like we’re gross and what you’re supposed to do. Oh, that is disgusting. I mean, you are gross. Exactly. I know. I know. I agree. Um, but there’s a a bunch of problems. So like we had to take our car seats, right? Because you can’t just like be like, “Oh, I’ll get there.” You know, I used to pack light. I used to be like, “Cool, I’ll get there. I just need my phone, I’ll call an Uber, get to my hotel. If I’m missing something, I’ll just buy it there.” And with this, with kids, it’s like the opposite. It’s like can’t even get in an Uber because you have to like have a car seat, all that stuff. So I saw this business called BabyQuip. I thought it was kind of cool. It’s again, one of our like telltale signs is any business that shows up at the top of a Google popular Google search, but the website looks like it was last updated in like 1996, um, those are businesses that print money. And so it’s like, “Congratulations, you’ve identified a money printer.” And so I don’t know how successful BabyQuip is, but I would suspect it’s pretty good as a bootstrap business. And what it does is it’s basically a marketplace. So I could say, “Hey, I just landed in Las Vegas. I need two car seats.” I don’t want to lug two car seats, check them in, uh, you know, like on the floor like, you know, drag them to the airport, check them in, take them home, like just meet me at the airport with a car seat that I can just install into a rental car, or I can install into to to an Uber or whatever. Uh, and then like let me rent it for four days and then when I’m leaving, come pick it back up from the airport. And so that’s what BabyQuip is. It’s a baby equipment, but it’s a marketplace where people will bring you what you need. You need a stroller? I got a stroller for you. Don’t lug that heavy thing around. Just use mine when I’m here. Um, and I think people are making a lot of money. Just Google searching. I was like, I was Google searching and again, it’s a very good content play. I was Google searching “baby travel packing list.” So I was like, “Oh, what do I even what am I forgetting here?” And so they had a blog post. I was like, “Here’s all the things you need to pack for your baby.” And then at the bottom, it’s like, “By the way, if you don’t want to pack your stroller and car seats because they’re heavy as hell, like, you know, you could just use BabyQuip and get it when you’re there.” And I was like, click through and I was like, “This is cool.” And so I just thought this is like a very clever business that is a look for problems, look for annoyances, look for inconveniences, and then those become your opportunities if you can design a solution around them. So I just thought it was a clever little business.
Sam Parr: This is awesome. So BabyQuip is actually, it’s a peer-to-peer marketplace. So I don’t think you actually said that. I thought it was the company that would give you stuff. No, it’s just like Jane whose kid outgrew her car seat and she realizes she can make, you know, $200 a month just renting it out to people if she’s as long as she’s willing to go drop it off and pick it up from the airport.
Shaan Puri: I have they been around for a while and they haven’t it doesn’t look like they’ve raised money. Um, but yeah, they, you know, they are basically like just a kind of like a uh looks like a bootstrap business from everything I could tell. It launched in 2016. They’ve had over 30,000 orders. Uh I think they did a crowdfunding campaign at some point. So maybe there’s more data. And they’re on Shark Tank. This is kind of interesting. Now, I I’m not convinced that this is going this can be a huge, huge thing. But what what is actually what is actually interesting is let’s go to New York. It tells you how many reservations someone has ever had. I bet you that there could be like some mom who’s just dominated like a LA or a New York scene, like can just rank really high on all the uh all the big cities and lend out all their stuff. And so what it does is it it tells you how much it So what basically what happens is you land in New York, you but before you land, you tell BabyQuip, you hire Camila Shannon, who’s the top in New York. She’s rented it her stuff out 773 times and she’ll bring you any gear that you need and you can see all the gear that she has and she costs $40 to $60 to deliver the stuff to you, plus there’s gear for there’s a a car seat for $10 a day, there’s a playpen for $40 a day, there’s 15 pound dumbbells for $5 a day, there’s a This is crazy. This is awesome. This is a great find.
Shaan Puri: Yeah, so so another example of this, by the way, have you used or or probably not used, but you’re familiar with them, I’m assuming, Teachers Pay Teachers?
Sam Parr: No, what’s that?
Shaan Puri: You’ve never heard of Teachers Pay Teachers?
Sam Parr: No. Why? I mean, I don’t have kids.
Shaan Puri: That doesn’t doesn’t matter. This is just like one of those things that you know about because it’s just awesome and uh so Google Teachers Pay Teachers. So what this is is Oh my god. If you if you remember like a teacher spends a huge amount of time, every teacher spends a huge amount of time like creating their lesson plans and quizzes and tests and they have to like keep recreating like content basically for their little classroom of 30 people. It’s pretty inefficient, right? So you go you you teach kids all day, already kind of an exhausting thing. Now you go home and you um you have to grade papers, you have to come up with tomorrow’s lesson plan, and then you have to design the quiz for Thursday’s quiz, and then you have next Friday’s test. So you have all this stuff, you’re just constantly this content treadmill. And what Teachers Pay Teachers did, that was genius, was they said, “Look, that’s a lot of effort and you may not be the best person at coming up with a lesson plan or the quiz for this science topic. So why don’t we just create a marketplace where any teacher can list their lesson plans, their quizzes, their tests, and you can just find, go instead of just making your own, go on here for 10 bucks and go buy the best science thing for a fourth grader trying to learn about, you know, geology right now. And you just go buy the thing for 10 bucks and you saved four hours of time. And so it’s like a great trade. So Teachers Pay Teachers is a marketplace doing this. Some teachers were making millions of dollars just creating their uh putting their content up for sale here. The business itself does I think $300 plus million dollars a year in revenue. It was bought about by PE. In gross In gross revenue, yeah. Yeah, it was bought by a private equity firm and like just look at their traffic on this thing, man. It’s like over 30 million hits a month or something. Yeah. Holy fuck. So it’s an insane business. Um, beautiful business too because it’s like, wow, you turned some teachers who created amazing lessons and amazing tests and quizzes, you turned them into stars and millionaires, which is fantastic. I think the best teachers should be millionaires in the age of the internet. Uh there’s there’s no reason not that they shouldn’t be. On the other side, you saved a bunch of money uh and a bunch of sorry, you saved a bunch of time for all the other teachers so that they’re more rested and uh can go into class and perform instead of being, you know, like kind of falling behind constantly on the content treadmill. And so I thought this is like, you know, an amazing idea. Same it reminds me of the baby quip thing. Obviously this is much bigger, much more successful, but it’s like these niche kind of like pain points turned into, you know, marketplaces, solutions.
Sam Parr: This is badass. Maybe you could also do this for speeches. I uh I remember doing the uh my brother John um gave a really good wedding speeches. He gave a great best man speech and three people three people uh paid him money to write their speech. Uh and I think that you could do that for a I think you could start with just wedding speeches, but eventually do all other types of speeches.
Shaan Puri: Dude, that is hilarious. Somebody should absolutely do that because there’s a ton of Googling, right? Like when you have to give your speech, you’re like, “Oh god, pressure super high. Rep like how many reps have I had doing this? Zero. Um, okay, let me go to Google and let me try to get some inspiration. I’m going to try to get the ball rolling. Let me go and people go to YouTube and they try to watch like, you know, best best man speech ever, right? Best bridesmaid speech ever. And then you’re like, “Okay, like what am I going to do? Copy this? Not quite.” But if somebody created these templates, um, that could be pretty good. I I like that.
Sam Parr: Yeah, I actually think you could do that. There’s this company called Book in a Box, started by Tucker Max, who’s one of my investors. Before it was uh when they did Book in a Box, they would you’d pay them any number from $20 to $100,000 on a bunch of different options and they would write a book about your life. So you could like get speaking gigs or you could give to your kids or like whatever for any different reasons. You look like an expert, be a thought leader. And then a lot of their authors started getting speech offers, you know, they would someone would pay $10, $20, $30,000 to have someone come and talk about like best practices in meetings because some guy had wrote a book on how meetings suck and how to make them better. And then they created a new subsidiary that would write your do your PowerPoint and presentation for you and you’d pay more money for that. And I was like, “That’s cool. That should probably be the business more so than just the book thing.”
Shaan Puri: Right. Yeah, I like the the the micro-SaaS tool that does one simple thing that helps you win on a platform you’re already like trying to win on. That’s the key, right? So like I’m already trying to win on Twitter, I’m trying to win on Instagram, I’m trying to win on Reddit, whatever. And if you could build a micro-SaaS tool, it’s like here’s you know, other examples of them. Uh there’s uh what’s it called? Jungle Scout, which is for Amazon. So let’s say you’re trying to win as an FBA seller on on Amazon, so you’re selling a product on Amazon. Jungle Scout is this app you can use and it basically when you’re searching any Amazon like search search result, you can use you can open up Jungle Scout and it’ll basically tell you how much that product is worth, how much how much search volume there is for it, how competitive it is to be in that niche, and how much money they think that product is making so that you can find winning products that are like high demand, low competition, and then you could build a, you know, an FBA business in that niche. And so it’s a simple SaaS tool. I think Jungle Scout does some stupid amount of revenue too because they’re pretty expensive. They were recently um partially acquired by PE in the hundreds of millions of dollars valuation. Greg Mercer uh is is good friends with Neville and in Austin and uh he like uh this is I guess public. I mean, he’s got like a plane and shit. Uh so whatever it was sold for, like Neville will post pictures going to like Telluride in a private jet and I’m like, “Dude, whose jet was that?” He goes, “It’s Greg’s.”
Shaan Puri: But he’s the PE guy or he’s the Jungle Scout