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 sold my startup for less than what my investors had put in now you know the way it worked you know the team still did well and i made good money off of it but like that’s not that’s the that’s not the definition of a successful business because there’s a lot of people that have sold their companies for a lot of money we have a we have a handful of buddies that are like uber rich no one [ ] knows who they are and like even if they told you that what they did you’d have to like they’d have to beg to speak at a conference whereas guys like you you’ve got like the daily show reaching out to you you’ve got celebrities reaching out to you who want to like get on board with you and what i want to know is you can use the example and then you how does someone i guess i’m asking for myself because how do you create so much of this like brand equity uh like you guys have well i think in both cases it’s basically you put out you put your thoughts on blast so you know they’re the re the real answer and by the way i say that not to make fun of the app i think did sell for a profit so good good for them i’m saying i know that i’ve gotten disproportionate credit for my track record of success when in reality like the best thing i’ve built is this d2c company that i don’t tell anybody the name of that’s the profitable business that’s doing eight figures a year but like that’s not actually why people my reputation came before that so you know that’s kind of weird right so where does the reputation actually come from it comes from two things one is you meet people in real life so like you go meet you know the investors at these different big funds or uh ceos of different companies and when they’re talking to you they’re making an independent assessment of your lo your caliber you’re based on your thoughts so right so so first it’s like a hand-to-hand combat thing you meet a bunch of people you earn their respect one-on-one by by you know when they’re talking about some deal they’re doing or a company they’re building you you actually contribute by adding value by pointing out things or or giving them criticism or or giving them feedback on what’s really great um or identifying to them other things that are really cool and they say wow this guy really you know i i got a lot out of this conversation so you do that with like 300 people and those people matter right because they have themselves influence and trust so for example um you know uh like josh element is a is a good example this guy was he was early on at linkedin at facebook at twitter at robin hood uh like earlier sean meaning he was he was like head of growth at a bunch of these companies yeah yeah he’s a big deal he’s been on our podcast and so he’s got you know tremendous people have a tremendous amount of respect for him because he’s had a tremendous career well both and i have you know on separate occasions met you know met with josh and we when we’re talking about our startup and whether our startup succeeded or failed josh knows look you’re playing in the sort of like the startup lottery startup olympics a startup can fail and an entrepreneur can still be really great and if out of that conversation josh josh walks away thinking oh this person’s really smart and then they connect you to some other people that they they know and those people say wow josh thanks for the intro sean was really great you develop a reputation amongst people who have a reputation so that’s the first step through real-life interactions you develop a reputation with people who already have a reputation so that they will retweet your stuff so that they will vouch for you when you have a project or you’re doing something and that that goes a long way in the marketplace uh so like for example i’ve had josh or biology or different people who have their own big following and their own respect if they share me or they they they say this person’s great then a whole bunch of other people just inherit that reputation they say okay if josh says he’s great he’s great if biology says he’s great such a unique way of it’s almost like credibility hacking or something like that but but that’s the thing i think is important is like i’m telling you how the mechanic works but there’s the thing you can’t just the reason it’s not a hack is because your your thoughts actually have to be interesting you have to actually hack like you’re you’re a hack i just mean like you’re you’re getting the desired the the process of getting to the desired outcome right the second thing is we both created content so now his tweets are mostly making fun of people who create content and threads and teach courses but before that he was doing it himself right he was he himself was saying you know when you’re building a social app blah blah or here’s how we grew inside high schools for tbh and i why did i respect him because he released this this memo actually got leaked from inside facebook oh yeah yeah yeah and the memo basically said he was like hey guys at facebook here’s some of the stuff we did to grow amongst teenagers and i know facebook wants to grow amongst teens here’s some stuff we did at tbh for example for every high school we would create an instagram account for it branded to the high schools it’d be like you know mckinley high you know secrets and that’s the instagram account and it would be locked and we would follow anybody who had mckinley high in their profile then they would follow it you know 40 of people would follow us back they would request to follow but we were private we wouldn’t approve anybody’s request then at 4pm when everybody got out of school one day we would accept all the requests so everybody simultaneously would get a notification about our account so they would all go check it out and then they would all see the link to download the app and then they would download the app and then we and then as they’re downloading the app they’d get notifications that their friends are all downloading the app today and it felt like a big deal and that’s how we hacked distribution into high schools i similarly have told actually a very similar story about how we would go get our goal was always to get half of a high school to download our app in one day we did it a completely different way but i’ve shared that on podcasts different places or on twitter threads and people read that and they’re like oh [ ] this guy’s smart that’s a really smart growth tactic this guy really understands growth this guy really understands teens this guy really understands social and if so if you just if i like it’s that uh quote my buddy jason hitchcock told me once he goes you say one interesting thing i say huh that’s interesting you say two interesting things like oh those are interesting you say three interesting things i say [ __ ] this guy’s interesting and uh that’s really what you gotta do with content is you have to if you say three original interesting things around one topic whether it’s bitcoin or media or robotics or whatever if i get three interesting things from you i’ll in my brain i will assign that tag to you this guy’s interesting worth watching and then if other people endorse it and say this is interesting it goes even faster [Music] you