Sam and Shaan debrief their conversation with Palmer Luckey (Oculus founder), then go deep on a wild inside story: their friend Nikita Bier’s app Gas went from a geofenced Georgia high school experiment to the #1 app in the App Store in roughly 20 days, generating a million dollars in the process. Along the way: Kristen Kent holding sarahslist.com hostage in one of the best ransom emails ever received, and MailChimp’s CEO stepping down over an internal pronoun email.
Speakers: Sam Parr (host), Shaan Puri (host)
Opening: Waking Up Ready [00:00:00]
Shaan: All right, we’re live. Sam Parr, what’s up?
Sam: Nothing. How’s it going? You know, just the usual. Woke up, decided okay, no small boy stuff today. Got going immediately. Started considering some small boy stuff. Then remembered — there will be absolutely none of that today.
Shaan: What was it?
Sam: I woke up a little sore. So I’m waking up with a complaint on one of the greatest days I’ve ever had.
Shaan: This is not how I’m going to start my day. Wait, why was it one of your greatest days?
Sam: It’s just a general attitude I have.
Palmer Luckey Debrief [00:01:30]
Shaan: Do you want to start off by recapping Palmer Luckey? Because after talking to him I feel like he’s kind of the greatest guy I’ve ever talked to.
Sam: Yeah. He was awesome. What’s a word that describes Palmer Luckey?
Shaan: Independent-minded. I really respected that all his opinions felt genuinely his own. You know, people write in their Twitter bio “opinions are my own, not my employer’s” — his opinions actually are. Also, when people write “contrarian thinker,” if you have to say that you’re contrarian, maybe you’re not the most contrarian thinker.
Sam: Right. No offense but… yeah.
Shaan: He was also incredibly enthusiastic, which I liked. We’ve said no to a bunch of guests simply because their intelligence is cranked to level 10 but their charisma and enthusiasm is so low that they make for a terrible podcast guest. With Palmer, not only did he have the charisma to tell stories about the past — he seemed really pumped about what he’s doing now and what the future looks like.
Sam: Yes. Enthusiastic about life. Dead on the inside is something we say a lot. He was the opposite. He just springs out of bed every day.
He also had this thing where — I don’t want to over-explain this — but almost like a renaissance man. He would say things like “yeah, I bought this marina because there’s going to be new laws about Seaport access…” and I was just like, what are you talking about? And then he’d say something else, like “well, seasteading is off the table for now…” as if we all knew that.
Shaan: And he’s like building a jet engine over the weekend. He mentioned that he and some people were in a workshop and they discovered you should make oil-based foods, and like… we could take this conversation in so many directions and each one would be interesting.
Sam: Yeah. He didn’t say this, but there’s at least a 50% chance he has one of the top 10 samurai sword collections in the world. He definitely owns swords.
Shaan: One hundred percent he owns swords.
Sam: All right. Where do you want to go next?
The Sarah’s List Ransom Email [00:06:00]
Shaan: Check this out. I forwarded you an email. Did you see it — from about Sarah’s List?
Sam: Oh my God. You open up the email and it says: “I am holding sarahslist.com hostage.”
She goes: “You don’t know me, but I obviously know you. I purchased sarahslist.com and I’ve turned it into a bomb-ass website. I am willing to sell it to you for $20,000. This is a steal, as I purchased it for $30,000. I’m essentially giving you $10,000. You’re welcome. If you’d ever like to see sarahslist.com again” — and then she made the font really small — “reply to this message. Looking forward to hearing from you. Kristen.”
Shaan: This is amazing. Who is she?
Sam: So her name is Kristen Kent. She sends me her story afterward. She’s been in tech for 12 years and “regrettably chose companies off Kristen’s List, which was not as lucrative as companies off Sarah’s List.”
For people who don’t know — Sarah’s List is this concept we did a full episode on. Basically, Sam’s wife Sarah is a self-made millionaire who didn’t do any of the heroic entrepreneurial things you hear about. She just picked companies whose equity was going to 4 or 5x in a four-year period. She worked at Facebook — not employee four, more like in the thousands — then joined Airbnb somewhere around employee 1,000. Airbnb goes public, equity 4 or 5x. That’s the formula.
She joined companies that already had stable environments, interesting equity, great benefits — but where the equity could still multiply. Sam and Sarah made a list of 12 companies fitting those criteria about a year and a half ago, and in the time since, the average company value is up something like 2.5x. 11 out of 12 raised a significant up-round.
Sam: And Kristen built a website — sarahslist.com — and filled it with 12 companies, a picture of Richie Rich, the selection criteria, and the actual list. Flexport, Uniswap, Airtable, Figma, Replit — Figma alone got acquired for like $20 billion.
Shaan: When I DMed her back on Twitter — normally I either ignore DMs or I click the heart emoji as a thank-you. But I replied to this one and said: I’m an idiot, this is actually really good.
So here’s my counteroffer — public podcast counteroffer to Kristen Kent:
I’ll give you the $20,000. Actually, I’ll give you the $30,000 you paid for the domain. But it comes with a catch: we’re going to work together on this project. You do the work on the company side, I do the promotional and distribution side. And here’s what we’re going to do: turn Sarah’s List into a $500,000 a year passive income stream.
Sam: Wait, wait, wait. Shaan — I’m 50% of Sarah’s List. Sarah is 50% of Sarah’s List.
Shaan: Sarah gets a 1% royalty for use of her name.
Sam: And what am I?
Shaan: Your equity? So — Kristen deserves 50%. The other 50% — you and I split. 90/10, you got it.
Sam: As a minority owner I’m not sure I have a say here.
Shaan: Here’s how we’re going to make this work. Rather than monetizing as a job board at $500 a post — which is fine, but a lot of ongoing sales — here’s a different idea:
We take these companies and host a hiring day once a quarter. Each week we feature one company in a deep-dive email — why this is a great place to work. We spin off a separate email list for this. Interested people — high-quality tech workers — sign up.
The business model: instead of charging for a job posting, we take a recruiter fee. When a recruiter places a candidate, they take 20 to 30% of first-year salary — call it $20K to $30K per placement. If we can place 25 candidates a year at $20K each, that’s half a million dollars. Hire a ghostwriter to do the company deep-dives for a couple grand a month. That’s basically all the cost.
You’ve heard of The Muse? It was a women-focused hiring site that did exactly this — deep dives on companies, drove traffic from search, charged companies a big fee. They’re getting like 6 to 8 million visitors a month now. Packing McCormick does something similar — charges $25K to $50K per deep dive.
Sam: Milk Road does a deep dive thing too. It’s like $25K to $40K depending on total promotion.
Shaan: There was a company called Developer Auction that ran hiring days like what I’m describing. Instead of companies listing jobs and candidates applying, it flipped the model: developers walked the stage, companies competed for them with salaries. Auction energy. Developers got huge pay bumps, companies scrambled. Built a flywheel.
It eventually needed to scale and the Boutique model didn’t work at venture scale, so they pivoted. But if you kept it Boutique — making a million dollars a year of passive income — you could do that.
Kristen, the real value here is not the domain and not the website. It’s you. I want you in my life and would love to work with you.
Sam: Agreed. She seems special.
Shaan: All right, Kristen — side hustle that’ll make $250K a year. It’s there for the taking. All you gotta do is all the work.
The Nikita Bier / Gas App Story [00:22:00]
Shaan: Do you want to talk about Nikita?
Sam: Yes. We kind of did at the end of a previous episode, but I realized this story deserves significantly more time.
So — most everything here is public information from articles and his Twitter feed. Nothing confidential.
Shaan: Nikita Bier is a friend of ours. We’re in a group text with him. He started an app called TBH — “To Be Honest.” It was basically an anonymous compliments app. You know how in high school they’d pass around those superlatives sheets? “Most likely to become famous.” “Best smile.” TBH was that but as a mobile app.
Under the hood it’s pretty smart — surfaces the right four or five names from your contacts so you’re answering about people you actually know. Then it sends those people a text saying, “Hey, someone said you have the best smile — download the app to see who.” And you are 100% going to download that app.
That taps into something deep in teenagers. The app got acquired by Facebook for tens of millions of dollars — originally reported as $100M, later articles said closer to $40M. Still a great outcome. That was about five years ago.
Right after acquiring it, Facebook basically shut it down. It got viral quickly but didn’t have long-term retention. But it gave Nikita this persona of: I am a wunderkind who knows how to make things go viral.
Sam: So Nikita said something in our group message. I’m going to read this the way he actually said it — because I wanted to be soft about it and someone called me out. He basically said: “I’m just thinking about how I can make $10 million in three months. I want to make an app that generates like $10 million in 90 days.”
Shaan: And we were like: …what?
Sam: We laughed it off. And then we brought it up on this podcast as an interesting thought exercise — is that even possible? He must have had a non-compete from the TBH/Facebook deal for something like five years. The other day, it seems like that period ended. And he launches this app.
The Launch: TBH with a Paywall [00:30:00]
Sam: The new app is basically TBH again. Same concept. But this time, there’s one key twist: you can pay to see who voted for you. The subscription is $6.99 a week — basically $28 a month. That’s double the price of Netflix. To see who voted for you in a high school anonymous compliments app.
Shaan: And he’s like: they’re gonna pay.
Sam: And we’re like… will they? And he’s like: they’re gonna pay.
Shaan: What’s interesting is that with TBH he raised a little money from Founders Fund and Greylock — so there was pressure to build the next Snapchat. This time he’s self-funded. He’s got like four engineers living in his LA house. He’s just trying to: get in, get big, make money, get out.
Sam: He launches it and geofences it to three high schools in Georgia. He says: you can’t even download it, it’s not public yet. We’re like: what? He says: we’re doing it high school by high school. There’s only like 2,000 people in the school — this is going to take off fast.
And he’d post charts — using this academic language, like “we’re seeing the K-factor stabilize at two, user retention has not stagnated, the churn at three percent is nominal” — and we’re like, are we watching a real-time startup or what?
Then he starts adding: “a thousand new users per hour.” And I’m brushing it off — like, these are bots, right? But then he’s like: “We put it in the Games category under Puzzles.” So he could stay out of the Social Networking charts until he was ready to flip the switch.
Shaan: That is like if you watched Game of Thrones and they’re talking about how to invade King’s Landing. This is chess pieces being moved around on a map, but the chess pieces are high schools.
Sam: He had this whole launch playbook he’d developed and even wrote up internally at Facebook after TBH. The idea: the most valuable asset for a social app is a reliable petri dish — a small, dense network where you can test the app quickly and learn. A high school has roughly 2,000 people who mostly know each other. If you can seed it there, you get real data fast.
Shaan: His strategy for seeding: create an Instagram account with the high school name and the app brand name. Make it private. Go follow every kid who has “class of [year]” or the high school name in their bio.
The kids see: who followed me? It has my school name in it. They click. It’s private. To see the profile, you have to follow back. So they request to follow.
He doesn’t accept any requests.
At 4 p.m. on the day of the launch — as kids are getting out of school — he has a guy in a truck watching the school. The moment kids come out, he hits “accept all.” Everyone gets a notification at the same time. They click the profile. The bio says: “Download the app. See who likes you.” They download the app. And then he instantly moves to another high school.
Sam: He’s doing it again now with this new app. And it starts working. We’re watching it live in the group chat.
Human Trafficking Hoax, Rebrand to Crush, Then Gas [00:40:00]
Sam: But then — the rumors start. People on TikTok are saying this app is being used for human trafficking. He laughs it off. But the deletions start. He’s like, it’s just a couple of reviews, it’s nothing.
But then someone makes a TikTok: “Guys, delete this app. It’s sus as hell. I downloaded it and a white van started following me.” And people start sharing it — girls from the school going: “Do NOT download this app.” It spreads like wildfire. He’s like: this originated somewhere coordinated. It’s not organic.
Apple ends up taking it down.
Shaan: He relaunches as Crush. Sends us the new brand — and it looks exactly like the Crush soda brand, orange and all. I got so thirsty looking at it. Hadn’t had orange soda in a decade and I needed it immediately.
Crush launches. This time it attracts a slightly different demographic. But the same thing starts happening again. So he changes the name again. This time: Gas.
Sam: Act three. He relaunches in Alabama with the same four-high-school playbook. Same geofencing strategy, same petri dish approach. And it starts taking off — even faster than before.
Shaan: In roughly seven to ten days, he starts tweeting out the results. Something like: a million daily users. Adding 30,000 new users an hour. Users answering 3.2 million polls per hour. About 10 days in: a million dollars in sales. And the app goes to number one in the App Store.
Above TikTok. Above Instagram. Above Facebook.
He tweets: “Ladies and gentlemen, after a five-year hiatus, I’m no longer a one-hit wonder. Introducing Gas — the number one app in the App Store.”
Sam: And then he starts getting hilariously cocky about it. Which I love, by the way. A VC tweets something about growth without retention being meaningless. Nikita just @ ‘s him and replies: “Just @ me.”
He starts jumping into every thread about high-growth apps and basically saying: are you talking about me?
Shaan: Then the human trafficking rumors start again. This time Ashton Kutcher — whose whole philanthropy is around fighting human trafficking — retweets about it. Nikita screenshots Ashton DMing him. Not even saying hi, just a winking face. And Nikita shares it with us like… look at this.
Sam: Ashton Kutcher. A wink emoji. No words. Just the wink.
Shaan: And then Nikita posts this hyper-official statement: “After an investigation, our team found several indications that the Gas App human trafficking hoax was planted by an entity or person originating in China. Our data shows users connecting from China when the app first began growing, and the first fake reviews were posted that same day.”
He’s accusing China.
Sam: I told him: you need to go full Trump on this. Stop saying “gas app human trafficking” in the same sentence — you are poisoning your own search results. Start saying: “Why is China spreading fake news about the number one American app for teens? Is Tick Tock involved?” You should be leaning in way harder.
Shaan: He starts going on Fox Business. They’re interviewing him, showing screenshots of the app in the background. And he’s like: “Well, the thing we wanted to do was bring positivity to teens. Teens feel really bad — we just wanted an app where there’s no bullying, no negativity.” And the screenshot behind him is a poll question that says “who do you want to steal from their boyfriend?”
Sam: It is the most Silicon Valley HBO show thing I have ever seen in real life.
What This Story Teaches About Viral Apps [00:55:00]
Sam: So the story — what does it actually teach?
Shaan: A few things. One: you don’t need a mission. “I want to make $10 million in three months” is a great mission. Maybe there’s something there about positivity for teens — maybe. But what’s really driving it is: the puzzle is interesting, getting big fast is exciting, and let’s just play.
He goes on Fox News and says “I get messages every day from teens saying this app made them feel better about themselves” — and the screenshot behind him shows “who do you want to steal from their boyfriend.” It’s just funny.
Two: the really good founders of these consumer apps are maniacal about small numbers. They’re obsessed with the K-factor. Not the design, not the logo, not the branding. When the K-factor drops below 1.0, they’re like: we’re screwed, we have to completely redo the app. That obsession with the unsexy metric is the real difference.
Sam: Three: this whole story — from “I want to make $10 million in three months” to number one in the App Store — takes place in roughly 20 days. That’s the roller coaster. And he called his shot and hit it.
I find Nikita very entertaining for the same reason I find Conor McGregor entertaining. Cocky guy, tries to call his shots, then tries to pull them off.
Shaan: And I think there’s something Bane-like about it. For four years he was probably watching other people try to build social apps and just silently judging them. Like: unless you’ve built the number one app in the App Store, don’t talk to me. And now he did it again.
The fact that he relaunched the same app idea is hilarious. He probably had a countdown timer to when the non-compete ended. He was considering other ideas — a real estate thing, something else — and then it was just like the wand choosing the wizard. Just pulled him back in.
It also breaks a lot of narratives. You don’t need a noble mission to build something meaningful — at least not at first. You need to care deeply about one metric. And the platform can change, the demographic can change, the name can change — but the core idea of an anonymous positive voting app for teens just works. It worked in 2007 on the Facebook app platform. It worked in 2017 as TBH on mobile. It works now as Gas.
Sam: Props to him. What an incredible story. Thanks for the entertainment, Nikita.
A Moment of Silence for the MailChimp CEO [01:03:00]
Shaan: I want to have a moment of silence for the MailChimp CEO.
Sam: What happened? The MailChimp CEO or the founder?
Shaan: Ben Chestnut. He stepped down. And here’s the context: MailChimp was this Indie darling — bootstrapped forever, then sold to Intuit for many billions. They did it out of Atlanta over like 20 years. Amazing success story.
Ben Chestnut sent an internal email to a small group of employees criticizing the practice of employees introducing themselves with preferred pronouns. He wrote that he found it unnecessary and thought it ultimately did more harm than good. He used the word “peeps” throughout, which is apparently internal MailChimp slang. He said it was forcing about 1,300 employees to adopt a new communication paradigm for an extremely small group. He compared it to illogical mandates and said the workplace was becoming politicized.
Then he stepped down, coincidentally, not long after this got out.
Sam: My recommendation: don’t comment on this stuff. My personal opinion is I understand what he’s trying to say. I think he said it in a pretty aggressive way. And using “peeps” when you’re trying to make a serious argument… you can’t use slang in a serious argument. It just undercuts you.
Shaan: I’m going to add “peeps” to the list of words that sound wrong in serious conversations, alongside “tweets” and “texts.” Like when I’m arguing about something important and I have to say “well he tweeted…” It just deflates the whole thing.
Sam: Either way — rip Ben. I like Ben. I’ve emailed him many times, he’s never replied, so we kind of know each other. He can go off and enjoy his six billion dollars.
Shaan: That’s the episode. See you next time.
Sam: Let’s travel, never look back.