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 chrome plug-ins and i’m like well this company duolingo is very successful it’s a five billion dollar company i think um i i’ve been thinking about chrome plug-ins what i think is like do two things one look at successful companies already that do over 100 million in sales and just say well how can i just create this in the form of a google plugin or two which behaviors do people want but they don’t do it because there’s a little bit of friction and how can i use this plug-in to alleviate that friction right now there’s a ton of downside with google plugins you know you’re a google plugin so google can ruin you but it’s incredibly incredibly incredibly interesting to me and that’s what i wanted to bring up was some google plug-in stuff and so basically what this i don’t know if this is how she did it but she basically um uh or the way that i look at it is you just look at what is what what behaviors are people already doing so for example learning a language people already want to learn a language you just change the text of the article to a different language or at least parts of it grammarly did this with grammar so you just fix it as you write one that i use all the time is similar web so it tells me the traffic of someone’s website passwords you use passwords on a regular basis so a plug-in just inserts different passwords and loom is another one have you heard of loom oh yeah my buddy was with the guy who started it isn’t that worth like a billion dollars uh not yet but getting close it’s several hundred millions i think it was the last round and all it does is uh screen record recordings yeah so so they basically say oh you want to show something on your screen here’s a click boom record share um so the two famous ones that everybody kind of has heard about is honey because honey sold to paypal for several four billion four billion dollars so honey had i think 17 million users when they sold and what honey does is if you’re about to go check out on some website honey will go in the background it’s looking for is there is there a deal on this is there a coupon for this or a sale for this somewhere else or a coupon you can use right now and it’s surface is a discount okay that makes total sense i don’t have to take an action i have to remember to go look for a coupon it’s just gonna do it and the honey sign just glows whenever it has a discount available for you so that was one grammarly was another that i think shocks people because grammarly does over 100 million dollars a year so the grammarly founder spoke at hustlecon and he’s an engineer he’s like a very um by the book like straight shooter engineer he’s really cool his name’s max and i was like shooting the [ ] with him and i was like dude a freaking plug-in who would have thought and he kind of had like a funny [ ] eating grin on and i was like how big are you guys he was like we do over 100 million dollars a year in sales and i was like would you ever believe it he was like yeah i thought it could be done and then and then i go you just raise money he goes yeah we raised 100 million the other day i go why he goes because it was at a one north of a billion dollar valuation yeah i was like oh my god you pulled it off yeah they did it exactly um so those are like the big successors but there are some other ones right so we have pinterest was started as i believe a chrome chrome extension so it was uh the pin the pin button that basically was able to get all the content for pinterest to be a cool app uh you needed a quick way to pin while you were surfing the web so that was one and then there’s others that like like for example if i look at the plugins that i have installed i have adblock or you know you block origin or whatever um that’s definitely one of them and so i think i think this was one of those non-obvious ideas because it kind of feels like not a serious company it’s like dude you’re just making this like plug-in and definitely there’s a lot of people like my mom doesn’t know what chrome extensions are she doesn’t know there’s a chrome extension store she doesn’t really know how to install them like she knows apps but she doesn’t know chromic stuff so you’re going to get a little bit more of a tech savvy audience you know it’s a smaller market overall but the first one is a big deal i actually want to change your opinion of that so i went and looked at the numbers there’s 1.6 billion iphone users okay 1.6 billion users 2 million iphone apps in the store right now chrome users 3 billion chrome users 200 000 plugins there’s a ton of opportunity here i hear you that like your mom doesn’t know how to do this but does your mom if she saw a commercial on tv for grammarly i bet you she would know what to do you just go to grammarly.com actually she doesn’t grammarly because of that she saw it and she’s self-conscious about her english because she learned english later in life and she like doesn’t want to write something stupid so she downloaded grambly for that reason actually and so that’s why when i saw this toucan thing i was like oh you guys just run a commercial for this on tv that’s easy you’re going to get so many users and the the plug-in the reason why the plug-ins are interesting to me is the churn is so low churn on plug-ins are so low compared to iphone apps or and we’ve been so we both have plug-ins you have a plug-in for the hustle i have a plug-in for my my one big thing framework of just like what’s the turn on one there’s like no churn on it do we have like thousands of users now the engagement’s not super high like they don’t always use the thing uh but they leave it installed and it’s like you know so so we’ve both dabbled in this not seriously i would say neither of us took it super seriously but we were interested enough for both of us to build a chrome extension and get it out there to you know five ten thousand people it’s interesting and i think that uh um i just think that people discount it and i think that it’s far more it’s far more interesting than most people realize and so i actually had a brave pull some of the biggest uh plugins so it’s uh block ad block plus adobe acrobat what do you use adobe acrobat for i don’t know probably like flash or something i don’t know um safe price which is a deal thing video conferencing from uh cisco google translate which is kind of an indicator about for toucan which is interesting honey pinterest say button skype what’s uh tamper monkey uh i don’t know it looks like it’s trying to keep you safe dude there was a cool one called ghostery back in the day that would just show you who who’s trying to track you on every website you go to that was kind of cool and try to shut that down uh there’s also these paid ones so are there was there anything interested in the paid group no but tell me about the ones that you’ve invested in because they’re actually similar because i and so in this document that we have i said screenshots would be great and you said oh i invested in this thing called bubbles which i remember you telling me about it but what is that bubbles is a lot like loom which we talked about earlier so the idea is how do you easily share what’s on your screen with your co-worker who wants to see it and be able and so how do you do that some people just take a screenshot right they use the hotkey on their keyboard they take a screenshot and it goes into their desktop file then they have to go grab that then they drag and drop that to their friend and then the friend has to comment on it but they can’t comment on it they have to like send it back as another file it’s kind of annoying right so what bubbles does is much simpler it says it’s a little chrome extension and on any page you go to you can say i want to record a screen recording like a video i want to take a screenshot or my favorite one is a scroll screenshot so like you know when you’re on a website that like is long and you want to take screenshots of the website you have to take like eight screenshots and then send them as separate files to somebody yeah it’s a pain with this it just takes one long screenshot and sends it to the person so it’s it’s easy to capture the what’s on your screen you can then comment like bubbles so it’s like a speech bubble so you just click anywhere where you want to point something out on the screen like let’s say for the hustle you want to make the trends website better you would click bubbles you would record a screenshot you would tap on the part of the screen where you’re like this thing is stupid we need to change this and you would write this thing at stupidity changes and then that’s a the whole file is a link you just share a link with somebody else and they can comment back like a google doc and so is it doing well yeah it’s doing well it’s doing well specifically i think the niche initial niche that they’ve done well with is agencies and so agencies like creative agencies there’s always creative people within the team that are sending ideas mock-ups concepts back and forth with each other and then they have to share with the client also and the client has to give feedback so there’s a lot of showing screen stuff and commenting back and forth on it and so that’s where they’re getting an initial foothold and i think it’ll kind of break out from there so it’s like loom but it does more than what loom does and what’s dashworks so dashworks is a company investment that is it’s like the homepage for your company so this is this is a chrome extension that’s sold to companies so let’s say somebody joins the hustle you give them their laptop if you work with dashworks when they when they open up their google chrome for the first time to use the internet they would not just see like the generic google like new tab page they would see like the hustle’s branded page and that page can do three things one there’s a search bar and you could type in anything into that search bar and it’ll find the file inside your so like most companies now use slack and google drive and dropbox and asana and github and like all these different tools that are all in the cloud so like if you’ve ever been on your macbook and you want to find a file you just use like the little spotlight search finder right you just type it into spotlight it finds the file on your computer but the thing is now with the cloud none of the files you need are on your computer they’re all in the cloud so this is basically that search bar for all your cloud apps so now so what it does is it helps any any employee find any file that’s in your network without knowing where to go to find it right it’s just like networking yeah this is cool so then the second thing you could do is you could search anyone’s name so i could be like oh what does steph smith do with the hustle i type steph it’ll show me her profile show me what she does who she reports to and that sort of thing and then the last thing is that um you as the kind of ceo or your kind of your your admin at the can post announcements or updates that will show up in their chrome like new tab bar so you can be like oh welcome these new employees or like happy birthday to this person or hey remember this friday we’re all doing you know happy hour or whatever and so it’s a kind of a communication pipe also so that i that i thought was cool they’re taking the chrome extension to deliver critical internal company stuff a search for people search for files and and internal announcements so um this this is interesting and another one i actually don’t know how to say this company but you wrote it in here how do you pronounce that luster uh jack our friend jack was one of the early users and i think invested in it and he says that it’s awesome but basically they look at wire cutter amazon and dozens and dozens of other sources and anytime you have a product in front of you it tells you the average review um kind of interesting i don’t know how i think it’s a little better than that i think what they do is you say yourself yeah my description was about a year ago you you i think what it does is you go on amazon or whatever and you search for flat screen tv and uh you know it’s there’s so many products out there and all of them you know great it’s four stars what what do i make of that um and so what lustre does is try to make the buying process simpler so it’ll basically say here’s the recommended option for what you searched for is the mo this rrai has searched all the reviews all the different websites has all this data to tell us that this is the most popular result for what you’re looking for and then here’s the high-end version of it and here’s maybe the low-end version of it um and so i don’t know if the product has evolved too much since then but that’s what it kind of did at that time was it would help you figure out which product should you actually buy using data and again you didn’t have to remember to go to luster it was a chrome extension so you’re just on any website shopping you can go to walmart go to amazon you go bestbuy.com wherever you’re searching and luster will be like hey here’s the product we recommend and here’s why here’s what the reviews say about it summarized automatically for you which i thought was pretty cool i think that that’s a this could be a good product when he pitched it to me and when jack told me about it i was like this is stupid i’m not in uh i understand though i actually i think i i was wrong about it it’s really cool um yeah so the founders was really smart and and um for this one he showed me a chart uh a graph that was doing pretty well so here’s some other ideas of things so those are ideas that we’ve either invested in or seen i have a couple more for you so let’s use your framework of take a popular app like duolingo that shows that there’s a need or a demand people want to learn a language and you make it a chrome extension as the user experience instead of a mobile app so or at least one of the main widgets or main points of distribution right so let’s take meditation right you have headspace you have calm um why don’t you have a chrome extension a chrome plug-in that will basically say it’ll see you know you’ve been on you’ve been browsing for two hours straight you’ve had you have 85 tabs open hey let’s take a minute would you like to earn some earn some mindfulness points and take one minute quick meditation and it just you tap the thing it turns on there’s a clock and there’s like a guided voice that’s doing a guided meditation for you i think so i think i think meditation delivered through a chrome extension could work because it’s so popular as a mobile app but again for mobile app you have to remember to go do it whereas this could just kind of like as you go it could pause you and uh and help you out that’s great i think that has that has legs uh i’ll i’ll i’ll keep going with this game um do you know the you know how do you on your iphone what’s that thing called where it blocks you from using a website after a certain amount of time oh yeah like time something i don’t know i don’t know what you do i never use that [ ] no do you yeah i mean i have it installed screen time screen time um i used to have this chrome plug-in called nukem i think it was called newcomb or the option was called newcomb where after a certain amount of time you would nuke your website and you cannot go to certain websites so you could only go to like google docs email and that was it uh i loved it so similar to meditation i would 100 try to create more of a of of these uh what do you call this uh change your stop using stuff app right right right yes defend yourself against yourself okay i have a smart idea and i have a gimmick idea which one you want okay smart one or the gimmick one smart one first all right smart one first okay we had the founder of you mentioned the founder of superhuman he’s the guy who built rapportive before that we both loved rapportive it doesn’t exist now so some people might not know what it is but what reported was doing was when you were emailing somebody as soon as you typed in their name or their email a little sidebar would pop out of your email that would just show you their face show you their name show you the last few tweets it was like at the time it was like magic we were like how on earth do they know all this it was it just makes you a more thoughtful person because you can see the person you can see what they’re up to you can click their linkedin and get a little more information and it kind of did like it served it up it was like you had an amazing assistant executive assistant who was like you know by the way sir you need to know this about this person so i think you could take rapportive all around the web so i think you could make it where anytime it sees a name on a web page it just highlights it yellow and then if you just hover over that it’ll just tell you something about that person so i think you could bring this idea of like anytime you see a name tell me a little bit more about that person i could think you could turn that into a chrome extension rather than something that was just for email how would you make money off of it um ads boom that’s my easy answer i don’t know oh all right okay but here’s my gimmick one which definitely needs ads so uh i think there should be a chrome extension let me take that back i don’t think this should exist i think this would be funny if somebody tried to do this um so if you ever remember million dollar homepage it was kind of this cool idea of like here’s a web website there’s a million pixels on the page buy a buy pixel and sponsor it okay that’s cool i have i’ve always thought about similar ideas how could you make a million bucks of something simple and goofy and there’s this concept in in the bitcoin world of i think it’s called a fountain or a tap it’s basically a website where you go to and then sometimes there’s like a thing about like a spout like a fountain and uh sometimes bitcoin free bitcoin comes out and so a bunch of people like to go to these to so some projects use these to say like go collect your coin for my new coin go there and get some and you would go to the website you like collect some of the new coin that you can get and then other people have done this be like hey sometimes something comes out sometimes it doesn’t it’s a game of chance it’s like a um what do they call this they call it a um there’s this company that did this with candles we talked about them it was called like diamond candles i think and at the bottom of every single candle we’re talking candles like a wax candle that you burn in your bathtub or whatever like like cool candles that’s [ ] the only way i’d want to use [ ] candles is what i’m saying i like you start dropping f bombs to like get masculine real quick while talking about bathtub candles yeah i gotta [ ] dude i use my my bath bombs or what are they called uh yeah anyway i’ve got all of them i’m i’m a sensitive guy man and anyway uh they at like one in ten thousand candles probably has a one thousand dollar diamond right the rest have like nothing right something but like a like a like a cracker cracker jack ring and what you could do with this is you could always have coupons or discounts off of something and if you redeem them you get the chrome extension gets a kickback but every once in a while one out of x does get a bitcoin right yeah so something like that where basically every time you open a new tab there’s a little little package in the middle of the screen you give it a quick click and then you’re either gonna get nothing you get air you get you know a tiny little something it’s like a puzzle piece or you know maybe like a little something i don’t know something or you can actually get some bitcoin you can get you can get a little satoshi’s basically and so it would just become this little like the little hamster game where every time you open a new tab are you really going to not click the thing and um and so i think you could get a lot of people to install this to try to get free bitcoin while they just browse the internet every time they open a new tab it’s like a little mini scratch off lotto ticket that they get to scratch off that might have some crypto inside and um you could give away little [ __ ] coins you could give away micro amounts of bitcoin you can give away little puzzle pieces and if you get it right it’s like the monopoly game at mcdonald’s we actually earned the bitcoin if you get all the pieces you can make a game out of it basically and uh and then the rest of the screen you just plaster with ads or sometimes what comes out of the box is just an ad and uh i think that’s how you make money off of my gimmick chrome extension well i hope someone tries this because i think it would be hilarious that they create a product out of your joke i feel like i can rule the world i know i could be what i want to i put my all in it like no days off on the road less travel never looking back