Sam and Shaan cover four ideas: Peak (a TRT subscription business they both invested in), Zed Run (digital horse racing NFTs — $18M in one drop, top spender paid $800K), B-Roll.io (a marketplace for UGC-style ad content that Shaan thinks could be a 9-figure business), and Polymarket (bet on anything using crypto). They close with a podcast growth update — 520K monthly downloads — and Shaan’s two mottos from Twitch CEO Emmett Shear: “impatience with action, patience with results” and “no silver bullet, only lead bullets.”
Speakers: Shaan Puri (host), Sam Parr (host)
Peak: TRT Subscription Business [00:00:00]
Sam: I invested in Peak over the weekend. And I’ll give some context because we talked about TRT on the podcast early on — maybe episode one or two of the brainstorm format. I said something like: TRT is a subscription business — why doesn’t somebody do this? And obviously people were already doing it, and now Peak is one of the leaders.
Shaan: I went in skeptical. I wasn’t sure how big it could be, had some concerns about side effects. Then I got on a call with the guy who started it — Saad — and he just crushed it. Phenomenally good communicator.
Sam: The problem this solves: as men age, testosterone levels drop. But it’s not just age — the average 25-year-old today has testosterone levels like a 56-year-old from 50 years ago. Doctors don’t fully know why. The leading theories are: we live soft lives with no physical fear response, we drink out of plastic, we smoke less.
What low testosterone actually feels like isn’t just weak muscles and bad looks. It’s depression. Feeling flat. Losing that “purposeful aggressiveness” — not aggression like wanting to fight someone, but confidence and drive.
Shaan: The business model isn’t complicated. You do an at-home finger-prick blood test, mail it to a lab, a doctor reviews the levels. If they’re low, you get offered a prescription — injectable, cream, or gummy. Then you stay on a monitoring cadence. It’s a digital medical workflow, like Hims or Ro but for testosterone.
Sam: Risks here are not market risk or product risk — both of those are solved. The risk is operational excellence. Can you handle the regulatory workflow properly? But you know how to solve that? You hire the person who opened Uber in Atlanta and ran their market there. Operational excellence is a commodity if you’re willing to overpay for the right people.
Shaan: Joe Rogan — the male Oprah — takes it and vouches for it publicly. Once he normalizes something at his scale, it’s a matter of time. His diehards go first, then the curious ones, and eventually it crosses over. I think they’ll be at $100 million in sales within three years.
Sam: Also: the cream is actually the most effective form of administration. But the injectable is the most popular — because people perceive the shot as “the real thing.” Perception is reality, even in medicine.
Zed Run: Digital Horse Racing [00:16:00]
Shaan: Zed Run. zed.run. Digital horse racing. NFT project.
Here’s how it works: you buy a digital horse. You race it against other people’s horses. Each horse has stats — certain probability of winning, certain genetic traits. You can also breed two horses together to create a new horse, and when you breed them there’s a small chance you get the LeBron James of horses, a great chance you get average. So the gambling isn’t just the races — it’s the breeding and buying too.
The company does “drops” — batch sales of new horses. They just did a drop three days ago: $18 million in digital horse sales to 2,400 buyers. The top spender paid $800,000. The top 100 spenders combined spent $8.3 million.
Sam: I talked to the founders. I tried to invest. They said no — either no room or they’re not raising. I was devastated. But the interest this thing is getting is nuts.
Shaan: Here’s what’s really happening underneath: there’s a group of people who were heavy into DraftKings and FanDuel as daily fantasy whales. Then NBA Top Shot came out. They went heavy on Top Shot, drove up prices, did well. Now they’re asking: what’s the next Top Shot? And they landed on Zed Run.
Sam: My personal view: this is going to have a hype cycle, prices will spike, and then about a year from now we’ll be saying “remember Zed Run?” The primary value here is speculation. And when the primary value is speculation, things are hard to sustain — because speculation creates the price, not the other way around.
Bitcoin is the exception, not the rule. With Bitcoin, the speculation actually creates the store of value — the speculation loop feeds the product. Zed horses don’t work that way.
Shaan: Valid. But I’d separate “will the price go up for a while” from “will the company survive.” Even if Zed is just a 6-month hype cycle, they just did $18M in one drop. That’s better than 99% of startups that never get a hype cycle at all.
What Makes a Business Last: Flywheels and Lead Bullets [00:28:00]
Sam: This makes me think about a broader question. How do you build something that lasts 20, 30, 40 years? When I look at the top 50 tech companies right now, most launched in the last 15-25 years. Everything changes so fast.
Shaan: My framework: you want to be in a business with a positive flywheel — what economists call the “law of increasing returns.” Every new customer makes the product more valuable for all the other customers.
Classic example: Facebook. Facebook with zero users is worthless. But every person who joins makes it more valuable for everyone already on it. That makes it nearly impossible to compete with over time.
Amazon: more customers → more sellers → more selection → lower prices → more customers. Uber: more drivers → faster pickup → more riders → more revenue → more drivers.
Those businesses are hard to get spinning. But once they’re spinning, momentum is on your side. You work extremely hard at the beginning, then the flywheel does more and more work.
Sam: Versus e-commerce, which has almost no flywheel. You hit a million in sales, you still have to work just as hard to hit two million. You have to keep spending on ads. Your existing customers don’t bring in new customers automatically. The costs don’t get cheaper over time — they get more expensive as you scale.
Shaan: But there’s a second category I also like: arbitrage opportunities. They won’t last forever. But they’re real now. Don’t be snobby about it — if it’s legal and the money is real, exploit it while it’s there.
The mistake is going for the middle: something that’s not a flywheel and not an obvious short-term play. That’s where you hate your life.
B-Roll.io: The 9-Figure UGC Opportunity [00:42:00]
Shaan: B-Roll.io — bee-roll dot io. Potentially criminally under-marketed and could be a 9-figure business.
Here’s the setup: if you’re advertising on Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest — you’re not competing with other advertisers. You’re competing with the feed. Your ad has to beat a meme, a hot Instagram model, a funny video. How does your product ad compete?
The answer turns out to be: don’t try to look like an ad. Look like organic content. Look like someone just posted a review. User-generated content.
The old way to get this: pay influencers. But influencers are expensive, they’re divas, they have managers. The Sugar Bear Hair gummy vitamins paid the Kardashians absurd money just to bite the gummy and hold the bottle. That costs a fortune.
Sam: So what’s B-Roll?
Shaan: B-Roll is a marketplace. On one side: e-commerce brands who need UGC-style ads. On the other side: stay-at-home moms, college students, anyone who wants to make $40-100 from home by recording a video review of a product.
You as a brand write a storyboard: “Step one, open the package on camera. Step two, go to the bathroom mirror. Step three, put the cream on. Step four, show the before and after.” You submit it. A real human records it. You get authentic-looking content. You put it in your Facebook ad.
That content outperforms studio photography. Repeatedly. The reason: it blends into the feed instead of announcing itself as an ad.
Sam: I used to do this manually — go to Fiverr, write a script, pay someone $5-100 to record a testimonial. It worked but looked too polished.
Shaan: B-Roll is just a niche version of Fiverr but focused specifically on UGC ad content. It’s similar to UserTesting — another company that activated the stay-at-home workforce for a specific task (recording themselves using websites). UserTesting grew to hundreds of millions in revenue and is going public.
Why could B-Roll be 9 figures? Because people are spending billions on Facebook ads. If you have a tool that produces ad creative that converts better at scale — that’s a massive market. They’re probably doing a couple million right now. But they’re playing at the edge of something enormous.
Sam: The biggest risk is quality control. You write a brief, some person in Tennessee half-reads it, records something in bad lighting with background noise and ignores two of your three prompts. Now you have a dissatisfied client, a creator who feels they did the work, and you’re in the middle. UserTesting has a whole fleet of human reviewers and automated checks to avoid this. B-Roll needs something similar.
Polymarket: Bet on Anything [01:00:00]
Shaan: Polymarket. A crypto-based prediction market. You can bet on anything with yes/no resolution.
Current bets: Will Dogecoin hit $1 before June 15, 2021? Will Andrew Yang win the NYC Democratic primary? Will Floyd Mayweather beat Logan Paul? (94% say yes.) Will NYC be fully reopened by July 1?
Sam: So it’s like a sports betting app, but for current events and real-world questions?
Shaan: Exactly. And built on Ethereum. The bets are actually on-chain. The platform itself says it’s “for informational and educational purposes” — they don’t custody the money, they just display the protocol. There are “trusted oracles” — a decentralized group of people who submit the resolution when the event happens and reach consensus.
I put in $5K and started betting on different things. I bet “yes” that Elon would mention Dogecoin on Saturday Night Live — paid out at 94 cents on the dollar since it was so heavily favored. Bet $250, made about $80 profit. Small but fun.
Sam: The Floyd Mayweather one is interesting. At 94% yes, you get a 6% return in one month — that’s a lot annualized. But the more you bet the more you move the market, so you can’t really size it up.
Shaan: If there’s been $6,000 bet into a market and you put in $10K, you move the odds. The bigger the market — Andrew Yang has $260K bet in — the more you can put in without impacting your return.
This is basically Las Vegas on top of Ethereum. Not just speculation — actual value being provided. And it shows why Ethereum isn’t just speculation: real casinos and financial products are being built on top of it.
Podcast Growth and Lead Bullets [01:12:00]
Sam: Update on the podcast. March: 338,000 downloads. April: 436,000. May is tracking toward 520,000. 30% growth month-over-month to 20%.
What’s driving it? A few things. Guests with cult followings work — we did Tai Lopez and it got to 30,000 listens in five days versus the usual two months. How-to episode titles work consistently — “How to Build a Paid Community,” “How to Build Paid Events.” Those rank highest most often. People don’t come for us and our great ideas — they come for themselves. We’re the spice, but the meat is the how-to.
I also grew my email list from zero to 26,000 this year and I send a weekly recap of the three best ideas from recent episodes. Some worry it reduces listens — if you can get the info by email, why listen? My view: if you keep giving people value in every format, they learn that Sam and Shaan are the place to go when you want your wheels turning. The clips and emails are bringing fringers closer to the core.
Shaan: I’ll share two things from Emmett — the CEO of Twitch — that have stuck with me.
When we were inside Twitch after the acquisition, I was pulling a rabbit out of a hat every two weeks. New genius tactic. New big idea. Emmett observed: “You’re impatient with results.” So I started writing at the top of every weekly memo, in bold: Impatience with action. Patience with results.
Being impatient by taking action is good. Being impatient about results is bad. Those two things look the same from the outside but they’re opposite.
The second thing came months later. When growth finally started working, he said: “Notice how we can’t point to one thing that did it?” There’s a phrase from Ben Horowitz’s book — no silver bullet, only lead bullets. No single genius tactic. Just fire a bunch of things. Keep firing. Keep firing. Until the thing falls over.
Those became the two mottos at the top of every update: impatience with action, patience with results. And no silver bullets, only lead bullets.
Sam: The line I keep thinking about: people overestimate what they can accomplish in a year and underestimate what they can accomplish in ten years. We’ve been doing this for almost two years. We miss sometimes. But we’re almost always on. And the consistency is what’s actually working — not the genius tactics.