Sam and Shaan cover a wide range of business ideas including building a Barstool Sports equivalent for the tech industry, interactive coding course platforms, internal company podcasting, crime walks and experiential tours (crime walks, Coach K’s fantasy camp, Museum Hack), “manhood as a service” physical challenge events, and a rent-the-chicken side hustle. The episode closes with a long riff on productive procrastination, effective vs. efficient work styles, and the Eisenhower Matrix.
Speakers: Sam Parr (host, co-founder of The Hustle), Shaan Puri (host, former Twitch/Bebo)
Podcast Growth Update [00:00:00]
Sam: So we’re going to talk about what you guys can expect in today’s episode. But first — we just went from 80th in our category on the iTunes store to number 14. That’s a big deal to us, and one of the reasons why we did it was because you folks who are listening clicked the subscribe button. So if you’re using iTunes or an Apple product, please go to our My First Million page and click subscribe. Then email a screenshot to mfm@thehustle.co and we’ll give you a shout-out on the podcast. We’ll actually do a call-out at the end of this episode for everyone who did it previously.
Shaan: Yeah, we got a bunch of topics I’m excited about today. We talked about creating Barstool Sports for the tech industry, internal company podcasting platforms like Spoken, and then we went on a crazy detour — crime walks, manhood as a service, rent a chicken. We had a bunch of good topics this week. If you like ideas, you’re going to love this episode. Sometimes we’re a little light on ideas — we were super heavy on ideas today.
iTunes Rankings and Podcast Growth Mechanics [00:02:00]
Sam: So we were just talking for a few minutes about podcast updates. What I was about to tell you, Shaan, is I have this doc I’m going to send you. Have you seen how the podcast goes in the email every day now?
Shaan: I have not seen that.
Sam: Yeah, and I’m the one writing it. We set this up so you’re going to see the clicks in the document I sent you every day. Anyway, it’s going well. Did you see that graph I tweeted out?
Shaan: You sent a graph of the iTunes rankings for us in the business category — it’s a pretty big category. We usually hovered between 80 and 100. And then Sam takes over growth and — boom — step change. We’re up to number 20 for the last week or two. You could just see when you started working on it, it’s like a direct thing. Which reminds me of a lesson I always teach everyone on our team: there are lots of marketing things you’ll do where you’re like, “did it work?” and it’s like, I don’t know. But no — just show me the revenue graph, show me the user graph. If I can’t see that something happened on this day, it didn’t work enough. When you’re on a small project you need step changes — not 1%, you need 10%, 30%, 50% type changes.
Sam: Where we are now is — and you and I are both capable of doing this — it takes about two weeks. Took me about two weeks to talk to people and look at the numbers and then it was like, okay, I now know if I only do this I’m going to be mostly there. What I’ve learned is: it’s getting people to click the subscribe button on iTunes. If I get people to do that, mostly everything will be fine.
Shaan: That’s going to sound overly simplistic. It’s like saying “all I gotta do is get checkmate and then I win chess.” Well, yeah, but how do you get people to click the subscribe button? That’s the question.
Sam: It is not overly simplistic — it is simple. Get people to click that button. The not-simple part is how I’m going to get people to click the button, but the way to grow is simple. And we’ve got loads of ways. For one, I’m just asking people. We asked people to leave a review the other day and that day we had 600 reviews. Do you know how many we have now?
Shaan: I don’t know — a few hundred came through?
Sam: 1,400. We added 800 reviews just off of a quick one-minute ask.
Shaan: Right. It wasn’t rocket science.
Sam: Exactly. It was sincere but it wasn’t complicated.
Two Observations on Growth: Intensity and Simple First Steps [00:07:30]
Shaan: One of the reasons I want to share how we grow this podcast is because what we’re doing is stuff people can learn to grow whatever their thing is. So far, two observations.
Number one: intensity. When Sam does something he really throws himself in, in a more intense way than the average person. The average person thinks they’re doing it, and then you watch Sam’s level of aggression and intensity and you’re like, oh, okay — that’s what a level 12 looks like.
Number two: start with the stupid simple stuff. We want subscribers — well, have we just asked people to subscribe? Have we tweeted saying go subscribe? Have we said it on the podcast? That takes zero effort but yields real gains because it’s just low-hanging fruit. A lot of smart people would have talked themselves out of that — they’d be afraid to ask anybody for anything, afraid of getting rejected, afraid of coming across as a salesperson or beggar. And secondly, they would have over-complicated things. They’d say, “I’ve gotta go do this sophisticated strategy,” when you haven’t even tried the dumb strategy first.
Sam: I completely agree. And that’s why I always make this joke — when I meet really smart people… we interviewed Naval the other day and he was one of the most high-IQ people I’ve ever spoken to. I think he might be the highest-IQ person I’ve ever talked to. And when I was talking to him I was actually wondering — for the longest time I thought you want your IQ to be just above average but not really high, because the really smart people I meet often talk themselves out of anything. I think being just slightly above average might be optimal. That’s the sweet spot.
Shaan: I know where you’re going with this. I’ve got a strong opinion on it. You want to do Barstool for tech?
Barstool Sports for the Tech Industry [00:11:00]
Sam: Yeah, so this is something I’ve talked about many times. Barstool is a super interesting company to me — not just as a fan, I’m more interested in the business behind it. They basically went into sports media, which was dominated by ESPN. Dave Portnoy started with nothing — literally writing a newspaper himself and going down to the subway to hand it out to people before they got on their morning commute. He was the writer, the editor, the paperboy. And ultimately they sold for around $650-675 million. Great outcome, and a lot of people really love Barstool.
So why doesn’t this exist in the world of business or tech? If you listen to Dave’s early interviews he says: we are an entertainment company. That’s the first thing. We’re trying to make people laugh and have a good time. ESPN’s mindset is news, information, analysis. Barstool has no rights to the games, they don’t bid for them, they don’t own NBA or NFL games, they don’t do much analysis — but they really focus on making people laugh.
I think the world of business is full of ESPNs — information, analysis, the official broadcast of content. I think somebody should make Barstool for tech. I’m here to make you laugh. You’re into the business world, the tech world, the startup world — pick your niche. Every day we’re going to report news that makes you laugh. There’s the Onion, which kind of does that, and there was Valleywag which took gossip into business and tech — they got sued out of business eventually, but they were popular for a while. I think if there’s a Dave Portnoy out there who’s funny as hell and interested in this stuff, you could build a media company doing this. That’s my theory.
Shaan: I don’t disagree with you — I think it would work if you could pull it off. Let me explain why it’s hard to pull off. When you’re a sports journalist who happens to be funny, you don’t have many options — local newspaper, maybe ESPN. Regardless, if you’re lucky you make $150K a year. But if you’re smart enough to do this for business and you’re funny, you likely can get paid a ton of money as an analyst, an investor, or an operator. Why would I make fun of people for $80K when I could go trade stocks, invest in companies, or start a company? That’s the problem. The end goal in sports journalism is to be a journalist. When you cover business and tech, the end goal is to start or join an early-stage company. That’s the rub.
Sam: I agree there’s a higher opportunity cost. But here’s the kicker — I think this could be fun. There’s enough people out there that can’t parlay that smart-and-funny combination elsewhere. You kind of need just-above-average IQ and then two standard deviations above average internet funniness to make this work.
Here’s my pitch — and I’m looking at you, Trung. Trung, this is what you should do: leave The Hustle, leave HubSpot, and create Barstool for tech. You’re already doing it on Twitter. But here’s the kicker — here’s how you make it more valuable. It’s not just a media company. It would actually be an investment fund. You’re a VC fund whose brand is built through journalism, whose distribution for helping companies is through your media arm. You’re a media arm whose business model is your VC fund.
Shaan: That would work, but you need to be a VC fund first that then hires content people and offers them upside. You’re a VC fund in disguise.
And Trung came to mind because he did a tweet the other day about Steve Ballmer — when he first joined Microsoft, here’s his salary, then he renegotiated and got this much equity, which turned him into a 30-billion-dollar person, and by the way the whole thing he’s wearing the same white New Balance dad shoes. “Anything is possible.” That’s the perfect blend — a useful information nugget wrapped in a joke. That’s the model.
Sam: So I’m bullish on this. And also — the type of person who makes them great also makes them a pain in the ass to work with. What makes them good is that they come up with stuff off the cuff. But sometimes you need people to do things. I’m kind of like this — I showed up ten minutes late today. You hate that. I wasn’t trying to be late, but I’m late. But I’m also good at what I do. You can find so many people who show up on time. It’s hard to find somebody who’s going to consistently create great content.
Shaan: That’s the rub with talent.
Slip.so: Interactive Coding Courses (Codecademy in a Box) [00:19:30]
Shaan: You want to talk about Slip? You were quite interested in this. And I know what you’re going to say — you posted it in Slack and I said “I hate course businesses.”
Sam: Yeah, I’m basing this on you.
Shaan: A company that publishes courses is awesome to own, horrible to invest in — am I wrong?
Sam: Maybe. Let me explain what Slip is. The domain is slip.so. It’s a company I’m potentially looking at investing in. I saw it and immediately was like, this is a smart idea. What they did is make it easy for any developer to create a course to teach some programming — a language, how to build X, how to make X go faster. Any developer teaching other developers.
Why do you need a new platform for this? Why can’t you use Udemy or Udacity? Well, those platforms teach through video. You upload a video and maybe some text or PDF and people take it self-serve.
What Slip did is a little different. The best way to learn how to code online today is interactive — like Codecademy. If you’ve ever tried to learn to code, first you have to download the text editor, then download Python packages — what the hell is all this? I don’t even know what Python is yet, but I need that just to get started. What Codecademy did brilliantly was put it all in the browser. There’s a place to type, you don’t have to install anything. “Let variable equal a — now you made a variable called a. Level one complete.” You make a mistake, a hint pops up. It’s like a game.
What Slip did was make that Codecademy-style sandbox or toolkit available for any developer. Let’s say I’m a developer good at front-end development — making parallax scrolling websites. I want to teach that, but I don’t want to have to build the underlying infrastructure. So this is Codecademy in a box. Any developer can now create an interactive course and make money sharing what they know.
I think this is pretty cool. It’s very early — not much traction, just got started. What do you think?
Shaan: Have you done the math? How many teachers does he have? What does he charge?
Sam: I think if you’re a developer using it, he charges $30 a month plus 10% of course sales. He himself taught a course first — a course on learning Vim. He made $10-15K selling it. Then he was like, I should make this available for any developer. The guy who knows Solidity and wants to teach Ethereum programmers can now use the same toolkit.
Shaan: I wish this had started six years ago. These course platforms are actually booming right now. Do you know Thinkific?
Sam: I’ve heard of it — it’s like Kajabi, like Teachable, right?
Shaan: They went public yesterday. On the Toronto Stock Exchange. They only had $20 million in sales, broke even or lost a little money. They went from $10 million to $20 million in 2020. And their market cap is over a billion dollars.
Sam: Ankur started Teachable. When Teachable sold, it was around $250 million — and I think he was only doing $25 million a year in sales. He’d only raised $4 million. And now Thinkific has this massive valuation. I asked Ankur: why are these valuations so high? He said it’s the payments business. Once you get someone to start spending, you save their credit card and they continue buying. Investors value these companies highly because they want the payments revenue.
Shaan: The way I think about it: these are Shopify for education. Shopify lets anyone create a storefront — this lets any educator create a storefront to sell information. Super high margin. Shopify is a hundred-billion-dollar company. If education is even a hundred times smaller, that’s a billion-dollar company.
Sam: And Slip is differentiated. The developer ecosystem — developers teaching developers or aspiring developers — is quite different from Teachable/Kajabi/Thinkific, which are all basically the same: create a video library, charge students, they get access. Slip’s product is differentiated.
I saw it on Twitter — I think Zack, who scouts my feed, found it. As soon as I went to the landing page, something clicked. He’s under a thousand dollars of GMV right now, maybe a couple of teachers, been live a few weeks. What’s the URL — slip.so?
Shaan: Yeah. Look, it’s neat. I’ve always had a problem with course businesses because do you know what the finish rate is for courses?
Sam: Like 10%?
Shaan: Yeah. A hundred people buy it, only 10 finish if you’re lucky. I have a friend who just sold a course — couple thousand dollar ticket price — and I think 12 people had finished the course out of everyone who bought it. Less than 6%. He also said about 20-something percent got halfway through. He asked me, “did I make a shitty course?” And I said no, dude — this is just what self-serve education is. When it’s on-demand, I can go learn whenever I want. Even paying thousands of dollars isn’t enough skin in the game to actually do it. Counterintuitively.
Sam: That’s a great point — you paid $60K a year or whatever to go to Duke and you missed classes.
Shaan: I basically took a four-year piss down the drain of my college tuition — that’s how I’d describe that experience.
Anyway, that’s one of the reasons I’m not all gung-ho about course businesses. But not all have that low completion rate. I invested in Maven — Guggenbein’s company. He did Udemy, saw that low completion rate problem, and created this cohort-based course product. A batch of people come in, they do the thing for a defined period — five weeks, live instruction every week. Completion rates are way better. Lambda School, too — I invested in Lambda School early on and they had like an 80% completion rate. Because it’s live: you show up to class with other students and a teacher. And they do good filtering up top. Most course companies try to sell as many seats as possible. Lambda School is the opposite — like Harvard, they’re trying to only accept the 1% who are actually going to do the thing.
Sam: As a general rule, the usage kind of sucks.
Shaan: Dude, you have so many ideas today. Where did you find all this?
Sam: You inspired me. You were working on growth and I was like — if he’s doing growth, I better bring the heat on content.
Spoken: Internal Company Podcasting [00:30:00]
Sam: What the hell is Spoken? Sounds sick.
Shaan: Yes — Spoken. S-P-O-K-N. It’s podcasting inside companies. The URL is getspoken.com. Tell them I sent you.
When I first started this podcast I used to record out of a studio in San Francisco — there’s this old radio station place, and they converted radio studios to podcast studios. They were the only one in SF. A hundred bucks an hour, go record. I used to book on their little scheduler and some days it was all booked. I was talking to the guy and asked, “who the hell is booking all these hours?” He said, “sorry — Facebook booked all the hours.” I said, what do you mean Facebook? He goes, yeah, they have tons of podcasts internally. I was like, what? They have a manager’s manager podcast — it’s just an internal podcast for Facebook managers to talk about managing inside Facebook. And I was like, oh, that’s actually kind of smart.
We’ve talked about this before — internal media companies. A big opportunity. We’ve talked about it from a blogging standpoint, newsletters, central announcement dashboards, building tools for companies to better communicate. Building an internal high school newspaper, essentially.
Sam: Yes — the high school newspaper for your company.
Shaan: If you’re building one of these please reach out to me. I want to invest in all of these. I want to invest in like 20 of these companies.
With Spoken — companies will clearly pay for the platform, the recording, the library, and the private feed that only their company can access. The companies that need this are very large companies. I don’t know realistically how many people at Facebook are like — on my commute today I’m gonna listen to the manager podcast. Maybe nobody wants to hear this. But maybe they do. Maybe there’s interesting personalities. I know that if Twitch had an internal podcast, I would do one — on managing, product, innovation, whatever. And it’s a highly monetizable niche.
Sam: On the surface I think this is badass. We talked about this because I was publishing my 1-2-3 newsletter inside Twitch. I had this networking hack — I write this thing, send it to the 25-person exec team, and it’s just a great way to stay in front of people. Stays top of mind. Helps them get to know me. Takes me one hour and I essentially get an hour with all the execs. But I was sending it in Gmail — why isn’t there a Mailchimp or ConvertKit for sending stuff inside companies?
There’s a company called Recess — recess.io — started by Ryan Dice. It never really got off the ground, but it’s “easily send internal email newsletters and track results.” Basically what we’re describing. Episode 53 is where we talked about this idea, if people want to look it up.
Shaan: Spoken went through Y Combinator, class of W21. Started in 2018. I’m wondering why it hasn’t taken off more — three years in you’d think it would have more traction.
Sam: On the surface this is a brilliant idea. I’m wondering what’s going on and why it’s not kicking ass. I like this idea a little better as the newsletter version because I think it’s more accessible than podcasts. But both are cool. And if you’re a credible person, me and Sam will invest in this.
Crime Walk: The Airbnb Experience Making a Million [00:36:00]
Sam: Crime walk — what is this?
Shaan: So Airbnb has this experiences thing. I saw this experience and saw how much money it was making. Let me just read the description word for word: “First, let me say that most gangster tours in New York are total BS. This experience comes right from the horse’s mouth — no tour guide, no filter. Get real stories while visiting notorious gangland locations as we walk from East Village to Little Italy, experiencing what it was like to be an associate of New York’s famous Mafia families. You’ll hear first-hand accounts of New York City Mafia crimes and taste local cuisine.” It’s led by a retired NYPD officer.
I saw this and was like — this is such a good idea. I would do this if I was in New York.
Here’s the business: first of all, he charges around $120 to $130 per person, and in the description he says he’s had 8,000 guests. $123 times 8,000 is a million bucks exactly. That’s what caught my attention. Who’s built an Airbnb experience that made a million bucks?
Sam: So what’s the idea?
Shaan: This is a cool thing for a cop to do in retirement. I was telling you we had that police situation where we had to go do a shakedown — we brought a cop with us and became friends with her later. She was describing how hard it is to be a cop nowadays. Backlash, budget cuts, defund the police movements. And I was like, this is a cool thing for a retired cop to do.
It could also be applied to a retired SWAT officer, military veteran, firefighter, whatever. I think a lot of people — like little weaklings who spend all day behind a desk — want a safe way to taste adventure. What the real tough world looks like. That’s why Spartan Race does well. And similarly, I think crime walks would be huge.
Then I took it further — why don’t people do this with more things? Breweries do this already. They have the brewery itself plus the side business of tours. People come through, see how it’s made, taste the beers, take photos, buy stuff on the way out. Why doesn’t this happen with more things? When I visited the warehouse for my wife’s ecommerce business I was fascinated — 80,000 square feet, forklifts everywhere, seeing how fulfillment works. I think factories, warehouses, police stations, fire stations — they should all have this.
Sam: VaynerMedia did that. I don’t know about now with COVID, but prior it was like a $20 million a year business. Ten thousand dollars per person or per couple — you and your co-founder would go, the head of people would have a discussion with you, then eventually Gary would come in for half an hour. You learn how an agency works, walk around the office, see where the departments are. It was called the VaynerMedia “4 D’s” — daily digital deep dive.
Shaan: And you could go to their Eventbrite page, see how many seats they had, how many were taken. Ten grand. You’re a small agency owner, Gary Vee is your hero, VaynerMedia is where you want to be someday.
Sam: Coach K does this too. Duke basketball coach — most famous college basketball coach probably of all time. He coached the Dream Teams: LeBron, Kobe, those guys. He does Coach K’s Fantasy Camp every year. Almost identical to what we’re talking about.
Shaan: I heard about this when I was in college — my roommate was a manager on the team. He’d stay during summers to be the shuttle bus driver for the fantasy campers. He’s like, “I make a killing in tips. These guys will just hand me hundreds when they get out for the 5-minute ride to the gym.”
So you pay $10,000, you go to Duke campus for five days, you live like a player. Stay in the dorms or right near campus. Come into Cameron Indoor Stadium — the hallowed ground — and Coach K takes you through camp. You’re on the court, shooting, doing the drills the players do. You get the motivational talk. He brings in old players — Carlos Boozer, JJ Redick. You get autographs, you wear the jersey, you go into the locker room, they play the sounds when you come out. Your dad bod coming out the side of the jersey. “Here comes Duke!” And these campers are all CEOs or hedge fund guys — they actually want the business network too.
Sam: Here’s how you could do this as a hustler: go to, say, Grant Cardone — people who are high-profile but still need money. I don’t think you could do this with LeBron necessarily, but a college football coach, a famous high school coach, a CEO. You basically create the same fantasy camp setup. “Hey, I’ll run this whole thing for you. I just want 20% of profits. When I bring people over, you come out, kiss babies, shake hands, let me handle the rest.” It’s a way to attach yourself to an influential person and create this business line from scratch, offering it to their fans.
Shaan: And honestly this is something I’ve thought about doing because I enjoy physical work. Whenever I’m done working on my current thing, I’m either going to read a book and master a niche like crime in New York or the Gold Rush in San Francisco — or I’m going to start a landscaping company. Something I’m outside all day working really hard. I truly believe I could turn it into a million-dollar-a-year company inside six months. The reason this fascinates me: too many people are trying to make money on the internet when they could probably crush it doing something outside that is totally unscalable. “Oh, it won’t scale.” I’m like — who cares? First of all, everything can scale at least a little. And second, who cares?
Manhood as a Service [00:47:30]
Shaan: I would love to see somebody do Manhood as a Service.
Sam: What’s Manhood as a Service?
Shaan: In the same way that Spartan Race and Tough Mudder are pseudo-tough-guy events — you get muddy, you get cut, you climb this mountain, you get your headband and drink a beer at the end — they’re offering manhood as a service. It’s a fake ID. It’s your McLovin. But that’s what they’re offering.
I want to see somebody take this to the extreme. Our friend Aaron who comes on this show — he trains jiu-jitsu and boxing and he just wants to do an amateur fight. Why? Because he wants to see what he’s made of.
You could take that concept and make it a weekend traveling circus that goes city to city. You just say: step up and face some pain. Want to see what it’s like to get tortured? Can you take a punch? Can you last an hour in an isolation tank? I don’t know what the actual product is exactly, but it’s counterintuitive — people are paying to get hurt, to do physical labor, chop down this tree, and they don’t get picked up until they’re done. It’s: what did we used to have to do that we don’t have to do anymore? What’s hardship that we’re sheltered from because machines or other people do it for us? I think there’s a very big craving in society for those types of experiences.
Sam: I totally agree. I’ve been boxing every Friday and I love it. I need to get punched in the face to feel alive. You make it safe enough where the mass market — who don’t actually want to go get punched — can participate. Like Tough Mudder. If you really wanted to fight, you can go do that. But you need the people who want the experience with padded walls, with gloves, where you’re not actually going to get severely hurt, but you get to experience: what is my level of toughness? My grit? My pain tolerance? My physical endurance? My max?
Shaan: Survivor should do this. Jeff Probst, this idea is for you. You’re on Season 42, the show isn’t getting that many new viewers. Here’s what you need to do: the Survivor World Tour. You go city to city and set up the Survivor events you’ve seen on TV. Can you do it? Can you hang?
Survivor superfans get a deeper way to connect. They’ll pay — shut up and take my money. You can get ex-players to come out, because they’re not doing much anymore. They’ll come out to extend their fame. You’ll get new people going with their friends to try this thing. They’ll get into the Survivor universe. And then when I’m watching the show I’m like, “dude, I did that one where you have to hang on to the pole.”
It’s an amusement park or a carnival or a fair but branded by TV shows. Or multiple shows that get together and do this.
Sam: It’s almost like a TV version of Disneyland.
Shaan: Yes — exactly. You take the IP from TV and make Disneyland out of it. Or like any kind of carnival. Do you watch The Challenge?
Sam: Your wife Sarah watches it. I sit with her sometimes. I have literally no idea how it ended.
Shaan: If they had a Challenge location where you could do Hall Brawl… let me describe Hall Brawl for people who don’t know. Imagine a narrow hallway, two feet wide, just plexiglass on both sides. On one side there’s one person wearing football pads, another on the other side. Someone says go, and you run straight at each other in this narrow hallway, smash into each other, and whoever gets out to the other side and rings the bell first wins. It’s one of the famous things on the show.
This is exactly what I would do in my Manhood as a Service fair or my TV fair. Step up, sign the waiver, do Hall Brawl. There are video cameras positioned everywhere and you get to share the content to Instagram at the end, just like the Museum of Ice Cream or Tough Mudder — due today for photo opportunities.
Museum Hack and the Tour Business [00:55:00]
Sam: I’ve got two stories. The first is I was at my friend Nick Ray’s house the other day and I met the founder of Museum of Ice Cream. He knew we’d talked about him. And I think we were both like — this is a great business idea but if you go it’s kind of underwhelming. That was our true user opinion. We’ll have to have him on.
Second — have you heard of Museum Hack?
Shaan: No. What is this?
Sam: So I was at Nick’s house and he’s got this website museumhack.com. He recently sold it. This is just another example of one of these tour things we’ve been discussing.
He just enjoys museums. He built this business making $2 million a year in sales. You’d pay him — or eventually he’d train people in a variety of cities — $50 to $100 plus admission, and he’d give you a custom tour of a museum and explain the background behind different paintings and pieces of art, but do it in a fun way. If you Google “Museum Hack,” the meta description is literally “Museum Hack — f***ing awesome museum tours.” Clearly like a young, hip thing. And companies would pay money to send their employees there. They do it in six cities — LA, San Francisco, New York, and a few others. It was a $2 million a year business. Very successful. A lot of work to set up, but ran itself after a while.
Shaan: I like that one.
Rent the Chicken: Blue Collar Side Hustle [00:58:00]
Sam: Can I do one more idea?
Shaan: Sure, slip it in.
Sam: This is related to “back to the roots” — the idea you were talking about, like I’m going to buy a farm and offer tours, let people come farm with me. I want to talk about Rent the Chicken. I saw this thing that said the chicken rental business has been booming during the pandemic.
What is this? People are renting chickens as pets. Chicken owners — real farm people — are basically saying: hey, you live in Austin, you have a house, do you want a chicken coop in your backyard? Here’s what you get: two chickens back there, kind of like a little pet. I’ll bring the coop, I bring the feed, I bring the instructions. They’re going to lay six eggs a day or whatever. You get fresh eggs from your own coop.
My daughter is about 18 months old. Kids love animals. Our friend Ramon had a little chicken coop in his backyard — three chickens — and his son loved it. They’d go out and feed the chickens and get eggs.
So this is booming — all the chicken rental companies are sold out. Demand tripled during the pandemic. Still small numbers: “oh yeah, we used to have 70 chickens to rent, now we have 200.” That’s still not that many coops. But pretty amazing.
Shaan: I’m calling this my new segment — “Blue Collar Side Hustle.” I may never do this segment again, but at least for this one.
Sam: No, we’re going to do that again. That’s a good one.
Shaan: This whole episode is blue collar side hustles, actually. We talk about side hustles like: make a newsletter, build an audience, build a job board, do dropshipping. But no — blue collar side hustles. Things you could just do with your bare hands. Make money with your bare hands.
Here’s how it works: whatever city you’re in, there’s probably demand for chicken rentals, too. If all these other ones are sold out, there’s probably demand in Nashville, Florida, LA, everywhere. Go get some chickens and start renting them out to people who want to be connected with nature, have a little pet in their backyard that’s low maintenance, and get some fresh eggs. Simple way to make $5-10K a month of side hustle income.
Sam: And the website — Rent the Chicken — they also have a thing where you can find out where the nearest one is and buy fresh eggs. Farm to table but you’re in the city getting eggs from somebody two miles away. They also do this with schools and offices: “Are you a school or office? We can do a six-week program. You get chickens for six weeks, the kids get to name them, take care of them.” Same thing we used to do with a class pet. Then they move on.
You could do bees and honey too. Anything where it’s a simple low-maintenance pet that’s unorthodox and ideally provides a little bit of food — eggs, honey, something like that.
Shaan: Here’s the price for Houston — $285 for a five-week rental. February to October, they deliver and set it up for free. You get one chicken that’s going to lay eggs. Sixty bucks a week to have a chicken in your backyard making eggs.
Sam: I went to a party the other day and they had a backyard petting zoo delivery service — at an adult party. Chickens, a guinea pig, rabbits. Rent the Chicken, backyard petting zoos — I’m into all this stuff. My friend who had a chicken said the eggs looked different but didn’t taste different. But I’d feel a lot better eating backyard eggs than store eggs.
Staying Focused: How Shaan Gets Things Done [01:04:00]
Sam: Let me switch gears real quick. How do you stay focused? I’m all in on the podcast right now — that’s all I think about, almost all I work on. I’ve got 200 unread texts, hundreds of voicemails, phone calls from salespeople, email is ruined, Twitter, Slack constantly beeping. It is so hard to get in the zone. How do you do it?
Shaan: I would say this — I’m not a details person in general. One of the ways to get stuff done is to correctly identify the 80/20 of any project. For you, for the podcast: what do I ultimately need to do? I need to get people to smash the subscribe button. So how do I get more people to hit subscribe today? You focused on the thing that matters and threw away the rest. What’s the one step I can take today to make that happen more? Tomorrow I’ll come up with another one.
I identify what is the thing that if I just did this one thing, it’s going to get me 80% of the return. And then I try to narrow it down — make it memorable. I don’t do a to-do list. It’s one thing I can remember in my head all day. This is the one outcome I’ve got to get done. I’ll find a way to get it done. It won’t leave my brain.
This bothers my wife. My mom’s staying with us helping with the baby, and she’s like, “oh, you’ve got to get your car insurance thing done, your trash bins are overflowing, people texted you for your birthday on Sunday, did you reply to any of them?” Like, no. I didn’t do any of those things and I don’t plan to. None of those things are in line with my chief aim right now.
Right now my chief aim was being helpful with the baby, because with two kids under 18 months, my wife was going to drown otherwise. I went all in on being Mr. Helpful. But if it’s a project like growing the podcast — identify the one thing that gives me 80% of the impact. For example: get booked on other big podcasts. I know that’s going to drive attention. Cool. I’ll only do that thing, nothing else.
Sam: What you’re describing — I actually wrote about this. I have an article called “I’ll Do It Later: Why You Shouldn’t Worry About Procrastinating.” I wrote it in 2015.
The Three Types of Procrastination [01:09:00]
Sam: Basically there are three types of procrastination. The first type is you do nothing — that’s easy, a lot of people suffer from that, and you want to avoid it. The second is doing something less important than what you should be doing. That’s when you have homework but you play video games instead. Or you clean your room instead of studying for tomorrow’s test.
Shaan: Busy work — and that’s actually the worst type because you think you’re being productive when you’re not.
Sam: Right. Really dangerous. But the third type of procrastination — I think we should all embrace it. It’s when you do something more important than the stuff you were supposed to do. And that’s actually what you just described. Getting your car insurance is important, but what’s more important? Making a ton of money to the point where car insurance is just less important. The best example is the brilliant scientist who accidentally wears two left shoes or forgets to shower. Is taking your trash out important? It’s important but it’s far less important than creating the theory of relativity.
Naval said something about this the other day. We asked him what his day is like and he said, “You know, thinking about the future of X and the past of Z — these heavy, meaty topics — that’s not so hard for me. That feels like play. What’s hard for me is remembering I have a call I need to be on in 10 minutes and stopping what I’m doing and getting there on time.” He gets completely engrossed in what he’s doing. Normal life becomes hard. He is the absent-minded scientist — his desk looks like chaos to someone else, but he’s piecing things together and doesn’t care about organizing his desk right now.
Logically we all know the third type of procrastination is good and you should embrace it. But the world basically tries to beat that out of you. “But you have to do your insurance.” The answer is often: but why? It’s far more important if I do X, Y, and Z.
I find this extreme question helpful: will the tasks I’m working on right now be mentioned in my obituary? If not, you’re procrastinating. Work on the thing that has a chance of being mentioned in your obituary.
Shaan: I actually got into an argument with my wife yesterday about this. We have some bill, like a $700 late fee. She was like, “Oh my god, we’re so wasteful — why didn’t you just pay this bill?” And I said, yes, you did put it on my desk, but I was so knee-deep in learning about DeFi the last three days. And hey — we’ve made $68,000 in three days on this DeFi trade. Can we not worry about the $700 thing?
For me it’s so black and white. But she comes from a totally different value set — it feels worse to her to take something avoidable, that you could have just taken care of, that would signify adulthood. And for me it’s the exact opposite: focus on things that matter and let other stuff fall on the ground.
So we are very different and we constantly get into arguments. Financially I’m on the right side of history, but in the house I’m definitely losing rounds every time we do these battles.
If your wife is listening — my wife does, which is weird — show her this episode. And to anyone out there who fits this forgetful-scientist type, where they forget birthdays or miss calls but they’re actually focused on something interesting that will actually change their life or others’ — let it slip, let it slide. Do not give in to the societal pressure to focus on unimportant things. Instead, be focused on things that actually matter: your health, what you’re working on, your family. Everything else is pretty much noise.
Effective vs. Efficient Productivity [01:16:00]
Shaan: Can I give my last piece on this before we move on?
Sam: Yeah.
Shaan: I made a choice a long time ago. In the productive class there are two types of people: efficient productive and effective productive. I’m effective productive. There are a lot of people we work with — in fact people we have to hire — who are efficient productive. What they do is get a high number of tasks done, and done well. But they don’t necessarily correctly identify the one or two tasks that are going to have disproportionate rewards, and they don’t go overboard on those.
What you and I do — whether it’s project selection or even within a project — is find the one or two things that will drive the most returns, give that 120%, and then do zero percent on the other things. And by the way, that might all happen in a two-hour burst or a four-hour late-night binge. The other hours of the day we were scatterbrained, doing other stuff, and it didn’t matter.
The other type says: I’m going to work nine to five, make every hour count, get a whole bunch of things done, plow through my to-do list. That’s efficient productive. Both have pros and cons. I think for a CEO or entrepreneurial type, effective productive is better — or at least I’ve seen it’s a more common path to success.
The other thing — and I left the Cody Sanchez podcast saying this — when people think they need a mentor before starting their startup, that’s just an advanced form of procrastination. You will find mentors along the way. People who have experience will open doors and guide you. But that is not what’s stopping you from making progress right now. If you are looking for mentors before you do the thing, you are procrastinating. You’re just doing it in a way other people can’t point and laugh at — because you’re not eating Cheetos watching TV. It sounds productive. But it’s still procrastination.
And the final point — I have this framework I call the Eisenhower Matrix. Two crossed lines: up-down is impact (low to high), left-right is urgency (urgent to non-urgent). On a given day, do the things that are urgent and high-impact. That’s obvious. But then what? After those, what do you do next — the urgent low-impact bucket or the high-impact non-urgent bucket?
What most people do — 90-95% of people, including myself on many days — is the urgent low-impact thing. Pay that bill, call that person back, type up those loose ends, because they’re due today. But there’s a whole other batch of things that are important and non-urgent, just sitting there like ticking time bombs. And the great quote around this: what’s important but non-urgent becomes urgent very quickly — when it’s too late.
For me right now, that’s setting up my tax strategy. My estate, my trust, how to manage all this. I don’t know about that stuff, it makes my mind bend a little, it’s easier to avoid — there’s no specific day I have to get it set up. But every day I don’t, I’m not doing something that has a very large impact. So think about the things you’re doing on this axis. Don’t avoid the non-urgent high-impact bucket. That’s where a lot of value gets driven.
Sam: I’m doing all that stuff now. I can’t stand it.
Shaan: Good episode. Good little rant on procrastination and productivity.
Sam: That’s a wrap.