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 it’s insane this whole this guy’s life is insane is what i can see from this i mean this guy’s his steroids are you know as good as his cookies i would say that’s what yeah i want the hgh drop i feel like i can rule you look fantastic you upgraded uh i’m currently recording i wish i could turn the camera around but i don’t want to screw it up but i’m sitting at my friend jack’s house in hawaii where i’m having a week vacation congratulations well deserved uh yeah yeah it’s it’s cool uh just got here but uh going to be here for maybe five days but it’s all right how’s uh things going with you yeah things are good did you see um this thing that the these guys who tweeted at us that were like dude we will pimp out your your stream did you watch these videos that they made no i’ve been flying but they said that they booked a ticket to austin are they actually going to our to my house i don’t know if they i don’t think no no they’re they’re waiting for us to be like yes or no but uh these guys applied very intelligently i gotta give them credit so basically they saw that we were trying to upgrade our stuff and they’re like we’ll do this for you we’ll make it no hassle i’ll come to you i will hook it up and a few people tweeted tweeted something like that at us and you were like kind of you know humoring it i guess and then these three guys are kind of like i think they’re like college seniors or something like that i don’t really know didn’t look too far into it but they sent us a video they go watch here’s what we’re gonna do and they recorded a video and it looks like a casey neistat video like the quality is like that and the editing style and storytelling is like that there’s a funny video it was basically telling us how to how they would pimp out our stream and uh they kept calling it like you know my first million to the moon and they’re like we’re gonna take this baby to the moon here’s how we’re gonna do it and so they did two things he he showed how his camera set up how they do it for their podcast and it looks awesome looks way better than ours and then um also he’s then the next day he sent us an edited clip of a con of you telling the story of bumping into the silk road founder at a party and he like stole your girl or whatever and um they edited like a little clip and they’re like dude we’ll pump out clips like these all the time my first million to the boom baby and uh are they good they’re good they’re really good both videos are really good first of all why let’s hire them and second time where did they send this to on twitter i’ve been flying since saturday it’s on twitter i sent you a link because i was like dude [ ] yes this is like this is you know like it’s like the opposite of a job application normally you get a job you you you put a job up that you want to hire somebody to do x and then some people apply and then you’re like are you kind of squinting you’re like do i think this person’s really going to be able to do it and then you make a guess and then it takes some [ ] six weeks to ramp up and then or or this guy just applies showing look i can do it i’ve done it for myself i’ll do it for you and uh let me make this easy for you let me show you how bad i want this and i just thought like this is so much better than than what we’ve been talking about of trying to find people to do this stuff i’m looking at his okay cool his name is dylan jardin weird last name i keep because i want to say jordan uh yeah dylan if you’re listening to this let’s do it i’m in um and you know i don’t know there’s probably people with the hustle who have similar jobs but i think we should reward the hustle of these guys and be like the gig is yours to like pimp out our the video side of our podcast i think we should give we should give them the the chat all right i’m in cool um all right we have a bunch of topics you wanted to talk about where do you want to start you wanna start with this open salary thing no let’s start with food because was this yours yeah i’ve thought about this for years so i have a lot of i’ve got i’ve got something boiling up so you want to leave let me intro this all right so i’m talking to ben my right hand man ben and ben’s kind of like uh you know i’m easily excitable you could tell by the way i talk ben is the opposite he’s chill mode he’s always relaxed and um but when ben mentions things i’ve learned like when he says something is just like like oh this is cool you should check this out it’s actually [ ] amazing and he just doesn’t say hey dude he doesn’t like shake you and say look at this this is amazing and so he showed me this thing that is amazing so he goes check out this website um or this instagram handle my cookie dealer i was like my cookie dealer so i go to it you should click this oh my god i’m looking at it now i want to eat this dude so all right so he sent me three instagram accounts he sent me buy cookie dealer click the second one one 900 ice cream so like 1 800 but 1 900 ice cream 1900 ice cream looks so good just like describe what you’re seeing it’s incredible is it a pie i don’t know what this is exactly like what you would call it but it’s a it’s a cone what it what i don’t know what shape it is it looks like it looks like there’s a stick so like at the top of the stick where you would have like a popsicle instead it’s like a full ice cream concoction which is like the ice cream and all the toppings and the fudge on top or it looks amazing you should if you have instagram go to go to 1 900 ice cream there’s one called the cupcake wonderland which is uh vanilla ice cream rainbow sprinkles strawberry marshmallow icing so they call themselves they call themselves the ice cream uh thirst trap slash thick check trademark um and and they uh they have a bunch of followers they’ve they’ve grown really quickly uh 26 thousand followers so ben was sending me these and i was like okay cool food account on instagram that’s not too new what what what do i care about this food porn he’s like no no dude i’ve been trying to send you one of these and i’ve been trying to like get these myself they do weekly drops of their stuff and these are selling out instantaneously so i go what do you mean so he showed me my cookie dealer so my cookie dealer does a drop a cookie drop every week they do a random cookie drop so a different flavor or whatever and it sells out within literally seconds and they’re doing 200 000 a week they’re doing 10 million dollars a year dropping cookies on instagram and just instantly selling out and then they ship them you know a few days later they know how many orders they get and then they ship them out a few days later um kind of like you know nationwide or whatever and there’s another one ally’s banana bread go look at this banana bread dude just look at this banana bread i want to print this banana bread out and just lick the paper it looks so good and same thing sells wait wait wait wait wait wait wait dude check check this out so if you go to uh mycookiedealer.com that’s the website okay click click instagram page are you on their instagram and tell me when you’re on their instagram page i’m on it okay you see go scroll up to their profile and you see who where it says like the owner is this guy named juan diesel moore morel click it oh dude he’s like a bodybuilder this guy is huge this guy is so big he looks like if you’ve ever seen an espn or whatever bodybuilding competition where the guys are like this crazy color of skin that nobody is and he’s just humongous no i i can’t tell if it’s like the tan i think it’s a black guy is he like he’s so dark i think it’s a white guy you know like the white guy black tan for bodybuilding well and then look at his wife it’s insane this whole this guy’s life is insane is what i can see from this i mean this guy’s his steroids are you know as good as his cookies i would say that’s what yeah i want the hgh drop this is awesome man this is cool okay so ally’s banana bread so ali’s banana bread so there’s a bunch of these so ben is like d knee deep in this world of like instagram food brands that are basically they’re kind of like drop shipping baked goods all around the country so they have them for cakes ice creams banana breads and they’re just specialists and so there’s a couple cool things that i wanted to bring up about this and i know you have some stuff on food too but the part that i thought was cool is so the internet is the internet is really good at doing this which is normal before the internet you would just go to whatever’s like your local whatever so you’d find the best within your local radius of five to ten miles or whatever it is that’s what you would go by but with the internet whether it’s news or comedy or whatever the best thing can just get distributed everywhere and so the best brand wins on the internet and so this is why you see things get so big you know like facebook and other platforms because the best the best thing will get all the users and it’s what’s interesting is that these guys are doing this with food so if these guys really do make the best goddamn banana bread or best cookies or best ice cream they don’t need a physical shop they could just through instagram alone spending zero dollars on marketing have customers worldwide like ali’s banana bread literally ships worldwide and um so if you’re the best at making something now you have a pathway to become like a multi-millionaire um where that really wasn’t possible if you were just a local baker in whatever in cincinnati you know you were always restricted by however many customers you could get into your local radio so i thought that’s pretty cool the second thing is if you think about this you know this is like a mix of a bunch of things that we’ve been talking about for a while so we’ve been talking about cloud kitchens so these are essentially like cloud ice cream shops or cloud bakeries they don’t have like a physical storefront necessarily they’re all in the cloud and you just order online the second thing is direct to consumer so they’re going direct to their fans they’re getting their fans phone numbers and so that when they do a drop they just text everybody like one picture of the new thing and then instantaneously people buy and i think that’s kind of like amazing a way to go to direct to consumer you don’t have to worry about getting on the shelf at you know whole foods or wherever else to to build your your brand as a cookie company or whatever and go ahead no keep going last one is if you think about it like you know who’s going to be the next mrs fields or ben and jerry’s or like auntie andy’s pretzels it’s gonna be one of these brands it’s gonna be one of these cloud bakeries doing it on instagram building a cult following like these guys are doing and um and you’re gonna see i predict you’re gonna see just like um i forgot what was the name of that meme company that sold for like a hundred million dollars they had like they were the ones behind um daquan and whatever like a couple of the meme instagram accounts uh yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah that was about eight months ago maybe yeah we talked about it on the pod it’s like we’ll pull it up just like what you see it’s right there you see it i can’t really i am gm media so so basically you know some brand that just owned a bunch of like meme accounts on instagram sold for like 100 million dollars i think if i remember correctly you’re going to see the same thing in the food space you’re going to see a bunch of private equity companies coming in and they’re going to buy up you know alleys alleys banana bread they’re going to buy up 1 900 ice cream because they’re going to be like dude this is the next ben and jerry’s and we’re going to take this this thing we’re going to put it on steroids we’re going to advertise the [ ] out of it and then we’re going to get it into retail stores on top of what it’s already doing and so you’re i think you’re going to see a bunch of these if i could go invest in those four brands that we talked about right now i would go give them each you know 25k check because i think these are gonna get scooped up okay so let’s break this down further i’ve thought about this a ton the reason i’ve thought about this ton is i i’m a media guy right by the way is my mic good yeah you’re good all right i’m a media guy i love content and i’ve studied what goes viral and why for years and one thing that i’ve always been fascinated with is i’ve known people who have worked at thrillist and thrillas started as a food well they started as like things to do in new york but one of their biggest things is food and i remember when i started dating my wife she was from new york city and i hadn’t been there since i was the first time i’ve been there was when we started dating 26 27 years old and i went there and i would see these long like i would go to like the areas that you see in movies where like the cute people hang out where they all dress like you know like they dress like right they go yeah like they just like for me that was like wow i feel like everyone looks like a movie star everyone was cool and hit by you know i don’t i don’t know madison square park or washington whatever those parks i don’t know i don’t spend a lot of time there but you know what i mean uh they would have the longest lines and i’m like what what are all these people waiting for and it was like the latest uh thrillers craze that went viral and so i i would walk or through brooklyn and everything and i would see these lines and i’m like what is going on and i would do research and i kind of broke it down into i like i’ve like studied this for a while and uh or not studied is the right word but thought about it a lot and i basically broke it down into the into a handful of categories and what it appears what what seems like what happens is people have a small store a relative like pretty like a corner store in hit parts of brooklyn or new york where there’s uh people who share so like college kids mostly and they create one or two things that that thrillist or buzzfeed or someone because all those companies are located in the cool parts that i’m describing in soho things like that and one of these uh buzzfeed or thrillers folks sees it a whole bunch of college kids see it and then it creates a line and it creates hype it it becomes like a good business that lasts for three to six months and then it kind of like goes away and maybe like it still is a remainder but like still as a business but it mostly like is a hype cycle whatever and i was like what is going on and so i broke this down into a few categories and i want to go through these categories because i agree with you i think this is so cool and i’ve tried to break this down so first and these are like uh different ways to say columbus for virality yeah like formulas for food virality okay the first one is make a side ingredient so something that’s normally a side ingredient make it the main thing so the best example of this is cookie dough there’s a lot there’s like this is a thing i saw in new york uh there was a line out a door the door for someone sold cookie dough as if it’s ice cream so it’s like sprinkled cookie dough then like ice cream flavored cookie dough it was like cookie dough is the main thing another one is cheese like people do like fondues they have like fondue bars something that’s uh what else is a side ingredient that could be it i don’t know if it’s a side ingredient exactly but uh cereal does this too there’s there was these like viral things there’s like cereal bars all you do is it’s just milk and cereal and that’s it and you can come normally that’s not a restaurant it’s a side like it’s like literally a side dish of a side dish and they made it the focus of the restaurant and that made the restaurant notable and remarkable for people to talk about and go to or an eye or a whipped cream like a a whipped cream store just like anything that is typically an afterthought that is a topping or a side to the main thing make that your thing okay the second one is doing the have normal foods but different colors a few examples rainbow bagels okay crazy popular they’re they’re hype i mean they’re still popular but they went through a cycle the second one is rainbow rainbow kettle corn that’s quite popular when i was a kid i remember a couple times buying green ketchup do you remember green ketchup yeah dude i love green ketchup it was just red ketchup but green right it was literally just the color looks different it’s just the name just a normal thing but a different color and then the latest trend on uh uh or this year on tick tock was cloud bread which is basically you know everyone is baking at home now it’s just bread that’s kind of blue and white and looks like a cloud right and by the way your side thing main thing i got another example of that but you know captain crunch the crunch berries were always just the extra and then they came out with captain just just the berries just the crunch berries it was like way more popular yeah or like lucky charms with only the marshmallows yeah exactly so you you take the thing that’s supposed to be the top yeah the topping the second the third string thing make it the first string thing right okay the third one the same thing but a different side uh different size this is pretty common so like huge pizzas that you can’t fit through the door huge sundaes they call it like the kitchen sink everything but the kitchen sink in a kitchen sink or or sushi rito is another example have you seen sushi rito that’s a chain right yep so it’s just sushi that isn’t cut so it’s just a long piece of sushi uh another one uh i had a friend named seoul you probably know him and he created a kitkat bar that was the size of like a cake he he would make these things and so i’ve actually never seen this sold but you get the idea a kitkat bar that’s that’s like a the size of a loaf of bread in san francisco they have this place bob’s bob’s donuts or bob’s whatever yes and they have this humongous donut it’s like this donut the size of you know two of my head and uh and you could buy it and then you could try to eat it and you could take pictures of it because you’re eating this enormous doughnut boom that’s the whole book it’s not special but i mean it becomes special it’s just a normal thing but a different size okay or like in st louis the whole thing is this is so silly how this works and st louis our pizza is cut into squares right right right so it’s around you kind of said one earlier about like sushi sushi sometimes it comes in these like boats or if you go to a beer place and they serve it in a boot or whatever it’s like it can also be you know a punch bowl that’s in a fish you know fish bowl or whatever yeah like it could be bigger and in a you know in a non non-traditional like the kitchen sink in a non-traditional container yes the same thing but different size okay or it could be miniature you know just something that you know whatever uh like white castle mini cheeseburgers uh okay so the the fourth one combine two things that are quite different okay so i’ve got a this is a really easy one there’s a ton of examples the first one is the crow nut pretty easy right the latest trend right now on tick tock pancake cereal it’s i don’t even know what it is there’s like recipe i don’t even know what it is but it’s i don’t know okay uh look it up actually while we’re talking to brayu it’s probably it’s probably just i i don’t know probably pancakes and cereal okay no they uh they bake it they call it pancake cereal it really it’s just probably normal cereal made out of like the same ingredients they just bake it at home and it looks like the shape of a pancake same with donut cereal but there’s um uh do you know do you remember ramen burger yeah okay so there’s ramen burger there’s fairy bread you know what fairy bread is no what is that it’s basically just bread with sprinkles okay so you’re just taking two things that don’t normally go together chips and you mash them just like a dessert burger uh right very simple or you can get a a cream cheese bell pepper sandwich right and the more um more unusual it’s you know it’s doritos locos tacos right it’s uh when kfc came out with the fried chicken bun or whatever and i was like the bun is fried chicken um like you know there’s the more shocking i would say the better in this case yes you just take two things you smash them together pretty easy relatively simple okay the fourth thing or the fifth thing is you make something that’s normally a crappy food but you make it fancy so tater tots mozzarella sticks you add a fancy stick to them or you probably go the opposite way of making something pretty uh fancy and make it not fancy although that would might be gross but you get the idea and then the final one is you uh take um some type of food allergy but this one isn’t actually that sexy if you take some type of food you just make something for food allergies so there’s banza which is a chickpea pasta there’s uh there’s uh lou ellen’s ice cream i think it’s called in brooklyn it’s vegan ice cream only vegan ice cream right uh or like oatly is like this right it’s milk not made from cows boom this is now so popular that this almost can’t go viral anymore but um maybe if you chose some category that’s not not typical but it feels like a lot of these are now mainstream um at this point here’s what i would do is i would open up this was what i was thinking about do i mean i would never i don’t think i would do it but maybe one day i would want to actually it seems pretty fun is i would have a kitchen in new york and i would get it in a really high trafficking high traffic area and i would just every three months try to do a launch where i launched like a rainbow cheesecake or you know i don’t even know i’m just making you’re just making stuff up and then i would even what i would do is i would mix i would do a ton of stuff and then just post a picture and drive a little bit of traffic to it and see what had the the cheapest cost per click right yeah so so what you’re saying is just reuse the hype cycle no embrace that the hype cycle exists and just make a kitchen that’s going to rotate every month into a new crazy concoction and people will line up every month to go try the new thing and you’ll build your brand as like willy wonka when he would create you know now everlas everlasting gobstoppers or whatever you know like he creates a new a new crazy concoction that you gotta go it goes a step further so do you remember cronut yeah so cronuts got popular in 2013 it was invented by a guy named dominique uh what’s his last name i don’t know what his last name is but uh a french pastry chef he’s like a big name chef um but he made cronut because he likes he was like i just want to have fun and create something new and interesting all the time and this one just kind of hit he actually trademarked the name cronut and he is like a purist he’s like an artist so he didn’t actually want to license it to people but he easily could have made tens of millions or more by licensing that name to someone and so there’s a step further so you create the food and you got to come up with a really cute name and you could actually get a trademark and and there’s licensing deals there so i think this is super fascinating i think if someone invested one year of their life to do this and a hundred grand or less they could probably get one or two hits right um which may not be the right thing to do with your life but if that’s you if you’re like i’m doing it great great good it’s definitely fun it seems fun but yeah it’ll teach you a lot i think it’ll teach you a lot about business and marketing to be able to approach you know food this way um okay so a couple other opportunities i see here so i mentioned i think you know investing or private equity i think will start to scoop up these brands i think that’s one opportunity second one is i think somebody could could build a kind of guy fury of instagram food uh character who basically just goes and tries to find the next you know who really does make the absolute best like oatmeal or whatever right like come up with like you know go to every category and then just hunt for the best one ever and then you do the drop on instagram you know for that brand for that for that shop and maybe you you found you know the absolute best philly cheese steak in philly and then you uh you know you dropped that so i think somebody could create that if they were if that’s what if they’re foodie and that was their thing the other thing is a little more boring which is like we’ve talked about um cold chain 3pl so basically how the heck do you ship all this stuff um and keep it where it actually tastes good when it arrives you know three to five days later uh across the country how do you how do you make it work and so i think that there’s just a bigger a bigger and bigger need for cold chain logistics um and and i think we’ve we’ve heard this a few times now and i feel like if somebody’s working on that or somebody has one of those i would love to talk to you just to learn because i think this business is booming and i think more and more people are going to go into it okay do you want to hear one more food thing that we could to discuss do you remember as a kid seeing these books i’m pulling them up now called eat this not that no what is that okay so it was awesome i loved it i bought it once just because it was at barnes noble and uh it ended up like being like pretty amazing so google eat this not it started as one book uh like almost like coffee table-esque book right and on the left side it says eat this and on the right side is not that and so for example um it started as just like a general a general one but then they eventually went to like desserts fast food all types of that all types of stuff like that and an example let’s find an example one that i could say so it would say eat this arby’s beef cheddar classic 450 calories 20 grams of fat not this arby’s roasted turkey ranch sandwich which has 800 calories and so it shows two things that are quite similar and it says eat this one instead of this one right and if i want to say eat a salad don’t go to arby’s it’s saying like if you’re at arby’s get this one not that one yeah or let’s see if like they have like different den different denny’s breakfasts or uh like ihop versus denny’s or whatever eat this or uh yeah you get the idea right yeah okay it’s are you looking at you google it yes it’s pretty sick i it’s been around since probably 200 uh probably 2002. i mean i think i bought this when i was pretty young um let’s see there’s a whole half a million followers on instagram which is like i think all these old like kind of publications like either magazines or or little brands like this today they’re all just instagram accounts i think that’s the way to like reinvent these wow okay so they eat this not cat eat eat this not that as of 2012 had sold eight million copies of the book right and then they spun it up into a magazine and wow it’s freaking amazing i’m just pulling this up um here’s what i would do right now today if i wanted to get popular on instagram is i would do i would do the same thing just for instagram yeah it’s a whole eat this not uh on instagram totally great and and the format is so good it’s just a split screen so it has half the food item on the left and half the food item on the right and then it has the nutrition facts about why why one versus the other i think a lot of this stuff is super shareable on instagram and you would grow very quickly like i can see their instagram right now it looks kind of shitty like they’re not doing a great job i think you could basically steal this concept pick a different name and uh grow a big instagram account off this oh yeah i was bored i would do something like this yeah and it’s kind of a fun topic uh i’m i’m reading all about it now this is pretty amazing i hadn’t thought about this in forever but anyway there you go i think uh uh if you did that for six or six or twelve months you get hundreds of thousands of followers on uh instagram um all right we’ll switch off food let’s go to something else what do you wanna talk about you want to talk about money real quick tiller money okay yeah what’s this i have okay very fascinating do you you what do you use to track your money i don’t use anything to track my money i use excel okay everyone says that oh i’ve talked to uh not everyone but a lot of people here’s usually the answer right here i use mint or i use personal capital or i use i have man tia as well and what can i ask you why don’t you use mint uh i used mints back in the day i mean i used mint like 10 years ago so it’s just kind of like one of those things that i don’t have a habit of going and looking at and i don’t like looking at uh that stuff because it makes me focus on like you know expenses and saving money here and there and i just don’t think that’s fun i don’t enjoy that so i’ll i went and looked at a bunch of subreddits about uh because i usually use personal capital and i don’t like it for a bunch of reasons right now but when i asked like 10 different people how they track their money most who i ask maybe five or six use excel which is kind of crazy to me because how many how many accounts do you have that you need to track over 10 yeah yeah so it doesn’t matter if you’re wealthy or not wealthy most people like between if they have a wife or a husband you have like your checking account bank account your 401k your stock stuff uh maybe your home loan credit card credit card you probably have two or three credit cards so typically i imagine the average joe has 10 plus so it’s actually a lot to track regardless of if you have money and everyone i’ve noticed or not everyone a lot of people have noticed use excel so i did some research there’s this thing and it’s not like i’ve discovered this i think it’s pretty popular already called tiller money and all it is the landing page is beautiful but i’m just fascinated by this business all it is is a if you go to google sheets and you click tools and then add-on okay you’ll see the ability to add plug-ins to google sheets okay tiller money all it is is a plug-in for google sheets that costs 100 i think it’s 100 a year and all it does is it automatically imports your bank accounts and any other account into google sheets and templates that they have or you can just make your own template but i’ve never seen someone build such a sick and awesome business off of a google sheet add-on it’s it’s incredibly fascinating yeah this is good i like this um i think this is this of all the like kind of money manager things this appeals to me more because it feels like i’m managing my own money and uh in reality you know the thing i’m always worried about is data like i don’t want my data on all these different services like i’m not going to try your new finance app because like i just don’t want to link my bank account to all this new stuff but uh if they could do this where this was like self-hosted in some way like it’s just a template um that’d be great it doesn’t look like that’s the case but it is sweet i like it so if you go to google sheets right now and you click add-ons on the top right once you’re in a sheet you can see add-ons and i actually just realized i use a few add-ons the other add-on i use is called super metrics which is uh it pulls in data from sql and stuff like i’m i bet you they do close to eight figures a year in in revenue but uh we’ve talked about plug-ins for wordpress we’ve talked about plug-ins for chrome google sheets plugins is another that is super super fascinating to me and i completely overlooked it uh it’s so neat and so i don’t know what else to say other than it’s cool so you you had a thing that i thought was kind of interesting that was about open salaries what what is this and do you want to talk about this or or where do you want to go i’ll let you lead a little bit but i’ll i i it’s so funny i’ll i’ll put stuff in here throughout like two weeks and three days goes past and i’m like wait did i write that or did you write that so all right so we’ll do a quick we’ll do it quick so so you put this thing on here i got kind of intrigued so you you open salaries what is it uh it’s the idea that like today it’s kind of crazy we don’t know what other people make and not in a gossip kind of way but it’s really you know the company knows what everybody makes but the employees don’t know and that actually puts the employees at a pretty big disadvantage you don’t know when you’re underpaid you don’t know if there’s any like systemic bias and let’s say women or minorities are not getting paid as much as you know tall white males or whatever and so um it’s kind of weird that this is this like taboo thing nobody talks about it you’re not allowed to talk about it it’s seen as kind of a faux pas but it would actually be to the benefit of any employee to know to have transparency at as to what people are getting paid and it can be anonymized but being able to see what what other people at your role at your company are getting paid and so you would put this thing on here that colorado was gonna say that hey from 2021 employers have to disclose pay rates and ranges for job posts um of any job that could be working in colorado including remote jobs which i thought was kind of interesting and then we have companies like buffer and whole foods have been doing this for a while buffer kind of tried to like make a name for themselves by being like the open transparent company we’ll share everybody’s salary and like literally you can like here’s a link you can go and see everybody at buffer’s salad whole foods let’s do whole foods you can see people’s salary uh you put that in there or a braided i don’t know i haven’t seen that one but i wanted to share a couple interesting things i i found when i was digging into this so first uh check out this spreadsheet of buffer salaries i just put it in the chat so you can click this anybody can google this and find it you can go and you can see that joel the ceo is making 280 thousand dollars this year and you can go see what the what his ea is making she’s making 89 000 and you can just go down the whole company roster everybody’s salary is public which i think is like pretty insane um but interesting then you have things like the google kind of secret spreadsheets i don’t know if you’ve seen these but at big companies people are starting to just make an anonymous spreadsheet and say hey put in your salary and your level and your your location here um so we can all like have more transparency you don’t have to put your name next to it and um they circulated with inside company so microsoft had one google had one facebook had one and the google one the the so i forgot who was some woman created this and within two days ten thousand people had put in their information and now there’s over twenty thousand people in the open google database and you can link can you link to that yeah it’s right here um i have it at the bottom um so so so these are kind of cool and um and it’s interesting how viral these go so then i was looking at levels.fyi which i know you know about yeah yeah yeah it’s a place to go see like you can go and say all right i’m interviewing at amazon and facebook and they they labeled me an l5 software engineer located in bay area like what am i going to get paid how much is or i got an offer i don’t know if that was a fair offer or a low offer did they lowball me and so you can go on levels at fyi and it’s the same thing crowdsourced information about what you make at these different companies and levels if you look at their traffic they’re getting about a million and a half visits a month and like there this thing is really elevated from a side project to something like pretty legit so they have like job boards now if you click at the top they actually have the thing we were talking about last episode a negotiator as a service so if you hit the top it’s a sick little website where they have a little calculator that says you know what company where are you located how many years of experience here’s what you’re getting here’s what we think you should get paid based on the levels database which is now in the i don’t know tens of thousands of entries or something like that and then they basically say hey if you pay us 500 bucks we’ll negotiate your offer for you we have former recruiters from these companies that freelance with us and basically you book a time you talk about your offer and how you’re feeling about it and what what you really want out of this and then we’ll negotiate for you and they show all these like success stories of like this person at facebook got 20 000 more than their offer this person got 40 000 more this person got 10 000 more and so they’re taking and they just take a flat fee of like whatever 500 600 bucks i think and um so i think there’s some interesting stuff going on in this like transparency around what people are making and it really goes and like fits in my values where um i think it’s crazy that people don’t talk about money more i think it would help everybody if we talked about money more and it would be less like kind of taboo and less uh less like a big deep dark secret if people were more open about it and i think that’s right can i give you a counter point for that go for it i thought that that was interesting and i’m not saying how i feel because i’m still thinking about it but leo i forget his name leo but he did it from buffer the co-founder of buffer who no longer works there so buffer started with this whole transparency thing um that was like the whole shtick and it worked out about everything users revenue salaries everything it was it was a stick that got popular amongst bloggers in particular there’s this guy named pat and he has this blog called smartpassiveincome.com i used to read it when i was 15 or 16 or 18 something like that in high school and he would make money by creating books and doing a bunch of other side businesses and he would reveal his income every single month and other bloggers copied him and it was a really cool thing john lee dumas did it all these like really cool people did buffer did it and that was their stick to get popular and it worked because the buffalo buffers product isn’t really special it there’s so many uh different versions and they did it uh leo uh leo said in an interview someone was like dude this whole transparency thing it’s pretty cool like you guys got traffic and everything do you think that it would work and i believe i don’t want to quote them because i i saw this a year and a half ago two years ago but something like this works now and it’s great for us but i have a feeling when we get to 75 80 90 100 people it’s not gonna work anymore and it’s actually gonna hurt us big time and i forget exactly why but i believe steve man i’m getting all my names screwed up someone else had apple like a hedgehog apple said something similar he’s like no the transparency thing it actually can hurt it hurts the company after a while we tried it and so i actually think that maybe this is good for startups but it kind of sucks after a long time because look let’s say you own a small business that does 20 million in sales and you’re the business owner and you want to pay yourself three million dollars a year that’s pretty shitty then if you’re a 50 receptionist or something but that’s like your right to do that why would you want to share that with everyone yeah as the employer it’s not great right buffer used it to get a bunch of traffic because there’s it was an effective growth tactic for them hey if we’re open about this we’ll get a bunch of people asking what the heck is buffer and some of them will use it but uh as the employer it’s not great as the employee it’s great and so that’s it depends kind of which side of the coin are you on also it depends how far you go the buffer thing where they write everybody’s name and how much they make bit much but the google thing where it’s like hey look there’s thousands of employees here i need to know that within my level within my kind of area am i underpaid overpaid or you know somewhere in between um it gives people peace of mind and and it gives them you know an opportunity to get more sort of fairness or equity in terms of being able to negotiate with information information that the other side has that you don’t have so i like it from the employee perspective and i think it’s but i wouldn’t go the buffer way of writing everybody’s names down now at a small company cool that kind of happens but i thought that was i think it’s kind of cool i think there’s definitely interest around this you know a couple little ideas of things that people could do so levels f dot fyi is cool is working um i’m surprised that somebody like you know our buddy andrew wilkinson doesn’t go buy a company like this um it’s it’s kind of a n of one company it has like a unique data advantage it’s in it does job boards which he loves as a business model on top of all this traffic that they’re getting and it’s kind of like a side project that’s probably like you know reach the max of that of which you know the two guys behind it really can take um the other ways that you could do this i think you could do this in any vertical so i don’t know is there a level of fyi in the like hedge fund world or consulting or banking like if you’re in those worlds and there isn’t a tool like this you should just make the levels that fyi database for your industry nursing i don’t know whatever the industry is that this product can work across those um and so i think that’s cool even within levels somebody could go further and be like all right i’m going to take product managers or data science and really own that if they were somebody who has a big audience for that like if if that guy lenny um lenny who’s got a big blog and kind of audience around product managers he could do this for product management and do it better than levels can generally so i think the levels concept could be exported and done in different areas when we first launched like maybe the first couple months of launching so we didn’t have an audience so and i’m saying this so anyone could do it we didn’t have an audience um i wrote a post called how much money do founders make because i was trying to figure out like do i pay myself do i not pay myself right whatever and if you google how much money do founders have in their bank account the hustle you might see it and all i did was i took a google form and i posted it on hacker news and it went to number one uh they eventually took it down because i think that goes against their terms of service i have a survey but i got like three or four hundred replies and i asked people how much money they have in their checking account how much they have in their bank account how much they pay themselves how much do they have in illiquid assets i got 100 and then what their job title is and where they live and i got hundreds of replies and i published all the data and i took out any information where you could like learn about someone and people loved sharing anonymous information and loved reading anonymous information like they loved like it was amazing and so i agree i think it’s pretty sick and it was way oh there it is i bet you posted it uh it was way easier to get people’s i’m not like literally getting their information because it’s all anonymous but people were so forthcoming with us it was pretty cool and pretty interesting yeah i want somebody to do this with vcs um i think most people don’t know how much vcs make and all the different people in the food chain like the gps versus like a partner versus like an associate or whatever and um i feel like somebody should like kind of crack that egg open and be like look here’s the here’s the numbers here’s what it is and anonymize it um but give people some transparency into what what’s really going on let’s talk about this for a second so there’s two companies that come to mind that are interesting to me when we’re talking about this the first is pitch book you know what pitch book is yes do you pay for it it’s so expensive no my sister-in-law works there though and so every once well she’ll she’ll be kind enough and let me ask her a question of like to look up uh no i don’t pay for it because it’s really expensive it’s like 25 000 i think yep um so pitch book it’s kind of like crunch base but souped up and so you pay 25 grand and you get access to like a lot of information about privately held companies uh the second well let’s just talk about pitch book the reason it’s interesting is they have a team of outsourced folks i don’t know which country they’re in but i think the philippines and they literally have like 200 people and and by the way pitchbook is a publicly traded company you can go and read about them they’re owned by morningstar so you could actually go and see their operations and how they how they work they’re growing like crazy they’re have north of 100 million in revenue you can they have a team of folks and what they do is call vcs and they literally just ask them information or they call companies and they just ask them information and for some reason i don’t know how or why people give them information and that’s one of the ways one of many of ways that they get data the second thing is this uh business called is it called the org is that what it’s called yes okay the org very interesting because in a nutshell the tagline is the org transparency starts here build a better organization with a public org chart celebrate your colleagues basically that’s just kind of crap let’s not let’s not read their marketing yeah really what it is i mean i’m sure they do all that nonsense but it’s a photo it’s an org chart it’s a public org chart yeah you pay money and you get access to people’s org chart and this helps you know who to email to sell [ ] to right exactly uh and that’s cool like there’s no i don’t know why they don’t just say that but they’ve raised a lot of money like i think tens of millions of dollars it’s probably gonna be a monster business and so i would do two things with the salary thing one i would actually hire people in the philippines or whatever and just hit it hard and just go out and hit it hard and i would trust that a lot of people would be actually pretty pretty transparent uh and the second thing is i would pay wallet kind of like the org and i would sell this to every hr uh department in the country so i have a friend that is doing this with shopify sales i showed him a way to roughly estimate how much a not roughly it’s pretty good estimate how much how many how much sales a shopify store is doing and um what is that what can i get you don’t have to save it true is it because you order from them and you see what the order number is that’s one of the ways yeah and that’s one of the best ways and so i showed him i said look this is this is useful people want to know what their competitors are doing and the second way is you look at the traffic uh yeah you still need a couple other pieces of information for example you need to know how much the average order is and things like that but um but roughly that that will tell you uh you know how they’re doing and so now he emails me a report every month that shows me you know these four companies that i decided uh hey i want to track these four companies and emails we report this is their sales this is their social media following this is how many ads that they’re running on facebook and um one other thing which is just like the month over month changes uh between those and i think it’s a great idea so he was kind of looking for something to do i told him look i think this is a good pivot uh i don’t know exactly how well he’s doing i should really shout out the name but i kind of don’t remember let me look it up while we’re doing this how did you find this person he was in my mastermind let me see what his thing is called it’s called okay dramatic pause let me figure it out and you came up with the uh with the uh i told him i was like look uh because he was like dude i’m good with data i’m interested in this kind of stuff um but i also like you know i also have a team in the philippines and um you know so so i really like this okay so here it is so the the website is shopsalesdata.com and uh i hope he gets a bunch more customers from this i hope he’s still doing it um he still emails me my report i hope he’s taking more customers right now but it’s a monthly report of shopify competitor data in your inbox every month for 100 or something like that yeah this is great i mean you could do the same with um facebook ad accounts just like because facebook shows everyone their ads you can say you know email me my competitors ads every time they launch a new one exactly and so i think that there’s like there’s some good stuff in this kind of like data data-based businesses where you’re just collecting data from public sources you’re cleaning it up you’re structuring and then you’re offering it as a service to a bunch of other companies okay you want to do a mini one do we have a mini one uh yeah let’s do a quick one what else we got um do you have anything good of like your first week working at a real job it is was my first week and now it’s in my second week and i’m sitting on a beach in hawaii uh so working doing it having a job rocks i should have done this years ago i love having a job um it’s cool man hubspot announced that they had a billion dollars in revenue like uh run rate it’s pretty amazing and so there’s like two things this is like my first like real job uh or like a corporate job um i mean that’s not exactly true like i would have friends like my friend neville who is like a works for himself he would be like hey you want to go hang out on a wednesday like at noon i’m like no dude i have a job like right so i treat like running my company it was 100 more more than a job it’s two jobs yeah it’s more than it’s i would call it a nine to five i’m like yeah like i’m it was in fact way more than nine to five but i was like i’m like pretty straight like i get to work at nine i do my thing anyway so i i tease about this but yeah first like corporate job um it’s it’s gonna slow down but like the amount of meetings is pretty crazy and i told them i’m not doing meetings like this anymore um because i’m gonna make stuff but i how it’s still crazy to me how people find time to get the actual work done yeah i uh i realized how that works which is just that managers don’t get work done managers just go to meetings and then ics or individual contributors as they’re known are the ones who actually like sit down and do work because they don’t have you know back-to-back meetings throughout the day but i think even like your work is basically just communicating between people but my seven days of working has shown me that even ics have a lot of meeting yeah like they should they shouldn’t they should not have that many they should have like whatever one or two or three a day but uh they should have like you know somewhere between three and five hours of uninterrupted time yeah like so is that a like i just don’t understand how people so like i’m telling everyone that husband i’m like you don’t no one talked to me for these hours i had i like like and i’m like this is i and i and i say i say it nicely of course but i say uh i’m doing this for the better of everyone like i’m gonna make good stuff so like let me go up my hole and you just just don’t bother me all right what’s been the worst part so far the meetings let’s be um okay what what what me with the meetings boring or just the amount of them the amount and also like i didn’t know what workday is and all this stuff there’s just so much paperwork that i’ve always had people do for me that i’m having to do um what’s the worst part uh you know like everyone’s like is having a boss weird because i’ve never had a boss before no i think it’s gonna suck after a while of course like having a boss might suck i’m so pumped i don’t have to like i get to just shovel [ ] onto karen’s plate that i don’t like i’m like hey you know should we hire this person like i don’t have to make that decision i love that i love that i think it’s awesome um so having a boss has not sucked so far um i don’t know what do you think would be the worst parts and i’ll tell you if they are what was your worst part there are certain meeting types that you have to do that i just found like completely soul sucking one of them was called a calibration meeting it’s basically like uh even just describing it you know gives me some pain here basically it’s like you’re trying to promote people but how do you know like if every manager has their own criteria for promotions how do you make sure you’re promoting people equally and fairly throughout the company so you have to do these things called calibration meetings or you sit down and you basically say this person’s up for promotion or they get they’re getting promoted because of this this and this and then other person says well you know i i felt like they weren’t uh they weren’t great at this or they didn’t do a great job with that project and you have to kind of defend them for me it was boring on two levels one and foremost i didn’t know anyone else in the company so i just sat there for three hours not being able to say anything because i didn’t interact with any of these people i just got here i just got bought i don’t know these people i can’t give any input nor do i have any opinion on if the feedback is valid or not and the second thing i was just like wow even after all this talk like i still just feel like the person who’s the most uh vocal and best salesperson is getting their way and the person who’s not that great at talking is not getting their way so like we could have just skipped all this like it would have almost been better had we not gone into this room and said you sell your person and you sell your person and you debate this person it’s like the better debater wins in big companies and i think that that’s like really crazy well i think we do at our company all the time which is like if it will say i’ll like if a meeting says for 30 minutes and and like in the meeting i’m like okay i said what i had to say i don’t need to be here anymore i’m leaving or like it’s very it wasn’t considered rude to be like hey uh you need to leave now you’re done uh it was like kind of a helpful thing and i’m still trying to figure out how to politely do that here i’m like do you guys need me here can i can i leave right or or i’ll just say i’m out i’ve said what i need to say i’ve heard what i need to hear you guys can talk yeah um especially on zoom or whatever you just sort of like you hold up you wave and you click exit the second thing is hubspot is doing really well and just the software business and this sounds like just like like obvious stuff from anyone who’s in software but i’ve never been at a company like this man if you figure out how to get a hav if you figure out how to reduce your churn to very little or or even positive so for every dollar someone spends it’s above one dollar the next year um and you pick a big enough market it’s just magical like just now i understand why people are saying like oh you know why is this company valued so high highly it’s like well because sticky revenue software revenue so something like i don’t know if hubspot would be considered this but something for sure where you’re building an entire business off of the and you know that the switching costs are quite high um it’s pretty amazing like software like just start a software company it’s so much better than everything else like it’s really hard and it’s slog early on but if it really truly if you can get your churn to be right and you pick a big enough market it’s just and you have a and you can figure out how to have a good marking machine which all this is like oh yeah if only you could do that like i know but like you can kind of figure it out actually i think giving it up if you if you give yourself like five years to figure it out i think you can um well i think all the things you’re saying are true and they really just point to this one lesson i’ve learned the hard way over and over again which is it’s much more important to pick what game you play than to try to be the best player at a game because if you pick the wrong game even becoming the best player still ends up in a small outcome or a really painful path but if you pick the right game to play and whether you become the best or not even the best but you know just kind of the top 25 percent um it’s just so much better to win that way and in this case like we’ve if we’ve we talk about and we’ve done different types of businesses right we’ve done like i did social network i try to make a new social network it’s the wrong [ ] game to play dude it’s so hard um so hard so it’s a low chance of probability of success you did a media business also hard hard you know higher odds of success but like lower size of the price if you get it right way lower size um ecom you know just a [ ] pain in the ass just tons of headaches all the time with your supply chain and logistics because you get real world products and you have to like ship them all around the world and you’re gonna have customers who have returns and like things that just like are not as easy as software and so like we’ve and you know we talk about all these different you know doing a paid newsletter or whatever like there’s all these different models and for my money by far the best one is to build a software business because a software business can scale a software business can like be improved over time and you know unlike e-commerce when you when you make a crappy e-commerce product uh you know you go make a better version the next you know it takes you six months to make it and then you make it and all those old customers who got the bad products still think you suck whereas with software you push the update and all of a sudden every single customer has the new best thing you know there’s all these just tiny advantages and um software is the way to go but we i want to say something that david siegel so we had david siegel on last time he had a billion dollar or close to billion dollar t business and i go david why are you doing brick and mortar stores when he could be doing software and he said the right what did he say he was like oh it’s fun i love selling product and i was like that’s the best answer that is a wonderful answer and i think that like will i ever be able to start an enterprise software company i think that if i was going to it would either have to be very soon or even a few years ago like you i would you have to do it i think when you’re like really like where money’s the one number one thing it’s like i got to get paid i got to get my hit and um in that case yeah i would do anything to make money but where i am now and where i think where a lot of people are is you really it’s f it’s i agree with everything you said but you have to add the and also not like passionate about but what what what excites you enough to that you’re willing to get good at it over a decade right we’ll flout your boat all right so let’s take you okay uh you’re happy at hubspot everything’s great you’re gonna be there for for 20 years we know that alternate reality you know we all know you’re happy to hub spot you’ll be there two decades it’s great uh it’s you know sunshine and rainbows let’s say alternate reality they fire you tomorrow you’re gonna go build something else um where do you think you would go build would you do what you’re would you go media would you go something totally different would you go software what do you think you would do everyone’s gonna laugh at me because i say trucking but i would do some maybe something something in the agriculture space yeah i think ag tech is is ag tech is interesting uh i think that’s the most interesting i had a great call with this guy who i’m gonna um we gotta have this guy in the podcast his name’s uh uh his son’s name is jordan i can’t uh rob uh van trump it’s called the van trump report so van trump report it’s this guy who has a newsletter that does 20 million in subscription revenue he’s the only writer and he was telling me all about ag tech do you know what act tech stands yeah agricultural tech and he was just saying all types of like what’s going on and i think working with like middle america people who whether they’re rich or not they’re more humble and they create things that actually impact the world like get food to you i would do something in that space or i would start another media company but okay let’s say you go into ag tech or and you’re probably gonna be open and whatever you know you’ll think of it then but knowing what you know now would you do media in agriculture would you do uh you know something with actual farms and logistics would you do technology hard you know trucking actual self-driving trucks would you do uh a job thing would you what would you what model would you be wanting to do in that space well okay so i don’t like this question because it will change every single day you ask me but as of right now i would start a blog with in the ad tech space and then eventually i would turn it into a database kind of i like this this company the org uh i think i could create something like a database that’s better um and yeah that’s what i would do okay so nice i think that’s what i would do as of right now that that fascinates me or i would create um do you know what tiger 21 is isn’t that like a like a kind of a conference or club or mastermind thing or something it’s like a club for people who have investable assets north of 10 million dollars and it costs 30 grand a year it’s and they have like a thousand people who are subscribed and uh my friend joined and i looked at the back end and it was horrible and i was like oh i’m just going to clone that and what do they do with the with the members is it events or is it uh it’s like both but like they create like um like little like safe communities where like you meet in groups of 10 and you kind of show off your portfolio and people criticize you and like try to def make you defend your position so you get better but it got bought by private equity so it makes a lot of money all right that’s cool 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