Behind-the-Scenes of Shaan's Power Writing Course

Episode of My First Million with Sam Parr and Shaan Puri.

Transcript

Note: This transcript was auto-generated from YouTube captions. It may contain errors and lacks speaker identification. A full Gemini audio transcript will replace this.

Kind: captions Language: en i think when you once you treat your hobby like a job uh that’s like a recipe for failure and that’s what happens to a lot of people yeah i feel like i can rule the world i know i could be what i want to i put my all in it like my days all right what’s going on what’s up man so we’re gonna get into some ideas but let me tell you something that i did this week and i cannot give the i actually got in trouble three different times where someone was like hey we had this conversation and you just talked well i’m like well i don’t i just when you and i the way that you and i talk now is how we talk all the time yeah and yeah and they’re so they’re right so i’m going to try to keep this one vague i had this dinner and i was with the guy who has 8 000 employees in china as well as many thousand in america wow and yeah impressive person like a factory or something else in china tech related just like just some huge company you if i gave you 100 guesses you likely wouldn’t guess it it’s just some big company that exists and in the tech world fair enough and um it’s impressive but it’s not like a mainstream thing okay and there was this other guy there who made a comment where he was like china’s gonna crush us in the next five years or something and then a couple other people people love to say that by the way don’t people love saying how china’s passed up america a bunch of other people pounced on that and then this guy it was this guy he lives in china um i believe he he he i don’t know what ethnicity he was but he looked like he i mean he’s probably maybe born and raised in china and then there’s this other woman there who actually was born and raised in china and this guy with the 6 000 chinese employees goes a lot of people say that i do not think that’s true and i don’t think any of you should ever think that uh he was just saying he was like americans actually work maybe as hard or harder than a lot of other countries interesting um and also you talk about this like artificial intelligence and this um it’s mostly ai that people i mean they talk about china crushing america and a bunch of stuff but ai is like a hot thing and this guy was like i don’t think that would happen and if and what i think you should do is invest all most of your money into american uh equities i think he goes like i’m just so bullish on america and this so it was like an interesting perspective have you ever heard that it’s like the one person who probably knows what they’re talking about at the table and everybody else who just reads [  ] on twitter and like regurgitates it uh all right i’m gonna go with the guy who’s got six thousand employees in china that that makes more sense to me that’s you know and and that was good i felt great about that and so uh it was just an interesting perspective but we love you some pro-america news yeah well so i’m also just finished reading this really great book uh do you know who giant steinbeck is no of course you do grapes or wrath no what is that [Laughter] i got a blank here wow uh have you heard a kill of mockingbird i have heard to kill mockery that’s the author oh my god like john cyber i mean people are going to make fun of you by the way anyway and mostly just read harry potter okay like it let’s be clear this guy he was born in 1902 so he’s dead he’s probably died in the 70s but anyway i’m reading this great book about his memoir from driving across the country for three months in america and getting to know america and it’s really funny in 1965 when he was doing this trip he was complaining about how americans are getting out of touch with and are getting too focused on technology and how there’s refrigerators everywhere and there’s tvs everywhere and how there’s artificial food everywhere it’s very funny we’ve always complained about this stuff but i do love learning about america i think america’s special i think we have this research resilience and i think the yeah anyway i’m very pro-america so yes i did like hearing it but you want to talk about some ideas uh yeah by the way dan corrected us i don’t think he wrote to kill a mockingbird but no of man or something he he he didn’t write to kill a mockingbird i’m saying his work is like it’s like it’s it’s like did he write mice and men i know he wrote like grapes of wrath it’s just like a famous like american classic i’m just shocked the fact that you don’t know that he wrote of mice and men so you know that so the fact that you you by the way i know that as in i’ve heard those words before that’s all i know about that anyways let’s let’s go into the stuff i do know about because i feel a lot better about that and also bitcoin rally thank you i’ve been waiting for this bitcoin pump and here we are we’re back up life is good because bitcoin is now right it’s like spiked up to almost 40 000 uh over the last like 24 hours 48 hours there was a bit of a short squeeze about a billion dollars of short positions got liquidated and that caused the price to uh run up because um are you familiar with how that works by the way like what a short squeeze is so no so here’s the like non-technical non-super uh super like nuanced version of it basically when you have a short you’re betting against and if it goes up you are on the hook to pay the the sort of the price for the for being wrong and so if you think something’s gonna keep going up you’re better out just closing down your short position just taking the l and saying okay i’ll pay i’ll i will i will go buy the shares now because i’m you know let’s say i was it’s at 30 000 i think it’s going down it goes to 32. you know what to close out my position i’ll go buy the asset at 32 and i’ll eat the loss right um but what happens is because all the shorts start worrying that the price is gonna run up they all start trying to close out their positions at the same time so they all start buying so the people who are betting against it all of a sudden at all this buying pressure where they have to to close out their position they have to buy bitcoin which causes the price to go up and up and up and up and so what happened is as it started running up all the shorts had to cover their positions because they were massively leveraged right they’re not putting in their own money they’re putting in like five to ten percent down and they’re taking the they’re taking 10x or 20x leverage on their position so as the price goes up they’re very sensitive to it and so i think that’s what happened uh to cause the price to go up about ten thousand dollars in the last two days is those shorts had to cover their position this is what happened with tesla tesla was the most shorted stock in the stock exchange and then as the price started to go up those shorts you know they basically are paying a huge price for every every dollar it goes up so they start to close out their positions which which puts a bunch of buying pressure which is why it becomes a squeeze because the shorts themselves cause the other shorts to like have to cover and it just causes the price to shoot up way above what its earnings is and anything else dude this is funny it’s funny because like when you you do so we’re in this chat group sean and me and all a bunch of other like successful young guys and they talk about like alpha like crushing alpha and i’m like i don’t know what that means yeah i got no idea what that means we talk about short squeeze i’m like this these words don’t mean anything to me i don’t even know what they mean you guys feel like so sophisticated to me yeah um all right let’s talk about some ideas can we yeah let’s do it you want to go or you want me to go you go first okay i have one okay here’s another one that’s crypto related and you’re going to be like what uh but i’m telling you this is a good idea this is actually ben’s idea so first of all ben is visiting me so i’m getting to see ben in person he’s sitting five feet away from me i wanted him to join this but had so many goddamn technical difficulties setting up that like i don’t know how i could get it to be where it works but maybe wednesday we’ll take an extra hour beforehand and just get it set up for a two-person setup um but anyways ben ben were talking last night and he’s like you know one we’re talking about courses right because and i could share kind of like how what the numbers like i just finished my course i can share what the numbers were on that but we were talking about other few other potential courses we could do like what would be fun he’s like i don’t know he’s like we’re not the right people to teach this but i think this course with crush right now so sam tell me do you know what solidity is if i say oh solidity so no when i saw you writing i thought i thought it was a typo for solidarity right solidarity is what we’ll call it so solidity is the programming language that you use to write smart contracts for ethereum so let’s say uh like one of the most promising things about crypto is that you can write a smart contract so think like a basic escrow contract i buy a house you’re going to give me the title i’m going to give you the money but i don’t want to give you the money first you don’t want to give me the title first so we use this third party this escrow agent we pay them five basically you hand them the title i hand them the money they say yep they’re both here and then they give it to each other right so in the real world we paid these exorbitant middleman fees i don’t know what you paid for your house when you when you bought it or you just did another real estate transaction i don’t know what you’re paying for escrow i don’t even i didn’t even look at it i don’t know it was like four grand to do an escrow transaction which sucked i was like this is just for nothing when i sold my business i think the escrow was fifty thousand dollars right crazy they think this is crazy so and they literally do like one ounce of work um they literally just oh you hand me the title and you hand me the money great i’m gonna just turn one hand over here and i’ll give you the you’ll give you this i’ll give them that so a smart contract basically says look we don’t need this like person in the middle and we don’t need to pay them four thousand dollars let’s just make a contract with some rules and we’ll just instead of writing it like a lawyer contract we’ll write it like a programmer contract the programmer contract says hey when this wallet has this much money in it person a has fulfilled their obligation and when this wallet has this asset in it person b has fulfilled the obligation and then release the assets to each other um and so and instead of paying four thousand dollars you can pay four dollars or forty dollars whatever the gas fees are at the time so that’s smart contracts so what what that means is a lot of jobs today that go to lawyers are going to go to programmers because you’re not going to want a lawyer to write a contract for something you’re going to want a programmer to write it down but you need that contract to like work it needs to be like solid bug proof hack proof and like i needed to do the many things that i need my my transactions to do so there is an extreme shortage right now of smart contract developers of developers who know how to write in this new programming language and write these types of contracts but it’s clearly like a big part of the future in my opinion and so one idea here is to create basically a boot camp that takes an existing engineer and says hey cool oh you write javascript or like you know you’re you’re a back-end engineer you’re one of like 10 million um why don’t you come over here where there’s this high demand high shortage of engineers that know how to do this thing i can train you in six weeks to learn how to write like smart contracts and solidity and then go to all the companies that are trying to hire this and basically do a lambda school i think you can do a lambda school that’s really niche really focused and if i’m an engineer that like i’m a crypto nerd this is a business that i think you could do you can just train other engineers to like learn how to write smart contracts and then get hired and placed in these jobs that you take the placement fee what do you think of that so i’m doing research while you’re talking all right oh wow okay no i i agree with a lot that you said except for the last part so there’s this company called coursera have you heard of coursera of course um so they were starting 2012 and i believe that they were started because the two guys i think they worked at google and they’re noticing that we are struggling to hire a particular type of engineer i’m just this is just off memory so i might be a little bit off here about some of the stuff but anyway they uh and so they built like these courses and they built it so people can get jobs data science or machine learning or something yeah it was some type of data science or machine learning i forget exactly what it was and they they came out of the gate and they crushed it and then like over the last five years they kind of like went nowhere and kind of like it was like what the hell happened to that company and they’re not really doing that well anymore well over the last year and a half two years with cove and a bunch of other stuff they started crushing it do you know what uh coursera’s revenue is now no idea so they uh they went public did you know that no yeah a lot of people didn’t know we didn’t talk about they had like stagnated and like wasn’t going anywhere yeah that’s what everyone thought so in 2020 they did about 300 million dollars or sorry my bad 400 million dollars in revenue and they’re currently publicly traded at a five and a half billion dollar valuation and wow yeah crazy right totally forgot about it and what you did with your course well i don’t know if you did this but what a lot of people and like you and me we’ll do courses and we’ll kind of do these kind of like bootleg things not bootleg but like yeah yeah and you’ll charge like three hundred dollars or something like that which i’ve done before and that makes things a little bit and you want like a person to buy it and that thing makes things a little bit challenging what i would do is i would take the thing that you’re describing and with this with bitcoin there’s like all these crazy new things that you’ve got to learn really quickly i would just copy the coursera model and just churn these [  ] out and charge like eight thousand dollars and it’s like we’re gonna like a company needs to buy in order to train their people so i think that’s lambda for x i would do coursera for x okay i think that’s fair the thing with the lambda side which is basically i think every time you place one of these engineers that’s like a 20 to 25 000 fee that you get and so it doesn’t take much to be i don’t i wouldn’t do this as like a venture scale business not at all this is basically i’m a developer who you have to be the right mold it’s like i’ve been tinkering with smart contracts for the last two years anyways i’ve actually kind of like gotten up to speed myself i’m a converted back-end engineer who now does smart contracts and i could go i work at like a fang company today i make 400 000 like wouldn’t it be great to make like four million dollars a year and i think this is a way to make four million dollars a year as like a two-person company basically that’s why i agree yeah i would never do it in the land so when sean says lambda school he’s referring to it’s free and you make money by getting like a 25 referral placement or a percentage of their income salary i have i know nothing about lambda other than we had austin on the show and i think he’s amazing and i love him and you’re an investor that’s really all i know about it i think my prediction if i had to bet money on it is that it won’t work yeah i think that’s a i mean i think that’s a fair prediction about most startups i think that’s true uh well yeah but they’re not most startups they’ve raised like 100 million dollars probably they’re not like an early stage startup they’re like in the thick of it i think that if they’re out of business in two years i wouldn’t be surprised right and i would agree with that even as a fan and an investor i would agree with that um i think that okay so here’s okay let me do two things first let me share with you a really hilarious story do you know this twitter account greg it’s like greg nine five five three two three like three two six seven eight seven a white guy like like a white old guy it’s a white no not old guy it’s a white like nerdy dork guy no i don’t know so you haven’t seen this just google search greg meme uh greg meme account uh you’ll see it and i bet you’ve seen this guy so you know like these mimo castle there’s like dr park patel by the way big fan of him i think he’s a big fan of us uh he works for the hustle you know that right doctor park patel works with the hustle yeah oh my god you just outed dr park patel amazing no no no no no no he like him he’s a contractor for us he writes for us sometimes oh my god i love it wow no i did not know that yeah yeah yeah my brain is racing to figure it out who it is now okay no he’s not like like i was a fan of his and i dm’d him and i was like hey you don’t know the real identity uh i do okay you do but it’s yeah so you’re saying yeah after you saw a dark fire so then you contracted okay gotcha makes way more sense so anyways what he one thing he does is like every time chamath tweets he’s like the first reply and he’s like just says it like like i’m proud of you son or something like that like something like totally non-standard so greg does that with like kylie jenner and like other people like that where every time she posts something he’ll be like babe why did you like you didn’t call me or like it’s like we’re like i’m so proud of you babe so it’s like as if they’re dating and so he’s this like dorky looking white guy and uh so the other day do you know who jose canseco is of course ben told me the story so so jose canseco the base former baseball player tweets out i need a i need a smart contract developer for a new token a token developer for a new token i’m going to launch this which is like the classic thing for like paris hilton and joseph has been celebrities that are like ready to launch their own crypto token here we go that what could go wrong so so greg replies and greg’s like uh like whatever like me ben what did he say what was his reply was it just like pick me something like that oh yeah he goes hey it’s greg dm me how can i help and jose replies and goes um he goes awesome like are you a token developer and then like are you are you developer or smartphone can you know how to do token development i think greg just replies no way jose 200 000 likes on that tweet it’s just like one of the most liked tweets on twitter this is like so good so dumb uh but anyways this guy’s like crushing it right now like he’s got like a hundred and something hundred thirty years handle well it’s the funny thing is you know when you sign up for twitter let’s say you typed sam it’d be like sam’s not available would you like sam eight hundred thousand and six because that’s like the next one available so his is greg and then it’s like 12 numbers that are like the whatever the default thing would be so it’s like you would never think it’s gonna go viral yeah it’s greg one six six seven six whatever like you know like 10 numbers long so what does this have to do though with okay so that was just my smart contract uh token developer uh tangent my next idea if you’re ready to transition i am is is um unbundling a piece of yc so yc does a few things for founders yc puts a stamp on you it says this is a yc startup so all of a sudden your valuation’s gonna go up blah blah they kind of coach you so they say oh you know come in for office hours tell us about your idea maybe we help you pivot your idea maybe we help you stay focused on growth or you know how to like tweak it so you grow faster and they do that for three months and then then they start working on your pitch and then there’s demo day which is like where you’re gonna get to stand in front of investors you’ve got to give a one minute pitch you’re gonna raise money that works they have like whatever 120 startups a year now or something doing um but another another kind of like course quote-unquote court i’m very i was brainstorming i was like very interested working backwards from what’s a course where the person gets a clear outcome this is part of my learnings of like doing a course which is people don’t buy a course for learning they buy some change they buy a transformation for themselves and so like you know for a startup going from unfunded to funded or like you know no name to like oh stamp of approval that’s like actually a big change and so one one transformation and one change that people would buy is getting their first round of funding it’s like i’m not just going to teach you knowledge that you can may or may not use it’s like i’m going to help you get funded and so i was thinking could you like i’ve raised probably 20 million dollars in my life and i’ve helped a bunch of founders raise money and i think i’m pretty good at storytelling so i was like i think i could help a founder who’s got no no funding today get funding in like a one month period and i think i could basically just sit you down with the deck with your story and then basically say cool like there’s a pretty intense workshopping of your deck and your story to get that to be as good as it’s gonna be and then there’s like a bunch of angel like introductions and like teaching you how to manage your pipeline so that you run this like a process like a bidding war unlike what most people do which is they kind of try to date one investor at a time and they go kind of slow and they fear rejection and they don’t know how to reach out and all this stuff i can teach you that kind of like the sales process of investing and i was thinking i was like oh you could do this like on a success basis so again like lambda which you don’t like but uh honestly you could align your incentives which is by the way i like lambda i just think the business model is silly i think because the thing with education most people will never benefit from what you’re telling them right well that’s the in some ways that’s the beauty of lambda but it’s also the bad side of lambda right the beauty of lambda is their incentive is aligned so let’s say most courses like let’s say for my writing course i don’t care if you’re good at writing bad at writing and i really don’t truly care if you’re gonna do it or not because i get paid either way right like i’d love for you to take the course and have a big benefit but the reality is like my financial incentive is not such that if you don’t if you if you don’t hit your goals it doesn’t really make a financial difference to me whereas for lambda does they have to select people who are gonna be able to succeed and then they only make money when somebody gets what they want which is a high paying job so that’s the beauty of lambda but it’s also the hard part about stealing what what were what were the results from your course though like what did that go well uh it went well so basically okay so here’s the kind of like the learnings from my course all right so can i guess can i guess yeah yeah we’ll do it on each category so first is let’s start with the most interesting one money how much money do you think i made doing this course i taught a course on power writing which is basically writing to get a result so like the writing i type i do which is like if i’m writing an email it’s because i want somebody to reply if i’m writing a landing page because i want somebody to click buy button if i’m writing uh tweet storms because i want people to share it and like the stuff you learn in school is not the stuff that that actually works in the real world and so it’s like copywriting plus plus that’s the that’s the course all right so i do this 150 is my guess 150 000 very close so i did 127 000 of top line sales and then let’s just break down the the p l so so then there’s my cost of making the course so i basically had a guide to like custom illustrations and graphics and things like that that would probably be eight to ten thousand seventy five hundred um and he was amazing and he was really good and so i’m like i loved that that was that was worth it then there’s mavin’s fee uh so maybe the fee is on the top number so i should take that like 10 10 right so so take out 12 grand roughly from 127 then you take out 7 500 of cost production then everything else then there’s payment processing fees that was another four three or four grand and so my net was like 100 i’m doing the math bad here but i think it was like roughly um and then okay so so that’s kind of like that’s the the money in and so that was off of 320 students i charged the first batch i did at half price so i charged i think 450 or something like that uh 400 maybe it was for the for the course uh and if i had that did you do like an mps yes i would bet it was like out of 10 out of 10. so for those who don’t know net promoter score basically you ask one question to your audience which is how likely are you to refer this to a friend on a scale of one to ten ten being i you know i absolutely will refer i would absolutely refer a friend to this one being no way seven point three nine 9.1 that’s amazing most of everything is but it’s definitely nice right because some people didn’t reply to the survey so i’m assuming the people who really didn’t give a [  ] also didn’t reply to the survey so i gave myself a true nps of probably eight but it was a 9.1 on the the stats so do you think people loved it i think people loved it uh the feedback was kind of amazing and then i did a survey of like what did you like about it and basically it broke into three categories it was like look i can’t you know the first one was dude two of those sessions were like game changers for me it’s like oh you’re a cold emailing one like that was great i immediately implemented this and i got you know meetings that i wanted i booked more sales like that one i just i used right away or like the second one would be like you have one about writing inside of a big company how to like stand out with your writing inside a big company that was i didn’t even know i wanted that that was a great one and so everybody kind of had two of this i did seven sessions everybody had like two sessions that they were that was the one and the rest was fine you know like the rest was good but like didn’t really like those two i got my money’s worth the rest was gravy um and then i asked people the other question i asked people was on average how much value did you get like you know zero dollars the price of admission like a 1x return 3x 5x 10x whatever it was and then the average per the average answer to that was 10x my money i got 10x my value back out of it and i was like okay for what i don’t know if that’s like a scientific question because how the hell are they measuring that i don’t really know but okay downsides guess what the biggest downside was because you’ve done a course before so tell me what what do you predict was my biggest the biggest downside of it uh well does that include logistics like quality like so i think they’ll probably complain about your camera or your sound or the time uh yeah timing was the biggest one because i taught it live and so a lot of people you know were like oh you know i could i either the time worked great for me it worked okay for me or it was horrible for me because i’m in australia and that time zone was awful uh so i only watched the recordings the the i went the biggest complaint i had to do the voice what was the biggest downside of doing the course talk too fast no no i mean like why what was the pain in the ass for me well it’s probably just way too much work yes complete underestimation of the work yeah it’s so much work i spent probably 50 to 100 hours like making the content which was way more than i thought i would do i thought it would take me so much work an hour or two per session all right so let’s say two hours per second that’s like 15 hours of work it was like a full day it was like an eight hour day per per session i made plus like the actual teaching of it and then afterwards what i would do is so i structured my the one the best thing i did by the way was i think i don’t think i invented this i’m sure other people do this but i didn’t really know what it’s called but i basically structured the session like this it was like all right you show up so it’s like hey we’re gonna be here for an hour the very first thing i do is i say all right the promise is this by the end of this hour you’re going to be able to do this all right so that’s my problem that’s the magic trick i’m going to show you today you can’t do that or you’re bad at it you’re going to be good at it by the end of this hour and then i basically would do i’d say all right let’s say it’s a cold email i’m not going to tell you anything about cold email write a cold email right now and they would all have to sit there while i’m sitting there watching them 10 15 minutes write the thing so it was called do learn redo so i’d have them do it i got that gives the bassline and they would all share it in the slack channel then i would teach them like not everything about cold email and be like hey here’s the three biggest things you could do to improve your improved cold emails i do some examples i teach them the theory and then i’d say be like all right last 15 minutes you’re going to redo it and then they would redo it and then they would just have a before and after of their one hour session where it’s like a really shitty first attempt and then like a pretty good second attempt and then after the course i would take one hour and i would just go through as many examples as i could of students and just give them like feedback through loom so that was like that worked pretty well but it was like kind of intense for me because i’m basically performing a magic trick live i don’t know what they’re going to do and so it was kind of high risk it wasn’t like like it could well are you going to happen my wife did it by the way sarah my wife did it and she sold out she made ten thousand in like two weeks maybe and why did she cap it because they told me to cap it and i didn’t care she’s not like you and me this is her first time doing like a public facing thing right um you know you and i have you know tens of thousands of hours of like riffing under our belt and like we know how to perform she she’s just learning and trying to figure out how to do it by the way one thing you should tell her best thing i did was i did rehearsals so for each session i would invite four kids who are like kind of like 25 and under usually who can’t afford the course and i just say hey you want the course for free in a personal session i need to do a dry run with you and so i did a dry run for each of the sessions and in doing that i would realize five minutes in like oh this is all [  ] up like i gotta change this or like wow this is way too hard when i just asked them to answer they’re confused like they are yeah yeah so i needed to do those open mics basically to make it work but will you do this do you think this will be a significant income source for you in the future or are you going to quit doing it so i’m doing it one more time we’re going to see how that goes my goal was basically i put the price back where the original price so it’s 9.50 so i’m like all right let’s see if there’s enough demand there at that point price point because below that it’s not really worth it for me i don’t think because you need a lot of students it’s a lot of work so i’m doing it one more time in august we’ll see if it’s like good again i had a lot of fun doing it so we’ll see if it’s fun again or if it gets like old for me but then i also have a bunch of other ideas for other courses that i want to do so i think i’m going to teach different courses which is more work but i think more fun for me can i tell you okay so now by the way we’re talking about maven.com which uh this is here’s your disclosure we both have incredibly vested interest in this and i want them to make money yeah because we invested in them yeah but i do think they’re gonna have to change i don’t think it’s gonna work to do live courses i don’t think are gonna have they can’t be their bread and butter it’s just gotta be how they get into the market that’s that’s my prediction but we’ll see well i started off being like i’m gonna do it recorded and i started recording the content and i found a few people and i was like uh first of all recording good content takes a lot of time too so it’s not like it was gonna save it saves you time when i you know it’s scalable later but it takes a lot more time up front the second thing was people were way less excited about me recorded and i was like no no look i’m it’s me i’m like planning this out it’s gonna be like as good as i can get it it’s gonna be edited it’s gonna be tight versus me live and they’re like no we’d rather just to be you live off the cuff and like not so tight like the perceived value of live is way higher and so i was like yeah okay if it’s easier for me to do and it’s higher perceived value like that was one pivot i had to make halfway through of like switching to live um all right let me let me pivot to a different topic yeah you maybe told me about this but i had jake research it i i think you did you tell me about swimply yes okay so i like to keep a list of things that i thought are horrible ideas and i ended up doing like amazingly well i definitely would put bitcoin in that category like you’ve done like the stupidest thing i’ve ever heard of ryan hoover told me about producthunt the davey he was launching it and i was like just quit i also thought it was stupid yeah yeah um if you have an easy hack to do this whenever i just have a bookmark thing on my chrome so whenever i see a startup website that i’m like oh that’s interesting i bookmark it either into i think it’s going to work or i think it’s not going to work so i have this like then i can go back like a year later i could just go click and see how many of those websites are still like up and like doing something uh you know and i exactly i’ve had this for like five years so if i saw this next company that i’m about to tell you about in this next idea if i saw that five years ago or a year ago i would be like well like just quit why why are you even doing these stupid games like this is the dumbest thing i’ve ever heard so it’s expensive the name’s even stupid it’s called swim lee is that p supposed to be there is that a typo let me see is it swimly it might be swimly no it is swimply it’s swimly that’s it okay so we’re looking at a google doc that’s that’s crazy i thought that i wasn’t sure if that was a typo but he wrote swim please and like everything the way i found this i was just driving and i saw a billboard and it just said swimply rent a swimming pool near you and i was like what and that’s what it is so uh you know with everything going on people are desperate to get out of their homes and they’re working from their house and they want to get out and so they go and they can rent someone else’s pool airbnb for pools if you told me about this four years ago i’d be like this is the dumbest thing i’ve ever done this is right next to like go out and rent a dog for an hour but you’re a believer i’m not a believer yet but the numbers definitely show that i’m wrong so they’ve grown two thousand percent since summertime and a roughly fourth that what’s so if you grow four they’ve grown four thousand percent in a year what’s that mean forty x four thousand is forty x yeah okay they just raised up but you could be on anything right i could start with one and get to four that’s true but they raised a series a which i’m shocked and who’s their they’re they’re they’re they’re they’re they’re they’re they’re like they raise 11 or 10 12 million dollars so so the idea is like i have a pool in my backyard i can set like a 50 an hour rate and somebody who doesn’t have a swimming pool in the backyard because that’s a big expense can say cool we’ll rent your private we’ll rent your pool we’re going to come swim for two hours 100 bucks there’s four of us it’s worth it like we’re gonna have fun doing that you like kind of clean up your backyard later um that’s the idea they raise their money from like some ballers like people who like i think i respect as knowing what they’re doing so i definitely think i was wrong uh north northwest ventures they’re i mean they’re like a huge um a huge thing right nor west generic name come on if you’re gonna figure it out yeah but they’re like a multi-billion dollar they’re big enough that i assume that they have employee used to like vet well yeah of course uh okay so their traffic like if you look at their similar web thing it’s pretty nuts so like january it’s you know 50 000 visitors and by june it’s like hockey sticking to 400 000 monthly visitors uh according to similar web so similar web the exact number’s not right but the direction is correct usually and so this thing is like doubling it’s like doubled last month doubled the month before that doubled the month before that so four doubles in a row and so i got i was i was interested in the space because i found a company that was raising money and what they were doing and the reason i got interested in this company was we had this guy who i talked about this guy named preston on the podcast his name was uh i don’t even remember his last name but preston i think the company he started was called spacious where they would uh do short-term retail space and rent it out for co-working yeah there’s this other company that i’ll find i’ll say the name in a second and what they’re doing is you can rent people’s homes just during the day for co-working oh yeah i’ve heard of that and it starts with a c what’s it called cozy or some i don’t know what it is yeah chills i’m just thinking of names and again that idea i thought was a stupidest thing and then i talked to preston and he’s like no these could be legit these could be huge companies it’s astounding and so here’s a few more companies that that are interesting so neighbor is a storage marketplace and by the way almost all these i would bet against and i am being proven wrong consistently neighbor is a storage marketplace they just raised a 53 million series b imove is an electric vehicle subscription service so you can um uh they just raised a bunch of money i’m actually on board with that it’s just like leasing kazoo subscribe to your next car online picasa buy and own a second home with eight others that’s just a time share isn’t it yeah and then resort resort pass you can share uh day passes to uh resorts pools and hotels so anyway kind of interesting i this space has always interested me because i’ve been the one saying how i think it’s really stupid and it’s not gonna but these things are actually are are beating my are proving me wrong right uh by the way a a you just said something like share a thing and we’re talking about courses uh we had this idea a long time ago i still think it’s a good idea if somebody wants to do this i’ll be uh you know first customer slash your minority business partner who does nothing besides give you the idea which is class pass for online courses so i right now would pay like if you said hey i can bring you a student but you’re gonna have to you’re going to have to give it to them 50 off but i can get you volume of students and you don’t have to worry about getting students um i’d take that and if you basically i think you can work out the math where you can basically get let’s call it 100 a month from somebody and then they get access to like your course my course sarah’s course you know like 10 other courses right now um and and get all of them basically and all you can eat past i think there’s a class pass for courses that could work for online courses let me um could exist let me keep being a hater but there’s this company called um every every dot what is it called two every dot so or every dot two i think every dot two yeah um there’s guys doing that for newsletters and the guys running it are great uh his name’s nathan really cool wonderful guy uh i know nat is a writer there i like his work there’s a bunch of like interesting uh great writers on there but i think this business model is horrible um because dealing with how you’re gonna pay each writer seems like a huge pain in the ass doesn’t it yeah if i’m like if i’m like a big shocker based on uh who brings in subs so if your stuff brings in a sub you get the bounty of that you give i’m bringing in subs like go f yourself i want to own all of it yeah but you get you say you get the majority bounty on yours so let’s say you get 50 of the subs you bring in but you’re gonna put 50 of the pool so you’re gonna get 50 from everybody else and so it’s a but the beauty of it when you’re doing paid newsletter there’s this obligation like [  ] i gotta write this thing i can’t write one a week i gotta write two a week it’s gotta be good it can’t just be like off the cuff you know random stuff they’re paying for this it’s gotta be better than normal blog content so what they what every does is say look you just got to write one good thing a week let’s say because the consumer is going to get value from eight other writers in the bundle and so that’s the that’s why this works is for each person they don’t have to carry the whole subscription value themselves um they have eight other people contributing to that subscription’s value and so just give away some you think this is going to work i don’t know if it’s going to work i think or the concept at least yeah i think i think it can work i think so basically i think i’m kind of a believer in that that the mark andreessen thing that he stole from whoever which was basically like most business is just bundling and unbundling and so i think that right now newsletters are all unbundled and somebody creating a bundle of newsletters it’ll be like the cable package and like you’ll somebody will say uh why am i paying for i don’t want to pay for 10 individual subscriptions and some of them are good some are bad and instead if i could just pay a flat 15 a month and get access to my 10 favorite writers like great so i think i think it can work are you getting sick of newsletters uh no i have fun i like writing my stuff uh but i i do it on my terms so like i’m not consistent i have this thing i send out every tuesday but like if you subscribe to it you’re like [  ] you don’t send it every tuesday you said it like every other tuesday at best and so yeah because i just like if i’m doing something else that’s fun i just don’t send it and like you’ve experienced the pain of my like my like inconsistencies or being laid and things like that like it’s just kind of like the way i operate on all things and like you know the good the good of it is like when i do it like i’m never just going through the motions like i’m always trying to bring but if i don’t have something to bring i don’t like do it or like sometimes i’m i don’t send the thing because i’m doing something interesting but that’ll make the next week’s letter more interesting because i was doing something interesting um so that’s my only way of sustaining these other things i think when you once you treat your hobby like a job they they think it’s fun to blog and then they want to make that their career and then you know they make the grave grave mistake of turning your hobby into a job uh when it when you weren’t you didn’t want it as a job really yeah it’s hard it’s [  ] hard as someone who has not i haven’t written them but i have owned a newsletter company that has sent 365 newsletters times four years it’s very hard by the way very challenging i heard uh a a another newsletter company that shall not be named uh say that oh you know our subscriber base is like you know the third largest city in america and i thought that was just a badass way of saying like we have whatever two billion subscribers three million subscribers or whatever it is uh and i think you should steal that and start saying things like that yeah i like that one it’s kind of like i think the skim was the one who said um the skim said like if we were a morning show we would be the number one most popular morning show right um another great way of framing that’s part of this part of the playground it’s just like [  ] it’s a bit [  ] but it is yeah it i it is useful right um okay do we want we want to wrap here do we want to go to one more let’s do one more fun thing do you have one otherwise i can get one you pick one uh you want to pick one off your list maybe uh do this elon filing a patent thing that sounds good okay so basically i’m working with jake our researcher to like find different signals and figure out what do those signals mean and so there’s something interesting i’ve always been i’ve always been interested in gas stations because like i said we said earlier i’m like in this nerd about america i love like nostalgia middle america stuff and gas stations are interesting to me because we spend a lot of time there like i have found many memories of gas stations and many of the biggest top 100 privately owned businesses in america if you look at one of the biggest privately owned companies in america most not most but a very large percentage are gas stations right and so by revenue gas makes up typically two-thirds of sales for gas stations but it only makes like one-third or less of profit the majority of profit comes from buying [  ] on the inside and elon musk recently filed a trademark for different restaurant services aimed at electric vehicles and and things like that and for food services basically and so i’m very eager to see what tesla’s gonna do and also i’m very eager to see how the the modern gas station is gonna change and so far so what are the biggest ones i think the biggest ones are um are casey’s quick trip there’s a few more that are the top ones they’re not doing [  ] because if you go to a gas station right now for tesla it’s still a pain in the butt the tesla superchargers are way better and so i’m very eager to see and i wanted to know what you think what is going to happen to gas stations and how are they going to continue making money yes i think there’s two big changes that are happening so cars go electric then what the hell happens to gas stations right do they just convert into electric charging stations or is it going to be different because you’re charging at home right like i can’t fill up my tank overnight in my garage but i can charge my electric vehicle that way and so maybe those gas stations they’re just not needed anymore they need to convert some other use of real estate um you know it’s like blockbuster on the corner store when why would i need that when i could just push a button and stream netflix to my tv the second is self-driving cars which is going to change the game for both gas stations and for parking garages so you don’t need as much parking when you have self-driving cars most of city real estate is parking whether it’s street parking or parking garages there’s a huge amount that’s just parking and because cars are idle ninety percent of the time when cars go self-driving they’re not going to be idle ninety seven this time so cities are gonna have to like re renovate basically the the way they use their land because it’s gonna become totally obsolete but let’s do gas stations for a second so one theory is gas stations become like entertainment hubs because actually charging a car takes a lot more time than filling up a gas tank i think even supercharger takes like 30 minutes right to to to fill up basically to recharge your tesla while you’re like on a road trip or whatever and so you know what what do you do to entertain people during that time maybe they’re just sitting in their car using the in in car entertainment system but maybe there’s something else that you do with food and drink and tvs and maybe it’s a sports bar essentially that you turn this into the other thing that i think is interesting is um like so i’ll give my cousin a shout out so my cousin rohan has a startup called stable.auto so check it out you’re not going to fully grok it from the from the landing page but but i’ll just tell you about it so it says company stable uh just stable like s-t-a-b-l-e like a like a stable of hormones auto a-a-u-t-o um so so he started off what he started off doing was he he he was like a robotics guy from mit so he’s like look um how do i make it where a self-driving car when it like self-driving cars are gonna need they’re great because they’re gonna drive people around without a driver but how are they gonna charge like they have to go to a charging station and then are you just gonna have like attendance there plugging in cars and taking them out like how is it gonna do that and so he was creating if you’ve ever seen elon tweeted this out once um which is a robotic arm that would just find the charging thing and would like plug itself in so it was like a self a self yeah yeah like as imagine the gasoline pump could go into your car without you having to pick it up and put it in the hole so he built a robotic arm that did that so what my cousin was doing was basically he was just saying oh if tesla’s doing that but then there’s all these companies trying to compete with tesla i’ll make the robotic arm for all the other companies so like every other company has a different like charging like kind of location on the car how do i make machine learning that’s going to find the hole and stick the stick in the hole uh basically for that and he started doing that but the problem was and i told him this which was like look uh like self-driving cars are not here so you’re building for a future market like you don’t know when it’s gonna happen we all know it’s gonna happen eventually like that’s a little bit difficult and so um and so and you’re also building this robotic arm it’s really hard hard to build so he switched to now he switched to something else which is basically like software that basically will um it it basically tells you when you need to when you should go charge your when you should go charge your electric car for so imagine like uber and lyft they have these fleets of electric vehicles uh that are gonna be out in the roads and that’s for sure happening and so when do you go charge if you go wait till you’re like almost out you might miss like peak peak uh traffic time where you’re gonna like get a bunch of rides and make a bunch of money um you also might go charge when it’s really expensive to charge because electricity costs fluctuate throughout the day so what they’re building is basically an app that you load into your like this is at least last i heard of it it’s like an app for any driver of uber or lyft that has an electric vehicle that will say now is the optimal time to charge go over here there’s a charging station nearby there’s a little there’s not much traffic for uber rides right now and the price of electricity is low and so it basically that’ll work while you have human drivers and then when you have self-driving fleets it’ll do that whole thing automatically it’ll basically say let’s send to this 10 of your fleet to go charge right now let’s keep 90 on the road and it’ll optimize it so you’re like saving the most money both ways but let’s talk about what do you think is going to happen where’s the opportunity right now i i mean his idea that maybe i i think it’s far simpler have you ever heard of bucky’s yes tell people what’s bug news do you know what it is bucky’s is basically in texas there’s like a gas station chain that like people love they don’t just like it they love it it’s a tourist destination and it’s destination for a couple of reasons i i’ve never been to one even though i lived in texas it has extremely clean bathrooms and they have a bunch of food that people are like obsessed with it’s basically shitty sugary food but it has a funny logo and they serve brisket it’s just like low quality but fun it became a thing yeah but it’s huge so i think that it’s gonna break down in two categories the first categories is just everyday use i think people are gonna keep their [  ] at home charge at home or they’re just gonna charge while they’re in the grocery store and that’s how they and that’s in whole foods is gonna be the winner the second thing is is traveling and i think the way that that’s gonna look is bucky’s it’s gonna be just like it’s gonna be a bucky’s meets museum of ice cream so when i go to bucky’s it’s a spectacle i stop there because i’m gonna get like a huge soda i’m gonna get maybe something to eat but i’m just gonna look at stupid [  ] like a bucky knife or a bucky book bag just dumb trinkets going into a bass pro shop basically it’s like going into a bass pro shop or just looking walking around ikea it’s just a spectacle it’s gonna be like that with a little bit of museum of ice cream where there’s gonna be a little bit even more spectacles that are fun to take pictures in front of that is where what’s gonna happen i think and i think like the shells of the world or whatever gas station 711 711 i actually think could become a bucky because 7-eleven has a little bit of nostalgia like 7-eleven it’s kind of it could be cool it’s like subways yeah yeah it could subway could be could be uh the next version of vans yeah um so i think there there’s definitely some people that are gonna go that route right they make it a tourist destination and they have a quirky brand and that works i think some people are gonna go full automation so like in san francisco we had that thing cafe x did you ever buy coffee from that no it took too long touch it i mean it takes like a minute right it was just stupid i thought it was dumb cafe x is stupid how do you think that’s stupid that’s like that’s so good so if nobody knows who look after describe it so it’s basically okay but here’s the thing so like it’s basically a keurig machine like it’s not that fancy but it looks like it’s usually like it’s in a building and it has like this glass around it and it’s a massive robot arm that’s making a spectacle of like moving the car the coffee cup around and then pouring the milk in it in reality it could like you don’t need that stupid [  ] arm it could just be like a coffee vending machine like i don’t so that’s why whenever i saw that i’m like when i see these like in warehouses and stuff it’s just like you put two quarters in and you just get like like at the hospital you’ve never been to the hospital to use one of those like cappuccino machines like i don’t need this dumb [ __ ] arm to trick me and act like it’s doing something special okay so that’s definitely one way of seeing it and i i could see that point of view i think what’s the difference between starbucks and that vending machine is it the quality of the coffee or what’s the difference probably not the quality so what is the one’s a spectacle and one you talk to uh no no no so i’m saying like between the keurig machine and starbucks like why do you even need a starbucks why couldn’t starbucks just be a curious i like getting out of the house and seeing people okay so maybe maybe it’s that if that’s the case then starbucks is safe the other case is basically that there’s some middle ground of like variety and quality that’s like above a coffee machine but more like a starbucks where you have like 40 drinks that you want because you want your soy latte with you know uh you know you want you want almond milk and then you want two pumps of sugar and you want light ice or whatever and like that’s how you like your drink and so you know you can’t get that out of a cup a normal coffee machine either the coffee doesn’t taste as good or the drink is not as elaborate and cafe x basically says cool what if we could serve coffee faster and cheaper than a starbucks what if we could serve starbucks quality coffee but faster and cheaper than a starbucks why because we have a robot arm that could just like do the thing 24 7 and never call in sick and never be an employee you never need never have any employee like issues and by the way i take up one tenth of the square footage of a starbucks because it’s like a it’s like a giant robot in a hamster ball uh it’s like it has everything it needs right there it takes up like 10 square feet wherever yeah it’s like starting by 10. and so what they’re doing with the idea with cafe i don’t think cafe x specifically is going to succeed but i’d be shocked if there’s not a cafe x type winner down the road because you can shove these things anywhere you can shove it inside of an apartment building and it can make sense in apartment building whereas like a full-service starbucks with staff wouldn’t make sense in a stu in an apartment building and so i think that those are going to succeed and so i think there’s a version of the gas stations that’s like that i think there’s a version of the gas stations that basically is just all automation the charging’s automated and then you go and you push a button and it creates a giant slurpee for you like 7-eleven but it’s just a robot arm doing it we’ll see we’ll see if it works out but i think it’s gonna be more like buckies at least i hope it will be um all right that’s the episode i gotta i gotta go get a haircut no days off on the road let’s travel never looking back