Speakers: Sam Parr (host), Shaan Puri (host)
Intro: The Friday Quickie Format [00:00:00]
Shaan: All right, what’s up. It’s time for the first ever Friday Quickie. This is a little idea me and Sam had where we share basically the little things that we saw this week — the best article, the best tweets, a little video we saw. Normally this is stuff we only share in our group chat, and we wanted to try it out on the pod.
Shaan: I’m showing it to him, he’s showing it to me. I don’t know what he’s gonna say, he doesn’t know what I’m gonna say. We each have three, so we’re going to do a list of six things. Let’s run through it. Sam, you want to go first?
Sam: Oh, jinx. I’ll go first. I have a quick one.
Shaan’s Find #1: The VC Deal Flow Hack [00:00:45]
Sam: So this is a genius deal flow hack. You ever heard about how hedge fund traders will move their servers to be as close as possible to the pipe, or they’ll use a certain kind of wire so that trades get executed faster? I used to hear all these things about how in traditional finance people would go to crazy lengths just to get that little extra edge.
Sam: And I always felt a little sad that us — the soft boys of Silicon Valley — we don’t really do that. We’re all nice, paying it forward, just blogging everything we know. There’s no real secrecy, no ruthless secrecy about things. Until I saw this.
Sam: Our buddy Suli tweeted this out: there’s a company that started to help VCs improve their deal flow. Basically every VC knows deal flow matters. Normally the way you do it is you’re hosting dinners or conferences, going on podcasts, or you make a Patagonia vest to give away — stuff like that. But the problem is you don’t know what deals you’re not hearing about.
Sam: So what they did was — some company basically puts a photographer in front of the offices of Kleiner and Andreessen and all these top funds. Is this real or an idea?
Shaan: I think this is real.
Sam: So when people are leaving the office, they’re like, “Hey, do you want a picture in front of the Sequoia sign? I’ll send it to you.” They take a picture because it’s a great moment for the entrepreneur — “this is when we pitched Sequoia” — and they’re like, “Great, what’s the name of your company?” And they basically sell that list to all the other funds. It’s like, “Hey, did you know these guys are out raising? They were talking to Sequoia.” He was like, “I heard about this and I thought it was amazing. The VC who told me about it said, ‘We don’t pay for this, but I know it exists and others do.’”
Sam: I think that’s brilliant. What do you think?
Shaan: I think it’s brilliant. I think it’s insane and brilliant. There’s another version of this that I follow. There’s a Twitter account called something like “stealth” something, and any time somebody who had “working on something new” or “stealth blah blah” in their bio changes it to like the name of a project, it immediately tweets out: “This person just announced they’re doing this thing.”
Sam: What’s the name of that handle?
Shaan: So that account is called Stealth Coy. If you go to Stealth Coy, it’s a real-time notification any time people — it also tracks LinkedIn. Like if you leave a company that they consider a high-trajectory, fast-growth startup, it’s like, “This person is leaving to do something new.” For example, the last tweet was: “Julia is now building in stealth mode. She’s the ex-data science director from GitHub and she lives in Boston. Here’s her LinkedIn. She just announced she’s working on something new in stealth.” Or it’ll be like, “Noah comes out of stealth. He’s got a platform for no-code SDK tooling for enterprise LLM applications. Here’s the link, here’s his LinkedIn.”
Sam: This is awesome. That’s a good find. Nobody knows about this account, by the way — it only has 750 followers, so I maybe blew up my own spot here.
Shaan: There’s also a version for when people remove their employer from their Twitter handle or LinkedIn, and it’s like, “This person is now available.”
Sam: I like this.
Sam’s Find #1: Movement Watch Founder’s Reddit Post [00:05:20]
Sam: All right, let me give you another one. So I was reading Reddit the other day and I found this old post — it’s over a year old. Do you remember Jake Kassan, the guy who started Movement watches?
Shaan: I don’t actually.
Sam: So they were one of the first DTC guys to go big. They started this company, sold watches, got popular on Instagram. I think he sold it for $100 million, then there was another $100 million earnout — I’m not sure if they hit that or not. The company was bootstrapped, so he made north of $50 million, I would imagine.
Sam: I found this post, and I don’t know why he did this, but he did, and I think it’s great. He didn’t really talk about it on social media, but I found it on a subreddit called “Find a Path” — for those who have a hobby, passion, or a passing whim that they want to make a living out of but don’t know how.
Sam: He’s got this post and he says: “I sold my company, Movement, a few years ago for a lot of money, and thought all my problems would be solved. I made my life really cushy and comfortable, and I optimized to be as stress-free as possible.” Then he goes on to say he’s new to this subreddit and he’s still trying to figure out what he wants to do with his life. He set up his life to be easy, and now it’s been two years since he sold the company. He’s 31, single, never has to work again — but he’s never been lonelier or more depressed, and he basically talks about what he’s trying to do to find his passion.
Sam: What’s interesting about this post is: A — people never talk about this stuff publicly where they put their name on it and truly say how they feel. That’s fascinating. And B — you see his replies, where people ask him different questions and he gives really detailed answers about what he’s trying to do. He’s like, “I love video editing and making movies, so I bought a camera, I took a YouTube class, I’m learning how to take pictures and film and chop up videos.” It’s super fascinating to see behind the scenes of someone who’s 29 years old, worth tens of millions of dollars, pretty lonely, pretty depressed, and breaking all of this down.
Shaan: I love this. I thought it was awesome. I saw it because somebody on Twitter wrote, “I wonder what the guys who crushed it in the early wave of e-commerce are doing now — I bet they’re just killing it.” And then somebody else replies, “Actually, I just saw this post on Reddit from the founder of Movement saying exactly what he’s been doing. He’s been wandering and trying to figure it out.” And then I read it and I was like, dude — that’s the magic of the internet. Someone tweeting a random question, somebody else being like, “Oh, here’s the obscure Reddit post that has the answer.”
Shaan: I almost felt bad bringing this up on the pod because I was like, it’s kind of personal — maybe he doesn’t want this on blast. I mean, he posted it publicly on Reddit so I guess it’s fair game. But he’s being very vulnerable: “I’m lonelier than ever, I’m deeply depressed, and I’m trying to figure it out.” Props to him for doing it with his name on it. He could have easily done this anonymously.
Sam: I think that this is a problem not a lot of people go through, but it’s really fascinating for people who are dreaming of making money or who want to sell their company — what happens on the other side. Someone described this as the Second Mountain. You’ve climbed the first mountain, but you still need another mountain to climb. He talks about that — someone’s like, “Why don’t you start another company?” And he says, “In the past, money and ego were the huge motivators for me, and those motivators are gone now. So whatever I do next, I need to find fulfillment and to help others in some way.” Really interesting.
Shaan’s Find #2: Alex Hormozi’s Skool Investment [00:13:10]
Sam: All right, number three. I’m going to do the Hormozi bump.
Shaan: Okay.
Sam: So Alex Hormozi — friend of the pod, good dude — he bought a company recently: Skool. From another guy who’s been on the pod talking about Skool, the original founder, Sam Ovens. So that’s his new thing. He tweeted, “This is the biggest bet I’ve ever made.” He’s now wearing a Skool hat on every interview and every video, trying to promote it. It’s an awesome product — Skool’s really good.
Shaan: I’ve never used it. You actually used it?
Sam: Yeah, it’s a good product. That guy Sam is very savvy and it’s a very good product.
Sam: So basically it’s a community building tool — you can create a paid community and people can join it. It seems heavy in the affiliate marketing, drop-shipping type of game, from what I saw when I browsed the top communities on the site.
Sam: Anyways, I think it’s a good investment. So I was curious — how much of a bump do you think Skool got in web traffic after Hormozi did this? Because obviously he’s doing it with the belief that “I’ve spent two-plus years building a huge audience of entrepreneurial people, I’m going to invest in this thing, and then use my weight to drive traffic.” It’s the same strategy I’ve used: you can buy something at a fair price knowing you have a growth lever to bring more traffic to the site. So how much do you think it went up?
Shaan: I’ll give you the before. Let’s say three, four, five months ago, web traffic was at about eight million monthly visitors. What do you think it is now?
Sam: I would guess 10 or 12.
Shaan: Okay, so it went from eight million to — in January — it looks like it spiked at almost 17 million. According to SimilarWeb, which is not exactly accurate but directionally correct, almost double. About double the traffic for that month. Now a lot of it is people just coming to check it out because of the announcement — not necessarily the most sustainable thing. But let’s look at February numbers.
Sam: Wow.
Shaan: Check this out. Circle.so — they’re a community platform, a competitor to Skool. They’ve raised tens of millions of dollars. Skool has more than doubled their traffic — and they doubled it before they even took the money. That’s insane.
Sam: And Sam Ovens actually told me — he posted it on their about page — that he invested $10 million of his own money, which I think was a large percentage of what he had, into making Skool a reality.
Shaan: Yeah. It’s interesting, these top communities. So I just sorted by paid — you can see it’s the Digital Growth Community, which is basically internet marketing. Number two is Mark’s manifestation thing at $49 a month, 284 members. Digital Wealth Academy. The Adonis School — “like-minded men who want to live the Adonis lifestyle.” It’s a lot of Andrew Tate-type stuff.
Sam: Which I find interesting. But it’s cool because you’ve done a bunch of paid communities on Facebook and Slack and other places. You didn’t use this for Hampton, right?
Shaan: No, because when we started I didn’t know enough about it and didn’t think it would be any good. But then I met Sam, the guy who started it, and we were already on Slack — and I was like, you’re actually really smart, I should have. I kind of regret not using it. I have nothing to do with this company, but I thought it was awesome.
Shaan: They also have a bunch of non-business stuff — there’s stuff on style and clothing, meditation. It’s anything aspirational you’d want: better body, better style, better finances. Whatever it is, that’s how you get there.
Sam: I think it’s a great move. Also, just in general, the business model of: I take a kind of crappy but high-volume business model — let’s say media — and I use it to buy assets in the best business model, SaaS. Which is what he did. He converted his YouTube fame, which doesn’t pay very well, into owning a SaaS asset, which is one of the best business models out there. Good move by Alex on that one.
Shaan: And congrats to all involved on the big spike. I hung out with Sam Ovens once — my wife and I were at a restaurant with him, some type of bar or something, just talking. Sam Ovens is a wonderful person, but he’s almost a little awkward — he’s comfortable with silence. And it got to the part of the conversation where you’re like, “Turns out I’m the awkward one.”
Sam: Yeah.
Shaan: Yeah. It got to the point in the conversation where there was some silence and I was just like, I’m gonna sit in this for a minute. Let’s see what this feels like. So we sit. We finish a conversation. There’s about five seconds of silence. And he goes, “I delivered my baby.” And he’s from New Zealand. And I was like, “What? What do you mean?” He goes, “With my hands.” And he tells this story about how his wife went into labor, the paramedics couldn’t make it in time, and he just delivered the baby on his own.
Shaan: He just threw that out there. And I was like, oh my god. I would join a paid community of him just sending me a voice note every morning. That was like — the silence breaker was “I delivered my baby.” And I just thought it was awesome. You’re the best person I’ve ever met.
Sam’s Find #2: The $3.7M Income Couple’s Budget [00:24:00]
Sam: All right, let me show you another one. There’s this tweet I saw — her name is Julia Chang. She shared a woman on Instagram named Amanda Wolf. What she does is she gets people to share their finances, and then she’s like a personal finance wizard of some kind.
Shaan: She’s a witch. Personal finance witch.
Sam: I don’t know what you call these people. But it’s normally people making like $80 grand a year and she talks through what looks normal and what doesn’t. But she got this couple — 39 and 37 years old, husband and wife, one’s an attorney, one’s a CIO. Their personal income is $3.7 million. They live in Alpine, New Jersey. Their expenses each month are roughly $77,000.
Shaan: The $29,000 mortgage — that wasn’t wild? That’s wild.
Sam: A $29,000 mortgage — I think that’s what it costs to have like a $4 million house. I guess that makes sense. But their personal trainers are four grand a month. And she breaks down all these expenses. I thought it was really fascinating to see what these people are spending on, and like basically how you can make almost $4 million a year and not really be saving a lot. They invest something like a million dollars a year, which is a ton of money. But then she kind of shows that off in a weird way — like, they only have $2,300 left over each month after investing a million dollars a year.
Shaan: What does she do? Does she just write it all out and cross things off and say, “Start over, change this”? What’s the punchline? What’s her takeaway?
Sam: Her takeaway is basically just… look how crazy this is. I don’t think her takeaway is that important. She just lays it out and goes, “Crazy, right?” Personal trainers at four grand a month is ridiculous. Nanny at $10,000 a month. Kids’ school at $2,500. Kids’ tutors and coaches at $3,000.
Shaan: My takeaway is just: if they live in Alpine, New Jersey, I bet they work in Manhattan. And that lifestyle — even if you’re making close to $4 million a year — it’s really hard to reach terminal velocity, the point where you don’t actually have to work anymore. To not work and spend a million dollars a year, you’d have to have something like $25 million liquid — that’s what you’d need to withdraw 3% a year. Even when you’re earning almost $4 million in the Manhattan area, it’s really, really challenging if you live like these people.
Sam: That’s the key. If you want to spend $29,000 a month on your mortgage, $10,000 on your nanny, another $8,000 on miscellaneous, $4,000 on a personal trainer — and then $6,000 a month on shopping and $4,000 on dining out — like, $14,000 a month on shopping, fun, and dining out? If you’re not having fun with the shopping and dining out, maybe don’t also spend another $4,000 on “fun.” This is just excessive spending for that level of income.
Shaan: I agree. But I think the real takeaway is: whoever posted this is just good at social media. They’re like, “How do I enrage everybody? Okay, let me post this.” Because all this does is make everyone in the comments go, “Oh man, I can’t believe this. These people are so out of touch.” Total engagement bait.
Sam: Dude, I know so many people who live like this. I know a lot of people who make multi-millions and spend almost all of it. People who earn millions of dollars a year and still live almost paycheck to paycheck. It sounds crazy, but I know people like this.
Shaan: Having dumb friends. You are the average of those five people you’re spending time with.
Sam: Those five idiots somehow burning $4 million a year.
Shaan: Man, if you live on the East Coast, you spend a lot.
Shaan’s Find #3: Liquid Death’s Super Bowl Hack [00:31:00]
Sam: All right, you do one and then I have one more.
Shaan: All right, my last one’s a quick one. Did you see this Liquid Death marketing campaign?
Sam: No.
Shaan: Okay, genius. So the Super Bowl was a couple weeks ago and they were like, “How do we hijack this marketing moment without buying a $6 million Super Bowl ad?” So they put on eBay — they called it “the biggest ad ever.” They have a national run of half a million Liquid Death cases, and the side of the box is the ad space. They’re like, “It costs you $6 million to get in front of 110 million people on the Super Bowl, but 200 million people are going to walk through the doors of these retailers and see our Liquid Death box.” Pretty big leap of faith that everyone who enters a grocery store will look at this, but whatever.
Shaan: And they auctioned it off. Coinbase ends up buying it for $500,000. So pump one of PR is in the marketing community — marketers are like, “Oh, so smart.” Pump two was Coinbase actually paying them $500,000 to buy the ad space. So they got $500K for excess inventory that was just sitting there. And pump three was the news that somebody actually bought it. Three hits out of this one thing. Very smart marketing by Liquid Death.
Sam: Dude, the guy who started Liquid Death — he came on our podcast I think two years ago, when they were getting going but still big, not this big. And if I remember correctly, his background was working at an agency. My takeaway from that podcast was basically: when you’re selling water, the product’s not that important. It’s just water. It doesn’t taste particularly different than any other water. But he was just like, “I’m really good at advertising and I’m going to do all of these funny things to get eyeballs.” I would not have predicted that would work, and it has. He completely crushed it. His name’s Mike — I don’t know his last name actually.
Shaan: If you go back and listen to that episode, it’s really good. He was really fascinating.
Sam: That was a few years ago when they were a lot smaller. Now they’re prepping for an IPO or something. It’s pretty crazy. I don’t know how healthy the business is, but it went way further than I ever thought it would — probably way further than you ever thought it would too. Because the whole bet was: it’s water, and we’re going to be absolutely world-class at marketing. And they pulled it off. Props to them.
Sam’s Find #3: The Review Site Scam [00:37:00]
Sam: All right, here’s the last one. I found this article — it was from housefresh.com. If you Google “House Fresh” and “David and Goliath” you’ll see this article. Let me tell you why I was interested.
Sam: Do you ever use review sites to decide which product you want to buy?
Shaan: Not anymore. But I did for a long time.
Sam: Me too. And I started diving deep on this. I was like, how does BuzzFeed — what’s their specialty? — know which air purifier is best? I don’t think they can actually test all this stuff. And I started noticing there are all these websites — Men’s Health, BuzzFeed — reviewing products, posting “10 best items,” and I’m like, I don’t think they actually review these things.
Sam: Well, I read this article and at this point I don’t trust any of them. Let me give you a breakdown. House Fresh is a small company and all they do is review air purifiers. They’re missionaries in a mercenary game. Most people who review air purifiers — BuzzFeed, whoever — they just know they can rank on Google, so they read a bunch of Amazon reviews, pick the one that looks best, and put it at the top of their list. Whereas House Fresh actually buys the products. They’re not given the products, so they’re not owed good coverage to any manufacturer. They test it out.
Sam: Well, they did this big article explaining how review sites actually work. The takeaway: 16 companies — Meredith, which owns a bunch of different magazines; Ziff Davis; BuzzFeed; Penske Media (who we’ve talked about on a podcast) — basically 16 media companies get three billion clicks per month and they dominate Google. It’s really hard for any small company to get into the review space because these 16 companies control the whole thing.
Sam: And this article dove deep into how they’re doing reviews. They basically hire a freelancer to write something and post it, and then they own like 50 different websites and post it across all of them. They don’t actually show how they’re doing the reviews. The likely reality: they just go to Amazon, aggregate what actual buyers have said, curate it, and put it in an article. That’s not a great way to find out what’s actually best.
Sam: I read this and my takeaway was two things: one, I don’t trust any website doing reviews anymore. Two, there are very few I still trust. I used to trust Wirecutter, but now I’m nervous because they’re owned by the New York Times and have different incentives. I go to Reddit, but that’s even hard.
Sam: I actually think there’s an opportunity to create a trusted review website. I don’t know exactly how you’d do it, but I’m pretty certain you could do it while remaining small. But there’s a whole bunch of these niche websites that were talking about interesting stuff — one for VPNs, one for mattresses — and then the big mattress companies or VPN companies go and actually buy the review sites and put their own links at the top. At this point I’m skeptical of the entire industry. It’s completely ruins my browsing experience because I see this stuff and I’m like, I can never go to those websites for reviews anymore. That’s kind of fascinating.
Shaan: 100% agree. This is crazy. It’s gotten completely out of hand. It’s one of the major ways that news sites stay in business: they basically sell their SEO juice to the highest bidder. For everything — air purifiers, mattresses, everything. It’s all just SEO hacks.
Shaan: For example, if you want to find the best mattress and you Google “best mattress,” you’re not going to find the best mattress. You’re going to find who is the best at SEO. Which mattress company is the most aggressive at SEO — that’s the only answer you get.
Shaan: I’m totally with you. I wish there was a better solution because there are more products than ever and you do want to find out if they’re any good. I actually think there’s probably something you could do with a combination of video and subscription. Like: “We’re calling out the BS that exists in this space. Pay for this subscription and you get access to super high-quality reviews. We are not going to take affiliate commissions.” I think if you drew that line, there’d be a market for that. Maybe even let people share subscriptions so a bunch of people could chip in.
Shaan: The solution is somebody has to say, “I’m going to choose a different business model. I’m not going to get paid on affiliate links.” That’s the person who ends up getting trusted, because their incentive is not to push affiliate products.
Sam: You know that infographic where it shows four or five companies own like 80% of the food in the grocery store?
Shaan: Yes.
Sam: This article has one of those for media. It’s 16 media companies — Hearst, Ziff Davis, Dotdash Meredith, The Arena Group, Red Ventures, and a handful of others — and it shows all the companies and titles they own. You scroll through it and you’re like, “Those are all supposed to be the reputable ones.” And I’m like, I don’t trust any of this anymore.
Sam: It’s almost made me a little bit of a conspiracy theorist when it comes to this stuff. Completely ruins my browsing experience. I see it now and I can never go to those websites for reviews. It kind of opened up my eyes.
Sam: You can see it yourself — just Google “House Fresh David vs. Goliath.” Very fascinating article.
Wrap [00:50:00]
Shaan: All right, is that the pod for our… what are we calling it? Quicky Friday?
Sam: The Quickie.
Shaan: The Quickie. All right, that’s it. That’s the pod.