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 my favorite uh kind of podcaster content person out there dm me and was like this is this is this is a [ ] great thread and uh i was like blown away that this guy wrote this and then cnbc was like hey would you like to do this some german news station was like will you come on and talk about it and i was like wow this is unbelievable what could happen with just a random ass tweet i feel like i can rule the world i know i could be what i want to i put my all how many uh people did your tweet reach how many people did my tweet reach yeah so go to twitter and then click insights and then look at reach i’m gonna guess 5 million okay let’s give it a shot uh so it has 13 000 likes and yeah almost 5 million 4.8 million impressions wow and who all who are some of the more interesting people who reached out to you well first what what did you what happened here for the listeners okay so what happened um i went on twitter and i wrote a thread i wrote a thread about clubhouse and the thread starts basically saying you know everybody seems to think that clubhouse is the next big thing and um i think it’s gonna fail and here’s how i think it’s gonna go down and then i wrote it in this way that’s a little bit like goofy i kind of went over the top i just i was like all right you’re the ceo like first of all congrats champ you did it you know and i walk through like the high that they’re on right now because everything’s going great and everybody thinks it’s the hot [ ] and then like where things might start to go wrong and what what might go wrong based on you know the way that the product is set up the nature of that product and all that good stuff and so that uh that was a thread i put it out there and i thought it was gonna kind of flop because right away nothing happened and usually you could tell like you know this you could tell pretty quickly within a couple minutes you know if the thread if your tweet’s gonna get any action or not it didn’t look like it’s gonna get any action then the first reply was this guy being like dude this is way too effing long like what are you doing and like the way he said like what i thought i assumed some people would say this is super long because it’s like i don’t know 50 tweets or something crazy um but when he was like what are you doing i felt super embarrassed and i was like [ ] let’s just delete this this is stupid and then i just like let it ride for a few more minutes and then uh it took off and now some crazy shit’s happening and like i’m going on cnbc tomorrow to talk about it and [ ] so all kinds of crazy stuff has happened you’re going on cnbc tomorrow yeah i wonder if it’s the same person who invited trung on so you’re the second person associated with the company who’s been on in the past two weeks i’m hot on trunks heels i saw him on last week talking about uh kathy wood and ark and stuff like that and he was great so if i can do half as good as he did i’ll be in good shape and who else reached out to can you say you told me a couple uh yeah i mean okay so i can’t say all the names i’ll say well okay so first i started getting mentioned uh by a bunch of cool people so like the guy who started youtube was like dude this is [ ] hilarious like i love this and then uh so a bunch of people who have started big companies kind of were saying something and i started getting dms from people and and i kind of went to sleep at first i was refreshing for like four hours because i couldn’t stop uh like i was mid workout and then like between sets i would go check my twitter it was kind of annoying and sony was like what the hell are you doing like what is this and i was like i don’t know i’m obsessed i i really just want to see it was like a i would pull the refresh thing and then a different kind of famous person who i look up to was usually saying like this is awesome or something like that so that was kind of addictive i went to sleep i woke up the next day and so in my inbox is a offer for a book deal hey uh like a famous movie director who directed like a bunch of movies that we’ve heard of uh wrote like dude amazing storytelling this is all i found my email address and emailed me that he’s the uh i think i could say it he’s the director of uh like space jam 2 and like a whole bunch of famous movies and then um i i don’t know if i could say this one but tweet like how is it gonna take you to write not even a good one really um it took me an hour i sat down and so the way this played out actually was i had already believed this but i thought okay that’s not cool like nobody thinks it’s cool to just say oh a startup is going to fail well most startups fail so like there’s nothing that original there but because i had built a product very similar to club boss i kind of knew what the challenges are going to be and where they might get tripped up or what’s going to be really hard for them and um and so i thought well i kind of feel like i know the product strategy here but like that’s kind of a if i just write about the product decision like some of the product challenges and the product strategy it’s a pretty boring tweet storm nobody’s going to really care so when i ended up writing it i wrote it like an episode of silicon valley in fact ehrlich’s ability to jerk different dicks simultaneously [ ] yeah i think it would like the hbo show like i basically wrote it in that style like i wrote like you know okay you know emily chang invites you on to you know whatever cnbc and to do an interview you know you wear your your visionary gray v-neck shirt you go on and you say this this and this and so i was just kind of writing like a goofy style i wasn’t just writing information i’m trying to entertain a little bit and uh and then emily chang replies to the thing being like you know i can’t confirm or deny this but this is on point and um so all kinds of crazy stuff was happening but yeah it took me about an hour and then i just hit publish and you got like 30 000 followers from it congratulate or 20 000 maybe yeah dude that’s the way that twitter works though is like you think it goes against like all the conventional good advice which is just like you know be consistent put out content all the time and like you know try to like hit a bunch of singles and like what i found and i think i don’t know you tell me if you found this too which is like it’s just like five tweets that grew me from 20k to 120k everything else was the cost of doing business it’s a it’s the hits business yeah it is and uh so so summer summarize this actually bray you asked me to ask you to summarize this the your bear case for clubhouse because we’re actually going to use this probably for one of our twitter videos okay all right so all right so let me okay we gotta we got we gotta we gotta get the the video guys video guys this is the part you’re gonna edit all right here we go uh so everybody’s saying that clubhouse is the next big thing you’re hearing about it all the time they went you know from a test i think they were in test flight and they raised at a billion dollar valuation which is kind of crazy that apple’s no they were in test flight they raised at 100 million but it’s right but now they’re at a billion dollar evaluation it hasn’t been long they’re still ios only still pretty exclusive you can’t even you can’t even join the app unless you have an invite and so um but i see the other side of it i think that they’re gonna fail i hope they don’t fail i think the world is more fun if they win it would be awesome if they win but i don’t think me wanting them to win doesn’t mean that that’s what’s going to happen i sort of i said in the twitter thread i said you know if uh if me wanting something to happen would happen then every bag of chips would come with guac but that’s just not the way life is and um and so okay so here here’s how it works all right pretend you’re the ceo of clubhouse sam you know first of all you [ ] did it you made it people actually like the thing you made and they don’t like it they love it and uh you know you check your dms and chrysa is in your dms he says dude congrats this thing is this thing is kick ass and you know naval is liking your tweets and keith reboy is basically saying like this isn’t [ ] uh you know this is not garbage and so you take that as a huge compliment as it is and it feels like every day you open up the app and like a new star is coming on the platform like first kind of like just tech dork stars like you know the market andreessen’s ben horowitz people that we like but they’re kind of niche in our in our circles and then it’ll expand and all of a sudden you’ll get you know nba players coming on you know famous musicians logan paul will come on and then this was the most liked tweet in the thing was i said you know gary vee realizes that you’ve created a new place to yell and he starts telling everybody hey if you really want to make money go move back in with your parents and sell their furniture on craigslist and uh so every life is good right you get a term sheet you’re valued at a billion dollars and you know you’re doing interviews about you and you gotta kind of ham it up right because you can’t just say oh i made this app where you can go in chat rooms and talk to people that doesn’t sound very very fancy so you try to play it simple but you talk really fancy you say things like you know this is like this is a serendipity network this is this is not not just chat rooms this is audio escapism this is you know when you start saying like historical [ ] like you’re like you know humans have been talking to each other since the dawn of time you know around the camp you know around the campfire and you know audio is so powerful because you can see your your tone and texture and um and so you’re going on the media tour and then like you get back to your computer one day and you look at the charts and you know the graph doesn’t look as you know as upbeat and to the righty as it’s supposed to be and so you’re like what’s wrong with this thing you refresh and it’s still the you know the growth is kind of flat maybe even declining and you you start to look a little deeper and what you’ll find if you’re the ceo of clubhouse is after about you know a year into the product you see that retention is not so good it’s not as good as it used to be in the early days and you know why is that the case and and what will happen is that you’ll realize that clubhouse is used for two totally different things there’s two ways that clubhouse can be used if you talk to users or you watch them you’ll see these two things number one it’s a place to create content and number two it’s a place to just chill just to go hang out with other people and have conversations and so content is what we see all the time on there it’s panels it’s fireside chats q a’s amas and it’s like oh this is content it’s like the next youtube it’s where you go you make you make content people consume it um you know and the problem is that a lot of the content like on youtube is just like meh you’re right 98 of the content is junk and that’s okay that’s the same for every platform you just need to find that gold and there is gold on clubhouse right if you watch the good time show or the the nyu girls who go on there and they have that show called shoot your shot and that is gold but um you and so you want to triple down on that you’re like guys this is what this is what we need to double down on how do we make this how do we get more gold content and you tell the whole team we’re going to go get more gold content and so the engineers they go start building features for content creators they build like a scheduling feature and q a tools and like a monetization features where you can make money from your fans and the creators are happy but the retention stays bad and what you realize when you talk to somebody who knows what they’re they’re talking about here is that there’s this like problem called the interestingness problem which is that when you open up an app um there’s one metric that matters called ttf and ttf is time to fun how long does it take me to have some fun inside this app get some dopamine and all the great apps within seven seconds if you open tick tock youtube instagram in seven seconds you’re gonna get something juicy you’re gonna get fun and um and you know the way those apps do it is they have billions of pieces of content to choose from and the algorithm knows okay this is the most liked content the last 24 hours so it shoves it in your feed and when you open the app it’s going to show you something great right tik tok calls us the for you page because it’s here’s the best stuff for you and that’s why tick tock is so addictive every time you open it you get something great but for clubhouse you know you tell your engineers hey that’s what we need make an algorithm that will do that and the engineers you know they sit you down in a chair and they’ll say okay we’re gonna do our best but just so you know it doesn’t like it’s one thing to just find what’s interesting but we have to find what’s interesting and is being created live right now and when you multiply those two things together it doesn’t become twice as hard it becomes 200 times as hard to find interesting content when you open the app and so the what happens is most people will download this app they heard about clubhouse they heard it’s cool they’ll open an app and whatever’s on right then they’ll walk into the first room and it’ll be kind of boring it’ll be kind of meh and then they’ll walk into a second room and then within 30 seconds like why the hell am i here this app is stupid they’ll close the app and they’ll probably never come back and so they’ll get a bunch of downloads a bunch of signups and then but they’ll all just be leaking out the bottom of the bucket and so um you know you’re the ceo and so you’re like oh okay yeah live is harder i get it but twitch did it twitch is live and look at that they got you know hundreds of millions of users so clearly it can work you guys the engineers you guys just need to make it happen and then you know the product manager the engineers will come back to and they’ll say well twitch is a little different right because on twitch the great content creators are creating about 40 hours a week of content they stream every day six to eight hours a day and um they’re playing a game so they can do that they can play a game for six hours straight just talk while they’re doing it it’s hard but it’s not anywhere near as hard as just opening clubhouse and being entertaining for six hours straight while talking maybe some radio hosts can do that but the average person cannot and um and then the second thing they’ll say is like also you know almost all the content on twitch is about gaming so as a viewer if i come on there maybe one creator’s not live but another fortnight creator is live or another fortnite creator is live it’s like density around one passion whereas clubhouse is every category some people come there for music talk some for sports some for tech and so if i’m a sports person and i see a tech room that’s of zero value to me so twitch is vertical club is horizontal this is gonna be really hard to get great content in every category and so you know i kind of fast forward and you know okay this is tough and um you know your meeting ends the next meeting engineers leave next meeting is the biz dev guys biz dev guys come in and the biz dev guys are like you know what do you want us to do boss and you say you need to go get great content go get all the stars we got all this money in the bank go go pick cut some checks let’s get some star creators on the platform and you’ll go to people um who have who have a big audience who go to podcasters right you go to people like us and we’re gonna say okay so if i could spend an hour on clubhouse and get i don’t know 2 000 3 000 people in the room that’s good right but like if i just record a podcast i’m going to reach 300 000 people with that so why am i why would i ever make this trade why would i go live here when i go live there right when i could just record my podcast so you’re the ceo you say all right that’s a tricky problem but maybe you could do both right why do you have to choose do your show live on clubhouse and we’ll add a recording feature so that you could just make a podcast out of it later you can have your cake and eat it too and so you do that and some creators start to use it but um you realize there’s a big problem with that which is as soon as you start to like let people record and the core thing becomes i’m recording my podcast here i’m just doing a live version that will turn into my podcast or turn into a youtube video well then this live thing becomes a second class citizen and i stop letting guests hop on my clubhouse room and chat with me because i don’t know what the hell they’re going to say it’s unpredictable and you know what makes for a great live session is that spontaneity but that makes for a shitty recording and so um you know that’s that’s another trap there so okay you finally you have an emergency team meeting you say this whole content thing sucks um you know we we only have a few pieces of great content only a few hours a week for every vertical this is going to be impossible to do in every category that’s like recreating all of tv and that’s just really hard to do um you know and and i’m tired of all these people on there doing shows and q and a’s and these success coaches trying to manifest millionaires and all this [ ] you know what is this discord for douche bags like screw shows we need a new plan and we’re going to plan b plan b is chillin right this is a social network it’s not a performance network you come here to socialize you come here to just talk to other people that’s the most human thing in the world seven billion people on earth talk to their friends this is what you know this is what we’ll do here um and you know you you you ask people who had a great experience so far in clubhouse the people who think it’s amazing like our you know our friend narendra or you know bit different people who have really enjoyed their experience and you ask them why and they’ll say well i came on and i was i was in this room where this really cool thing happened and mark andreessen was there and then this guy was there and then you know i went into a side room and i met a bunch of other cool people in the tech world and we got along great i made a bunch of new friends and you say all right that’s what we’re going to do and um and sure enough that actually solves your retention problem because people will come here it will solve loneliness people will come here they’ll hang out and they’ll make friends but all of a sudden your growth will stall right because if i’m coming here to make friends and i’m not bringing friends to the platform that’s kind of the the rub there right so any platform where the value prop is to make friends i’m not gonna bring friends so now you have sticky retention but now you have no growth and in the other world you had fast growth but no retention and so you’re stuck in this catch-22 and um you know so then you know just to kind of round it out you eventually get disillusioned you realize this shit’s not gonna work you try to pivot you eventually sell the company to facebook you spend a year as the manager of facebook voice and uh then you quit you go you travel in southeast asia for a year you do some ayahuasca and you vow to yourself i’m only gonna ever work in enterprise sass again you know screw this social thing and uh so that’s my story uh over the top i hope i’m wrong but i think that’s how it’s gonna play out and i think a lot of people who are hating on you didn’t realize that this is the life that you led yeah yeah some people are like wow that’s really detailed where this where’s this coming from and some people are like dude that’s way over the top and i’m like dude i built this before like we built a app so similar to this it grew to four million users and tony robbins was using it an espn was using it and the jonas brothers and then oracle was using it and then you know some of the tech guys and the 37 signals guys were using it and it was awesome product was using it and then we hit the you know we get to 4 million members and we just started to see these same issues we tried everything to fix it and i hope these guys find the solution that we missed or maybe the world has changed or there’s some differences but the reason i you know this was 70 my experience 30 percent you know fantasy that i wrote this thing with i guess uh we’re gonna have to check in on this podcast in like maybe one year i bet i think we’ll see how things shake out in about 12 months yeah and i guess like the more interesting part that i wanted to talk to you about was okay so first of all creating something that goes viral is such a crazy feeling you’ve done it a ton i mean you built the hustle with a bunch of really viral blog posts like this is kind of nothing in comparison to the blog post you guys wrote and also you’re a writer so you kind of have a process where you sniff out stuff that you think is gonna go viral whereas for me i’m not really a writer this is kind of me just trying to i mean you you you have the it factor i think that um i think you can study and how to do it i think that you can just be born with the skill set um i think you and i are quite similar in that it’s both born or we we have that natural gift and also we learn and master the craft right i think you’ve tried it a lot more and therefore your hit rate i think is is higher i personally i just think that but um the question i was going to do i mean dude you got to 120 000 followers on twitter in like basically six months yeah that’s true um so i wanted to share so when i uh so the way this this came about because i think this is ultimately more interesting right the rant is kind of interesting but the how this happened i think for people who are listening they’ll probably find it i think they find it interesting um the way they started was a pretty high profile vc person called me one day i had never met them before they had said oh you seem interesting on twitter i’d love to meet so we did a phone call and then we were talking just about each other’s backgrounds it was cool and then they were like well what do you think of clubhouse by the way i gotta ask and um and i think they asked us because they had looked at investing they ultimately didn’t invest and they were trying to figure out like am i gonna kick is this gonna be is this gonna haunt me you know for the next five years that i missed this deal or is this gonna be a good one and um you know a good pass and i basically i i just went on this rant on the phone about this it just kind of came out of my mouth i like just the way i kind of explained it here and um without the whole like kind of dramatized like tv show script but just the reasons why i think it’s gonna struggle and um and they were like wow that was great like that was amazing and i was like [ ] i should have wrote that down that was like that would have um i feel like that would have been like a good like piece of content and so i went i kind of like quickly was like i gotta go and i hung up the phone and i went to my computer and i just typed the whole thing out and um and it turned into like and then i was like okay whatever i i kind of edited i took it out i did your your tip which i took a break for an hour yeah just when it went and did something else came back and i edited it for about 30 minutes editing is the magic to everything it doesn’t matter you’re talking about a viral a good email editing is the magic they say write drunk edit sober oh that’s a great one i’ve never heard that i love that um i think you’re in an attempt to just i used to just edit in the moment like i’d write no no no no and that was a mistake the tip you gave me a while back was go do other [ ] let it simmer in your head while you do other things don’t even actively think about it by the time you come back you can make it twice as good in 20 minutes yeah and there’s actually some science behind it i i i can’t tell you the exact science off the top of my head but basically you know how there’s like a shower thought of like not doing it so there’s like science behind like doing something really hard and then not doing it and then things hit you uh there is science behind why that works and that’s kind of what you’re doing yeah basically like the brain relaxes in some way and then when it relaxes it’s able to be creative in a new way and so um okay so then i post it and then whatever you know [ ] as well so then uh so that was that was oh sorry the other part that i forgot which i think my new it’s something i’ve been doing and i’m curious if you do something like this before uh before i write anything now at the top of every page i have a template and at the top there’s like seven lines that says what reaction is this meant to get and i have seven emotions it’s like lol like this is meant to be really funny is it wtf where it’s like dude what the [ ] and that’s when you’re talking about something that’s really unjust or people are pissed off and you want to you want to explain hey there’s this really messed up thing that’s happening and people be like oh my god um then there’s other ones like you know like aw aww something really cute awe oh like like that something is awesome like wow that is like kind of amazing wait did i tell you that i do this no i actually learned this from these other guys who make viral videos rubber republic they had a search engine where you would just search by one of these emotions and it would pull up viral videos that had that that were based on that emotion as well so the way to go viral is you always want to start you start with the emotion that you’re trying to get out of someone um and you and we already know that certain emotions get more shares so for example creating depression or sadness that doesn’t get shares um creating outrage gets far more and with small tweaks you can make something sad outrageous and that’s far better right you know so it’s either amazing it’s super funny it’s really really outraging it’s um it’s really touching and heartwarming that’s another one hard to do and then the one i had for this which is kind of like a new emotion which was i wrote finally someone said it and i actually think that’s a that’s its own genre that i didn’t even have in my template because i was like i think this is gonna go viral but it doesn’t match any of these i was like i think for some people it’s gonna be wtf like dude this guy’s a jerk why is he predicting failure what an but i thought no it’s gonna go viral because if you say something that a lot of people have been thinking but they’ve been afraid to say or they couldn’t put words around it exactly but they had this hunch they will share it because they agree with your opinion for them it’s the idea of recognizing something that you feel that you weren’t sure if other people feel but you see it on paper so the same example is with location so when you see like uh how you know you’re a san francisco bro or how do i know uh do you know sean perry like if i said if i saw an ad that said do you know sean i’d be like oh wait that’s directed just towards me right so with the emotion that you just evoked was like finally i didn’t think i was the only one who thought like it’s a recognizing it’s it’s a recognizing something type of vibe and they’re really sharing because they’re like i knew it i i’m right so they’re not saying wow he’s so right they’re actually saying i’m right read this this proves i’m right which is like a real subtle thing but i’m so interested in studying the like psychology around why people do what they do why do they share what they share because i want to grow an audience and this is the best way to grow it and i feel like this i’m this process that i’m doing i’m so glad you said you do it too because i thought i was a little crazy i was like no that’s what we used to do i mean that’s what i do when i i’m like i i i start with the emotion then i start with the package like how am i packaging this then i start with the headline then the preview image and then i work backwards from there right and i always try to find like i’ll find something that catches my attention just one fact or one line so for example um i was just doing research on one yesterday do you know um what recaptcha you know like um when you’re signing up for something you’re signing up for something that says spot right nowadays they say like spot click the thing or type in the uh the whatever picture is a sign click it yeah it’ll be like you know where are the traffic lights click all squares with traffic lights and uh by the way this is a good example i saw this meme that was that recaptcha with the traffic lights and in one of the squares just the tiniest corner of the traffic light is in it and it shows the guy like suit like sweating like crazy like oh [ ] should i include that or should i not include that and that’s one of those where it’s like me too dude i have i almost feel that way i’m always confused by this thing that’s just supposed to so i always feel that way meme now here i can take it another way do you want to know when i looked that up on wikipedia you want to hear a fun fact do you know why they do it this way is because people like google um i might be butching this just a little bit but the idea is the same people like google are paying recaptcha to translate stuff so for example somehow picking out that sign or saying where the headlights are that actually helps google and google’s paying you money it’s painful i have a little so the original captcha was done by this guy he was a professor at duke and carnegie mellon and captcha originally was letters remember it was always these kind of script like kind of hard to read letters but you could read it and that was basically taking they had scanned a bunch of book pages but who’s going to conv the computer was not good enough at tr getting all the book pages to translate over to text in the computer because some of the book pages were a little rounded or wrinkled or kind of fuzzy and so the computer couldn’t do it but a human eye could easily do it so they basically outsourced the work and solved two problems with one stone on the website side they just want to make sure you’re not a bot who’s signing up for their service like a scammer who’s going to spam everybody but then they did good in the world also because that project ended up transcribing like millions and millions of books i think all the books that they had scanned eventually and then capture two is about a recaptcha i believe is about image classification so for self-driving cars we need to know is this a bus or what is this and so i think that’s where the original idea was uh classifying images let humans do it while they sign up and the inventor of recaptcha the second one his name is luis von on i think that’s how you pronounce it he did both and that guy started duolingo and when he started duolingo he started it for two reasons one he i guess he just cared about helping you learn language but two when you are learning the language you’re actually translating stuff that a third-party service is paying for you to translate so that’s crazy so what a genius the exact emotion that you just had of this guy’s crazy that is the mo emotion wow this guy’s a channel i am trying to evoke by sharing that so i can tell that story and probably five tweets and i bet it will like virality is pretty impossible to predict but i can bet that there’s like a three out of ten chance that it’s going to that has legs i could say this has all uh this text is all the box to get popular i can’t i can’t anyone who says that they’re gonna be able to predict it they’re wrong like shawn’s thing just reached five million people he was like this is not going to work the other part you had there that was good is that you took a thing that we’ve all seen it’s a relatable oh yeah i’ve filled one of those in and you so you took a very familiar thing but i told you the uncommon truth around it um which i think is like really cool like there’s one yesterday i saw uh you know tom cruise’s name is not tom cruise his real name no what is it it’s tom uh tom cruise something it’s like his middle name is cruz and his last name is like some uh like very look it up it’s some like i don’t know random ass like name and he changed it to tom cruise which sounds like a total movie star name makes total sense that he did it and um so yeah his real name is thomas cruz mapothere the fourth or something i don’t even know how yeah i can’t even pronounce that mapathar yeah tom mappather versus tom cruise and so you take something really familiar we all know tom cruise right boom here’s the uncommon did you know and then it’s like oh sweet like wow you know and that one doesn’t have as much shock factor so it won’t go super viral but it’ll get a lot of likes but you know the closer you can get to the surprise gap between what i thought i knew and what’s real the more shares people will get yeah i think if anyone cares about this stuff i like the book made to stick and i like the book contagious by jonah berger contagious made to stick is how to say something so people remember and contagious is a great book by this wharton professor on how to make things get popular how to make them spread like a virus hence contagious i like it you want to talk about paid newsletters really quick a topic that we’ve discussed a lot yeah let’s do it but this one is particularly interesting um the reason why is we’ve talked about this company a lot agora financial i’ve brought it up to you a ton they spun off a couple of their brands and they tried to do a spack and when they tried to do a spec the company that they were spacking with just like kind of like went down like dropped like significantly so they there was already a publicly traded company that was going to buy a few agora brands the stock went down big time but that’s not that important what’s important is the numbers behind this paid newsletter business so there’s this company called um actually i don’t know what they call this little it’s a subsidiary of gordon of agora i think they call it beacon hill it owns six sorry 12 different newsletter brands collectively those newsletter brands do where did i put the number 550 million dollars in revenue and 200 million dollars in profit and by the way growing some that grew 77 over last year is that crazy now i’m going to tell you all some more numbers they have 10 million free subscribers so kind of like the hustle that’s like they’ve got 10 million of that uh this is even wilder they have 550 000 people paying them six hundred between one dollar and six hundred dollars for subscribers then they have a quarter of a million people paying them six hundred dollars to five thousand dollars and finally they have a hundred thousand people paying them more than five grand for a product for a paid newsletter and what is in this paid newsletter what’s the what’s this way here’s where things get way crazier they have some paid newsletters that cost thirty five thousand dollars now the reason why what gets crazy what gets crazy with this is that they have a 160 products across 12 brands so what’s that math so each brand has uh 12 12 or 13 uh products and the products i don’t even understand but basically i understand the business model the business model as they get you to buy a 50 or 49 thing then they get you to buy a 2 000 thing and they’re and so they get you to buy that 49 thing and that 49 thing is like a monthly paid newsletter like it’s not significant right i don’t understand how they get it to work and a large percentage of those 49 people buy the 2 000 thing okay so but i feel like okay so these must be b2b newsletters right no they’re not uh yeah that’s an important part that i left out nearly all of this is around and we’ll link to their deck so they have a whole deck when they they it’s kind of scammy so they it’s a financial and a wellness company which is kind of weird they’re talking about health and they’re talking about wellness and if you click agora up there sean under my name you’ll see the deck they say that their their target demographic is self-directed investors what’s that mean well i’m going to tell you if i look at the website it’s just a bunch of old kind of wealthy white people who are probably republican and because the reason i think this is they have ads that say like nancy pelosi is coming for your guns you better invest in these eight stocks like they think like crazy [ ] like that right it’s basically the like motley fool on uh you know steroids right yes uh but i think motley fools ethical these guys aren’t they also sold a book on how to cure diabetes okay i was going to ask you why do you think they’re unethical and then you answered my question and so it’s all financial news financial newsletter financial news related stock picks and it’s just just a crazy story i’ve brought this up tons of time we don’t spend too much time on it but it’s pretty wild to actually see these numbers i actually guessed that this is how big they were now we have proof yeah you’ve been talking about agora as like you know doing hundreds of millions of dollars and you know some people know about them but i would say most people don’t know about this empire and most people i mean this blows away most people’s expectations of you know paid newsletter right like oh you know like i just had a paid newsletter as an individual right i made a few hundred thousand dollars total and i thought i was crushing it and these guys are making hundreds of millions of dollars so when you look at this is my honest my honest reaction is dude why couldn’t you have done this with the hustle why what what did they do or what was that why was the hill too hard to climb where you could scale like this because this is huge i don’t think it was too hard to scale i think i could have done it i would say that this business has been around since the 70s right so it’s kicking ass now it didn’t always kick ass if you’re willing to be patient you can do it second of all if you’re willing to put your ethics aside a little bit it actually is quite easy to do it helps so exactly how would you do this you let’s say you want to be these guys or beat these guys what does you know you’re sam you’re probably one of the most well equipped people in the world to do this how would you have gone about it well what you have to do is you’ve got to create multiple brands under one it’s really hard to have one brand and only a couple products make all this money so you’d have to have for us we would have done and we were going to do this but then we got bought and the reason i got bought was a whole different reasons which is basically i wanted to um get a payday like and i wanted to i mean like i was pretty clear about that before like i wanted like it was cool it’s awesome i’m gonna stay here but like it was nice to like hit get a lot of ticket um but if i wanted to be patient and do it for 50 years which i kind of do to be honest um i would have created trends but for subset sub categories and you make the first newsletter the one that people pay for only like 49 or 50 bucks and we send you just a couple things a month and then the second thing is you go to sub categories and you charge thousands of for example if there was a newsletter uh dissected media companies i work in the media industry and you told me it was four thousand dollars and i also got access to a community i ain’t gonna complain about it right i mean i’m gonna do it if there’s something for digital streaming and that you know that the five analysts are smart twitch is gonna buy that it’s not that like challenging it’s not that hard um and so that’s what i would do from multiple industries and the thing that a lot of newsletter writers do which i’ve talked about those plenty of times and i don’t have to talk about too much is they do one of two things one they charge too little and two if they charge too little they don’t have a higher end back back product you need a front end and a back end so you need your cheap thing that gets a lot of people and then you need your paid thing that gets only a few people but it makes a lot of money so you guys at trends is like i don’t know 300 something a year uh you could have been 49 and then 5 000 would have been a better mix of value if you are if you were optimizing for how do we get this thing as profitable as we can lucrative as you can yeah and had we not gotten bought i would have done that i would actually we were about to change it we were about to make that change and by the way what happens to trends now people still pay for it or it’s free now um they pay for it we might lower the price before we were either gonna make that the back end or we’re gonna make that the front end but we were gonna copy this model of a 99 thing and then a two thousand dollar thing yeah dude when i see companies like this it just makes me want to do it so badly uh because it’s like it just seems so doable now i know that in practice we’re not in by the way we get we get heat for this sometimes because we’re like dude it’s so easy it’s so simple we’re talking like relatively like building a successful business is hard okay like it’s not just we’re not saying things are easy sometimes we actually do say that word easy really what we mean is simple so like being able to bench 500 pounds that is um um simple like it’s straight forward here’s how you get strong in the bench press you lift a lot and then you eat a ton now that is quite hard to do for five years but that’s that was that’s the steps you take so it’s like simple and so what we’re saying is that this is simple it’s not yeah actually i think i think weight loss is actually a better example because 500 pounds is a hard thing to bench weight loss is literally simple where it’s like hey you need to eat these you know avoid carbs avoid sugars you need to eat a little bit less less calories than you’re burning and like you should work out regularly do kind of whatever just try to get an hour a day of you know break a sweat if you actually just did those two things and be like hey give it like four to five months six months boom you’re in great shape everybody knows that formula it is actually simple executing it and doing it having the discipline and having the rigor to like actually stick to it hard but it is way easier relatively than becoming a crossfit champion right and so when we’re talking about business the scale is that it’s like it’s hard to create the next facebook that’s really freaking hard uh is it hard to create a paid community well i don’t think most people who try it will do it but it’s relatively way easier than creating the next facebook for people that out there that get all sensitive when we call something easy it’s not we’re not trying to mislead you like yeah it’s gonna take work most likely it won’t work it’ll take some time but we’re on a scale of one to spacex this is more like a one than it is a spacex and like that’s that’s a scale for people to think about i completely agree and um i think like now let’s talk about what makes this hard the first and is that you have to sell your soul a little bit now many people will not be comfortable with this stuff sean is pretty comfortable with it i think i’m comfortable with it but i think i’m a little bit less comfortable with it you have to be a face sometimes you have to be you have to say i’m an expert at x pay me money to for me to tell you my thoughts right second um well no this is off that so guys like james altucher who we’ve had this podcast he was ridiculed for doing this with bitcoin everyone made fun of him he made 60 million dollars doing it but he still got mocked constantly and shockingly most people would actually prefer not to make the money and not get made fun of than they would to make the money and get made fun of well the way i think about it is most people truly will not they are afraid that they’re gonna get them not gonna get the money and get mocked and so they’re like [ ] it i won’t do it if you really had a guarantee i think people would happily trade reputation points for bank points well yeah and perhaps but that’s not moot point because the fact is is that most people don’t even want to because the first point you said of like they may not get the money at all that is also true and that’s what they’re they’re not going to do that so you have to do that second it’s a treadmill you can’t stop this is a lifetime job so if you’re a content creator you i hired people to do it for me you 100 can do that but you’re gonna you can’t you have to you actually have to do the work for a little while in the anyway so you’re gonna have to work and by the way uh quick question on hiring because people ask me this and i have no idea i’m like why don’t you ask sam he’s the one who did it why are you asking me they’ll be like dude the hustle has had amazing talent like they talk about trung they talk about steph smith some of the people you guys do me i mean right i mean i consider you be part of our crew you me trung steph it’s got colby we’ve got yeah we’ve got a bunch of people so so the question is where the heck did you find these people so can you give me the 10 seconds on each where’d you find chung where’d you find steph where’d you find colby where’d you find you know all these people colby was uh worked at a pr firm where he was doing some copywriting work uh and uh trung uh eamonn did he just apply to you or you like recognize like oh this guy’s good mutual connection friend of a friend said you should talk to this person uh trung came from eamon troy a mutual friend and investor of the hustle steph uh i found on twitter because i read her blog who else i’d say i just kind of want to know and then when you found these people are you what’s your did you cycle through 30 people who kind of sort of stopped before you found the gems when we actually sold to hubspot they’re like wow you guys have a lot of churn i’m like yeah but here’s what we do like this is actually quite normal in the editorial industry but you hire a bunch of people and you’ve got a you you either fire or there’s a mutual like all right we tried it it wouldn’t fit um and that happens a lot um yeah and you also when you have to do the tone i would say that was also a key right because you were writing it originally and so you yeah and you called it interesting people you saw the trends community like i was the one actually doing every day you were posting in that thing yeah and that sets the culture and it attracts like-minded people um i also think that um once you find the winners then you go all in on them so trung is what i call he’s a made man steph a made woman whatever steph wants to do something cool sounds good what do you need uh when other people come with an idea trying to double that number whatever’s number sam gave you time to double it these guys are all doing great um whenever if if an outside person or if a non-made person comes with an idea it’s you know why don’t you just show me a little mvp and let’s see what people think if trung says something it’s all right yes sir right yeah like you’re a proven hitmaker and then the um the last thing is when we interview them i always ask about the bottom fourth of the resume which is like the college classes and all the things that they take because i want them to like entertain me during the interview so in the same way that you are really good at storytelling you have to have other people that are good storytelling right right okay i like it um can we do one idea real quick before we we jump so um this is kind of kind of kind of going to feel like it’s out of left field but i would say there’s something interesting here so i light it on the page oh yeah uh so i’m down here uh virtual team building so for a long time people have had this problem of we have a team we’re working on stuff together you know as the boss you’re you know sometimes you got to crack the whip and it feels like it’s just task after task and deadline after deadline and you want to make sure that this team is really coming together and is bonded and you want people to have a good time here and you don’t want them to leave and all the good all the good things you care about your people the experience they have working for you and so in the old world this was different team building solutions and so we would do off-site i don’t know what you did with the hustle crew but like you know some people go to a shooting range some people go to an escape room some people do like you know um painting and wine tasting and whatever you know what i liked most just like a fancy dinner right yeah let’s go out to dinner right let’s go to a cool place i you know it’s on me order what you want type it yeah i just like go we would do like fancy dinners right and and and this is every team literally i heard a nba coach talking about this the other day he goes man we got all these new players so hard with kovid because in the old days you just go to the bar you put your card behind the tab you know and you say all the drinks are on me tonight you know go crazy guys he’s like he’s like you didn’t have to like have conversations like you just needed to give guys a night out together and good things will happen and um and so with the you know we have this remote work trend everybody’s going remote um so how are those teams gonna do it how are they gonna do team bonding because although you get to spend more time with your family and you get not less time and traffic commuting you do lose the water cooler you lose the team bonding so how are people going to do this so i’ve seen some cool companies popping up that are doing this and i think they’re doing quite well so i want to point out a couple and then get your take on if you think these are good ideas bad ideas or how you would do it so the first couple of team team rock team rotary is that right yeah team rotary like camaraderie but for a team and so this is actually backed by some pretty legit players like some pretty pretty famous people in silicon valley which i’m surprised at because it kind of just looks like a goofy like they seem like small bootstrapped ideas but actually they have some big backing i think people recognize the spaces companies pay tens of thousands of dollars per division a year to have team bonding and so then you know in a big company you have you know easily high six figures low seven figures worth of spend on uh on this type of thing that’s my guess uh i’m not in the finance team so maybe i’m off but i think that’s about right i’m sorry first of all team rotary looks interesting horrible name what an awful name um they’ve got a pretty badass uh a pretty badass set of advisors guys like heather boy who seems to hate everything as you’ve said uh is on their advisor or their board pretty interesting yeah exactly so he’s on this and it says trusted by three 300 plus global teams you see pinterest who’s that you don’t remember summer sanders she was from and uh she was like a swimmer in the 90s and then was the host of all the nickelodeon tv shows no way that’s that’s hilarious summer sanders works at product development at team rotary so like you know you could do things so if i click their experiences right i click the bond and engage category so it’s like a coffee and tea tasting a wine tasting a guacamole tasting a painting class or whatever it could be if you do kick off kick team kickoffs uh okay we got our guacamole tasting again but we also have the high-heeled shoe project a lesson for inclusion um you know so there’s these like uh kind of team experiences lessons in a box or bonding in a box experience it so that’s one then our friend from the pod greg eisenberg created one called nice break dot fun um dude this guy loves like cute names yeah give me give me a name check how do you feel about nice break that fun it’s okay it’s good he loves like he he love greg is like the coolest guy in my company like public school or like school works or like school bus like well his studio is called late checkout checkout like you know the grocery store i remember being like why did you open this agency late check out it seems like a weird thing to do like you’re an entrepreneur why are you doing this like kind of like product design creative agency thing and um and then every week he’s like yeah we’re like i’ll put i’ll post a cool product that i think is awesome he’s like oh yeah we worked with him we designed the prototype i’m like he’s doing it for all of them i’m like oh actually this is [ ] awesome you’re like on the ground floor of all these things you can invest in them you’re meeting them you’re like seeing all these spaces and getting paid to do it like okay that’s pretty cool and he’s using that to fund his own in his own projects they’re their own internal projects which i don’t know that’s that’s actually a pretty cool way of doing it but they have things like a comedian will do like an improv class with you guys over zoom or a virtual escape room or a um you know a wardrobe makeover or stuff like that right so i think this is kind of cool and there’s other products like this that are like just a straight up zoom escape room it’s like eight people enter one hour goes on the clock and the whole thing happens in zoom so i think there’s this is going to be i think a pretty big space that starts out looking like a toy but ends up being a pretty pretty solid business what do you think yeah i first of all late checkout.com or sorry uh with latecheckout.com is greg it’s uh mostly shawn’s buddy uh he’s got a community community design firm go to that website and look at what he’s doing it’s really good that guy is really good um nice break fun nice breakdown fun i think it’s cool they’re charging a lot of money which i think is badass so they charge two thousand 000 a month plus okay so a grand a month gets you two nice breaks per month for and that’s for companies that are 25 to 50. if you’re okay i understand how this works uh yeah this could break this could be a hit i think this is great i think this could totally be a hit can it be a huge vc thing i don’t know but this could make tens of millions of dollars in the subscriptions exactly and the other thing is um one way to think about problems like these or find opportunities like these is you go uh in the c-suite so you say okay there’s a ceo there’s a cmo there’s a cto cfo cio whatever right you go through all of them and we were laughing because you were like what the hell is a chro so this is what a chro thinks about they’re the chief people officer essentially of a of a company i kind of use this interchangeably maybe there’s some nuance difference sorry to you know the three chroes that listen to this podcast um i didn’t mean to to uh what is the chr chief human resources i think uh officers right so so they think about the stuff right they’re like okay the whole workforce has just gone remote we really care about what’s called employee engagement which just means how happy are people to work here are they going to leave are they going to is this a toxic work environment or not and so then they have this do you so one thing you could do is you go talk to these people and you just sort of say what sucks what’s what’s keeping you up at night what are you stressing about and you start to ask these questions and at first they won’t give you a whole bunch but then you say all right can you show me your budget for the year oh wow you spend a lot of money on you know people development what is people development means and it’s like oh that’s corporate training and blah blah blah oh interesting who do you guys use for that you go look up those companies that is like some people sometimes people ask like how do you guys think of these things that’s how we learn these things it’s like we just start to sniff in these types of ways and you start to learn about all these spaces that are outside of just your day-to-day world view so if you’re out there as an entrepreneur trying to figure out where can i build a company where there’s i don’t want to just guess on demand this is one way you go talk to somebody who’s in charge you figure out what their what’s stressing them out what problems they need solved what language they use when they describe it that’s your landing page that’s your ad and then you look at their budget and you see do the does the money map to the problem and if the money maps to the problem you start to see oh okay and you ask them hey which budget line item is growing a lot year over year which which line item was smaller last year and bigger this year because that’s the space where they’re still looking for new solutions and you could do that for an individual as well i think what you can do is you can go sign up for mint or whatever and just look at the categories of your money and just look at the trailing 12 months and be like wait what am i consistently spending money on and do that with five or 10 friends and that’s actually a great way to find an idea and doing it with businesses is far more profitable so you just go and you look at they’re co you look at quickbooks and you say all right what’s going on here where’s all the money going to right it’s an awesome way that’s actually kind of a cool business in itself which is like how do i how do i what like wallet share like how do i just see how call wallet share these people are moms in america where is their wallet going right like what are they spending their time and money on i think you know big brands like i don’t know procter gamble they they think about this a lot they interview a ton of moms they say oh okay the mom controls this much of the household budget you know 70 percent or whatever and then within that every month she’s spending x percent on groceries y percent on household cleaners this percent on this 60 on this and that’s how they decide okay we need to invest our product development according to where the budget is um because that’s how that’s how we make our money back that’s such an interesting way to do things like i guess you could do it how many public companies there’s two thousand public companies in america you could easily or i think there’s like four thousand something four thousand uh however many michael actually said last episode four thousand let’s say you could easily do that with with all their categories right you can’t see line items but you could see like gna or but you might be that’s kind of an interesting study right and uh and you can do this with just media companies how are media what what does the expenses look like of a media company where are they allocating you know where where are they where do they spend all their money and where which which ones are changing uh over time where is things shifting and so i think that’s kind of like an interesting signal that you can use at the company level one um division in a company an individual person whatever and i think you get a lot of insights from that i think that’s a great idea i think what we just said of like did you make up name wallet share is that a thing uh i think that’s a term in general um like it’s it’s a general term but but um i’ve also seen this by the way in terms of for in the social networking space in terms of time so wechat i think or um one of the chinese companies they had this presentation i saw and you know i’m sitting there trying to go through a chinese presentation so you maybe someone’s lost translation but i got the general idea which was they want an app for every minute of your day because china has all these like super apps like wechat you can pay your house bills in it and it’s like whatsapp and you can also like subscribe to netflix through it you know their version of netflix but it’s also like you know where you post photos and something like that so what they said was like they took a person’s day so they’re like okay 15 year old kid wakes up in the morning at this time first 10 minutes of the day what what products are they using what apps are they using and they start to break it down minute by minute basically like what where are their gaps so today we’re taking up four hours of this person’s if they’re awake for 12 hours how do we spend how do we get 12 hours of their or 16 hours how do we get 16 hours of mind share from this person well they watch movies at night we need an app for movies well during the day they need they message their friends we need that they need news they get the news all right cool we’re going to do news and that’s how they they think about because how do they expand if you’re an ad based business you need attention so how do i get more attention well i need more hours of the day of yours how do i get more hours of the day well i got to figure out how you spend it today and i got to insert myself there i have a few friends that have worked on those on that at facebook where they were like all right we have found out that if you put stickers onto photos people spend like five seconds more and they have like 50 people just working on stickers and i’m just like kill yourself uh like these people hated their job dude one of my best friends his job at facebook was literally he was in the you know it was called like security and safety and privacy of community or something like that department and literally he’s like i just try to make sure a dick doesn’t show up on your facebook feed he’s like so uh he’s like you wouldn’t believe how many dicks are posted on facebook every day he’s like have you ever seen a dick and i was like no never not one he’s like that’s right at least there’s that’s cool you’re like trying to protect people whatever that’s cool but he’s like i’m writing like he’s like i’m reviewing folders of images that are just being like dick not a dick dick not a dick right and then like also same thing on the algorithm side like we were writing programs to train the computer to recognize this verse that and he’s like it’s a cat mass game always harder than you think they’re always one step ahead like dimes or sean’s d [Laughter] no that’s just about a dollar in pennies they uh but yeah i mean at least that job is all right but like i can’t imagine working at a facebook or an instagram and just all i’m trying to do is suck more of people’s time um yeah it is sad when you think about it like the the best brains of our generation are basically sitting inside the giant slot machine and being like okay how do we how do we get the rat to come back again you know like how do we get her to come back more and more and more and spend more time and more time right like that’s the reality and it’s like hey i get paid 500 000 a year to do this and i get free lunch and they do my laundry and i get foot massages on fridays and like people think i’m joking that’s those are all true things that happen um before we wrap up did you see that you were you so you and i are one for one of being turned into meme so you posted something like i’m looking for a meme creator 500 a month no vacation and uh you posted all this other funny stuff and people like mocked you uh liquidity a bunch of people mocked you it’s pretty great i think hopefully they realize that like we do this [ __ ] on purpose yeah or like it’s not even okay like okay i’d love to say huh i’m in on the joke i knew this like yeah i knew it was silly but like i didn’t think anything would turn into like we know like we’re self-aware enough to know this is like like mockable i wrote no vacation it’s not even a real job like of course this is a fake job posting i’m not fake it’s like i’m basically like just being like hey does someone want a side hustle for me by making a bunch of memes you can make 500 bucks a month just make me a few memes every week that’s really what i was trying to say but if i say it’s only going to get like 100 likes but if i say it the way i said it over the top boom i got thousands of likes and the things spread and a bunch of people got angry and literally like taylor lorenz was like why does this person not get sick leave and so um yeah we’re kind of doing this on purpose but also i am just kind of a character and like i don’t i’m just saying things you know as i think them and then i move on with my life and like i win either way like i win if if you get mad i win if you you know like if you take it seriously and um you apply i win like it’s i win i win no matter what as long as i don’t get completely canceled i win which might happen one day soon but we’ll have we’ll have fun until then um and i will explain someday why i am hiring uh a personal meme god to uh to to do some memes for me i will explain you have to explain that why i mean there’s nothing no there’s something there’s actually a cool story um there’s actually a cool story around it but uh it’s not quite ready yet the story will be cooler if i put the whole thing together and then explain it when it’s uh when it’s ready so that will come in i don’t know a couple months um and i guess you’ll have to share some of the best ones you got yes sir um all right that’s it i could be what i want to travel never looking back