Shaan introduces the “one-chart business” concept — finding a stat that signals a massive trend and surfing it. He walks through Jack Smith’s Funnel, Jeff Bezos’s internet growth stat, and a list of generation-defining stats today. Sam recaps Dafina Smith’s Covet Mane hair extension business (six employees, tens of millions in revenue). They also cover the lice inspection side hustle, Triple A Locksmith hustle logic, a micro-hustle framework from watching waiters, and the Roundtable AI tool that simulates survey responses.
Speakers: Shaan Puri (co-host), Sam Parr (co-host)
One-Chart Businesses [00:00:00]
Shaan: This is an example of a business that is what I call a one-chart business. What’s a one-chart business? There are times when you can look at one chart and one chart alone can be your business plan.
Rick Rubin’s Party and Michael Rubin’s Drivers [00:00:30]
Shaan: All right, we’re live. What’s going on? I haven’t seen you in a week.
Sam: I know, what’s up?
Shaan: Nice jacket. Wearing white is a summer move. You’re going to Rubin’s party or what?
Sam: No, I’m not on that. Was it last year that you were in the Hamptons when Rick Rubin was having his party and you ended up with the limo drivers?
Shaan: Yeah. The beach that I went to was five doors down from his house. Public beach, parking lot. Me and my family were just hanging out. We drove by — saw Henry Kravis, founder of KKR, the $50 billion guy, pull up in his two-million-dollar Bugatti. We park in the parking lot and I see all these blacked-out Escalades and the drivers: suits, playing soccer, eating sandwiches, drinking soda. I walk over. I’m like, “What the hell is this?” They’re like, “Oh, that’s Michael Rubin’s party.” I go, “Who are you driving?” And they’re spilling everything — who’s a good tipper, who haggles with them over $500 tips.
Sam: Most relatable blue-collar thing to do — just hang out in the parking lot with the drivers and kick it.
Shaan: I saw a video of that party and I think the reaction for most people is, “Oh my God, so cool, I hope one day I can attend.” I gotta say — I saw that thing and I was like, “This would be my worst nightmare.” Having to look cool. Sam’s wearing a Mickey Mouse t-shirt right now.
Sam: I bought this recently, this is new.
Shaan: Having to look cool, be in conversations with super famous people, trying to get into those conversations — I just want to go home already.
One-Chart Business Examples: Jack Smith and Jeff Bezos [00:03:00]
Sam: So to your first point — our buddy Jack Smith started Funnel, sold it for $750 million, it was making a million dollars a day in revenue. I asked him, “Jack, why’d you start Funnel?” He said, “I just saw that mobile games were going to be really popular. I saw a chart from a Forrester research report that said mobile games are taking over the world. What can we build on top of that?” So he built an ad network for games. He goes, “No matter which surfboard we pick, let’s just pick a board and catch the tide wave.”
The same is true of Jeff Bezos. He was at a private equity firm, doing research, and he read a stat: the internet is growing 2,300% per year. That blew his mind. We actually use that quote on the front page of Trends. He said, “Nothing grows that fast unless it’s in a Petri dish. I knew I had to start something. So I wrote a list of ideas of things we could sell on the internet and we happened to choose books.” He chose books because the internet lets you have infinite selection — no shelf space limit — and books are durable, don’t go bad, easy to ship.
Shaan: Steph Smith — former Trends writer — had a great tweet about this. She said, “Famously, Jeff Bezos had this stat that made him quit his job. What are the generation-defining stats of today?”
Her list: the cost of mapping a genome has fallen by 100,000 percent over the last 15 years — from $100 million to under $1,000. College tuition has outpaced how much people earn by 10x. Cyber insurance loss ratios have increased for years despite exponentially growing rates — cyber security is becoming an exponential issue. The percentage of men under 30 not having sex has tripled in the last decade — it’s now around 30%. People used to get eight hours of sleep; now the average is 6.8. The electronic system in a car was 5% of car costs; now it’s 50%.
Sam: Those are brilliant. I’ve definitely started stuff because of things like that.
I remember sitting with one of the founders of Crunchbase — this guy Alex — and we were at lunch. He burst out laughing out of nowhere. “What?” He goes, “I just realized there must be like ten million people a day dying on Facebook. Facebook must have so much churn just due to death.” He starts laughing uncontrollably. He’s like, “Can you imagine millions of users churning because they died every day from your product? What do they do with those profiles?”
Back in Austin: Stuff Anxiety and the Minimalism Debate [00:07:00]
Sam: This is my first time recording back in Austin. I go to New York every summer between May and October. This time only six weeks. And every time I come back I get this immense amount of stress.
When I go, I bring basically nothing — a pair of Crocs, workout shoes, one nice dress shoe, two workout shorts, two workout shirts.
Shaan: Crocs, workout shorts, a box of Captain Crunch, and a switchblade. Summer ready.
Sam: I come back to my house and I’ve got a closet full of stuff, two cars where I have to check if the batteries are dead, a motorcycle, a cold plunge that needs to be refilled and cleaned. I saw a picture of our friend Sahil with his baby — and in the back there were literally three barrels of toys. Barrels. And I’m freaking out about Sarah’s baby shower registry. I don’t want any of it.
Shaan: You’re not freaking out about stuff. I think what you’re having is fatherhood fear and you’re redirecting it. It’s expressing itself as anxiety about your cold plunge.
Sam: Maybe. But I also get nervous about stuff in general. I was talking to my buddy Dennis — he’s a single guy, he’s got three cars, and he’s like, “I have to run them so the batteries don’t die.” We all wanted this stuff and then we got it and now we have to take care of it.
The situation is: you have to be a conscious consumer. I’m going to the baby registry and I’m like, if it’s not a book we shouldn’t ask for it.
Shaan: With kids it’s a different game. Sometimes you buy the ball pit and the slide and the Nugget because it buys you thirteen minutes of relaxation. And if you have that — worth it.
New York vs. Austin: The Ones-and-Tens Problem [00:10:30]
Sam: The reason I love going to New York is that it’s a land of ones and tens. Everything about it is either a one or a ten. The beauty, the energy, the excitement — ten. The crime, seeing what you see on the streets — one. Austin is a land of sixes and sevens. Everything’s mostly pretty good, mostly all the time. It’s never going to blow you away. But you walk around New York and sometimes you’re like, “This makes me feel alive.” And sometimes you’re like, “I need space, I need quiet.”
What’s a good life — surrounding yourself with ones and tens, or sevens all the time?
Shaan: One choice is no choice. Two bad choices just tells you that you need a third option. What worked for me: live in California but live in the burbs. You lose a little bit on the energy and ambition around you, but you get the weather, the beauty, the sunshine — without the downtown crime.
Sam: I think what I’m going to do is rent a place for one year in Westport, Connecticut. Never in a million years did I think I’d say that. But I met this woman named Dafina Smith through Hampton. She went through the same thing. Found Westport — 60 minutes outside New York City. I went out there and I was like, “This is nice.”
Dafina Smith and Covet Mane [00:13:00]
Shaan: Tell me about her.
Sam: I met her at a Hampton dinner. Her company is called Covet Mane — C-O-V-E-T, then M-A-N-E, like hair.
She started in real estate, doing normal stuff. Her parents own a beauty supply store — a small brick-and-mortar. She starts helping them and thinks, let’s create a website and sell hair extensions online. It doesn’t work the way she expected. So instead she invests $100,000 to $150,000 into the business and starts reaching out to beauty stores. She creates an invite system: “We don’t have much inventory. You apply, and if we can make it work, we’ll start sending you product. And we’ll send you customers because we’re good at marketing.”
In her first year with only six employees, they did $4 million in revenue. By year two she was already in the tens of millions. Year four — many tens of millions. Two or three agencies work for her, but only about six full-time employees.
She hosts these meetups — parties for women who own beauty supply companies, brick-and-mortar stores. There are speakers sharing best practices, and then if they want to apply to sell her product, they can. That’s basically how she gets most of her customers.
Shaan: And the hair itself?
Sam: It’s real hair, usually from India or China. In certain parts of India it’s considered holy to shave your head. You can pay people for their hair. So there’s a whole supply chain around ethically sourcing it — I went down this YouTube rabbit hole about how they get hair from villages. There are some great videos if you’re curious.
Hair extensions can cost $500 to $3,000 for the fancy ones. It’s a big industry. I had never known about it, and I was flabbergasted at how big it could be.
A company called Maven raised $76 million from Andreessen Horowitz, Serena Williams, Jimmy Iovine — every cool person you can imagine — going after this space. I don’t know what happened to them. But your cap table is one of the few irreversible decisions in business. Raising too much money can break companies. Dafina, by contrast, is bootstrapped, profitable, and crushing it.
StyleSeat and Squire: Software for Stylists and Barbers [00:18:00]
Shaan: There’s a few other businesses in this vein. StyleSeat — have you heard of it?
Sam: My wife used it for a while. What exactly is it?
Shaan: There was a period when the “online booking for services” idea worked across a few verticals. Mind Body Online did it for yoga and Pilates classes. Peloton figured out that people come for the specific instructor, not the venue. Same thing is true for hair stylists — people follow a stylist from salon to salon. They track where they’re working and book specifically with them.
StyleSeat made it easy to book a stylist. It got valued at nearly a billion dollars. Melody has been running it for over a decade.
There’s also Squire — same thing for barbershops. Barbers were always on the phone while cutting someone’s hair, writing down names on scraps of paper. Squire streamlines the booking, maybe handles payments too. Software for brick-and-mortar small businesses is really hard to crack, but if you get product-market fit, the scale is massive because the market is huge and fragmented.
The Lice Lady Side Hustle [00:20:30]
Sam: Let me give you a blue-collar side hustle. I met this woman — Bricia Lopez, she owns a restaurant in LA, she had taken my power writing course. Ben keeps tabs on everyone and told me she was blowing up: the restaurant’s getting popular, she has a podcast, a cookbook. We went to her restaurant and she just started feeding us. Incredible restaurant owner energy — plates just appeared. Our friend who was with us walked out and said, “Wow, is that what it’s like to own a restaurant?” Our other friend said, “This is how every entrepreneur makes the mistake of owning a restaurant.”
Anyway, she loves the pod and she loves the blue-collar side hustles. She said, “I got one for you.” I said, “What is it?” She goes, “The Lice Lady.”
If your kid gets lice at school, the whole class has to get checked, and not just the kids — the whole family has to get certified clean before anyone can come back. So you can either go to a lice treatment place or — in LA — you text a woman and she comes to your house. $300 for her to come out, test your whole family, plus around $100 per person for a certified-clean certificate. She makes $500 or $600 for testing a family of four.
She serves eight districts in LA. Another woman serves the east side. They don’t cross paths — otherwise there’d be a showdown.
Sam: This lady is making tens of thousands of dollars a month, just booked out with lice inspections and treatments.
Shaan: You go to something like LiceLifters.com — they have locations in Florida, Texas, Pennsylvania, New Jersey. It’s almost like a franchise. This is a local model that works. If it works locally, you scale it across locations. If you get aggressive, you franchise it nationwide. It’s one of those hidden-in-plain-sight niches.
The Triple-A Locksmith Concept [00:24:00]
Sam: Speaking of which — the Triple-A Locksmith.
Back when people used the Yellow Pages to find a locksmith, all you had to differentiate on was your listing name. “Smith’s Locksmiths” puts you far down the list alphabetically. So someone was like, “I’ll call it A Locksmith.” Then another guy was like, “No — AA Locksmith.” Then some genius came in: “AAA Locksmith.” Because being first on the list gets you 80% of the dials.
I love this story because it showed me the power of finding the one lever that actually moves the needle and going all in on it. When I was hiring engineers, I always wanted to hire AAA Locksmiths — people who can do the job, but also have just 10 or 15% of their brain constantly thinking, “How do I get more customers? How do I get to the top of the list?”
That immigrant hustle — just finding the one micro-move that gets you a little further.
Micro Hustle: The Waiter and the Dessert Menu [00:26:00]
Sam: I was thinking about micro hustles because I left the house and started observing how broken some industries are. I went to dinner every single night while I was in LA, and every single night the same thing happened.
Waiter comes up at the end: “Can I get you a dessert menu? Dessert? Anybody want dessert?” Voice going up like a hot air balloon. Then everyone at the table awkwardly looks around. “You want dessert? I’m good.” That’s a rookie waiter move.
The smarter move: set the menu down without asking. Same thing as what they do at fancy restaurants — just put it on the table.
The smartest move I saw: one guy came to me at the side of the table and said, “I’ll leave this with you to order dessert for the table.” Just whispered it to me. Making me feel like the head of the table, giving me agency, making it our little secret.
And I started thinking about the third answer when it comes to dessert. Most people think there are two answers: yes or no. But there’s actually a third: “I’ll have some if you want some.” That’s actually where most people land. You could actually put a little device on the table at the end of the meal — three buttons: no thanks, hell yeah, or “I’ll have one if everyone else is.” Reveal them at the same time. If anyone says yes, plus anyone who said “I’ll have one if everyone else is” — boom. “Would you like the brownies or the truffles?” You could add $40 to every ticket just by removing the awkwardness.
Shaan: I love those games. Like the In-N-Out secret menu — I love when restaurants have a game in them.
Sam: A lot of life is just played in your head. The challenge I give everyone: how do you play a little game today? Add a little showmanship. Add a little restaurant-owner energy. Add a little psychology. If you do that every day you become a different person.
We did this at The Hustle. Team-building activity: 12 employees, we gave everyone $50 and sent them to Costco. At the end there were three awards: most useful gift, favorite gift, most tasty. People went wild. We talked about this one when you did the hundred-dollar Costco version too.
Roundtable AI: Simulated Surveys [00:30:30]
Sam: My weird AI tool of the week — this might be a recurring segment. There’s a company in YC called Roundtable, roundtable.ai. I saw their post on Hacker News.
They use AI to simulate surveys. You write a survey, define your audience — say, people 45 or older — and instead of running it on actual humans, the AI simulates the responses. It’s trained on the whole internet.
For example: “Are you interested in buying an e-bike?” The AI says yes 28% of the time. But if you filter to only Tesla owners — 52% say yes. “Where did you learn to code?” If you filter to people 45+, everyone says books. Younger than 45 — 76% say online. “What’s the most important factor in choosing an airline?” 5% overall say legroom. Filter to people six feet or taller — 20%.
I saw this and I thought, wait, does this defeat the purpose of a survey? You’re literally making up the answers. But then I thought — humans are actually more predictable than we think. And the AI is trained on the entire internet’s dataset.
One person tested it: “Was the moon landing fake?” Options: A) Yes, B) Moon. 94% voted “Moon.” But honestly, I think that’s what a real survey would say too.
Is this satire or is it genius? I couldn’t tell. Anytime you get something where it’s either satire or it’s the next big thing — that’s interesting.
Shaan: You know what that reminds me of — you driving around being like “I’ll be a taxi.” Did you tell me about the Disco Frisco Taxi?
Sam: So for two New Year’s in a row, my buddy Joe and I rented a Zipcar minivan. We wore fake afros and disco clothes. It was called the Disco Frisco Taxi. We’d drive around: “Hey guys, where are you going? Want to go there? How about $30?” They’d get in, we’d spin a wheel, they could win a juice box. We’d make like a thousand dollars a night on New Year’s.
Shaan: All right, let’s wrap it up.
Sam: That’s the pod.