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 so i like these like big things software companies that can scale but when i heard him describing this i’m like god i want to get in on this like this is still like you know what i mean i feel like i can rule the world i know i could be what i want to what’s up sean here we got sam and today’s episode we’re going to talk about a blue collar side hustle aka the hillbilly of the week which is a vending machine business and sam breaks down all the numbers behind it we talk about this idea of creating the edible arrangements of doordash through ghost kitchens we talk about the new uh hottest app in the app store the number one app aka is this the next snapchat is this the next clubhouse we don’t know it’s called paparazzi and i tell a story around that and we talk about vimeo a you know a business you’ve probably heard of but may not realize that vimeo is now a 8 billion dollar business and then at the end we shoot the [ ] with abreu and uh the new abra you dan and you get to meet him a little bit so that’s the last i don’t know five ten minutes of the episode all right great episode enjoy all right what’s up yo you know what’s funny i put out that thing for um for merch designs and somebody had a great one that was all right so the funny ones i thought were somebody made a yada yada yada shirt with your face on it i thought that was funny and then somebody made one that just goes it’s both of our faces it’s both our faces like kind of illustrated and it just says i’ll pray you we good which is what you say at the end of every episode do i really yeah i uh and then another guy so sean we’re doing this meetup in miami um by the way i feel like that undersells it right live show we’re going on tour that sounds more badass than we’re doing a meetup well yes you’re right but there’s two things going on here the first i was downplaying it because i frankly i didn’t know how many people are going to show up yeah so we set the limit originally at and then uh our venue now is changing and so we don’t i don’t know how many going to see right so we capped it now at 3 35 that’s how many rsvps we have now so if more open up we’re going to open it up when i was doing it to like make it so if i failed it would be okay um and also so when you’re talking about show i know that you’re i think you’re pretty comfortable on stage and you actually aspire to be kind of a professional comedian i have no idea what we’re actually going to talk about we haven’t even we haven’t even said a word to each other about what are we going to do there yeah so uh we’ll figure it out but basically the way it’s working and we agreed to as per usual we agree to stuff without thinking it through but basically we have a thing in austin at 6 00 p.m on thursday that’s probably going to end at 10 p.m and then we have a 7 a.m flight and i think that flight is gonna land at noon 12 30 in miami these are the logistics people came to listen for well sorry but anyway it’s just we have a lot we’re going to be running them out a million miles an hour you know what i thought was would be a fun idea i just thought about actually while i was putting my contacts in before this i go what are we going to say on stage what would be a good live show because i was like either we just do research and we just have like a fire episode where it’s like great ideas great billy of the week great business breakdown we could have that ready i said or we could do it you know like when you go to a comedy show and they [ ] they take your phone they zip it up so you’re like you can’t record this it’s like well if they showed up live what can we give them that special that we can’t just say on air so i thought maybe i think each of us probably has a few business stories war stories that we could share that are entertaining that you could do kind of an off the record format um and i feel like we could put out five stories that we could tell about stuff you know or three or four stories at least that could be entertaining about you know uh something something something that happened that is uh you wouldn’t just like you wouldn’t go publish a blog post about it because it’s not necessarily the details you can’t get out to everybody but in a trusted group of some of our you know biggest fans i think that’s cool a 400 person trusted group but yeah i think that’s a group of strangers i think i think maybe it might default to like q and a but we’ll see um it’s gonna be weird we’re gonna i’ve never i’ve talked i think the most amount of people i’ve ever talked in front of is 5 000 and that’s not a big deal i can do that all day but never 5 000 people who came to see me just like riff so that’s going to be weird but uh we’ve got a lot of ideas and you want to get straight to it yeah let’s do it where do you want to start you want to actually start the vimeo one’s not an idea you have this cool thing about paparazzi or po i don’t actually know how to say it yeah that’s actually a lesson i want to start with vimeo because there’s no lesson here i just thought it was cool so did so vimeo went public two days ago i didn’t even know this until i saw the tweet it was an awesome tweet about uh the woman uh was with her kid and i and saying like wishing her mom a good day’s work when it goes public a good day’s work to you know like uh child like good good luck it was like a three-year-old saying you know good luck as you ring the bell i i i i love that type of [ ] uh and anyway uh went public but there’s a background behind vimeo so do you use vimeo i use it all the time i’ve you i’ve used it i think everybody runs into vimeo once in a while i don’t use it to upload unless i’m like oh i need a high quality kind of private thing and i’m just surprised this company made it it just seemed like video was dead i think it literally died at some point but they pivoted and made it actually into a great business so tell me about it never died so it’s always been like kind of popular like for a very particular type of person i love watching it on my tv because i’ve got like a fancy tv and they have fancy videos like high-end videos and they particularly have like weird stuff weird music they’ve got what sort of uh fancy weird videos are you watching like like like waitress stuff oh there’s like yeah tons of nature stuff like women stuff like what are you watching oh like uh like um like a drone flying around or something gotcha or or you know stuff that’s like it’s just it’s kind of like it’s uh oddly entertaining or they’ll have really unique art pieces like an art video or so it’s very niche but it’s really neat i love it but the way it started is actually interesting so these guys it was a guy named ricky van i think his name is ricky van veen he started with a guy named josh and it started and a guy named zack three of them they were only 18 and they started this company called college humor and you know college humor of course we’re a similar age we if you’re young and listening to this you probably don’t know it but basically it was like [ ] jerry but before instagram exactly or bar stool sports but not sports right and it was like a kind of a smutty it wasn’t smut but it was like snl online and it was cool and it was one of the first blogs and they started it and it got going and they also uh had little side projects these guys lived in new york and they were just like your typical like 20 year old cool new yorker guy where they like you would see their life and they would start little side projects it was really fun one of their side projects was a video uploading tool that they built because they were uploading videos before youtube was around and that was vimeo and barry diller who we have to do a deep dive on he’s very fascinating he started this company called iac they’re pretty huge they’ve owned match.com which they spun out to be his own business they own uh tinder they want a ton of stuff angie’s list and anyway he bought that for 20 million dollars in 2006 and he’s held it now for almost 15 years vimeo they spun it out so what barry diller and isd does is they buy these companies they employ people to run them and they grow them not like crazy fast they grown and then they spit them out to go public and it works often and they went public recently they bought this business for 20 million dollars it’s now worth 8 billion is that crazy that’s insane publicly traded worth 8 billion by the way if vimeo is worth 8 billion youtube’s worth what 800 like youtube must be youtube is yeah more valuable than vimeo so that just seems a little off right like dude vimeo does like four or five hundred or six so it’s like many almost close to uh it’s half a billion ish in revenue yeah but youtube there’s like 20 billion in revenue it’s crazy right it’s like yeah well i’m agreeing with you youtube should be worth a lot but i don’t think so explain the niche so vimeo basically did what they went they sort of pivoted from consumers uploading videos to more like businesses or creative people filmmakers you know type of people uploading videos is that right yeah so if you want to upload a video and you want to upload it quickly and you want to upload it in the highest uh highest quality possible you’ll use vimeo and you’ll buy a creator’s account they also let you do some editing online that makes it a little bit easier you can add some captions things like that uh you can have a people will use it to like store their portfolio um and so what you’ll see if you go on there and you type in like nature you’ll see some video and like then you’ll see like oh wait this has this is by yeti and it’s yeti hosting a lot of their cool videos that they’ll pay a creator to make for them as like an ad and no i don’t actually know where they even display those videos other than vimeo but uh like you’ll see um what’s the code com what’s the outdoors company that uh let my people go surfing north face the north face guy like you’ll see him fishing in a stream telling like the story about the background of the company right so it’s a lot of uh outdoorsy a lot of brand stuff it’s pretty interesting uh the niche i don’t actually know how to describe that niche but it’s kind of like it’s all people who want to have higher quality stuff than youtube in terms of like resolution and they also do a couple things that they like goes against their culture like they don’t have view counts they don’t have a sort by popularity thing so it makes it a little bit easier to discover to discover uh stuff that you normally wouldn’t have seen well it’s good by then because all the other video upload sites whether it’s like dailymotion or like all those other ones they all died right youtube just uh youtube youtube took over it ate it ate everybody up and vimeo squirted away and found a niche that works for them that is actually like an eight billion dollar niche right it ended up ended up working out and not like a oh that’s a lifestyle business kind of way so you know props to them because i don’t think this was the i don’t think this was what most people would have bet was it would be the outcome once youtube started growing like it did so the company vimeo has 200 million uh users so 200 million people a month i believe go and use them and also they have 1.6 million paying subscribers so pretty substantial um another company that i didn’t put on here but is killing it in video do you remember weebly yeah oh sorry not weebly what’s the other one sort of the w w wistia you know wistia so whiskey is in the same thing so wistia is kind of an interesting company they also start in 2006 and they were based out of boston and they raised a [ ] ton of money built this business to be like 30 40 50 million recurring revenue and then they bought out their shareholders they raised money from pp uh from kkr the pe company and bought out their investors i bet you that company could be potentially worth a billion dollars as well um but they’re kind of doing something similar yeah you know when last episode i had this thing or not the mark lower one but the one before that where i said you know one of my one of my learnings that one of the counter-intuitive things that i learned is never underestimate these mega trends uh even when you feel like you’re late you’re early um and there’s another version of that which is even when you even when you’re niche you’re big with with a mega trend and so uh mark zuckerberg came out i don’t know what it was i didn’t start using this term megatrend until i heard zuck use it i think five years ago when he goes video is a mega trend i thought oh that’s interesting facebook’s not even at that time facebook wasn’t even about video they hadn’t launched watch the feed was mostly photos and text updates and but they see everything right facebook knows what’s going on on the internet they know exactly where all the opportunities are whether they can capture them or not and for video i thought huh what does he mean by megatrend and i think what it means is like mobile like the internet like now video social these were um there were like trends of trends meaning like they were going to transform basically every space and so you saw that we saw this with video all of a sudden newspapers are you know the kind of the meme in for media companies was we’re pivoting to video right um which is like used to write articles and now you produce videos um you know same thing happened with with instagram you know more and more instagram content shifted from photos to videos either through stories or posts or now like reels or tick tocks and so video just has just eaten up more and more share of people’s attention and what the internet is used for and i think that that’s pretty pretty fascinating and i think this is a good example of video is such a big mega trend that even being the niche kind of like the the video uploading site for creative makers hobbyists fishermen and photographers it’s like boom eight billion dollar you know 80 billion dollar company if you end up winning that space that niche and so yeah just another example of do not underestimate a mega trend don’t think you’re don’t think you’re late when it’s a mega trend and don’t be afraid of going niche because even the niches are big with megatrends i would say today’s mega trends my personal bets are that today’s mega trends are anything that’s actually real in machine learning or ai as well as crypto i think those are the two mega trends that are happening right now speaking of mega trend something happened the other day an app like went crazy viral and you kind of have an insider story of it yeah a little bit okay so there’s this app so i’ll i’ll tell you kind of my my my learning here friend uh friend of the pod actually he’s never come on but one of our friends or i don’t know if you know him very well he’s got nikita beer he um he’s an entrepreneur his company was tbh got acquired by facebook for 100 million dollars in a really crazy way uh they basically were grinding trying to build like social products like you know the next the next twitter the next snapchat for a while many years and we’re just getting really really smart about it learning a bunch of stuff but never hitting the home run and i think about a few months before they ran out of ran out of money they just threw you know they were either gonna wind it up just all right let’s all go get jobs or you know get aqua hired somewhere they uh they threw one last attempt and they made this app called tbh and it went viral amongst high schoolers it was like a app where you’re kind of like answering questions or polls about your friends you know who’s most likely to blah blah blah or who is your favorite person about blah blah blah um and then it was a place to go you know can i post like a social network for high schoolers takes off facebook buys it for i think 100 million bucks was the reported price how do you think that deal was structured 100 million dollars for an app that doesn’t like it’s brand new i have no idea um obviously it was an overpay you know months later tbh shut down uh you know no longer it was kind of a fad right it didn’t have legs uh they shut it down and they kept you know some most of the talent and so anyways he’s been there for a little so he tweets out when the app store refreshes there’s a new king 500 000 installs on day one all right you got my attention i’ll bite what is it and people start speculating what it is and i thought sort of i i sort of do some internet digging and uh and i find out okay there’s this app called paparazzi so have you seen what the app is the app is called paparazzi it’s currently the number one app in the app store it’s had over a million installs and i think less than a week they’re they’re wait list basically they were a test flight app which is like how you give it to like uh beta testers it’s not even in the app store their test flight app went viral and so they had half a million people ready and waiting to download the app as soon as so they just they just rushed it onto the app store and bang they hit the hit the number one i think they’re still number one on the free charts above snapchat above tick tock above facebook above above everybody and um okay so what is paparazzi and by the way paparazzi has almost the same story as tbh these guys been working on this for a while they like three years i think years yeah they were just kind of grinding away you know small team i think they’re in la and um two brothers they they almost got acquired or kind of aqua hired for single-digit millions of dollars like you know a couple of the big social networks were talking to them they could have took that you know they would have made probably you know a million bucks two million bucks amongst themselves if they did it but they said all right [ ] it yolo one more try they released this new app paparazzi and it hits um and it hits big and so we’ll see if this is gonna last right no who social lapses could be like a tbh could be like a clubhouse it could be the next snapchat right that’s the thing with social apps is they all start sort of start up start out looking the same they look kind of silly they sound kind of dumb and then you know you fast forward a year and then you know some people are proven right i told you that was dumb it faded away and then for some people like me my my you know i think i was right about clubhouse my famous clubhouse prediction that i think is being proven right you know their their downloads went from like 1 million to 4 million to 10 million and then back to 2 million 1 million half a million right so you have intel are you are you right i mean the download numbers would tell us a story that i’m right so far now but when i was saying it it looked like this thing was going to take off they just had 10 million downloads in a month which is insane now it looks like i’m right but of course it could turn around they may you know maybe they could uh maybe they could turn me wrong but how did this one app get to get popular so uh so i don’t know exactly how how it got popped it’s very cleverly architected the way their sort of flow works to get you to invite friends but i think it was just like a novel hook with this so why is it called paparazzi it’s called paparazzi because on every other social network you post about yourself right i go post on instagram i post a photo from my camera that i took about me and my life and if i post a story same thing paparazzi is just like the name sounds it’s other people taking pictures of you which is kind of funny right so like your profile is not pictures you upload about yourself which tends to be you kind of in a manicured setup environment making yourself look good with paparazzi it’s other people taking pictures of you and that sort of is like a photo tag onto your wall and so your whole profile is just pictures that other people took of you and you can sort of like accept them or deny them if you don’t like the photo or whatever and so that creates a cool dynamic where now you’re getting people in more candid shots because it’s other people taking photos and which makes the content more interesting it’s more raw than what you’re getting on on facebook it’s more raw than what you’re getting on instagram it’s even more raw than what what snapchat was which this is the game snapchat played on facebook snapchat was more raw and candid because the photos disappeared so people they had less of a filter on what they posted but still they wanted to you know post a certain type of thing that made themselves look good this is even more raw than snapchat it’s even more candid it’s content that wouldn’t have made it to snapchat makes it onto paparazzi which is what makes it interesting now you’re getting new [ ] shared that you wouldn’t have otherwise got so that’s the premise of it what do you think of this never in a million years but i thought this was gonna work and i can’t decide if i just have bad taste or if i’m old is that the app i’m opening the app there’s like a hype video do you uh which is cool more apps should do that they should have like a trailer like instead of a boring onboarding this thing is playing me like i want to play the music it’s like let’s get it pop in and then there’s pictures of all these like cute boys and girls my phone is literally vibrating it’s like that’s the most excitement an app has ever shown me so do you but when you were looking at this did you think that this so i get that it’s popular now and it’s easy to say yeah i get it but no i would have never predicted this right like okay you would have told me i’ve been like huh that’s clever but still probably not gonna [ ] work right like it seems so unlikely for anything to just like hit like this is so unlikely and it’s not the expected things so you sort of by default you sort of you don’t imagine that this would hit same thing with clubhouse i was like oh that’s cool i’ve seen a bunch of things like that i don’t really see why this one will go viral but it did and so it’s very hard to predict with social even i spent like maybe like five six years of my life trying to build social stuff i knew everybody in the space i tried so many different things so i i would say i’m not like a novice to this stuff but it’s very very hard to predict and our friend jack smith says this best he goes if you look at even the guys who invested in snapchat or whatsapp or whatever they go and they start like okay sequoia the best venture fund that’s you know ever existed basically they invest in whatsapp they invested in every single round of whatsapp they led every round which was a genius move so when exits were 1920 billion bucks they were huge winners out of that cool guess what they also invested in yik yak a social product that died whisper it’s those products that died right like they have a graveyard of other things they tried that didn’t work out and i don’t know if those are the exact ones that they invest in but they have a bunch and so jack pointed out he’s like if even the best guys who have had the home runs have a bunch of swings and misses with social it just shows how hard it is to like correctly predict social before it plays out i have a friend who who who was in the seed stage um a friend of a friend he was in the seas stage of robin hood and uh a whole bunch of other stuff uh and probably worth multi billion for sure worth multi billions and someone was asking him about social apps and about consumer stuff and he goes honestly if the person is competent maybe do it but really it’s just gambling and i have no idea which one’s going to work he said he goes with b2b stuff i can kind of like i can look at some stuff i’m like okay i understand you can you can cut you can the likelihood that you can make this at least a mild success is quite high but with social and some basic consumer it’s just i’m just rolling dice and i i have very little confidence in any of it so the beautiful thing about social like who it’s like who would try this right like because you’re right it’s so hard to predict if you’re a great entrepreneur and you go into this space you are inten you’re going to a casino and you’re saying all right my odds at the craps table or you know 51 i’m a 49 to 1. 49 to 51 i’m 49-51 oh you have you know whatever chinese backgammon over here okay i’ll go play pai gow i’m gonna go play paigo even though the odds are you know 80 chance of loss it’s like why do you do that because it’s a it’s fun and b when you get social right you’re the [ ] king of the universe right it’s like yeah my app is the one that’s used by like a billion people every day of their life their whole social scene is on here they use it with their mom their friends their their girlfriend boyfriend whatever and so it just hits different when you hit social and that’s that’s why i love even talking about things that are social that hit because it’s a rare type of game that you kind of have to be a madman to go play so let me bring up something that’s the total opposite of this which is you don’t have to be a madman and and the likelihood that it’s going to succeed is incredibly high but it may not be like a huge winner okay just with that information do you know where i’m going with this i see vending machines on our thing and i i think that a vetting machine business is probably the most predictable simple understandable guaranteed type of business you could do is that what you’re going to yeah so these uh two folks came to me and they pitched this idea they’re raising money for it it’s a vending machine business uh for it basically it’s mostly female products so tampons and stuff in uh bathrooms and oddly enough i had another guy email me a deck about a vending machine business and i’m not going to do that one but this first one was kind of intriguing they’ve got some traction they’re making money it’s kind of intriguing and i started doing some research and i tweeted out who knows everything about who’s the person he talked about vending machine it got a ton of traction for some reason i think it’s a lot of people are interested in this this guy named quinn miller reached out to me and i did a call with him this morning very fascinating he worked and i just want to bring this up because this is the exact opposite of what we were just talking about right but it’s oddly as compelling and as interesting even though it’s the two totally different uh parts of the world so this guy he’s 27 he worked in software sales he quit about a year ago to start this business he’s got a vending machine business and he gave me all of his numbers and he said i could reveal it so he’s about 10 months into the thing he’s currently doing 15 000 in monthly revenue and he’s doing that across 27 machines his startup costs were 600 500 or 400 to buy a machine and 200 to fix it and move it to the place where it had to go by the way this is our weekly blue collar side hustle this is the great college side hustle yeah so on the 15 000 in revenue 65 is profit so he’s doing around uh 97 a month in profit so far total investment into the biz so far after he already bought his first machine has been fifty thousand dollars time involvement per week relatively high 20 hours a week because he’s actually delivering all the stuff i asked him all about i was like how does this work because the reason i reached out to this guy was i was like hey uh there’s this like tampon startup it kind of looks interesting what’s your tampon vending machine startup what’s your opinion he goes yeah i mean i obviously don’t know anything about that like too much but basically my opinion is the world uh he goes america runs on coke and monster energy drink and i was like what do you mean he goes let me let me explain so i put these vending machines i love that so let’s slow down so so the guy basically buys vending machines like you and i are used to just a snack vending machine nothing nothing innovative there well he does one quote innovative thing he puts uh he installs a credit card machine on him for about 250 bucks you can get a credit card okay so he gets a vending machine he says all right people aren’t carrying quarters so i’m going to take cards he puts them uh he puts them so he buys each machine you said for 500 bucks the first one was 500 he has 27 machines uh with 50k so whatever that math is so what’s that 2k a machine roughly yeah okay so he buys a thousand to two thousand dollar machine he puts it in places like what office building department yeah so he cold calls uh lower income hotels uh motels assisted living places in in uh low-income apartments so sorry low-income apartments dash or comma motels comma assistant living places okay and so he goes and he basically says hey put this here and he there’s a revenue split or he pays rent how does that work so most of these businesses the way that they work is they give 10 to 20 to the real estate folk right uh this guy he goes i actually am because i sold software i’m pretty good at sales and i do what’s called a value sell and he goes basically i say look your tenants are if i just improve your tenant experience by just a small percent maybe you’re going to make more money because someone will want to stay or want a rent he gives him nothing he gives them nothing and so he’s got a bunch of machines in like 10 different locations and he just cold calls them and then it’s so unsophisticated where does he get his stuff costco so he buys a can of coke from costco for 33 cents and he charges a dollar for it right uh it’s very simple uh not complicated at all by the way my grandfather used to have a vending machine so this was probably the first business i ever encountered was i think i was probably five years old and my parents you know they worked so my dad would work in an office building and he needed me to be babysat but then like you know old people also kind of need babysitting so my dad went for a two-for-one he basically bought or rented out a little like kind of like a corner store inside like a little deli inside of the office building and um and then my my grandfather ran it and we used to go work the register at the age of you know seven um and he was like baby baby he basically he occupied his grand grandparents and his kids without having to like do any pay for any like caretakers in fact it made a little bit of money and then my grandfather had this vending machine that we used to go and do this exact refill we would go to costco buy the cokes put it in he would collect a bag of like change and then we would like go to the bank and like exchange the change and i remember being like what is this he had one vending as his business it sounds awesome and i asked the guy by the way this guy’s name is quinn miller i’ll give him a shout out quinn miller i asked him i go how big can this get he goes look i’m not trying to be offensive or anything but the operators of these businesses typically are pretty hillbilly um and so they’re pretty unsophisticated which doesn’t mean they’re dumb they’re just not sophisticated in terms of like technology or anything like that and they like there’s a low-key easy life he goes but i met a guy in palm springs who had about 1600 machines and he was making anywhere from five to 10 million in revenue with about half in profit right and i was like well that’s pretty amazing how else can it get big like what else is big and he said there’s a company called canteen and i looked it up i i think it’s public uh but they do like 15 billion in sales of this and they’re the largest vending machine company in america they operate them yeah and they do distribution so the thing is is like what this guy does uh quinn he finds he finds his route so he finds a route so he’s like all right if i go from destination a to b it’s a straight line i’ll do everything in between and so i try to find locations on the way so one truck can do all of it in an easy short amount of time and he’s like i’m very specific specific about where i choose and that’s where you make a lot of money is you can be very efficient with your time and so basically that’s what he does and he said this company can’t team just does that on a huge scale and they’re ultimately at the end of the day a logistics company and a bit of a supply chain company but at this point quinn told me he was like i rented a small warehouse now because i’m getting so much freaking coke he goes the reason i like doing that and so back to tampons he goes you have to like look at what the repeat purchase rate is he goes if i go to like a lower income area these folks love coke and love monster to the point that one guy will drink five cokes a day i’m getting five dollars from them you have to ask yourself can you get that for uh tampons or other products and he goes in fact a lot of the money guys once they move from coke and monster energy they’re starting to go with into what’s called honesty market so basically at a wee work you know how they like you swipe your credit card and you only take one sandwich for eight dollars yeah he’s like that’s where the money is right now huh that’s so and um yeah that’s so it’s almost like there’s whales for the vending machine it’s not like everybody buys one every three days it’s one guy drinks nine cokes a day uh or you know four red bulls you know a week and that’s where you make your money is on the like 10 of the of the residents who buy like 90 of the goods or something like that probably yeah this guy was interesting man he’s only 27. he’s the lives in san diego worked in tech sales he told me that uh he goes like basically i’m a pr he goes i’m pretty i was pretty good at selling software um i’m not the best but i’m pretty good and this industry that i went into they’re just kind of not that great at that many stuff and i could outsell relatively easily i could kind of outwork relatively easily and so anyway fascinating story so you know we have the billy of the week i think this needs to be the hilly of the week it’s the hillbilly business that’s actually of the week that’s actually great uh so quinn miller you are the hilly of the week congratulations uh i love this business so just to summarize buy the thing for a thousand bucks cold call you know um apartment complexes motels hotels you know low income the better i guess is the way that this market works and then you’re trying to generate he’s generating off of uh what’d you say 50 50 machines 27. 27 off of 27 machines he’s generating about 100 to 120k of profit uh a year and so that’s you know that’s the business and then what’s the work uh it sounds like it could be easily you know delegated but sounds like he wants to do it keep his margins which is you go you buy the stuff wholesale and then you stock all the machines on some regular cadence and you collect uh you know the payments on the other side so i was so fascinated so like i get uh when people call me a tech guy i’m like not really i work in publishing like i’m a publisher but i guess compared to someone who works in vending machine i am a tech guy and so i like these like big things software companies that can scale but when i heard him describing this i’m is just so like you know what i mean like it’s like we just got done talking about paparazzi and how this young guy named nikita who sold an app for a hundred million dollars to facebook and is probably 26 years old baller like dot you’ll die a billionaire if you just breathe okay that’s it but then i hear the [ ] about this guy who spent 50 grand and is gonna make a hundred and fifty thousand dollars a year in profit and i’m like [ ] yeah sign me up let’s get into this so i think it’s kind of interesting i like hearing about it yeah whatever floats your boat you know okay let’s do some quick like other ideas or other brains so i think first of all i’ll say the beauty of this is that you don’t need to come up with a genius twist on it you just do the same thing in your local market and it would work okay so that’s that’s cool but if you were gonna do a twist right like i i like to dabble in ideas so let’s let’s come up with some ideas here’s a couple that i think might be interesting as twisps you mentioned um the honesty market what do you call it honesty market that’s what he called it yeah so um i’ve seen this at big companies they do this um like at the adobe office i remember they did this which is like there’s a bunch of sandwiches in a thing you take it out and you pay and nobody’s watching you so there’s no labor cost and uh they just hope that you’re not gonna steal [ ] and that works in certain types of like high-end places you said wework things like that okay i think that’s cool so maybe there’s an out there maybe there’s an opportunity there what about subscription so you if you’re taking my credit card and you got this vending machine how do you get me with saying hey you could buy this one right now you could buy this one can of coke for a dollar but for uh you know six dollars a week and get unlimited coke or you can get unlimited vending machine swipes and uh and you basically set up a recurring revenue business off of the residents in in the place and um you know it’s like a breakage model so you you know you they just can’t empty you out and dude i think that’s the move but you’re wrong it’s not unlimited no no it’s capped right but the machine caps you it’s like oh hey it’s user whatever i don’t know how they would know that you’re you’re you i guess that’s a little bit of a tricky one you have to swipe your card every time which feels bad you just need like a metro card you know like a like a like a metro card or exactly you need a clipper card or whatever where you basically get a certain amount so the question is this if someone’s gonna if you’re gonna spend so when i lived in college i had a vetting machine would i spend 30 a month in that vending machine i think yes i think i did yeah yeah i think i did we had snapples and i couldn’t resist right so then the question is you just have to ask yourself are you willing to give up of your revenue in order to give the customer a discount if they pay up front yeah but you know i think it works both ways so you get two benefits one is they prepay so you float all the money that way and you’re able to like cash flow the business better the second thing is not everybody’s gonna maximize the value so there’s like a breakage model where some people use the full amount um great and you know if 30 of people don’t max out that’s just free money for you that you didn’t have to send a dime on and uh easily you know most of i think this is the the ugly side of most subscription businesses is that people don’t use the subscription they just don’t remember they don’t cancel uh they’re either too lazy or they forgot and you sit here thinking you have all these happy customers and in reality go look at your usage numbers how happy are they if they haven’t used you in a you know a year and a half and you’re just charging their card and so that’s the truth about subscription businesses why people love them is because the people set it and forget it and uh and so yeah i think the same thing would happen here all right so that’s another idea last one i’ll bring up with this vending machine thing is i’m buddies with the guy who started life aid he came on the podcast they have yeah i remember that fit aid party aid you know recovery aid whatever sleeping whatever they are they have a bunch of different drinks i’m like addicted to fit aid it’s like my whole mini-fridge in my gym here is stocked with them and he got his break by giving he he basically went to crossfit gyms and he said hey crossfit you don’t have a mini fridge i will give you a free mini-fridge and a case of fit aid here you go you know here’s a 79 mini fridge and a case of fit aid um try it out give it to your people let me know what they think and uh if they like it or if you like it and you guys making a little bit of income off this just give me a call back or you know i’ll send you a second case uh next month um and so this is how he grew the brand was through the crossfit um the crossfit gym network and specifically with this idea that they didn’t have fridges so they didn’t have a vending machine they didn’t have a fridge and they couldn’t have a vending machine because you can’t be crossfit and then sell kitkat bars that doesn’t work and but what you could do is you could make the the post-workout machine and you could put it in every gym what’s in the post-workout machine it’s gatorade propel it’s you know fitted it’s all all the no no i’m just saying you could do this this is idea um and then you have like you know i mean the bcaas like the branch chain amino acids you should take post-workout as a little supplement you know you could have hydrant for your for your hydration needs so you could put a whole bunch of post-workout stuff that people take protein powders protein pre-mixed drinks you could put it all on a vending machine and put it and put it in gyms i think you could have a similar model yeah i think that could work i would i don’t know actually what the margins are on health food versus a coke uh i imagine they’re the same to be honest um but i’m into it i think that those honesty market things i bet works shockingly well yeah i remember when we were doing the sushi restaurant we met the guys who started like i don’t know panera or something like that and panera bread was doing this actually i think in st louis they opened up the first yeah they’re from st louis the first like pay what you want uh restaurant so pay what you can i think is what they called it at the time which is like anybody could go and you could eat and you just pick what you want and at the end it says pay whatever you want the average person pays 12 and uh what he said was that the average ticket price in that restaurant was higher than their normal ticket than their normal uh restaurants where they have fixed prices you would think oh people are going to scam you and cheat you anybody says it’s a bell curve 20 of people go over 20 of people go under and most of the people pay the exact same you know but when you look at how the exact numbers break down it’s a little bit higher because people eat more and um because they feel like they’re getting a deal and the customers were happier because they didn’t you know it’s like kind of like a feel-good story so i thought that was kind of interesting then again i also when he was talking i was like this sounds a little bit like pr so uh i’m gonna like discount what you’re saying by like thirty percent here i might do this for fun do what i might do the vending machine thing i think it’s i think it’s a great idea i think you should do it as the uh just basically build it in public for the podcast i think you should you should basically give us updates on how the vending machine business is going i think i will i think i’m gonna do it i love it i think this is a fun weekend thing you want to talk about one more thing you want to do uh ghost kitchen for gifting yeah so um so it was my trainer’s birthday yesterday or two days ago and i was like uh [ ] i want to get him what do i get him right and so i was like okay i’m not great at buying gifts buying gifts is like a huge pain in the ass i’m a procrastinator so like today is his birthday so i can’t like order something online it’s not gonna arrive it’s gonna clearly be like i ordered this on your birthday it’s gonna arrive three days later that’s [ ] up yeah that’s who i am i’m [ ] up right like that’s just the reality of the situation and so i was like okay well what do i do that what can i do now that will like arrive today and how do i be a good friend who’s also a lazy bastard and so my go-to recently has just been i just surprise older people postmates or ubereats stuff like i’ll just like i’ll just order you know like two jamba juices to somebody’s house and they’re like uh and i’m just texting them be like hey uh you know there’s something for you outside and they’re like what and they go and they pick it up or they you know the person rings the doorbell and says hey this is for you um and people love this [ ] uh i it happened to me somebody on my birthday instead of giving me a birthday gift they just ordered me food from one of a restaurant that i like and i was like this is fantastic and like sometimes the logistics don’t work because you’re like not there or whatever like it’s not perfect but um these the food ordering apps i think they recognize this because now like recently in all their apps they kind of have like a gift a meal like option but um what it made me think of was oh what’s the actual business what’s the if this is um [Music] you know what that phrase is where have you ever seen this diagram where there’s like a street or like a a walkway where you’re walking and it’s like a l right like i walk straight then i turn left and then there’s like if you cut across you get there faster and you could see in the grass people so many people have cut across it’s like worn out it’s called like a happy path or something like that like a desire path uh it’s basically you show what people actually want to do it’s called the desire path and so similarly i think the desire path is not to randomly order food have to ask your friend for their exact address hope that they’re there to receive it so you can’t really surprise them but instead why don’t people make why doesn’t somebody make the version of like edible arrangements or like one of these like gift basket products on top of ubereats and post base and all these companies that we already use so if you’re on top of doordash already has my credit card i’m already opening the app every day why doesn’t somebody make the best way to just send a gift product to somebody else as a ghost kitchen on top of this i think this is a no-brainer successful idea what does edible arrangements do oh you never had basically it sends like a kind of like a platter or gift basket to somebody yeah yeah yeah yeah i know that in a like um cool format and this business does like hundreds of millions of dollars like it’s a very very successful business old school business no i i get that but how do they how do they like how is this any different than you just ordering food for someone so what edible range it looks like a gift like it’s a it’s like a gift basket and you want to do that for a restaurant no i think somebody should make a ghost kitchen on top of ubereats and doordash that is specifically a way to send food gifts to other people it looks like a gift it’s like a giant chocolate thing right interesting it’s like a giant fruit fruit arrangement it’s a it’s just you know hearts and strawberries and chocolate cover strawberries or whatever right like it’s stuff like that and it basically and like instead of you know when doordash says customize your order you’re like you know i’m allergic to gluten instead of this it’s like what’s your gift message we have we print it out we put it in there right like the thing you want to be a thoughtful person is like a cool looking thing that looks like a gift and it comes with a little message but i want it as a last minute option and the way to do that is as a ghost kitchen i think so i was talking to andrew this last podcast and then i talked to him afterwards i called him i go hey what were you talking about was pretty interesting tell me more so he started this uh uh a bakery bakery basically andrew is being andrew he’s always tinkering and uh he was like i want low carb like something to satisfy me like bread right and so he he uses this thing called sucrose i think some monk fruit some alternative sweetener right and he got the guy to he hired a chef and he paid him a small amount of money single digit low hundreds of dollars to come to his house for a few hours and make these recipes single digits love hundreds of dollars what does that mean like i don’t like two three dollars no like uh single day as in not like 800 or i guess that yeah okay right now you’ve got a few hundred bucks gotcha yeah a few hundred dollars to come and make a bunch of muffins i think is what he made okay and he had him use this monk fruit thing he goes this is sick and he designed a website called uh i forget what it was called something like i forget he made a little website on shopify for the brand and then he put it on a doordash or uber eats and he sent it to a bunch of friends and he only did local delivery in victoria and he had the the meal delivery company dude he sold like three grand in month one worth of stuff and he’s like invested eight thousand dollars into it so didn’t make a profit but it kind of sit he was able to test this idea very easily and he’s i’m like man of all the stuff that you do this like agency that which makes more way more money this bakery thing is so much more fascinating than like just you know doing a design design work for someone this is way neater to me right and anyway so i think you could test this so easily yeah totally because you could just rent out a commissary kitchen for the hour right you don’t even have to commit to very long right so you can rent these things by the hour so you can rent it for a couple weeks a few hundred bucks maybe maybe a thousand dollars max you list your your restaurant on uh your fiverr or logo you list your your ghost kitchen on on doordash or ubereats you pick one city and you start and if this works you basically just you become the easiest way for people in that city to send a thoughtful little gift to others the key is you don’t have to spend the money acquiring customers right so like you could have always done this business but you would be competing against you know 1-800 flowers and edible arrangements and i forgot what the other ones like david something we send like chocolate like i did this for my neighbor my neighbor lets us use their playground with my kid and so i sent them like a big like chocolate gift basket or something like that because i don’t know i need to do something nice and i don’t want to make anything so you know how do i spend 100 and give a thoughtful nice gift to somebody make them happy for for five minutes and uh so i did the same so that’s what i want to do but i don’t want to have to go google search and figure out the brand and then go through their website input my credit card no i already open doordash six times a week it should just be there my credit card’s saved i push the button and it goes to the person and it’s it’s done what’s your grocery bill every month is do groceries are insane i don’t know if i’m insane or if inflation has happened but i went to the grocery store no joke last two times went to the grocery store it’s 450 to 500 for me my wife and i have a like you know i have a baby who drinks breast milk because i don’t even that doesn’t even count and then we have like a you know 20 month old so you go to whole foods it’s whole foods but like whole foods you didn’t it wasn’t a 500 trip for me before it was like a 200 trip so i think we got like a little crazy being like yeah let’s buy these like nine dollar juices or something like that i don’t know what’s happening but that’s crazy what’s yours uh i would have to look but i imagine it would be between one thousand to fifteen hundred dollars a month one thousand okay so that’s like 400 a week so about the same yeah but my thing is even before i had anything i would always spend a lot on it because my logic was what’s the point of living if you don’t feel good and so i’m gonna buy the highest quality stuff i know i don’t care about price yeah my logic was i want this uh i really want to eat this right now look like when it comes to books i don’t care what the price is same and i don’t even care if i read it if i just get one sentence yeah it could change my life forever so i don’t care like there was one time i saw this book and it was eighty dollars i’m like oh my god i’m like nope i don’t care i’m buying it mostly it’s the same thing with groceries so like the healthiest uh freshest stuff that like like for example i used to buy like kroger that’s like the grocery store in nashville like kroger generic cheese and like if i thought about that now i’m like oh i can’t even think about eating that right now well do you do the thing where you’re like you look at your parents and you’re like yo what were you thinking like yeah cheese in a can and like yeah this was like everything yeah every thursday we used to eat like you know like um like totino’s uh you know pizza rolls and like takadis or whatever those things are like or like yogurt [Laughter] yeah same exact thing that was the regular food we ate that wasn’t like the one-off thing if you asked my mom what a carb is i don’t think she could still tell you so like i just this is good it has carbs i’m like no mom see that’s the problem you know this has carbs and you’re like yeah pasta that’s a good hearty meal i’m like no no no no mom that’s like because she’s still like you know but i can’t even blame her dude the food pyramid the food pyramid how big of a lie was that that was like a middle finger to america the bottom of the food pyramid is like get your grains and your carbs and cereals and pastas and breads and then like vegetables has this small little half slice on the third layer like fruits and vegetables just got like you know shoved in last minute right right next to dessert it’s crazy yeah like if you how many grams of sugar are in a can of coke ballpark you know i think it’s like 30 40 grams yeah it’s great so you that’s the ball part yeah so i think it’s like a little bit more than 40. if you ask my family like growing up how many grams are they’re like i have no a million i don’t know like what is the what is it what’s the gram yeah like i don’t know and also like if i told them 45 they’d be like i don’t is that right 45 like is that good like we’re not we’re not 100 sounds good to me they wouldn’t know um so i think that there’s something here about uh like growing up i i middle school i used to eat the school lunch in texas i grew up in houston texas in middle and this is my first time where like mom stopped packing my lunch and i started to buy the school lunch six six seventh grade and straight up every single day i ate a frito pie which is by the way that’s not even like a meal like you can’t go to a restaurant and order a frito pie because all it is is it’s a bag of fritos emptied into a basket and then chili and cheese put on it like nachos i ate that every day it tastes [ ] amazing by the way but i ate that every single day as a kid and my parents where was the intervention that’s what i want to know where was the intervention that that should not have happened i definitely think it’s changing now i don’t think it’s changed entirely at all but i think it has yeah jamie oliver died for this man he tried to change the schools or whatever yeah the naked chef um so yeah so when it comes to like budgeting i for food i just whatever because like i’m putting this in my body okay i need it to be like the best stuff so but i did just drink like a diet dr pepper yeah i was gonna say pretty sure i’ve seen you just like just house like a whole halloween that’s a small child’s like halloween hall i do a podcast one time it is it is a huge weakness of mine but uh whatever i i mostly do good uh we will i’ll have to do an update so i’ve been i’ll i’ll say it now i’ve been taking trt now for about a year yeah and both sean and i invested in this trt company called peak it’s switching its name now but it’s switching its name um and i’ll like do an update on it but basically like i took it not to change my body i took it because uh like i was feeling down and i got tested and they’re like oh your t’s real low it has made me jacked like totally jacked like i i feel like i’m still feeling down but dude so we’re gonna have to do an update on this and i like i told these guys i was you know like i don’t know if i want to post a shirtless pic but i might be open to it if you want to do like a like a because they’re appealing to like nerds right and i’m like i’m that if you but i look like a kind of a shredded nerd right now maybe i could be like your you want me to post a pic like a before and after i will but uh oh my god this trt stuff i feel amazing that is crazy so you were taking this before but you switched peak is that what you did i took it for a little while and then i got off of it when i got uh when i got lime i cuz i couldn’t get like a refill something like that and then i got like and then i’m back on it again now um and i and i started using peak pretty cool service i’m not telling anyone to take this by the way don’t i mean just like this is like some doctor [ ] yeah but it’s pretty awesome yeah if don’t come to our podcast for either financial or medical advice to be honest yeah but just say what we do and what works for us that doesn’t mean it’s gonna work for anybody else no no promises for anybody i’m eating whole foods and i’m shooting up with trt and like your body’s transforming my body is completely transformed in the last six months um i’m just like crazy strong i have pretty low body fat like 15 which isn’t that low but pretty low and i just feel like a professional athlete so it’s pretty awesome that’s amazing congratulations i think now we know what to do with the live show you just need to take off your shirt i think that’s going to be your contribution and then i’ll prepare some content well i sent you a pic and someone was like you look like a white ape you’re like yeah you do you look like a gorilla you look like uh you were like you looked like stunning like when you wear your shirt like right now if somebody’s watching on our youtube channel which you should youtube.com hustlecon i think is it yeah um if they see you right now they’re gonna be like like i’m not meaning this as an insult but you just look like an average person right now yes you sent me that picture and you looked like my bodyguard like you looked you looked like somebody i would hire to protect me which was insane yeah it was crazy so anyway we’ll do an update about that my birthday’s coming up in june and i thought about maybe i’ll post a shirtless pic just like why aren’t you um why don’t you wear shirts that make you look more jacked you wear stuff that like makes you look non-jacked are you trying to do some clark kent superman [ ] i don’t know it’s not intentional i it’s not intentional i don’t think about it so we um meandered a bit we’ll see if this turns out to be any good no dude that was great the vending machine stuff alone was the price of entry i think people will you know go check out paparazzi that was okay uh and then the ghost kitchens for gifting i think is like a cool idea but nobody’s gonna go do that but i think the vending machine thing was the star of the show today what do you think abreu or should we ask dan because abreu you know handing off the baton to dan so let’s start with dan and then let’s go to a brayu let’s go for the apprentice and then the master all right i liked the paparazzi i i like the vimeo um the vending machines i don’t know i looked at that when i was in high school actually oh damn the contrarian i love it yeah and then the ghost kitchens i don’t know you guys use doordash and stuff maybe i’m just too old i don’t use that yeah i feel like that’s one thing that i’m always like yeah everybody uses doordash six times a week i’m like oh wait probably probably not probably most people don’t but that way people wait dan you don’t use door dabs or you don’t i like to cook yeah but what do you do when you don’t want to do it we go out to eat or i’ll pick something up i don’t think like you like to cook all the time yeah he’s like i like to cook it’s like dude but you eat what do you do for the other 18 times i’ve been intermitting faster i also like because yeah i also like to have that in common yeah i did i cooked too last month i don’t think it’s even i don’t think it’s even an older person thing like it’s just expensive you’re just paying so much for the delivery yeah but like what do you do when it’s like when you’re hungry when i have an eight-figure access i i guess yeah you cook every meal yeah just about but i also eat like chicken nuggets for lunch so yeah yeah okay so give me give me give me yesterday’s menu what did you eat breakfast lunch yesterday and snack yesterday um i’ll start with dinner it was mashed potato kielbasa frozen veggies um toasted hawaiian uh hawaiian bread whatever it’s called um lunch is always the same thing it’s uh carrots and chicken nuggets every single day so i feed my dog yeah and then morning it’s just like coffee okay what’s kielbasa that’s like a it’s like a sausage yeah yeah polo sausage with hawaiian bread and what um mashed potatoes frozen veggies dude so you’re not on the whole foods tip dude that’s yeah you’re eating like my mom my mom top you’re eating like my mom taught me to eat you’re starting a company up right it’s like at least go in the whole foods scholarship and eat and you gotta like when you’re on the whole food scholarship you gotta you fill the plate with the hot food and then you take a cart and you walk around while you’re eating it and then you just and then you just try that um you can pay him back when you’re done okay but like that’s that’s crazy to me damn what do you eat i feel like now i get now i feel like an [ ] is this what i’m supposed to be doing and i’m supposed to be eating kielbasa for dinner what what i have a little uh instant pot spice pack business so make an instant pot meal a few times a week so i got some damn coming in hot with the plug what is it what’s the business bonniespices.comispices.com so you put spices into the spots and then what you put just like chicken in there yeah so the biggest thing i thought was the challenge with the instant pot was measuring out all the spices if you wanted to make something so i had a butter chicken recipe took two minutes to do everything but the spices so we sell a pack that’s compostable it has the recipe has all the spices you just open it up dump it in makes using an instant pot much easier that’s not a bad idea okay what’s uh how’s the business doing i kind of went on hold when covet hits so i’m spinning it back up why would it go on hold for kobe like you had to go on hold yeah i ended up losing all my clients i was doing consulting for events and that kind of disappeared i see i see okay gotcha and so you uh you pause the business okay but are we talking are we in the tens of dollars hundreds of dollars thousands of dollars tens of tens of thousands like the hundreds of dollars a month so okay all right so everybody go to any spices order something let’s get them into the thousands of dollars uh i’ll get one what’s your best one is butter chicken rice butter chicken i have a little indian three pack we have a rogan josh an indian curry lentils and a butter chicken if i take off my shirt i also have a little indium that’s my nickname for sean i mean that was easy you just yeah thank you for the assistance uh dan what’s the url a n i spices dot com a and i spices dot com yep all right and dan uh so abreu grades us at the end of every episode what’d you give this one i thought the vending machine thing was worth it that made it an a minus everything else was a so in the a’s thanks the vending machine and then dan are you uh are you more simon cowell are you harsh or are you paula abdul you just give everybody a’s what’s your what’s your grading style uh let’s do this one as a b plus i feel like there’s a bray who’s literally has never given us a b it’s only an a it’s a a minus or a dude it only used to be b’s you guys started actually doing some work and you got some a’s all right fair enough all right good stuff let’s uh let’s let’s leave all this in this is fine um people can people can enjoy this so all right we’re out of here see you in austin see you in miami i bought my tickets this morning what i want to i put my all in it like no days off on the road let’s travel never looking back