Sam breaks down the numbers from a 27-year-old who built a profitable vending machine business with $50K and 27 machines. Shaan covers Vimeo going public at $8B, the viral Paparazzi social app (paparazzi-style candid photos taken by others), and the “ghost kitchen for gifting” idea — using DoorDash infrastructure to create an edible-arrangements-style last-minute gift delivery service. Ends with Shaan’s TRT update and a guest segment with Dan.
Speakers: Shaan Puri (host), Sam Parr (host)
Vimeo Goes Public at $8 Billion [00:00:00]
Shaan: Vimeo went public two days ago. I didn’t even know this until I saw the tweet. Worth breaking down the backstory.
These guys — Ricky Van Veen, Josh, and Zach — started it when they were 18. They first started College Humor, which was basically the college internet version of SNL before Instagram, before Barstool. One of their side projects was a video uploading tool they built because they were uploading videos before YouTube existed. That became Vimeo.
Barry Diller — who runs IAC, which owns Match, Tinder, Angie’s List, a ton of stuff — bought Vimeo for $20 million in 2006. He held it for almost 15 years. That’s what IAC does: buy companies, put good operators in charge, grow them, spit them out to go public. Vimeo’s now worth $8 billion.
Sam: If Vimeo’s worth $8 billion, YouTube must be worth what — like $800 billion?
Shaan: YouTube does like $20 billion in revenue. Vimeo does half a billion. So the math does feel off — but here’s the thing. Vimeo found a niche. They pivoted away from consumers uploading random videos and went toward creators, filmmakers, and businesses who want high-quality, private hosting. No view counts. No sorting by popularity. You’ll go on there and see Yeti hosting their branded videos, The North Face telling their story. It’s the premium hosting layer that YouTube never became.
Sam: They just squirted out and found a niche that works. While Dailymotion and everyone else died.
Shaan: Exactly. And it’s an $8 billion niche. The lesson: don’t underestimate a mega trend. Video was a mega trend — Zuckerberg called it that five years before it was obvious — and even the niche corner of that trend was worth $8 billion. Similar company in the space is Wistia, out of Boston. Built to $30-50M in revenue, bought out their investors using KKR financing, probably worth $1 billion at this point.
Today’s mega trends, in my view: real machine learning and AI, and crypto. If you’re building in those spaces, even the niche corners are going to be enormous.
Paparazzi: The Number One App [00:14::00]
Shaan: Something went viral in the app store. Our friend Nikita Beer — he built the tbh app, sold it to Facebook for $100 million, has been working on new social products — he tweets out: “When the app store refreshes, there’s a new king. 500,000 installs on day one.”
It’s called Paparazzi. It was a TestFlight beta that went viral before they even launched. Half a million people waiting to download the moment it hit the app store. Now it’s number one, above Snapchat, TikTok, Facebook, everybody.
Sam: Okay, what is it?
Shaan: On every other social network you post about yourself. You take a photo of yourself, you upload it, it goes on your profile. Paparazzi flips that. Your profile is only photos that other people took of you. Like the paparazzi — other people documenting your life. You can accept or reject photos, but the content on your profile is entirely what others captured.
This creates a more candid format than anything else. More raw than Instagram. Even more raw than original Snapchat — because even on Snapchat people still curated toward looking good. This is stuff that wouldn’t have made it to Snapchat. That’s what makes it interesting.
Sam: I never would have predicted this would work. And yet here we are.
Shaan: That’s the thing about social — even the best investors in the space get it wrong most of the time. Sequoia invested in every round of WhatsApp and won big. They also have a graveyard of Yik Yaks and Whispers that died. Our friend Jack Smith says it best: if even the best guys have swings and misses, it’s just hard to predict social before it plays out.
A great entrepreneur going into consumer social is intentionally going to a casino and playing the worst odds. But if you hit, you’re king of the universe. A billion people use your app every day of their lives. It hits different when you hit social — which is why people keep going back to play.
Vending Machines: The Hillbilly of the Week [00:28:00]
Sam: Let me tell you about the exact opposite of a social app lottery. This is a business where the likelihood of success is incredibly high and you don’t need to be a madman.
Two people came to me pitching a vending machine business — basically female hygiene products in bathrooms. I got curious and tweeted out asking who knows everything about vending machines. A 27-year-old named Quinn Miller reached out. He quit software sales about a year ago to do this full-time. I called him this morning.
Numbers: He’s 10 months in. 27 machines. Doing $15,000 a month in revenue. 65% profit margin — so around $9,750 a month in profit. Total investment: $50,000. Time: roughly 20 hours a week because he’s still doing the deliveries himself.
He cold calls low-income apartment buildings, motels, and assisted living facilities. He comes from software sales so he does a value sell — “I’ll improve your tenant experience, maybe they’ll stay longer” — and gives them nothing. No revenue share. He just installs the machine.
He buys a can of Coke at Costco for 33 cents and charges $1. Installs a $250 credit card reader on each machine because people don’t carry quarters anymore. First machine cost $500. He’s averaging about $2K per machine across 27 machines.
Shaan: And what’s the ceiling on this?
Sam: He met a guy in Palm Springs who had 1,600 machines doing $5-10 million in revenue with about half in profit. The largest vending machine company in America is called Canteen — they do $15 billion in sales. At that scale it’s basically a logistics company and supply chain operation.
His insight: America runs on Coke and Monster Energy. One guy at a low-income apartment might drink five Cokes a day. That’s five dollars a day from one person. The business is really about identifying your whales — 10% of residents who drive 90% of purchases.
Shaan: My grandfather had one vending machine inside an office building corner store. We used to go to Costco to restock it, collect the bag of quarters, take it to the bank. I was seven years old doing this. And now someone’s built a real business out of 27 of them.
Sam: Quinn said the operators of these businesses are typically unsophisticated — not dumb, just not tech-oriented. They like the easy life. He can outwork them, out-sell them, and do things like optimize routes. He said: “I find a route from A to B in a straight line and everything in between goes on that truck. One driver, one run.”
Shaan: Quinn Miller — Hillbilly of the Week. Genuinely love this business.
Twist Ideas on the Vending Machine Model [00:46:00]
Shaan: If you wanted to do a creative version of this — a few ideas.
Honesty market. At WeWork, they put sandwiches and drinks in a shared area. You take one, you pay on the honor system. No cashier, no labor cost. Works well in higher-end offices and coworking spaces. Margin is great. Takes the vending machine concept and strips out the machine.
Subscription model. You have the credit card. You have recurring access to the machine. Instead of $1 per Coke, you sell a $30/month unlimited plan — or a capped plan like a metro card. The math works two ways: prepayment improves cash flow, and breakage (people who don’t use what they paid for) is free money. Most subscription businesses run on this — people set it and forget it.
Post-workout vending machines in gyms. LifeAid built their brand by giving free mini-fridges to CrossFit gyms that didn’t have them. Just a $79 fridge and a case of FitAid. You can’t put Kit Kats in a CrossFit gym, but you can put post-workout drinks, BCAAs, protein premixes, Hydrant packets. Build a route of gyms, stock a post-workout machine in each one. Margins are probably similar to Coke. The niche is cleaner.
Ghost Kitchens for Last-Minute Gifting [00:58:00]
Sam: Here’s an idea. My trainer’s birthday was yesterday. I’m a procrastinator. Ordering something online — arrives three days after his birthday. That’s just admitting I forgot. What I do now is just order him something through Postmates or Uber Eats. Surprise delivery to his door. People love it.
But the flow is broken. I have to know their exact address, hope they’re home, try to surprise them without telling them it’s coming. What if someone built the Edible Arrangements of DoorDash — a ghost kitchen on top of existing delivery infrastructure that exists specifically to send food gifts?
Shaan: So you open DoorDash. Instead of ordering for yourself, you’re ordering a gift. It shows up looking like a gift — chocolate strawberries, a fruit arrangement, a branded box with a printed message card.
Sam: Exactly. My credit card is already in DoorDash. I open the app six times a week. I don’t want to go to a new website and look up edible arrangements and enter my card again. It should just be there. And the “desire path” — you know that concept where grass wears down where people actually want to walk? The desire path here is: I want to send someone a nice last-minute gift and I want to do it from the app I already have open.
You’d be a ghost kitchen. Low overhead. You pick one city to start. You list the restaurant on DoorDash or Uber Eats. If you can get customers who are already opening those apps six times a week to use you, you don’t have to spend anything on customer acquisition.
Shaan: Andrew Wilkinson actually tested something like this. He hired a chef to come to his house for a few hundred dollars and make monk-fruit low-carb muffins. Built a quick Shopify site, listed the ghost kitchen on DoorDash, sent it to friends in Victoria. Did $3K in month one on $8K invested. Didn’t make a profit yet, but he could test the whole concept.
Sam: The point isn’t the muffins. The point is the test was cheap. If it works, you just need to be the best way to send a thoughtful food gift to someone from an app they already use.
Closing: TRT Update and Dan’s Grades [01:12:00]
Sam: Update: I’ve been on TRT for about a year. Shaan and I both invested in the company — it’s called Peak, they’re switching the name. I didn’t take it to change my body. I took it because my testosterone was low and I was feeling down. It has made me jacked. I feel like a professional athlete. Low body fat, crazy strong.
Shaan: You sent me a photo and you looked like someone I would hire to protect me. You looked like my bodyguard.
Sam: So — don’t take medical advice from this podcast. But for me personally, eating whole foods and this TRT situation, my body is completely transformed in six months.
Dan [guest at end]: Vending machines — that made it an A-minus. Everything else was solid. I’d say B-plus overall.
Shaan: Dan — you don’t use DoorDash?
Dan: I like to cook.
Shaan: What do you do when you don’t want to cook?
Dan: We go out or I pick something up.
Shaan: Yesterday’s menu?
Dan: Dinner was mashed potatoes, kielbasa, frozen veggies, and Hawaiian bread. Lunch is always the same — carrots and chicken nuggets.
Sam: That’s what my mom taught me to eat.
Dan: Look, I also have a side business: bonniespices.com. Instant pot spice packs in compostable pouches. The biggest friction with an Instant Pot is measuring all the spices — we solved that. Butter chicken, rogan josh, Indian curry lentils. Doing low hundreds of dollars a month. I paused it during COVID when I lost my consulting clients. Spinning it back up now.
Shaan: Everybody go order from bonniespices.com. We’ll get you from hundreds to thousands.