Sam, Shaan, and guest Steph riff on a series of business ideas and trend follow-ups, including a job-listing tracker, creative recruiting via puzzle games, the Nuuly clothing rental model, the ecommerce returns opportunity, and creative ways to monetize real estate and physical assets. The episode ends with a long conversation about the “idiot-genius” mental model, designated gambling budgets for crypto, and the A-B-Z framework for avoiding analysis paralysis.
Speakers: Sam Parr (host), Shaan Puri (host), Steph (guest)
The NYT First Words Twitter Account [00:00:00]
Sam: Okay, first thing — super quick. Have you guys heard of this Twitter account called “New York Times First”?
Shaan: No.
Sam: It’s kind of just a fun little Twitter account where they track all the articles being published by the New York Times and find words that appear for the first time. It’s just a fun thing. I’ll post a link in the doc. So “dead ass,” for example — first found in the New York Times, March 2019. “Doom scrolling,” May 2020. “Tech bro” apparently was January 2022. That surprises me.
So it’s just kind of a fun thing, but I was thinking this should exist for jobs. On Indeed or Glassdoor or something. There’s a really quick transition period these days between completely new jobs coming to market, and I think there should be an account that tracks them. Like, “this is the first time I’ve seen…” — I don’t know where I saw this, but there’s like a professional falconer. What? Who does that? How much do they get paid? I don’t know, but I’m surprised to know it exists. And I’m sure there are many more practical jobs coming to market that people should know about. Someone should create the equivalent of this, but instead of the New York Times, it should be for Indeed.
Shaan: How do they do this? That’s great. How do they track every word and check if it’s ever been used before?
Sam: I think it’s just a scraper. I don’t know exactly how they set it up, but I don’t think it would be that hard. By the way, this account has 200,000 followers. So for that person out there who’s been grinding, trying to put out great content, and has like 3,000 followers — just know you could have been tweeting out single words from the New York Times and gotten 200,000 followers.
Shaan: I actually think that’s a great idea. Have you guys seen — remember how we talked about the kid who was tracking Elon Musk’s private jet on Twitter? Now he’s tracking all the private jets and yachts of the Russian oligarchs.
Sam: Great pivot. Shout out.
Shaan: Shout out. Also, Elon offered him five thousand dollars and he turned it down. He’s like, “No, I’m going to keep doing my thing.”
Sam: Five grand for Elon to stop tracking him? Yeah. Because Elon was like, “I don’t want people to know where I am.” What a stupid offer. If you’re going to offer someone money, do it right.
Shaan: Five thousand dollars. That’s how you reply to that.
Sam: I think this is a great idea. I also think companies would pay for it, right? Companies that have competitors want to know what their competitors are doing. We’re launching something at HubSpot soon, and I’ve already gotten an email from someone at TechCrunch who basically dug something up that we published and was like, “Hey, what’s going on here?” Imagine the same thing where you’re like, “Oh, I saw Salesforce is hiring for these roles.” Or “I didn’t know that was a role at Netflix.” I think companies would pay for that intel.
Shaan: That’s actually fascinating. If you could aggregate — when I was at the Hustle, I cared about what like 30 companies were doing. It would be interesting if I could have paid a monthly fee and gotten a daily email with the movement in people’s job listings.
Sam: That’s exactly what I was going to say. I don’t think the falconer thing is that interesting — it’s like, “oh, whatever, someone made up a random job” — but oh, Netflix is hiring a Web3 engineer. That means they’re probably trying to explore that space. Or, “Oh, they’re hiring enterprise sales.” Okay, they’re trying to go upmarket. There’s competitive intelligence that comes from these. I do think that exists. I’ve seen people tracking these, I don’t know if they’re doing it for fun or if there’s a real service, but it’s interesting.
Neil’s First Words [00:04:30]
Sam: What else do you got, Steph? Oh, by the way — one more thing. I love this story. I went into work one day and my buddy Neil, who’s a programmer at our company, he was standing at the coffee machine making a coffee. It was like 10 a.m. I hadn’t even said anything to him yet. We were just standing next to each other, and he just goes — he realized he hadn’t spoken that day yet. He got to work, sat at his computer, started programming, didn’t talk to anybody, and just said out loud: “These are my first words.”
And I thought that was so funny. He was actually hilarious and we ended up replacing our marketing person with Neil. He’s an iPhone programmer, but he wrote all the release notes for our apps because he was just funny. Like, low-key hilarious. But “these are my first words” — I’ll never forget that.
Shaan: How does that relate to what we were just talking about?
Sam: Because it’s a word tracker, you know? The first time the New York Times said this word. So that’s how I thought of that. What are your first words every day?
Shaan: Mine is usually like a grunt when I’m doing exercise. Like, “oh, this is enough” or something.
Sam: That explains a lot.
Mischief and Creative Recruiting [00:05:45]
Steph: So, related to companies hiring — you guys know Mischief, right? It’s this company that does these crazy stunts. They’re on I think stunt number 70. Their latest stunt I thought was really interesting and relates to this idea of creative hiring.
Sam: Scroll down and tell me about what Mischief is. I don’t entirely get it because they raised funding, but when you explain what they are I’m like, “what grown adult would trust this company with money?”
Steph: It’s like South Park or Saturday Night Live — it’s a weekly show. But instead of making a video with a joke, they make a website that’s a joke. Yeah, it’s basically a weekly sketch done through code.
Sam: Does it make money?
Steph: I think it does. I don’t know how much. They’ve raised three and a half million dollars, so I don’t know who those investors are or what they’re looking for. But to give two examples: one of them recently was called “Tontine” — basically “The Game of Death Online.” You sign up, pay $10 to join, and all you have to do is log in daily to stay alive. The last person who logs in gets all the money.
Then they did one on the MCAT. They got people to pay $50 to take their version of the test, and the highest score won the entire pot. They didn’t have that many people — maybe 500 — but it reminded me of something you guys have talked about on the pod: the power of crowdsourcing things. Like SpaceX puts out a competition when they want to develop new technology, and it tends to attract more interesting people than hiring recruiters.
Sam: The example I think you’re thinking of is — they were trying to decode some protein that helped with an AIDS medication. They’d spent 10 years trying to solve it, turned it into a video game, and a bunch of video gamers got it done in like three weeks.
Steph: Yeah, and there’s the X Prize and things like that. But anyway, my point is — we work for HubSpot, there are all these companies trying to attract “top talent,” doing it in a way where true top talent probably doesn’t want to be DM’d on LinkedIn and go through a traditional interview process. So my question is: why isn’t there a Mischief-style recruiting agency that puts out these challenges that the smartest people on the internet are stoked to solve just out of sheer pride, and then funnel them into companies?
The Secret Google Interview [00:10:30]
Sam: I have something for you on recruiting. This is one of the very first articles the Hustle ever wrote — it was literally two weeks after we started. It was about my friend Max. If you Google “the Hustle secret Google interview,” you’ll find it.
My friend Max was teaching himself some type of coding — a rare language — and he was googling things like “what does blank mean” and “how do you do blank.” After a while, his Chrome browser went all Matrix and said: “You look like you might belong to one of us. We’ve noticed you’ve been googling a lot about this language. We’re hiring. Would you be interested in applying?”
Shaan: That’s amazing.
Sam: Very few people ever saw this, but we wrote an article about it. It got seen by millions of people. The headline was: “Google has a secret interview process and it landed me a job.” He ended up working there. It worked.
Shaan: Only Google can do that because they own the browser and the search engine. But what if there was an app that just sat on your computer and tracked everything you did — and gave you job opportunities based on what you actually do on your computer? Like, if it knows Steph is in all these subreddits and looking at Google Trends, that’s a signal for what type of person you are. It’s actually a much higher quality signal than any job interview, where you’re just trying to present yourself a certain way versus what you actually do. Like, “Oh, you spend a lot of time in Excel” — we can see your capabilities from that.
I wonder if there’s something you could do for college students: “Hey, put this on your computer. Do you want your first job out of college? We’ll help figure out what that job should be. Just by putting this tracker on your computer.”
Sam: Sounds very naughty.
Shaan: I mean, yeah, I know it’s always like an “oh, tracking everything on your computer” thing. But the reason I thought of this — I watched the QAnon documentary and in it they covered Cicada 3301. Basically the epitome of these crazy online puzzles. I think there have been three of them. The first two were solved. The third one still has not been solved. And a lot of people thought it was actually a recruitment tool for the NSA or CIA. So I was like, man, there should be something like that for a company.
Steph: Did you guys ever do one of those? I did one in college. We found this website and it said something vague like “the game has only begun, but have you realized it?” And you had to right-click and view source, and in the source code there was a URL. You go to that URL, it downloads an audio file. You listen to it — sounds like nothing. You listen to it backwards, all of a sudden it gives you coordinates. You go to those coordinates on a map, and it was like a 50-part mystery game. Me and all my friends got totally obsessed with this, spent hours and hours.
I don’t remember the name — this was back in college, like 15 years ago. I remember at the end there was a puzzle we could never solve, and I think the guy just made an unsolvable puzzle. His name was Mr. Wiggles or Mr. Squiggles or something. But it was so much fun, and actually that is a great filter and barometer for who might be good at certain types of work. The type of person who does that for fun and solves that problem — I would love to hire that person.
Sam: Could you be like the game maker as a service for a variety of companies? Like, “we’re going to make this game, and I bet we’re going to get you 20 new high-quality applicants every month.” Silly games, but high quality.
Nuuly: Rental as Profit Center [00:17:00]
Steph: What’s Nuuly? Have either of you guys heard of it? N-U-L-Y.
Sam: No.
Steph: So it’s a company that’s part of the Urban Outfitters subsidiary. Urban owns Urban Outfitters, Anthropologie, Free People, and Nuuly. And Nuuly is a different take — all those other businesses sell clothes in a traditional way, but Nuuly is a rental business. Every month they send you six items that you’ve chosen. You rent them for a month, and at the end of the month you have the option to keep them at a pretty discounted rate — somewhere between 15 and up to 60 percent off. They have a ton of brands in there, including their own.
The reason I thought this was interesting: there are other clothing rental services, but this is tacked on to existing businesses that weren’t renting clothes. It reminded me of what Amazon did — turning a cost center into a profit center, or at least something way more profitable than the traditional clothing business.
You guys remember someone talked about how many returns there are for clothing?
Sam: 20 percent, right?
Steph: Exactly. And a return with clothing can cost up to 66 percent of the cost of an item. So a lot of these clothing stores were just saying, “You can just keep it — we don’t even want the item back because shipping is so expensive.” In this case, Nuuly doesn’t have to worry about that. I’m paying Nuuly to rent these clothes, so they’re not losing money on the rental. They’re making money on the rental, and they’ve structured it in a way that’s really compelling.
I don’t know the exact size of it now, but at my co-working space all the women there are wearing Nuuly. I wonder how this can be applied to other businesses. What are those cost centers that could actually be turned into a profit center?
Shaan: What’s the return rate on the things you’re involved in through investments?
Sam: Way lower than 20. More like — I’m not sure exactly what that number is meant to quote, whether it’s percent of orders or percent of revenue. But any return is a drain on the business, so any way you could turn returns into neutral or profitable would be kind of amazing.
Shaan: What do brands do with returned clothing?
Sam: Typically it’s like a triage. The patient comes in and it’s either a lost cause — dump it — or it’s like, “oh, this could be patched up.” So you re-tag it, it’s in good condition, put it back in packaging, good to go. Sometimes you have to clean it, steam it, whatever.
In fact, there’s a guy named Sonny who follows us on Twitter and he had an e-commerce brand — a nice men’s suit brand — and returns were killing him. It’s a heavy thing to ship, it’s an expensive product. His 3PL wasn’t willing to reprocess the suits, and he couldn’t send out a questionable suit. So he actually created his own returns warehouse for himself, and now a bunch of other brands use it too. Same as the AWS model — turned his cost center into a profit center. He’s just becoming an expert on the efficient way to handle returns.
Shaan: That’s interesting because usually what makes you good at processing returns is not the same thing that makes you good at a general warehouse — with pallets and boxes and shipping orders out. It’s a different skill set.
Real Estate You Didn’t Know You Had [00:23:30]
Sam: Can we talk about one other idea? What you talked about, Shaan, reminded me — there’s all this real estate that people have access to and don’t know what it can be used for. Maybe it could be used for a fulfillment center, maybe your garage could be rented out. There are a couple of examples I came across, and I wonder if someone could aggregate all the different ways that real estate or parts of real estate can generate income.
A lot of people have heard of solar panels — companies will pay you to install solar panels on your roof. You get into a licensing agreement and they make money off it. That’s why they often install it for free.
Another example: churches. Due to the height of churches — specifically the steeples — different telecom companies will pay for access to their steeples. The National Cathedral in Washington is paid — guess how much — by Motorola every single year.
Shaan: I would have thought like a thousand dollars a month. So $100,000?
Sam: A hundred thousand a year. Just for access to their 234-foot tower. And some churches are now building steeples they didn’t even have before. Like, “I heard this other church is getting $100K a year, we want that.”
One final example: Surfline. My partner surfs all the time and uses surf cams to check the waves every day. Well, those surf cams are apparently in people’s backyards. If you have a backyard in a strategic area to see the surf, you can sign up or refer people. They’ll come, install it, and you get paid a certain amount to have the cam in your backyard.
So those are three examples. I feel like there should be a site that says, “Oh, you’ve got a house in this area, you have a roof that gets this much sunlight, or it’s this tall, or this much square footage — here’s what you can monetize.”
Shaan: Would you go as far as to include cars?
Sam: Years ago, Shaan and I listened to a pitch from a guy who was doing advertising on top of Uber drivers’ cars — like cabbies have advertising on top of their cars. I don’t know what happened with the business.
Shaan: Huge valuation. They definitely got traction. I think it’s a multi-hundred million dollar company now. It’s called Firefly.
Sam: Wow. And there’s another one with screens in the back of car seats. But the execution on that has been terrible. Although, that’s another example — you have valuable real estate which is the back of a car seat, because you have people captive.
Shaan: I have an idea for you. A new side project for the My First Million website: the Side Hustle Generator. It’s a giant quiz that leads you into a list of potential side hustles. Like, do you own a church? Do you live by the surf? Do you have a car you don’t use all the time? People don’t realize the number of opportunities literally at their fingertips. Like, do you own a phone? You get paid to test websites for companies. All you have to do is go to a website and talk out loud as you try to use it. UserTesting.com. My mom didn’t know that, and it kind of changed her life a little bit. She had this thing she could do every day that kept her busy, made her some money, and she enjoyed it.
Sam: Airbnb — I remember telling my parents about Airbnb. It took some educating, but now they make six figures a year Airbnbing their home.
Shaan: Where do they go?
Sam: They’ll just go to a hotel or a vacation. They’ll come to my house. They’ll go anywhere, because they can get like $700 to $800 a night for their home. They’ll go rent a hotel an hour away for $200 and pocket the difference.
The Penny Hoarder [00:29:00]
Sam: Did you guys know the Penny Hoarder? So the Penny Hoarder started as a blog. It started with this guy named Kyle — he spoke at one of our events, cool dude. He started it in 2012, just talking about all the side hustles he was doing. He’d go on TaskRabbit and get people’s groceries and talk about how much money he was making. He’d become an Instacart driver, talk about how much money he was making. Uber driver, same thing. UserTesting, same thing.
He got really good at getting traffic, and eventually Uber said, “For every new driver you refer to us, we’ll give you $2,000.” Instacart did the same thing. TaskRabbit, UserTesting — everyone did the same thing. He built this digital ad business, and when he came to our event he brought his dog. I was like, “How’d you get your dog on the plane?” He goes, “Oh, I fly private.” And I was like, “What — are you crushing it that hard?” He goes, “Yeah, we bootstrapped it and we’ll do about $70 million in revenue this year.” He owned 100 percent of the company and he recently sold it for hundreds of millions of dollars.
The whole premise was just talking about ways to make money. It was mostly targeting lower-income people — maybe a mom who’s just trying to make ends meet with 10 hours a week available while taking care of kids. And he killed it. The business crushed it.
Shaan: I’ve heard it from you but never went to it. It’s just a WordPress blog?
Sam: That’s all it is.
Trend Follow-Up: Ideas That Listeners Actually Built [00:31:30]
Sam: Sorry, I was just looking at the doc and realizing how many interesting ideas are in here.
Steph: We have to do a two-parter. Yeah, the worst ideas are in the middle of the list. The best ones are at the top.
Sam: Well, why don’t you tell me — what’s an interesting one you have?
Steph: I’m looking at the trend success stories. I think those are pretty interesting. So last time I was on, I talked about this idea of “your listicle is my opportunity.” A couple people have actually taken action on that — they’ve created sites that identify the healthiest versions of not-very-healthy things. One guy started a TikTok, got hundreds of thousands of views in the first few days. And then someone else tweeted about this just last night. They’re called Fast Food Cravings. The headline says “eat what you want, not what you can.” It lets you put in a specific restaurant and find the healthiest version of the food at that restaurant.
I also talked about insider trading on one of the very first episodes I was on, and this guy Connor DM’d me — so there are sites that track insider trades, but there are specific types that are more interesting than others. Specifically stock grants to executives. It’s not obviously a sure thing, but what that typically signals is the company trying to incentivize certain targets. If the executives hit those targets, it’s generally a good sign. Obviously not investment advice.
He created a community called Springloading. He started a scraper that looks for all insider trades but specifically vets them for this one aspect: is the company granting a lot of stock to a group of executives? He shares the financial report, the grant details, summarizes it, and gives a conviction rating. Some are like a one — “guys, this is probably nothing, maybe something if you want to take a bet.” Some he’s rating a five.
Shaan: I shared one example in the chat — not investment advice — but he shared one for Cloudflare. Cloudflare, like all the other tech companies, has tanked recently, but he was like, “This is one of the biggest performance grants I’ve ever seen, with pretty massive price targets. I don’t think there’s any news in the near future, but I believe Cloudflare has massive potential and the stock is down 35 percent over the last month.” Then he shares the exact grant values, what targets they need to hit. Cloudflare today is at around $95; their first price target is $156, and it goes all the way up to $979. So this is what these execs are internally tracking toward.
Steph: This community is pretty successful. He’s charging monthly fees. Did you bet on this?
Shaan: I haven’t. My partner Cal has been in the community. He did actually bet on one — again, not financial advice — and it did go up. But I don’t even want more details. Don’t tell me more. I’m convinced.
Steph: I definitely don’t want people gambling their money on one anecdote. But it is interesting even just to be in there — I’ll dabble in the community, I haven’t placed any bets, but to see how these different companies are structuring stock grants and why, with someone commenting on it — and then of course there are just a bunch of people like, “are you betting? Oh, I’m 50 percent down, how are you doing?” It’s a fun community too.
The Degenerate Budget: Crypto and Tootsie Roll [00:36:00]
Shaan: You guys have like a degenerate budget or a learner budget? Like, this is my money to try different things?
Sam: You’re shaking your head no. I don’t, but it sounds like you do.
Shaan: I do. How much? In percentage terms —
Sam: No, don’t do percentage terms. How much literally? Like $50,000?
Shaan: More than that, yeah, for sure.
Sam: Wow. What’s an example of a risky thing you’ve done?
Shaan: I watched a YouTube video of some hedge fund guy — no idea who this was, couldn’t tell you his name, couldn’t tell you his track record. White guy, looked reasonable enough. And he was like, “My short pick of the year is Tootsie Roll.” I was like, “Tootsie Roll? I didn’t realize it’s a public stock.” He said, “First of all, who the hell eats Tootsie Roll? Do you think Tootsie Roll is growing? The people who eat Tootsie Roll are 50 and up. Kids don’t want Tootsie Roll nowadays — they want all these other candies. Tootsie Roll has zero innovation, they refuse to change their product, and it’s poorly run.” It was owned by some woman who was like 92 years old at the time.
I watched that video and I was like, “Oh, this guy’s totally right.” I went that day and shorted Tootsie Roll. Made a bunch of money. Zero thought process, zero diligence — just took a punt on a whim. And that was the first time I realized I want a designated budget for this.
With crypto this has become kind of a necessity, because you have so many new things that are all interesting and you can’t get to high conviction because they’re new and it’s rapidly evolving. You don’t have time to diligence all of them, but you can sense certain signals: a bunch of smart people are looking at it, there’s developer activity in that space, the premise is interesting. You can take punts on things in crypto, and you get paid off unlike in the stock market. On the Tootsie Roll thing I made like 20 to 35 percent. In crypto you can make 20x when you’re right on these things. The odds just shift in your favor — yeah, things can go to zero, but the upside when you hit pays for all your other bad bets.
So I created a budget because I was like, I can’t overthink this. I need to intentionally underthink it. In the last five years there have been so many things on my radar in crypto that I didn’t take action on because I felt like I didn’t have enough information to make an educated decision. And if I’d just made uneducated decisions I would have done far better, because the space is just where there’s a lot of progress and you can’t keep up with all the different projects.
So I set a budget: if somebody tells me something interesting, I have money I can dump into it. It’s a small amount, I don’t care if it goes to zero, and I’m not putting it all into one thing — I’m taking a portfolio approach. I get to actually learn how these things work by doing it.
Sam: I don’t. But Cal does. I think it’s smart, because like Shaan says, if you don’t have money sequestered for this it’s going to capture your psychology. That’s actually why I don’t dabble.
Steph: He’s done that a lot with NFTs. At first he was like, “Steph, I’m just going to buy one.” Obviously he’s bought more since then. He has a certain amount and that’s all he’s willing to invest. If it goes to zero, he’s fine with it. But he’s also probably sold too early because he has a concentrated amount — like, “I gotta sell this to buy another thing.”
Shaan: Did you get into Proof?
Sam: I feel like you should have. I didn’t do Proof. That’s a great example of one where I’m like, oh, interesting — Kevin Rose is doing this NFT thing, I should take a punt. It’s not going to go to zero quote-unquote, I can trade out if I want to. But I don’t want every decision to be heavy.
The Midwit Meme and the Idiot-Genius [00:42:00]
Shaan: Have you guys seen the midwit meme? It’s basically a bell curve. On one side is the idiot — looks like a troll, like Shrek. On the other side is the genius, like a Jedi master. And at the top of the curve is the average person. And the example is: the idiot sees a monkey picture — “oh, that monkey looks cool, I’ll buy it.” The genius is like, “oh, this has a chance to be an iconic NFT,” didn’t think about it much more than that. The midwit is like, “but why would anybody buy a picture of a monkey? How do the tokenomics work?” They try to analyze the whole thing and they’re paralyzed. Analysis paralysis. They don’t take action on anything and they miss the big simple opportunities.
I heard Michael Seibel from YC talking about this for startup ideas. He goes, “A beginner out of college doesn’t know how hard it’s going to be, doesn’t know how to vet opportunities, so they’re just like, ‘oh, that sounds cool, let me try that.’” Same thing with the Jedi master — like, “wouldn’t it be cool if you could take a rocket to Mars? Let’s try that.” You don’t need to analyze it beyond that at the beginning. And then the person he hates talking to is the second-time founder who’s over-optimizing their cap table, trying to get really complicated about valuation, doing lean validation on everything. That’s the hardest person to deal with because they know too much but not enough to keep it simple.
The best startup ideas are in the idiot-genius category. Like, “you should make cars that are electric” or “we should sell books online.” That’s it. You don’t need to go further than that.
Steph: I believe in that, and yes I think it applies to different things. For finance I’m in the middle — midwit in finance. That’s why I don’t dabble. I over-analyze things, hear one piece of news and I’m out. But I think it applies to other things differently, and I think our friendship is a great example. He saw NFTs and was like, “oh, that looks cool, I’ll buy one. What should I make? I don’t know, this diagram I already have.” Simplest thing. And the guys did millions of dollars.
Sam: How much do you think he’s made off those?
Shaan: He’s done well for sure. He bought Apes, he bought a Punk — and plural, like multiple of all of these. I think those were priced at like a thousand dollars 18 months ago and now each one is worth like $250,000 to $500,000.
He made something right like — a lot of people are like, “Oh, web3, the metaverse, I need to create an NFT project, it needs to have utility,” and all that. He’s like, “Hey, I minted a picture of something that says ‘not right-click-save-as’” — kind of making fun of the space — and sold it for like $50,000. Did that in an afternoon. Instead of being the midwit over-analyzer, he went to the genius zone. Just took a punt. It doesn’t take a lot of time, energy, or money to try it.
So I specifically carved out a portion of my investing budget: this is my gamble. I’ll get rid of my gambling energy. I’ll learn by doing. I’ll have skin in the game so I’ll actually pay attention to it. And I honestly think that part of my portfolio is going to do better than the well-thought-through part.
A-B-Z: Just Do the Next Thing [00:48:30]
Shaan: Sam, I think you do this really well. I’ve seen people come to you and say, “Sam, I’m thinking of starting this business, I want to cover this topic, I want to blog,” and you’re just like, “okay, what’s your first step?” Or, “just write.”
Sam: When Sam says “dying dog” — he just Randy Jackson’d him.
Shaan: Well, I get frustrated because — if building a business is step 0 to 10, and step 10 is you’ve achieved your vision, you own all this property, whatever it is — it’s good to have that step 10. But a lot of people are like, “Okay, that’s step 10, now I gotta figure out steps 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9 in my mind.” I’m like, no. The only things that matter are 10 and 1. After you get done with 1, you’ll figure out 2. But until you get to 2, don’t even think about 3. It’s not important.
Sam: I have the exact same thing. I call it A-B-Z. Word for word your thing. I gave a talk at Jack’s community — the Visualize Value community — and this was the one thing I told them. I said, “You’re at A. Z is the vision. It’s the dream. It’s good to have that, it’s good to know what it is — that’s your north star. But where everyone gets paralyzed is they think they need to know step B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J.” And then they’re paralyzed, or they start thinking about step D when they haven’t even gone from A to B yet.
A-B-Z. That’s all you ever need. Where you are, the next thing you need to do, and the end vision. Everything else is irrelevant.
Shaan: Great minds think alike.
Sam: Every time I’ve had any success, or even when I’ve done something that didn’t work out, I just think: if you just start, you’re going to see so many things you didn’t even expect or realize were an opportunity. Or you’ll realize a thing you thought was an opportunity actually isn’t, but now you know something different. You’ve just got to do something.
I get really frustrated with inaction. I’ve been saying this lately: I love thin books and quick silences.
Shaan: What does that mean?
Sam: I love a thin book because it’s a simple idea presented without the fluff. Don’t try to pad it. You don’t need a thick book for everything.
And a “quick silence” — I call my buddy Suleika about every business question I have. We’re starting the Milk Road, I say, “Hey, what do you think about this?” And then there’s a quick silence. It’s obvious that’s the answer. I was building up in my head, “I really need to sit down with him and talk.” But within three minutes we’ve reached a good pause where it’s like, “Well, I guess nothing else really matters until we go do that.” Yep. Alright, I’ll just do that. Obviously. Check you later.
That quick silence is what I want. I used to want to fill that silence with more detail, more analysis, more planning, more nuance, more “if-then” statements. You don’t really need any of that. We talk, I finish my sentence, he says his sentence, and I think, “Sorry, I guess I didn’t really need a call. I could have just texted. I kind of knew this to begin with.”
But that quick silence is showing me when I’m on the right track — either a thin book or a quick silence.
Shaan: That reminds me of coding. If you run into an error and you’re on Stack Overflow and you can’t find your answer, it’s probably because you’re googling the wrong thing. You’ve completely messed it up, you’re going in the completely wrong direction. And I feel like that applies in most cases. If you find yourself asking 10 questions, it’s like: hold up, you’re just going in the completely opposite direction. Pull back and revisit.
Wrap-Up [00:55:00]
Steph: How many people reach out to you after each episode goes live and say they want to pitch you on something or recruit you?
Shaan: It grows. And some of your buddies reach out which is always fun. I don’t want to drop any names because these are private messages, but people I’ve looked up to — people whose stuff I’ve read or whose book I’ve literally read, or we’re from the same country — not naming Eddie James, but it’s been cool. It’s grown because you guys have grown the pod a lot.
Sam: That’s amazing. Well, there are few people I’d get in a fistfight over. You are one of them, Steph. So let me know who.
Steph: You haven’t broken your contract, Sam. You’re good.
Sam: Well, good. I’m happy you came. We have so much more to cover — I think we should wrap up here though.
Steph: Yeah. Sorry. I actually apologize if anyone listened to this, because Steph had a bunch of gold and I feel like I took it in really random directions.
Sam: To make up for it, we’re going to do a second part with Steph if she’ll come back. We’ll do more of these ideas rapid fire and I’ll shut up.
Steph: I’m down. Let’s do it.