Sam and Shaan cover five business ideas in this early-morning session: (1) Elevator SaaS — AuditMate and We Maintain are building fleet-management software for the two million US elevators controlled by four monopolistic companies; (2) Unbundling Etsy — Jungle Scout clones for Poshmark and Etsy, plus a custom gifts vertical you could spin out into a standalone marketplace; (3) Wimp to Warrior — a licensed MMA training program with a fight at the end, built around the rite-of-passage principle; (4) Mental fitness as the next fitness wave and Ryan Holiday’s Daily Stoic as an underrated media empire; (5) Canadian R&D tax credits that cut engineering costs by 50%.
Speakers: Sam Parr (host), Shaan Puri (host)
Elevator Fleet Management SaaS [00:00:00]
Sam: Let me tell you about the elevator business. There are roughly two million elevators in America, and four companies control basically the whole market: Otis, Schindler, KONE, and Mitsubishi. Otis has been around since 1853 — invented in Yonkers, New York. It’s a $40 billion market cap company on $12 billion in revenue. The size of the elevator companies is insane.
Here’s the problem they’ve created: when you buy an elevator from Otis, you’re signing a 10 or 20-year service contract. Now imagine you’re a company like Target with five to seven thousand elevators. It’s incredibly hard to track when each one needs service, what falls under the contract, what doesn’t. So most of these large building owners just employ whole teams to manage it, or they give up and just call service companies as needed.
There are two new SaaS companies built on top of this: one called AuditMate, and one in Britain called We Maintain, which has raised $40 million. They charge $50–60 per elevator per month. They act as your agent — they sign on to negotiate with Otis on your behalf, make sure everything’s maintained, and handle all the complexity.
The business model I love: instead of a flat subscription, you take a percentage of savings — like TurboTax, or like tax savings services on Main Street that say “we’ll take a cut of whatever we save you.” It’s an easy sell because the customer has no downside. You’re literally turning a cost center into found money.
Shaan: Otis at a $40 billion market cap compared to Twitter at $50 billion — who would’ve thought? And these companies have been around since the 1800s, family-owned, printing money for over a century.
Sam: This is the type of business I love: old things that last a long time, a physical product you can touch, named after a family, absurdly profitable. I’d love to own something like this. Though the SaaS layer on top of it is a clever way in without being the elevator company.
Unbundling Etsy [00:14:00]
Shaan: The second idea: I’m really interested in what I’d call B-class marketplaces. If Amazon is the A-class marketplace, then Etsy, Poshmark, and Airbnb are the second tier — massive, with real seller communities, but with less sophisticated tooling built for their sellers.
Jungle Scout sells for nine figures. It’s a Chrome extension for Amazon sellers that tells you: here’s the search volume for this product category, here’s monthly revenue, here’s how much competition there is. You find the combination of high search volume and low competition and you know you’ve found an opportunity. That business is enormous.
Nobody has built the equivalent for Poshmark or Etsy. AirDNA exists for Airbnb — they charge about $100 a month, bootstrapped to $9 million ARR, then raised $8 million. I’d estimate they’re at $30 million ARR now. What I’d expect to be a cute side hustle is actually a $50-100 million business.
Sam: Ben’s wife Tiffany is a power seller on Poshmark — Poshmark reserved IPO shares for top sellers because they’d built the marketplace. That’s a massive community with real commercial activity and no serious tooling.
Shaan: So the SaaS play: build Jungle Scout for Etsy or Poshmark. But then go further — actually unbundle a vertical out of Etsy entirely.
Etsy is a big enough public company now that you could look at one of their top categories and ask: can I build a standalone marketplace that does this one thing better than they do? The classic example is unbundling Craigslist — Airbnb took the housing vertical, Etsy took the handmade goods vertical, and so on.
The category I’d target: custom gifts. It’s one of Etsy’s top categories. People go there for wedding coasters with names on them, bachelorette shirts, personalized everything. I’d build it more like Fiverr or Cameo — flat-rate custom gift ordering. You could rank in search for “custom gifts” specifically, or run Google ads to hijack Etsy’s traffic, and own that vertical.
By the way, you can already see how big individual shops are. If you go to any Etsy shop, they show how many sales the shop has made. Six thousand orders at a $35 average — that’s $210K in revenue from one seller. Multiply that across millions of sellers and you understand how big the data layer gets.
Wimp to Warrior [00:32:00]
Sam: Next one: Daniel Cormier posted about this program called Wimp to Warrior. You pay $2,200-2,500, sign up for a 20-week cohort, and on day one you have a fight scheduled. Amateur exhibition MMA fight, five months from when you start.
The idea is not really about fitness — it’s about a rite of passage. You’ve said you wanted to lose weight forever. Now you have a fight in five months. That’s finally the thing that makes you do it.
It started in Australia, now spreading internationally. They license the program to existing MMA and boxing gyms, who provide the training. The brand provides the marketing, the star coaches — Conor McGregor’s coach John Kavanagh, DC — and the customer pipeline. It’s asset-light. They raised $8 million.
Shaan: What I love about this model versus Spartan Race or Tough Mudder: those are traveling events businesses with massive operational overhead. Wimp to Warrior is a licensing model. They send you the business-in-a-box, provide the brand and the demand generation, you do the training. Way less capital-intensive.
Sam: And the deeper principle: men have lost the rite of passage. Women have biological milestones. Jewish boys have bar mitzvahs. Sparta sent 14-year-olds into the wild for five days. Modern American men have nothing like that. Programs that create that — a clear beginning, a real challenge, a definitive end — fill a void that’s only getting bigger.
Shaan: There’s something here with mental fitness more broadly. You can be physically healthy but not fit. Same thing mentally — you can not have a diagnosable condition but be totally unfit for adversity. Mental fitness is the ability to handle a high variety and intensity of challenges. The voice in your head all day is the manifestation of your mental fitness.
Sam: Ryan Holiday has quietly built one of the best brands in this space. The Daily Stoic — coins, email courses, books on stoicism. If he ever wanted to run a stoic boot camp for $10K, I’d sign up immediately.
Shaan: The thing I learned: most people approach stoicism backwards. They think practicing stoicism will make them calm. Actually it’s the other way — you first learn to calm the mind, and then stoicism emerges naturally. You don’t practice it to get there; it’s a state you arrive at after learning to master the internal noise.
Canadian R&D Tax Credits [00:50:00]
Sam: Here’s a financial hack. I was talking to a founder who has 15 engineers and is only spending $1 million per year. In San Francisco, 15 engineers would cost $5-6 million annually when you include salary, benefits, office, recruiting fees, signing bonuses.
Shaan: How?
Sam: Canada has these things called SR&ED credits — Scientific Research and Experimental Development. Basically: you pay an engineer their full salary of $150,000. At the end of the year, the Canadian government deposits back roughly 50% of that cost. So $150K effectively becomes $75K. You can also get a loan against that future refund for cash flow, so you’re not waiting.
This guy had 15 engineers in Toronto for $1 million a year. That’s a massive competitive advantage if you’re a startup. Anybody doing R&D work — not just software engineers — can qualify.
Shaan: The smart play is Terminal.io — they set up Canadian engineering offices for US companies. You don’t relocate, they do the talent sourcing, the legal setup, the SR&ED compliance, and you just pay the bill. If you’re starting a company, or even if you’re scaling one, this is worth investigating seriously.
Reese Witherspoon and the Hello Sunshine Sale [01:02:00]
Sam: One more: Reese Witherspoon sold Hello Sunshine for $900 million. Lots of people couldn’t figure out why. I think I understand it.
She’s been making IP since the early 2000s — gone Girl, Big Little Lies, The Morning Show, Little Fires Everywhere. Those aren’t the most insane box office hits, but the buyer — Kevin Mayer, the former president of Disney Plus, backed by Blackstone — is buying a media conglomerate play. They’re not just buying the shows. They’re buying:
- The Hello Sunshine production machine — a team that knows how to make prestige women-focused content
- The book club — 500,000+ followers on Instagram who Reese actively curates and can convert to viewers
- Her system of optioning books through the book club, market-testing them, and then selling adaptation rights to streamers
- The brand
That model — find the book, market-test it with the club, option the rights, adapt it for a streamer — is a flywheel that’s self-funding. She’s basically a one-woman IP pipeline.
Shaan: She also has a filmmaking lab for 13-18-year-old girls and a clothing brand with brick-and-mortar stores. She’s quietly an Oprah-level conglomerate operator.
Sam: I will say: the buyer paid a lot. If you look at the specific assets — a few films, three TV shows, six bought by streamers — I don’t understand how you get to $900 million purely from those assets. It’s more like the Beats by Dre acquisition where you’re partly paying for the person. Kevin Mayer is paying for Reese, and some IP, and hoping to build around it.
Shaan: Congrats to Reese for getting that bag.
Sam: Action-packed episode. We gave like eight good things.
Shaan: Early morning in the books. See you.