Sam and Shaan are joined by Elaine Zelby, a partner at SignalFire VC, to brainstorm a slate of business ideas from her Substack. They cover ideas including an adulting vault, a Snoo-style sleep pod for adults, subscription running shoes, a TheraPunch rage-and-meditation concept, and a startup SaaS bundle. They also dig into how SignalFire uses data at scale to source and support investments, debate the Chamath “8-ball” diligence method, and riff on Synthesis (Elon’s spinoff edtech company) and alternative wellness businesses.
Speakers: Sam Parr (host, co-founder of The Hustle), Shaan Puri (host, investor), Elaine Zelby (guest, partner at SignalFire)
Opening — Sam’s First Unicorn [00:00:00]
Shaan: By the way — first unicorn. Officially, today. One of my angel investments officially raised at over a billion dollars. I feel like I can rule the world.
Sam: All right, everyone. Today we have Elaine Zelby on. She’s a VC at SignalFire and — more importantly — she is an ideal woman. She has a Substack that’s three new ideas every week, very much like what we do. She also does a podcast called Unsexy, which is about boring businesses — like, you know, “oh, you run a chemical plant, tell me about that.” Very much in line with what we do.
Sam: We brainstormed a bunch of ideas today: the Adulting Vault, the Snoo for adults, TheraPunch, a subscription shoe company, and a startup SaaS bundle — that one was the best. She also gave us a peek under the hood at SignalFire’s data machine, which supposedly spits out great investments using 27 different data signals. We asked her: is that marketing? She gave a pretty good response.
Recap: Previous Episode Ideas — Fantasy Stocks and Milk Bombs [00:02:00]
Shaan: So, Elaine, last time you were on the podcast — before I met Sam — you had two ideas. One went semi-viral: the milk bombs idea. Like a functional bath bomb you dunk into your milk and it fizzes and you’re adding some adaptogen. People really liked that one. But now that we have all these viral video people, it would be on a whole other level.
Elaine: Should we ask them? Yeah, that would be a pretty viral thing.
Shaan: The other one I really liked was fantasy football for stocks. So, basically, creating a game where you and I and Andrew each get a budget, allocate it into a portfolio, and change it every month. Then we see whose portfolio would have performed best — like fantasy football, where you get points based on the ups and downs of the stocks. Very social. You’re not actually investing, doesn’t have to be real money.
Sam: I used to do that as a kid. I think everybody did this in, like, seventh grade. There was a fantasy portfolio thing for a month at school — pretty rudimentary, never made its way out. Somebody who worked at Yahoo Fantasy Football should just fork everything they learned about making it viral and be like: cool, instead of the Patriots it’s going to be Amazon and Tesla.
Elaine: Have you guys used Webull? They have this feature where you can sign up and share your portfolio with anyone, and people can copy you. It kind of turns investing into something like a fund.
Shaan: Public came out as one of the Robinhood competitors where it’s like a social feed — you can see what people are investing in. Then there are more extreme versions like Doji, where I create my own basket of stocks, I call it the Shaan Index, you can straight up buy it. The more popular my index gets, the more followers and investors it shows.
Shaan: In 2017, Eric Voorhees — the guy who created ShapeShift and Satoshi Dice, super early crypto — launched something called Prism. You could create a basket of tokens. It could be the Shaan basket of tokens, and you could watch and follow and invest. It was a competition too. Never got out of private beta. I dug it.
Introduction: What Is SignalFire? [00:07:30]
Sam: Can I ask you, Elaine — what is SignalFire? I’m on your website. Your landing page is… I want whatever you’re selling, but I’m still a little confused as to what it is.
Elaine: We do that a little bit on purpose. We are a venture capital firm, but we’re actually structured and operate a lot more like a technology company. If you look at our team, we’re about a third engineers and data scientists building products, about a third people on our platform — in-house business folks doing PR, recruiting, growth — and then we have investment. We currently invest out of our Fund 3, which is $500 million.
Sam: So are you using data on your webpage — like you guys use some kind of data to spot trends. Is that…?
Elaine: We buy, scrape, or aggregate every data signal you could possibly imagine, and our engineers have proprietary algorithms that use that data to do two things. One: alerting systems for us on the investment side. They pull in all these signals and try to show us — at seed, at Series A, at Series B — who the cool companies are, what should we be looking at, trends around markets, fundraising trends. Two: a bunch of products for the portfolio around talent migration, talent movement, competitive intel, co-spend analysis, market intel — all that kind of stuff.
Shaan’s Unicorn Investment: Deel [00:11:00]
Shaan: By the way — my first unicorn officially today. It’s a company called Deel. My husband and I were talking about that one this morning.
Elaine: Yes! What were you guys talking about?
Shaan: My first unicorn. The joke is this is essentially a company I wanted to build three years ago. I started seeing every startup that had ten employees was starting to hire internationally, treating them as contractors, with no way to manage it. Most companies under the hood were using Shield GEO as the PEO and everyone hated it — super old school. I was like: someone needs to build a better Shield GEO. Go into each country people in the US hire remotely from, build out the infrastructure, find every startup and say we’re going to handle all the hiring, payroll, compliance, everything for your remote people.
Sam: I love it. I think it’s such a good idea. So how do you spell it, Shaan?
Shaan: D-E-E-L. I think the URL is letsdeel.com, unless they changed it. I think they got deel.com also now.
Sam: I actually use it. That’s how I pay any contractors I work with — even if they’re in the US. I just type in their name, say what the contract is, every month I’m going to pay them this amount on the first of the month. It’s like: would you like an NDA with that? I’m like, yeah. Would you like milestone-based payments? You know what, that’s a good idea. It’s like boom — here’s a contract, we’ve sent it to them, when they sign it it’ll be kept in your records automatically. We took care of all the compliance and tax issues based on where they live, we’ll connect to your bank and auto-pay every month.
Elaine: It’s on their page that they’ve just raised money at a billion-dollar valuation. Their biggest competitors are Papaya Global and Remote.com. Deel started out a little differently — the other two focused on full-time employment internationally, they focused on contractors. They’ve since had to shift a little because in reality most companies want a one-stop shop. They now have everything. They also let you pay in crypto and every currency — doing all those gnarly problems.
Sam: I almost invested in Remote.com too. I really liked that guy — his name is Job. He’s J-O-B, and I just love that whenever it’s like Usain Bolt is the fastest man in the world, this guy named Job is creating the platform for remote hiring. I’m in.
Shaan: I was interested in Deel as soon as I heard the idea. I just wasn’t sophisticated enough to follow up in time. I’ve learned that lesson about thirty times.
Does Data-Driven VC Actually Work? [00:19:00]
Sam: SignalFire seems far more analytical than how I or Shaan started our companies. In reality, do you think that matters? Like, if I’m trying to start something, do you actually think that a data-driven approach meaningfully changes the outcome?
Shaan: Let me give you an example of honesty about this. When I started my rolling fund, the marketing was: “I have this big podcast that’s going to help me get deal flow.” And, okay — if you have a podcast that does 5 million downloads a year in the business-startup niche, that’s a unique asset, I see how you’re different. In reality, most of my deals don’t come from podcast listeners. Most come from the same five friends who email me when they see something cool. That would have been much less sexy to talk about — “I have five great friends who email me” — but that’s closer to reality.
Sam: So what percentage of your deals at SignalFire actually come from the computer programs going “this company undervalued, growing fast, nobody’s heard of it” versus someone sharing something cool on Product Hunt and you reaching out?
Elaine: So in general, venture capital — I have the most commoditized asset you can imagine. I’m selling money. If I break up VC into five stages — sourcing, diligencing, picking, winning, supporting — we try to leverage data in probably four of those five. On the sourcing side, we’ve definitely done deals that came completely from our alerting system. But is it the majority? No. On the diligencing side, we’re really trying to understand how good these people are — talent scores, hiring patterns, mobile app downloads, Alexa score trends, similar web data, that kind of stuff, but done on a different level.
Sam: Does that level actually matter? You implied you do what anyone could do on SimilarWeb or Ahrefs — times ten. Is doing it times ten actually better than doing it the normal way?
Elaine: I think in our industry it does actually move the needle. I’ll give you a concrete example: we have a portfolio company in the Shopify ecommerce infrastructure ecosystem. They wanted to target every merchant between $10M and $100M in revenue in four specific categories, with three buyer titles, in certain locations. We pulled all that data, matched it to people at those companies, and created a custom lead list with email addresses. Being able to do that — that’s on the support side, not sourcing. For the portfolio, that’s enormously valuable.
Sam: And you guys don’t sell access to this platform?
Elaine: We do not sell it and we don’t spin it out. That’s part of our whole selling point — if you come and take our money and become part of the SignalFire family, you get access to this stuff.
Sam: Who came up with this?
Elaine: Our founding partner Chris Farmer. He got frustrated saying: why are we investing in bleeding-edge tech companies and doing deals by talking to our friends? He has access to all this data. Why aren’t we leveraging it? He had spun something like this out at his last firm and then built an entire firm around it.
Sam: I’m going to say I still think it’s 50% marketing and 50% useful. But that’s higher than it was an hour ago where I would have said 90% marketing, 10% useful. So you’ve done a good job.
Shaan: Is he right, Elaine?
Elaine: I would say more useful than not. I think it’s on the barbells — definitely useful on flagging companies we never would have seen, and very very useful on the supporting side. And honestly, we care so much about NPS, we measure it, we treat ourselves like a tech startup in how we operate. If the data platform is most valuable only on the supporting side, that’s enough right now.
The Chamath 8-Ball Debate [00:27:00]
Shaan: Did you ever hear about Chamath’s 8-ball?
Elaine: Yeah, yeah.
Shaan: So Chamath — founder of Social Capital — came from Facebook’s growth team, helped grow it from 100 million to a billion users. He was like: why don’t we have the same analytical rigor when it comes to our investments? It evolved into something called “capital as a service.” Self-serve: you come, plug in your analytics, our algorithm runs a formula, and tells you two things — here’s how you rank relative to other SaaS companies at your size and age, and here’s our Moneyball formula for whether we should invest in you. As a founder it was a little scary, right? You’re basically piping all your data into their database. Whether they invest or not, they’ve downloaded your historical performance data. They can compare the Hustle to Morning Brew to the Skimm.
Sam: I think it was more marketing than substance. I don’t know, Elaine — was it as secret-saucy as they tried to make it sound?
Elaine: I was never on the inside. I know it was very polarizing — some founders loved it, some hated it. In my opinion, it only works at certain stages and in certain categories. It does not work at all at the seed stage. You’re betting on people, betting on the growth of a category. There’s no data. Most startups don’t have their data structured enough to actually run this type of apples-to-apples analysis until you’re ready — like Clearbank makes sense for working capital loans because you literally hook into their Facebook and Google data, there’s nothing they can fudge.
Sam: Yeah, and people are now doing this for Amazon sellers and Shopify. On Amazon it’s more around working capital — people are constantly in these manufacturing cycles where they’re cash-flow negative, so you hook into their Amazon seller portal and their bank account and do dynamic loans. That makes total sense.
Synthesis: Elon’s Edtech Spinoff [00:34:30]
Sam: Yesterday I invested in a C-stage company and I pretty much only did it because Shaan did it. He’s like, “yeah, I kind of hate it because it seems so good.” I said: if you don’t want it, give me your share. The algorithm didn’t spot it — but the five friends did.
Sam: It’s called Synthesis. Have you heard of this one?
Elaine: No. What do they do?
Shaan: Have you heard of Ad Astra? Elon Musk’s personal school inside SpaceX? His kids were going to school there. His big theory was: in schools, they teach you a tool — like algebra — but they don’t tell you why you need it. Maybe they should be teaching you how to run a lemonade stand, and in order to calculate how many lemons you need per day, boom, we’ll teach you algebra. The tool serves the goal, not the other way around.
Shaan: So he creates this school. The guy running it — I think his name is Josh — creates a curriculum where kids learn by playing games. Small teams, competitive simulation, kind of like Ender’s Game. They took those same principles and built the game system called Synthesis. When Elon gave his blessing, Josh teamed up with the number one engineer at ClassDojo and they spun it out as a company. SignalFire is an investor.
Elaine: Yes, it’s a portfolio company.
Shaan: They’ve been around six to eight months. Spent zero dollars on paid marketing. All the attention has come from free press — people reading about Elon’s school and clicking links. They had a big question early on: does this only work if the kids are rocket scientists’ kids? But they found it does transfer. Super high retention, already doing multiple millions in revenue with zero paid marketing, and what seems like a perfect team. What’s not to love?
Elaine: Can I pitch a spin on this? I wrote about doing something like this but on top of Roblox. Roblox already has the eyeballs — 75% of kids between 9 and 15 are on it. But instead of science/engineering, I was focused more on life skills: financial literacy, mental health, all the things you’d want a kid or teenager to learn. Gamify it, build it where they already are, and let the kids become the builders. Partner with people like the Synthesis team, bring kids in to make it age-appropriate, give them some of the upside, let them spin off games and bring in their millions of followers.
Shaan: I love that. It works for two reasons. One: teaching kids through games is not a new idea — when I was a kid I played Math Blaster. But now the games are already built with tons of love. Kids already know the controls, they already love Fortnite and Roblox. Roblox and Fortnite have already created these open-world systems where you can build whatever you want and just share the link. All you have to build is the learning experience. You’re borrowing the millions of dollars they poured into the game engine, the marketing, the distribution.
The Startup SaaS Bundle [00:43:00]
Sam: Elaine, I’ve been wanting to bring up your startup SaaS bundle idea. Most of our listeners could actually go start this. I’ve investigated this a ton. I used to own The Hustle — two million subscribers, very business-focused — and I was like, we should make this and sell it. There are a lot of reasons I think this can’t work at huge scale. But I think you could build a $5 to $10 million a year company in three to four years, pretty straightforward. What’s your thinking, and tell me if I’m wrong.
Elaine: I’ll tell you why I think it’s way bigger than that. The average Series A company is using about 34 different SaaS applications. We used to have monoliths — SAP, Oracle — and now I am so sick of dealing with 34 vendors, 34 UIs, 34 logins, 34 different bills and renewal cycles. If you’re a startup at seed or Series A, you need like 60% of the functionality of each best-in-breed tool, and 60% is actually the easier stuff to build. The additional bells and whistles aren’t even utilized by early companies.
Elaine: The idea: if you catch people when they have nothing and say here’s an out-of-the-box bundle — start with three modules, add the CRM when you have a sales team, it already hooks in, same user experience, no new login, no new vendor. That’s the pitch. And you break into it at the payroll layer — Gusto is kind of the only thing most people use today, it’s been around a long time, does fine. Can you say: if you’re under 40 employees, we offer the exact same functionality as Gusto but we also offer XYZ?
Sam: Wait, you said something important — that this won’t work if people are already using something. Can you explain why? Because that’s a really big deal.
Elaine: Ripping and replacing software is so painful. You’ve already trained your team on it. It has all your data sitting in it. It’s incredibly hard. That’s why Salesforce is a gazillion-dollar company even though people complain about it constantly — it’s your system of record. So you can’t do it as a referral/discount bundle across existing apps. You’re making an actual new beginner version of the core eight things.
Sam: Exactly. Not a ClassPass for SaaS. An actual bundled product that does the 80/20 of the core functionality, doesn’t chase edge cases, offered to someone out-of-the-box.
Elaine: And when you look at the volume of companies at the early stage versus later-stage enterprise customers, the volume is like 1000x at the early stage. The ability to capture those people early — they’re going to be sticky and grow with you. People who outgrow this? Maybe. But the number who ever get to that scale are so few that I don’t think it matters.
Sam: I totally agree about catching them early. Companies like Justworks need to get you when you’re just starting. It’s really hard to get a startup to sign up for you before they’ve done anything.
Elaine: Here’s my hack. When I was first getting into startups and doing growth consulting with seed and Series A founders, I learned quickly: if I partner with VCs, they’ll send me unlimited customers. I never had to do business development because VCs are constantly investing in net-new seed companies and they’re trying to be helpful. Their companies 100% need help with growth — or in this case, need software. They’d just say, “go talk to Elaine.” That’s how I’d go to market. Then you get viral word of mouth among founders, because founders have their groups online and they talk.
Sam: Even then, though — where’s the product before growth? When you talk to a VC, you’ve already done something. It’s still hard to catch someone before they’ve signed up for Slack and G Suite.
Elaine: Sure, but at seed portfolio graduation to Series A — that is exactly the time when they’re starting to think about a CRM, marketing automation, those kinds of pieces. Three different modules are the right insertion points. G Suite, I’m not trying to compete with that. Slack is a little easier to rip out. But those three modules that come after G Suite — that’s where you insert.
The Adulting Vault [00:54:00]
Elaine: One I really like that I also really want somebody to build is what I call the Adulting Vault.
Sam: What does that mean?
Elaine: By the time you’re out of college, you have a bunch of things in your life — a credit card, your first apartment, insurance, monthly bills, subscriptions, internet, utilities — all of these are disparate. There is no one place where all of my adulting responsibilities live. Mint.com, which launched in 2007, was the first thing that said: your financial life is sitting all over the place, can I aggregate it in a simple app? I want to do that for everything in your adulting world. And as you get older — kids, mortgage, car — you have insurance policies, bills, financial products, investing accounts all over the place. Nothing has aggregated that. And I also want it to suggest things you’re missing. “Hey, you might want to think about life insurance. Here are the best policies for somebody your description.” Monetize via referral and affiliate. It can also let you know when something’s coming up for renewal, auto-pay, all that.
Sam: Can I niche this down even more? I just bought my home recently — first time. I didn’t know anything. They had an inspector come through and I got this 50-to-100-page booklet about everything in the house. Two months later I’m like — what is this light switch? This light switch doesn’t turn anything on. I actually almost wish someone had just built me a house manual so I can just ctrl-F “bedroom back corner light switch.” And then you could layer on other things — best home insurance, all that.
Shaan: You’re talking like a life manual. I’d niche it down to just a home manual first, then layer stuff on top.
Elaine: I’m with you. And I have two ways to get customers for the broader adulting concept. One: quizzes. I think quizzes are extremely overlooked. Michael Birch — original founder of Bebo, sold it to Tickle which was a quiz company, and Tickle was like a $100 million company just doing quizzes. “What breed of dog are you?” “What city would you be?” And then some career quizzes where they made money. When he left, he was like: I know how I’m going to seed the next social network. He created the best friends quiz — “how well do you know me?” You answer a bunch of questions, send it to friends, results post on your profile. He got a million members in nine days. Their profiles were already filled in from the questionnaire.
Elaine: So I would create the adulting quiz and go viral with it. “What percent adult are you?” Most people in our generation kind of admit and laugh at the fact that we’re not really adults even though our age classifies us as one. You answer: do you have life insurance? Do you have health insurance? And at the end you get this little infographic — nine squares, like a report card. “Cool, you have three months of savings — you’ve checked that box. You don’t have health insurance — click here and we can help you figure out why you need it, how much it costs, how to do it.” Then let them click in to solve each problem.
Shaan: I love that. And you hit on an interesting stat — the longer the quiz, the more likely people continue to answer and convert.
Sam: 100%. For The Hustle, we’d get 10,000 signups a day. We started with two questions, then five, then ten, eventually thirty questions — and it had like a 98% completion rate. The more you ask, the more they interact with you afterward, which is counterintuitive. A lot of startup people are like, “oh, don’t be too aggressive.” And I’m like: no. Once they get to question three, they finish. Period.
Elaine: Let me tell the Michael Birch bored-on-the-internet story. He put a red button on the site for one out of every thousand visitors. You go to, imagine, Facebook, and there’s just a shiny red button in the corner. You click it, the whole screen goes clear, it’s like: “here’s a cat, click the cat.” You click the cat. “This is a bowl of pasta, don’t click the bowl of pasta.” You clicked it. “The cat’s dead. We told you not to click the bowl of pasta. Okay, click the cat to bring it back to life.” Just a stupid thing, a hundred steps, he did it just for fun. What he learned: the first button, you lose about 30% of people who just don’t click. Second one, you lose another 20%. After that — the people who get to step three? 98% go all the way to the end. We did the same thing for a charity fundraiser — same exact numbers.
Shaan: One nuance: that’s 100% accurate for consumer and 100% inaccurate for B2B. Anything enterprise, shorter is better. But on the consumer side, two psychological things: people love talking about themselves, and if I’ve answered 30 questions, I believe what I get at the end is going to be super personalized and valuable. It totally works.
The Snoo for Adults [01:07:00]
Elaine: Let’s do the Snoo for adults.
Sam: I know what the Snoo is because I have a baby. Do you know what it is, Shaan?
Shaan: Yeah, my kid is in it right now while I do this podcast. The only reason I can do the podcast is because the Snoo is basically babysitting my kid. You see this app — “Banks is calm, he’s sleeping.” If he cries, it goes to level two, rocks more to try to get him to chill out. It saves you the step of going in and soothing the baby.
Sam: So it’s a brand — the Happiest Baby — and these things are incredibly expensive, you can only use them for a short window, and there’s a whole secondary rental and resale market. Parents swear by this.
Elaine: So let’s apply this to the broad population of human adults. We suck at sleeping, and nobody has ever rethought sleeping from a first-principles perspective. First off, it kind of makes no sense that we sleep with another human in the bed — I roll over, I grind my teeth, we have a dog too. Second: I want something that is temperature-controlled, rocks me, knows my behavior, removes all light, removes my phone so I can’t scroll stupid quizzes at 2am. Why has nobody rebuilt the bed for humans? We have enough sensors, enough smart connected-home products today to do this.
Shaan: I would have been skeptical a year ago, but three reasons why I’m convinced now. One, I’ve used the Snoo and I was like, I wish I had this for myself. Two, you’ve seen the rise of expensive at-home equipment — Peloton, Mirror, Tonal, Eight Sleep — things that cost thousands of dollars to improve one small aspect of your life. Three: if there was genuinely a sleep pod that improved my sleep by even 20%, what is that worth to me? That’s eight hours a night, every night, making me healthier and more productive the next day. That’s worth five to ten grand easily.
Sam: That’s what Peloton should do, honestly. They’re not going to find another bike, even the treadmill isn’t going to do it. They should go straight to the bed. A sleep subscription layered on top — the Calm sleep stories thing — make a wellness brand out of it.
Elaine: Health is only one piece. Sleep is a huge component of wellness. I totally agree.
Subscription Running Shoes [01:14:30]
Elaine: Can I talk about subscription running shoes? I’m a huge runner and I think you are too, Sam. Most runners have some kind of connected device tracking their steps. You’re supposed to change your running shoes every 300 to 500 miles. I have no idea when my shoes have had 300 to 500 miles. I can’t even tell you when I ordered them. For runners, you have a brand and a style of shoe that you stick with — I don’t know any runners who mix and match. I’m a Brooks runner, Brooks Adrenaline 8.5 narrow, every time. I want Brooks to create a subscription that hooks into my watch, auto-orders new shoes when I hit 400 miles or x months, and gives me a discount because they know my LTV just went up 100x.
Sam: Let me give you the low-tech version without the Apple Watch. You know how toothbrushes have the little blue strip that tells you it’s been used too much? Baby diapers have the little streak that tells you they peed? You need that on the bottom of the shoe. The bottom changes color as it gets worn out — a visual indicator. And put the promo code for your next order under the thing, so when it wears away it’s like “time to reorder, here’s your code.”
Elaine: Here’s the problem though — I know when my shoes are worn out. My friends know too. It’s the fact that I have to go and be proactive and reorder that’s the sticking point. I just want it to happen automatically. It’s like the Amazon Dash button — anything to remove friction.
Sam: Okay, so how would this make money as an independent company? Like, Brooks — why aren’t you doing this?
Elaine: This is for Brooks. This is not an independent startup. I was excited about this — I thought you had an independent angle.
Sam: Here’s an idea: you provide the picks-and-shovels infrastructure for every brand to do it. Go sell to Brooks, Nike, Adidas, Reebok. That’s doable, right?
Elaine: Yeah, I think that’s doable.
TheraPunch [01:20:00]
Elaine: This will be a fun consumer-y one. I have this concept called TheraPunch and I need to give the backstory. About a year and a half ago, right before the pandemic, I was running in the Mission in San Francisco at like 6am. I had a green light, running through an intersection, and this dude in a super beat-up car comes and cuts me off, nearly hits me. I jump away, give him the look. He rolls down his window and starts screaming: “Get out of the street, you stupid [bleep]!” I had had a rough week, I was on edge, and I had to use every ounce of restraint not to kick the back of his car. I was so pissed. I just wanted to punch something.
Elaine: As I ran away, I was thinking: everyone always tells you to meditate, go download Calm, sit in a quiet room. Great. But I needed to punch something first. So the concept: with all the vacant real estate right now, you create a padded room with padded walls, punching bags, things to rip and pop — stuffed animals you could tear the heads off. You connect to a Spotify rage playlist. You go in for 15 minutes. If you’ve ever done boxing, 15 minutes will exhaust you. You get it all out. Then they take you to the zen zone for 30 minutes — guided meditations, spa water, sit and meditate. You get it out, you center yourself, you go back to work.
Sam: That would make me even madder. Like, I would be so mad that I’d be like, “I just want to smash this right now.” I mean, I do break things…
Elaine: What’s the last thing you threw or broke out of rage?
Sam: Cell phone. I mean, everyone does that.
Elaine: No, everyone does not do that. My screen is currently shattered, but…
Shaan: I’ll give you a quick spin on this. The timeliness thing is real — I don’t want to book a room in advance. By then it’s all dissipated and now it’s a task. You need the instantaneous release.
Shaan: What I find interesting is there’s a whole bunch of these alternative therapy things — cryotherapy, float tanks, all that. And I wonder if you could create the equivalent of a gym membership that bundles them together. Sauna, steam, cryotherapy, float tank — a gym with no weights, a gym for the brain to recover and relax. A different type of wellness category.
Elaine: Would you do them back to back?
Shaan: Or like a ClassPass model for that kind of stuff. They’re pretty niche today and expensive. How often are you going to go to a float tank or cryo spa? If it’s more of a one-off thing and you want to try a bunch of stuff, the operator could actually make money on that — unlike traditional ClassPass where they bled money on heavy gym users.
Sam: I do actually go regularly. I think when I lived in San Francisco it was a pain to get around. Now that I’m in Austin it’s no big deal to leave work at three, do the thing, and be back by five. I do cryotherapy — I don’t think it does anything but it’s fun — and I do the float tank. I love all that stuff.
Shaan: On the economics of these things — the cryo places and float tank places actually do pretty well if you just want to buy yourself a high-paying job. Low labor, one employee, the same machine that pays itself off in the first x uses. Maybe one month, maybe three, six months max. Very simple businesses.
Sam: Have you heard of Body Spec? They’re like guys in a van — the DEXA scan. They come to you, they work near company buildings, and they’re like “hey, come see how fat you are.” You pay 50 or 80 bucks, go get scanned. They’re the best. I go every three months. Maybe 50 bucks a turn — you see progress. They’re so awesome.
Elaine: I think I know what you’re talking about. I’ve never done it. I’m curious — is it telling you information you don’t know? If you’re doing it every three months, don’t you already know how your body’s been behaving?
Sam: Well, your actual weight stays the same because you’re adding muscle and losing fat. So I’m like — this doesn’t show progress. I can see it in the mirror. But I like the science of it. Me and my brother-in-law made a habit out of it — we just go every three months, measure body fat, see how we’re tracking.
Shaan: And the business model works. The machines range from $16,000 to $45,000. They’re in a Mercedes Sprinter with a car wrap — maybe $100K total. And the distribution is good because they can partner with gyms — CrossFits, trainers — “you send me a client, you get $20 out of the $50 scan for every first-time customer.”
Elaine: A partnership opportunity for them is also Future Fit — they’re already charging people $200 a month for a virtual trainer subscription. You can bundle in a lot of these other services. The people I know who do Future Fit are the people who care about this stuff, want to see incremental progress, want to know their score constantly.
Fitness Tech Tangent: Tempo [01:38:00]
Elaine: One of our portfolio companies is Tempo. Have you tried it, Shaan?
Shaan: It is so awesome. Have you not tried it?
Sam: I bought one. Tempo sponsored us so I had one, then I moved and they took it back. I’m so mad at them. I was number one in my category — I was really into it — and then I just bought one the other day. Paid eighteen hundred dollars, took eight weeks to get delivered.
Sam: For listeners: google Tempo Fitness. It’s basically like Peloton but for weightlifting and HIIT. It’s like a freestanding mirror — not wall-mounted like Tonal — and it has 185 or close to 200 pounds of weights built in. Amazing instructors doing all kinds of HIIT workouts. I built my whole workout routine around Tempo.
Elaine: It has a sensor on it — it tracks if you’re lifting the weights and counts reps for you. But it also uses computer vision not just to count reps but to check your form. If you’re doing a curl and only going 80% up, it’ll call that out. If you’re doing a lunge and your knee is going over your ankle, it flags it. It’s creating a dot matrix of your body — anonymized, but it can tell exactly what your form is. Real-time personal trainer, plus a celebrity trainer leading the class.
Sam: Get one, Shaan. They’re good. But there is a downside — it’s 50 a month for a subscription.
Shaan: That seems expensive.
Sam: It’s cheaper than a gym membership, and think about the value. They don’t make much on the hardware, they’re making money on the subscription.
Shaan: I still think I should get at least a year free after buying a $2,000 machine. Remove logic from me. I’m paying for it anyway.
Closing: Follow Elaine [01:43:00]
Elaine: Follow me at zelby.substack.com — Z-E-L-B-Y. It’s called “Three Things.” Every Sunday I publish three business ideas. They’re somewhat well-researched and thought-through, but they’re all fun and cover pretty much every topic you can imagine. And if you like unsexy businesses, I do a podcast called Unsexy where I talk to founders building in super random niches — chemical marketplaces, companies growing growth media for lab-grown meat. Super random stuff.
Sam: Honestly, when I first heard the podcast, I was like: oh my god, these are my people. You’re our sister from another mother.
Elaine: Thank you for having me.
Sam: All right, everyone. See you.