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 i used to chase money a lot like how do i make money maybe this will make us money maybe this will make some money and that was good because i like learned skills about how to make money but the things that actually paid off none of those really paid off with a big dollar amount yeah i feel like i can rule the world i know i could be what i want to i put my law in it like no days off on the road let’s travel never looking back all right before we actually get into the content um a few things we’ve been making a ton of changes to this podcast the numbers are working i think the last month was our highest ever right abreu i believe so yeah so i think we should start saying the numbers i think we should start saying the numbers i think we should say what it is say what we’re gonna do and say what happens whether it works or it doesn’t yeah so the trailing of 30 days was i think 350 000 listens um which if it’s not the highest ever it’s one of like one or two but the trajectory is is really what matters and that is great so we’re getting around an average episode i think is twenty thousand downloads an episode which is i think a sixty percent increase from the year before is that right abreu am i am i getting all these yes twenty two to 23 000. right so let’s say we’re at 22 000 uh it used to be 15 of course it used to be zero so you know whatever it’s growing and our goal is a hundred thousand per episode one rose bowl stadium per episode is what i want to be doing something like that and uh so we’re not far 4x is you know it’s not far i think naturally that would happen in a couple years and what we’re going to do is just accelerate it so it happens in one yeah i feel quite confident that if we do the same thing but more it would happen with time but i don’t want to do that i’m impatient i want it to happen immediately so uh the changes we’ve made is we’ve prepared more for every podcast which i think is very clearly working yes we now have these videos going um which i also think is clearly working and that it makes me feel good is it driving downloads i don’t actually i’m not convinced but it’s worth it you know what it does do is there’s a whole group of people that like either a just don’t listen to podcasts or don’t listen much so they’re like kind of like otherwise they would only hop in once in a while they didn’t build a habit with us and they follow just through the clip so there’s actually just like another audience that’s like oh good i watch those clips every time because they’re good and i always get messages i am yeah and i’m in that category as well i’ve never i don’t think i’ve ever listened to a joe rogan podcast but i watch a lot of clips right um and uh we’re putting our clips on youtube which is not working that is not working well at all for us right um maybe the we’re putting the full episodes on and a handful have 20 to 30 000 views maybe even more a couple of them have a few more that’s working but the clips are not working and then we’re doing email blasts and the hustle i think that started two weeks ago that is working we should we should rewind we should basically say we had a meeting which was like a few i don’t know week ago maybe something like that and i was like oh okay we got all these ideas basically i threw in a few ideas you had a few ideas bray who had a few ideas my buddy ben had a few ideas we were like oh yeah great all these sound good so like who’s gonna do them and then we kind of had this like come to jesus moment where it was like look in sam we trust like if and we can’t we can’t outsource this to somebody else who doesn’t really i don’t want to say it doesn’t care but like it’s a different thing when it’s your baby it’s your show you are getting the like the more people who listen to this the cooler opportunities we get the better dms we get every morning and so like clearly it matters more to us than it would be for even if it was somebody’s full-time job and uh the second thing is like your skill level is super high right like we saw you grow the hustle i saw you grow the hustle a lot of people who were subscribers saw you grow the hustle saw you go trends from scratch and saw you sell the thing and it’s like so i got excited because i was like i’m gonna get to see sam in action even closer than i did with the hustle where like you would send a monthly update now i’m seeing how you actually operate and it’s pretty dope and i actually think the listeners will like to see how you operate how you approach growing a thing and uh that i think that’ll be exciting that’s a lot of pressure thank you for the compliment that’s a lot of pressure i i will say i think growing the podcast has been i mean that’s actually one of the harder things i’ve done yeah but uh hubspot owns us now it’s not my money like it’s their money and and so we’re in a totally i mean we’re our owner you know the company this company now does a billion a year in revenue there’s like a billion plus in cash in the bank account like so we can actually so we’re gonna have a lot more resources i actually am not convinced that that’s actually gonna help us grow that yeah i don’t think resources helps you grow but i think i i would say like that wasn’t the problem before uh it could be helpful but that wasn’t necessarily the problem and then so what we’re doing now is uh we don’t have ads in the email anymore so in the hustle we do zero advertisements and the podcast is going in every day now um or not every day but a lot and then also what we are launching at hubspot and the hustle is we’re creating this thing well i actually don’t know if i could say too much about it but there’s going to be a lot more podcasts and amongst those podcasts we can promote one another and that’s what you’re going to hear so whoever is in our pot our podcast crew we’re going to promote them them us yadda yadda and i actually think that’s going to help a ton i think that um i actually don’t think i could talk any and it’s pretty dope who’s in that but we’ll say it later when you can so okay can i give the audience the five ideas that we had brainstormed that were like oh okay once thing one was like let’s put sam in charge of it because sam knows how to grow [ ] that was step one step two okay so what are the like how would you grow a podcast if you’re gonna grow a podcast so we said i’m gonna rattle off the ideas number one big name guests that actually have an overlapping audience so people like chamath people like tim ferriss uh not just like a famous person who like for example we had jake paul on uh super famous but his audience is in our audience not gonna have a huge amount of overlap where it’s not necessarily that his fans would would connect with us and become you know ongoing subscribers um okay the other one was paid can you advertise to grow a podcast right like running some experiments on take a few thousand bucks run it on a paid campaign and see can you grow through through paid i think we’ll find out that’s interesting we’re doing so we bought ads in uh player fm abreu is that what we did yep yep and then um we’re buying ads and a few more i have a few more that we’re buying ads did that work uh i bring you player fm it’s hard to tell because they claim a lot of their views come from desktop listeners um which doesn’t necessarily get measured according to them um oh that’s like saying like thank you yeah yeah it’s like like no look the it’s like this is like selling like cbd treats for dogs like does it work right can’t ask your dog yeah it was like the greatest business ever it’s like selling vitamin b for your puppy uh yeah exactly so i would say if it’s hard to tell it didn’t work it’s a very obvious way to think about it um okay another one go on other people’s podcasts so do a do a tour going on other people’s pods they already have an audience those people listen they say oh man what a great guy i’d love to listen to more of this person they were interesting boom get some people from there clips uh people have seen we tripled down on clips we found awesome clip makers we’re making [ ] up eclipse and we’re gonna post the [ ] out of them so i think that’s a good good strategy um there’s the and then the last one that i thought was kind of an interesting one was like get sharper on the branding so if you want to grow a product the sharper the hook of what is the product uh the better chance you have to grow because it’ll be more clear it’ll resonate with more people and so being able to describe it well as well as just being like on brand all the time about like what this is and what you get out of it if you listen to it i think that’s an area that honestly kind of shitty at which is ironic because i think we’re pretty good at it with our startups but we’re pretty bad at it with the podcast like the name doesn’t really make much sense um the description i don’t know we don’t have like we don’t do an intro when you join to like be like oh this is the podcast where xyz happens we don’t have like a a highlight reel of like you know start here if you’re if you’re new to the pod like go here this is the onboarding episode you know basically in a sense it kind of succeeds a little bit in spite of itself right um and and a lot of people say the name doesn’t really matter or sorry the name doesn’t reflect it and i’m in my opinion towards just names is it doesn’t your name really like it rarely will it hurt you in some occasions it actually could help you i think coinbase is like the perfect name ever right but uh even if coinbase was called like uh uh blue sky uh sunglasses i’m just looking i’m just making [ ] up that i’m looking at um it would work blue sky uh like it won’t work it would have worked uh okay so uh should we move on to coinbase actually let’s move on to coinbase so coinbase went public today and it’s everything about it is astounding right um do you want to start i can read off some of the kind of the numbers of like just how big is that business and then we can talk about the returns of this inves of the investment so how big is the business so coinbase came out the public now so now they released their numbers their q1 numbers came out 56 million users um six million monthly active users which is i think more than e-trade had uh you know like total i think e-trade had like three million uh like trade trader accounts or whatever and so this is kind of amazing to me that there was more people on coinbase um coinbase makes up 11 of the crypto asset market in terms of how many assets are stored on crypto crypt uh on coinbase 335 billion in trading volume okay here’s the interesting bits uh 1.8 billion in revenue for the quarter um for the quarter for the quarter so round up to two so about eight billion ish in revenue that’s right annualized um 800 in net income off that off that 1.8 billion in revenue so like 2.4 billion dollars annualize in profit right and uh and then yeah so basically the coinbase goes it lists publicly today it wasn’t a it wasn’t an ipo as a direct listing where you basically you know ipo is you create some shares uh you issue new shares to buyers direct listing is you don’t issue new shares it’s just people who have shares can get you know like basically sell some of their shares so uh they listed they had about 114 million shares for sale and uh it’s up about 40 on day one so the implied market cap as of right now is about 110 billion so what i wanted to know was um there’s this kind of uh phrase in the startup investing world which is like anytime there’s a gold rush like some new frontier new space it can be hard to like pick the winner it can be hard to like you know just grab your shovel dig and find the gold and there’s a thousand people looking for gold you don’t know where to dig it might be this one might be that lot that land you you know you don’t know exactly where the gold is so the foolproof strategy in any gold rush is what they call the pixel shovel strategy meaning you you sell the shovels to people who are going gonna go mine to gold and so coinbase is kind of a classic picks and shovels thing in the crypto market so you you could buy bitcoin you could buy ethereum you could buy one you could buy litecoin or dogecoin or one of the thousand altcoins that exist and you’re betting okay maybe one of these will become like the digital currency um or you could buy a coinbase in exchange that’s going to trade a bulk you know a bulk number of these coins and so i wanted to know once coinbase got up to where it was like 100 billion valuation i had the question of what would have been a better investment coinbase at its seed round or bitcoin that same day if you could should you have bought the currency or should you have invested in the company and the reason i thought this was interesting is i remember 2013 i was i just kind of heard about crypto from a guy in my office like our pete our rit guy was like dude bitcoin is the [ ] it’s at seven dollars now it’s at 11 i was like i don’t know what that means and he was like yeah [ ] fiat currency and i was like fiat i think that was a car i didn’t even know that’s a currency at the time i didn’t know what that meant um and he was like mining bitcoin using our servers at the office and he’s like we mined two bitcoin today and i was like okay good for you pete like what does that do you know i was kind of like you know mocking it but i was curious also so i started going to listening to some talks and uh and so one of the things i was looking at was like are are smart vcs are people smarter than me investing in this space and what i remember happening was i listened to this talk and it was andreessen horowitz was mark andreessen uh who now blocks me on twitter um he was talking at a thing he’s talking about how crypto’s gonna be great how it’s how bitcoin is gonna you know is such a interesting technology how uh blockchains might change everything and then the interviewer was like so how many investments how much money have you put into this you’re kind of hyping it up like how much money have you invested and like we haven’t invested in any crypto companies yet uh this is like i think 2012 20 i think it’s 2012 and he goes right now we’re just owning the currency we’re just buying bitcoin and i was like what that’s so weird these guys like they’re they’re a vc fund they bet on companies there’s a few companies out there like i found it to be super strange because right now the bet we don’t know which of these companies is going to emerge as the winner so we’re just buying the underlying tech the underlying currency we actually think that’s the right move right now and uh and later you know andrews norwood has actually did invest in coinbase later and uh since invested many projects and actually andreas horowitz changed their whole fund structure from a private you know vc fund to like some other kind of like financial investment vehicle they went and got registered with like the sec or whatever because they wanted to own crypto assets and you couldn’t do that out of a traditional fund they couldn’t you couldn’t buy currencies out of a traditional fund the paperwork the docs don’t let you and so um so anyways i went back and looked at the numbers so coinbase announces seed round september 2012. um i don’t know they probably raised it a little bit before that and then they announced it they raised 600 000 from investors including a crowdfunding campaign which i which i found interesting because i don’t like them i [ ] on crowdfunding all the time as like me too it’s always the bottom of the barrel but this was through funders club funders club had put in like 285 thousand dollars through its crowdfunding into that and so anyway what is is fun and funders club is just a startup like underscore itself is a yc startup and then coinbase was a yc startup and so funders club took a took a share uh like did it did a crowdfunding campaign for for that uh if i read this correctly i i could be wrong in this part but anyways i went and asked one of the seed investors so somebody who uh a friend uh who invested in the seed round of coinbase i said what was the valuation back then he said it was 15 cents a share so 15 cents a share there and he said the a round was only 20 cents a share so it wasn’t even that much more um something like that so so 15 cents a share and um now it’s trading right now like right before this podcast at 330 a share or whatever and so you got this uh you know 2000 x markup i think 2200 x markup and um so you invested a hundred thousand dollars in the in the seed round of coinbase that’s worth 220 million dollars on this day today because it goes it goes public now if you would invest in bitcoin same time bitcoin at in that same month was trading at twelve dollars a coin now it’s at sixty two thousand dollars a coin so your same hundred k instead you know would have been worth five hundred million dollars so still bitcoin was the better investment even though this was like a you know you invest in a startup that’s became a 110 billion dollar company still bitcoin outperformed but uh it’s closer than i would have thought because coinbase has really gone up in value in the last two years so let’s give some more numbers um i think right before we started the valuation was 80 billion but a few hours ago it was a hundred billion right we’re gonna use a hundred billion because that math is a little easier um brian armstrong is the ceo he’s 38 years old he owns i think twenty percent of the company uh which means uh a hundred billion his net worth is 20 billion dollars which puts him i think like in the top 50 richest people in the world at 38. uh the company coinbase i let’s see it started when 12 so it’s uh nine years old uh so basically became the from zero to richest uh top fifty richest people in the world in only uh ten ish years nine years and also he owns twenty percent of coinbase who knows how much i don’t know i certainly don’t know but you have to ask how much bitcoin does this does this person own if you told me that it was another 20 billion i don’t think i would be surprised at all do you would you be surprised 20 billion is a lot that is that is a that is a very very large amount so i don’t think it would be quite so high but i wouldn’t be surprised if if it was over a billion dollars i think 20 billion would be 20 billion would be he’d be one of the the top three i think bitcoin whales i think at 20 billion or something like that yeah okay okay so i think that’d be way too much would you think i i i i don’t i didn’t do the math ahead of time but would you think you would be a top 50 bitcoin holder that seems reasonable right it’s plausible yeah so i don’t know we you know he i don’t think he’s ever said or disclosed you know if he if he was buying the underlying coins though so the biggest thing is did you hold right because bitcoin on this run up right so from when you know if if he’s doing coinbase bitcoin’s at ten dollars a coin right that becomes your kind of like frame of reference bitcoin today is trading at 63 63 000 from 12 is such a like mind-boggling like change and so when i was talking to the my friend who was an investor in coinbase i said i was like wow did that did that mean does that mean that coinbase outperformed bitcoin he goes no i think bitcoin still wins he goes but name one person who held all their bitcoin from 2012 to 2021. he’s like sam’s racing well i guess like of people who owned a lot of it at that time no i didn’t i didn’t own a lot i owned i bought hundreds of dollars worth but no not a lot so let’s say you owned a lot you know as that nest egg becomes 10 million 20 million 100 million dollars you’re gonna like a lot of people would would liquidate some of it and so he was saying you know all of us at coinbase we really couldn’t sell this whole way and he goes the illiquidity was a feature not a bug like the fact that we couldn’t sell this whole time for coinbase it was the best money making strategy for us to like not be able to be liquid until now i didn’t sell but my numbers were like tens of thousands or maybe hundreds of thousands of dollars right it certainly was not a million or tens of millions but uh i i didn’t sell because i actually forgot my password and i was like uh i just don’t want to log in because it’s too hard and so i didn’t log in have you stopped you have it now or no yeah i have it now like i had i had uh i just never did like a forgot your password thing in my email because i was too much work maybe it’s a sign i’m just not going to sell right um and so i didn’t sell but can what do you have in front of you are you looking at something i’m looking at this tweet you put in of chances i want to bring i want to bring this up yeah so um the numbers here is fascinating but i actually don’t think that’s the really fascinating part what’s the fascinating part is the psychology behind this because today’s coinbase in 20 years it’s going to be something else uh 50 years ago it was real estate or something 100 years ago it was oil there’s always something yeah and the psychology behind the human being i think is far more interesting and by the way he was an engineer at airbnb before he left to go start coinbase his airbnb shares from you know would have done amazingly as well right like while he only worked at airbnb i think for a year and before that he worked at deloitte so i’m almost positive granted he was probably a genius probably like you know crazy high iq but like normal guy uh normal like a normal nine to five um and also uh so let’s talk about the let’s talk about the personality part here that i love um i like knowing what drives people what makes them tick we talk about billionaire of the week and it’s not actually about necessarily the money but what what what what do people think who achieve greatness right in this case it’s money but reality greatness can be a variety of things um so daniel gross is the guy we have in this podcast he went uh so hacker news if you guys don’t know what hacker news is you should read it every single day it’s basically uh reddit but only for nerds i love it i read it every day it’s uh tech folks um and anyway um brian armstrong has a handle on tech news or on hacker news and you could read his old posts and he has this ol and daniel gross uh tweeted out some of this guy’s old post his handle uh is uh i actually don’t know what his handle is but well it’s sorry it’s b armstrong and so b armstrong actually had a blog listen to his blog and this is actually kind of funny it’s called start breaking free.com which is which is kind of on right on brand consistently and actually if you go to startbrakingfree.com it’s controlled by a virus so it like they it automatically wants you to install a it’s controlled by a virus or you know what i mean like are you like it’s like if i go to right now it’s gonna try to install like you know security software that actually he’s gonna steal all my money yeah just do it yeah well it’s gonna say like you won you know you’re the lucky winner uh like somehow he let the domain expire or something like that and uh someone got a hold of it so now it’s just a scam which is kind of funny uh that the guy who’s supposed to be like mr security his web his domain expired and uh yeah whatever but anyway you can see his post history and he was launching a lot of stuff he launched this one thing and it says hey hacker news i just built a new forum software hey hacker news i just built a new photo sharing website so the guy was really prolific and it’s really interesting to see his posts yeah he was definitely like trying uh like what daniel tweeted out was i you know i look back at brian’s hacker new submissions before he started coinbase you can see what you see is a story of a hacker working on different projects slowly zeroing in on his launch coordinates uh right because he’s consistently shipping stuff they’re not all like you know some of them have like one up vote seven up votes 32 comments right like they’re not like taking off so you see a guy taking a bunch of swings and as his swings you could see it was you know like something about maps something about could you know how would you start your own country something about like could you build an entire web app in one language and then it’s like bitcoin android release um you know like how airbnb does x and then it’s about you know like how to build your own forum uh bitcoin iphone app and you know just like sort of finding finding like the thing that is his thing and this is this is the true for everybody right like you know people joke about sam’s uh you know sam’s foot long wieners or whatever your hot dog stand yeah you know my sushi restaurant it’s like if you dig back into people’s first projects um you’re always gonna find interesting things like mark zuckerberg first project that uh i’ve heard him talk about have you heard this the dentist office thing no he set up an internal like just net internet network for his dad’s dental office so it’s like a messaging like the secretary of the front desk could message him and his office uh you know in the back so he just like kind of set up the internet inside their office and let them message each other then he built wire hog you know oh and wirehog i think was really successful by the way well for like a 17 year old kid for yeah exactly 417 it was more successful and there’s chat transcripts of when he after he like leaves to go work on facebook he moves you know in the social network they moved to palo alto it’s like this is it facebook’s gonna be the thing there’s chat transcripts of him talking at that time like yeah like i think wirehog’s the thing um you know like so even then it’s not obvious at that time and whereas people try to project that these guys are visionaries they are you know visionary geniuses who never had a doubt in their mind and then they saw the future and then they built it and it’s like well well i actually think that a couple of those things are true they could be visionary geniuses or rather they could be geniuses but that’s actually not a prerequisite but it does help but they definitely had doubt regardless of how confident someone is it doesn’t matter if you’re conor mcgregor and you’re going in a fight you always have doubt no matter what um and second um they probably didn’t have a vision until it started getting a little bit of traction right um i go back through there’s these there’s this uh interview on youtube of mark uh doing there’s like some college news station that’s interviewing him some guy some some guy has like a college podcast and he invites mark zuckerberg on because he’s got the college social network that’s kind of like taking off on a handful of colleges i think they’re on like i don’t know five or ten campuses at the time and he’s like you know so what what is this going to be you’re going to go out to more colleges and then what like high schools and then you know non-college students and mark’s like we’re sitting there in his like basketball shorts um with a red solo cup in his hand and he’s like i don’t know like i don’t know if it has to do that like why can’t this just be like the cool thing for colleges like once you take it out of the college thing then you let everybody in it’s like less cool like maybe this is just cool and like now he’s literally putting [ ] satellites into the sky to give people in india the internet so that they can use facebook like yeah so the aspirations changed the takeaway here and i actually just went back to my high school the other day to like give like a talk and i was like dude doesn’t it you guys look small when you walk into high school yeah and you meet a 16 year old and you’re like oh my gosh like i felt i was mature i felt i knew what i was doing you’re a child yeah i could beat you up yeah i’m like i was like dude i’m 30 and i thought that we were more similar but we’re not we’re not at all yeah yeah we’re not like why are these children low to the ground yeah everything is so small and like water fountains are disgusting i can’t believe i used to drink from them anyway um i was like you guys just do [ ] take swings tinker on stuff first of all a lot of stuff that starts out cool it actually looked really dumb early on but even if it stays dumb just get into the habit of taking swings and making stuff because uh like i’m not like uber successful but my first [ ] was like a poison ivy business it was my first stuff was like stupid and like it led to this thing and this thing and like hopefully the thing that i’m doing now is actually going to lead to something even bigger and i also did a ton of research and i found out that there is this poison ivy treatment called zanful z-a-n-f i think zandful and basically i did a ton of research and i found the guy who started it used to work at a cleaning supplies company and i was like oh that’s interesting what is going on here like that’s kind of weird that i just saw that connection and i did research and i found out that basically what he did was he took this thing i think it was called mean green and it was really good at washing um oil off mechanics hands and it costs like five dollars for a gallon it was dirt cheap but he found out that uh the way poison ivy works is if if leave gets on you or if it leave it’s on you it gets this oil on you and you have to use this oil stuff uh this oil remover yeah yeah same thing with poison oak or whatever yeah yeah same thing and i was like oh so i’m just gonna bulk buy this mean green crap and repackage it and sell it for forty dollars as opposed to i sold it for like forty dollars for like some like a like a carmex size or like a you know like a like a chapstick size thing when it costs like 40 for like literally an industrial sized barrel and i just repackage it and i was making thousands of dollars a month and then i quit doing it because i was like i don’t want to do this anyway it was kind of a cool thing but i shut it down because i was like all right this is making money but like i don’t want to do this i’m not proud of this this isn’t like anything i i like to talk to tell people i’m doing it’s kind of lame even though i was making like five grand a month shut it down and um the point is the thing that we’re doing now i have a feeling it’s gonna lead to something even bigger and uh in in coinbase’s regard everything was much bigger in a much shorter time frame but uh it doesn’t matter it’s the the exercise i think is still true that’s great uh you know those guys who came and set up uh my studio here they just released a vlog on his channel this guy henry i forgot his nasty henry blancaster or something like that i don’t know what it is but basically i don’t know how you’ll find them henry uh on youtube he did this thing he put out a video yesterday being like oh the advice that i got from sean poury and i was like okay well i’m one of his like i don’t know 100 subscribers like i’ll click this this is about me so i will go ahead and watch this video and his videos are actually super well made he’s like yeah very casey neistatish like any casey neistat yeah yeah uh which just shows how hard it is to win on youtube like his quality is really high but like no one gives a [ ] because it’s just youtube there’s a billion things on there hey as we said just give it some time and just keep trying right so so the advice and i was like i’m curious what the advice was because they came over and they were like doing all the work and i’m just sort of standing in the garage with like a cup of coffee just like you know just sort of like trying to be nice i’m not helpful but i was like trying to talk to them and i was like and they’re like you know hammering things and i’m just like asking them questions and giving them some kind of well here’s how i would do it if i was you guys because i really resonate with anybody who’s like if you’re like 22-23 and then you you’re smart but you chose not to go the traditional path and like that feels right but then you also just get these like hunger pangs of like doubt when it’s like [ ] my friends actually have a salary wait like i’m sleeping in a like you know four of us are sleeping in this one bedroom apartment and um and so i started like i really like empathize with that because that’s where i was and uh like i just want to tell them what i what i would tell myself which is like dude you’re doing the right thing here’s how you need to think about this though don’t like don’t worry uh hey you know here’s how here’s how this is gonna play out and what i told them was like look honestly the best times of my life were three of us living in a you know one bedroom apartment my my co-founder and my roommate lived in my closet because he couldn’t even afford our dirt cheap rent so trevor lived in my closet and like turned my living closet into like a room for himself with a lava lamp and [ ] and then like his girlfriend moved in with him in the closet too oh my god and so then uh i was like you know he had a grocery cart because there’s no he didn’t have a closet because he was living in a closet so he stole a shopping cart rolled it into his closet and used that as like his hamper his closet for himself and i just remember like like at the time everything seemed so shitty it was like oh this is the shitty version of life and now i’m like no that was the that was the most fun time because all we were doing every day was just trying to figure [ ] out trying new different schemes and projects we had no responsibilities no burn and then we were just like party for fun like on the side and so i just remember thinking like now that i look back i’m like that was the [ ] that’s what i was trying to tell them i was like first of all guys this is the best so like uh like embrace this part you’re never going to get to have this again with your friends like you have right now it’s it’s so fun embrace these five years i said the second thing is like the things that paid off were like the people i was meeting and like doing projects with or learning from like those relationships pay off big in the end um you know the learning of like building skills around like i did my first ecom project like you i was selling these wristbands called fatbans.com and it was just a fat rip fat wristband that i like noticed a bunch of kids were wearing on on campus i thought oh wait maybe that’s a trend let me try to sell those online you can customize them and so um those skills translated but the the business did not and so what i told them the advice that he put in the video um that i didn’t even realize i said was you’re 23 years old now like here’s the trick to this whole thing you’re doing the right thing every day you’re just making stuff you’re trying stuff you’re making content you’re having a blast with your buddies we’re going to measure the scoreboard when you’re 30 not when you’re 24. and it’s like that was the game changer like kind of like advice i wish i had and that i gave them maybe 35 or 40. right but basically it’s don’t like you’re planting seeds don’t go dig up that seed the next day and be like [ ] this didn’t grow into a plant like no plant that seed water it enjoy it and just say look i’m not trying to win the whole game in one year uh in a year and a half and like if my if my friends who took this banking job or consulting job or are doing better than me in 18 months like i don’t need to feel like i made a bad choice like i’m making the right choice for me and it’s gonna like let’s look at this as a 10-year game and we can only measure the score that like the fourth quarter is 10 years from now so that’s the only time you can look at the scoreboard really and the seeds that you’re planting at least in my experience and i think in a lot of my friend’s experience and it also seems like you for sure uh is it’s [ ] it’s [ ] it’s [ ] it’s [ ] and then suddenly it’s like oh my god it worked it hits yeah like so it like it’s [ ] for the most of the time and then finally it’s like oh okay now it’s all happening your learning goes in this like gradual curve like your learning does go up every year where you’re like oh man last year i was such a dummy i didn’t know [ ] about [ ] and now i know better how i would do this and then the same thing happens the next year and the next year and the next year but your results can kind of stay flat-lined for like a decade almost for like seven years before it actually you know stops being a flat line and just like curves up rapidly so i wanted to continue talking about this but i’m actually going to save my stuff that i have these notes here i’m going to save that for the next time because i don’t want this episode to be entirely this stuff although frankly i love this stuff do you like this or not yeah man i’m just soaking it all in okay um i like this stuff but sean you want to move on you want to do the other thing you want to do micro choir or do you want to keep talking about this uh i don’t want to keep talking about this i want to do either some great micro car or some ideas i want to do micro acquire and this is an idea actually but uh we at the hustle we worked with this guy and i never talked to him because um i wasn’t the one working on the project but anyway i just started hanging out with him recently this guy named andrew uh people call him gaz but his last name was like gaznati or something how do you know andrew or something yeah guys ducky uh i think they can just call him gaz uh do you know andrew or do you know who he is i did the like the minis back with him so that’s the only way i know him just through dms i’ve never talked to him andrew is 32 i think um he previously had a company that i think was an agency and he told me that he sold it for like tens of millions of dollars so it was very very successful but his new thing is incredibly interesting it’s called microacquire i think it’s just microacquired.com that’s right and the premise is very simple uh he finds people that want to he that wants to sell their their company and he just talks about it in a newsletter it’s basically like appsumo or like the hustle but a newsletter that just sends out cool companies except what he does is he makes you pay money to be access to to get access to it you only have to pay 200 300 though and you get a year’s access and his numbers are pretty interesting and keep in mind andrew’s actually the only employee so no one works there um and so as of today he’s got 1500 subscribers paying 299 a year and that brings his revenue to about 400 000 a year and i posted a chart of this do you see the chart i posted uh no i’m on his twitter because i was looking for that because i know he posts oh here it is yeah no i have the chart so i posted it um and i’ll he just sent this to me so i guess i mean i said can i share it he builds in public so he he announces the revenue publicly as part of his like way of getting more traffic so he’s got 425 arr and look at that chart yeah that’s a pretty amazing chart really all the growth happened like in november december january february like it just lasts like four or five months yeah and it’s pretty interesting and i actually shared with you if you scroll down a little bit more i shared with you his his vision but what this guy is building uh i mean this is his vision we’ll see if he can pull it off um is a different type of angel list so basically he wants to disrupt investment banking and he wants to make it easier to buy and sell companies and it’s incredibly fascinating so he wants or sorry not disrupt angelus but kind of be like angel listen when you describe what it is so what it is you go on there if you want to buy a small sas business so a small business that makes recurring revenue through subscription and um and so that’s the that’s that’s the thing i browse and the size are it ranges so it could you could buy one for five thousand dollars that’s making a hundred dollars a month of revenue or something like that or zero dollars revenue but it has users so you could buy it for as low as like a thousand or five thousand dollars you could buy a business and as high as there’s a couple for like single-digit millions of dollars on on there maybe there’s a few that are outliers but that’s like i would say the sweet spot the range for these things are kind of like hundreds of thousands of dollars is like where the you know decent businesses are on this platform and this is the thing where i talked about this once on the pod but he had dm’d us and he was like hey like love my first million you guys are great would you know would you guys want to do something with me where i like give away a 5 000 micro sas business and i was like dude that’s a great idea i’ll like go in with you and i’ll pump this to the audience and so basically i tweeted out like i didn’t even talk to him i didn’t actually respond to his dm i just tweeted out hey me and andrew are giving away a sas business for five thousand dollars like who wants it oh you know all the business is there we’ll buy it and give it to you it’s like these are business that are already working to some extent you know uh it’s like we just need to add some hustle who’s a hustler who wants this business and what ended up happening was a bunch of other people started chiming in being like i’m in for 5k i’ll put 5k in and so we ended up raising a hundred thousand dollars as a micro spec meaning a blank check company so we raised a hundred thousand dollars into an entity to go and use that entity to go buy a business off of micro micro and then as of last week it closed so we found an entrepreneur found a business and we closed that deal to buy a shopify app that’s amazing and that’s pretty wild uh i’ll be eager to see what happens but i’m sure you’ll reveal in like six to twelve months um my opinion around micro acquire is at worst it’s gonna be okay right at best it could be amazing i don’t know what it’s gonna what’s gonna happen to it what do you think it’s a really fascinating business and i the the thing is now i’m actually shocked he’s letting me talk about it because i feel like i can clone this so quickly uh yeah it’s a lot of work like i saw this guy doing the the one deal we did and it was just like [ ] ton of work till this like you know separate everything to make it happen do the paperwork get a field yeah but that’s not the work for micro acquire well they have to help you do the transaction so so that’s their that’s their function um it’s what’s good is that they don’t make money on the like transaction closing they make money on you paying a premium subscription like i pay a monthly fee to be able to browse businesses which is a much better model because you’re not just reliant on taking a brokerage fee of closed m a because there’s just not a lot of closed m a that happens but there are a lot of people who are curious and will pay the you know 100 bucks or whatever it is 200 bucks to be able to like browse the premium listings and get the get the details get the info and so what i would do if i was andrew is i would decrease the price to 99 a year because that not or even 39 a year because that would make it an impulse buy and i would get loads of people then i would do this company selling then i would have a course that cost two thousand five thousand dollars and it would include a community and was all focused on buying and selling companies growing businesses and i’m pretty i’m pretty confident that you could get that to around 30 40 50 million dollars a year in business i don’t know if that would be a valuable company to um sell but i’m pretty sure that you can make 10 to 20 million dollars a year in profit for at least a handful of years i think that’s what i would i think it’s needed so i think it’s smart that he specializes in sas i think that it’s smart that he’s a curated marketplace versus like flippa or these different places where you’re just like so much [ ] junk you don’t know what there’s no trust so i think he’s doing it right that he’s bringing trust to these kind of like lower trusts like marketplaces so i i’m with you i really liked the project and i’m with you that the minimum is a good outcome the maximum is like oh wow this was a big idea hidden in plain sight and um i’ll i think it’s interesting i think it’s more likely gonna just be the good outcome but i like that it has the you know the option to do both and it seems like a fun a fun kind of way to build if you’re this guy i think he wants it to be the okay outcome which is he owns it and he lives a really good lifestyle right and uh which by the way i think like i would probably do the same as well yeah um so anyway that’s a cool company i wanted to bring up what do you got uh i got a couple okay so i’ll go for um we talked about this before but i’m curious what you think so um photo p uh we talked about this many many months ago but yeah we were much smaller than people those people are probably not even listening anymore so we’ll just pretend it’s the first time so there’s this thing called photop and all it is is it’s photoshop but it’s free and it’s in the browser you don’t have to download anything and the guy who makes it i don’t know much about it he posts on reddit or you know he he has posts on reddit it’s a pretty big thread i think you know a little more about him than i do with kind of like the backstory but it’s a free version of photoshop that has cloned every feature of photoshop pretty much it’s like it’s the exact ui of photoshop which is crazy because photoshop is such a complicated piece of software to build and this guy just chipped away just chipped away just chipping away and basically built photo p and p as in uh like the vegetable like p-e-a and so uh photop.com you go there and it’s just like one banner ad that’s like how he makes money i think i think it does a million dollars a year now because so many people use this goddamn thing like students and like people who don’t want to spend photoshop’s really expensive people who don’t want to buy photoshop can use photo p and get like 80 to 90 of the same power without any of the cost and without any of the headache of downloading a big ass one gigabyte application what uh oh my god i’m on it so we do i know this person is that what you’re saying i remember the first time we brought it up you had already heard about it i was like dude this i have a really obscure thing and then you’re like mr obscure so you’re like oh yeah i’ve seen this on reddit uh at the time i saw i remember being like shocked that you knew about this thing because i thought i just discovered like uncovered gem you know yes i see it’s from november 2018 uh a guy yes because it ha it got 50 000 upvotes and he started it by saying i made a free alternative to photoshop ask me anything and that’s how he got promotion for it yeah i like this um so you think he’s making a million dollars a year doing this yeah so i i don’t i don’t know why ben told me this ben gave me this topic and he was like photo p you know he’s like you know photo b was like yeah he’s like you know it’s been a million dollars a year so if i’m wrong ben’s wrong i didn’t look at myself but um by the way i got access to similar web i’ve got a premium account now bro you got the goods yeah i uh someone who works at hubspot uh i’ll i don’t know if i can blow up their anyway i got similar web dude i’m the same way where at twitch i was like oh dude you got a premium app annie account that’s like a couple thousand books a year to see app download stuff like share the login and they’re like you know we’re like a company you just buy a seat and it’s just the company pays for the seat if you think you would use this just to buy it i’m like oh my like i felt like such a pirate like i had to like hide i was like oh yeah of course of course i wouldn’t boot like that like well yeah that’s not what i meant that i’m still trying to like be a little bit less hood rats him and more like oh yeah it’s like this is roi positive just buy it right right uh it’s actually like very much looked down upon to be that way like i was negotiating with somebody and they’re like wait why are you trying to like why are you trying to like save us all this money negotiating with this vendor like just pay the thing and do it up front and be like but this goes against like everything in my jeans i can’t not do it i was like yeah but it’s in the motel 6. like i saved us at 200 i always used to tell people yeah like i’ll take care of your accommodation and it was that they would actually be sleeping in my stand on my aunt’s house and i would actually go i would stay at my girlfriend’s house and they would get my bedroom i did that all the time yeah we’ll take care of your accommodation uh because we get hustle god they just slept at my house so according to similar web photo p gets 8.5 million uh monthly uniques they spend a ton of time on the website and most all the traffic is direct so i if you told me that this made a million dollars i would think are you sure it’s not a million dollars a month uh i don’t know because i i got it i gotta check i don’t think it’s a month i think that would be pretty pretty crazy i think i think a year because you know he’s only he’s not monetizing well right he’s just got display ads so he’s you know he’s got the bottom of the barrel monetization i think on the on the site yeah you could probably crush this though um speaking of just well go ahead well i was just going to say like you know okay to so what so i think there’s so what here is a photo piece cool and interesting and like just a cool thing to know about but b like couldn’t you do this for more things like first of all take the whole adobe suite and do the photo p for after effects do the photo p for illustrator photo p4 for the whole suite right like anything that has over x million users um you could do this for what else like maybe it’s like autocad like i don’t know if that’s free or if you pay for it or whatever you know like uh i forgot like uh what’s that thing called math lab matlab or something like that it’s a thing that all the engineers have to use um like is matlab paid is you know great can you can you do this and i think a version of this is uh called obs so have you ever used obs no what’s that obs is an open source uh piece of software that’s basically the most popular thing for every twitch streamer or youtuber so it’s the easiest way to like stream from a pc high quality video and audio to twitch to whatever so for years twitch actually just until recently twitch didn’t have any way if you went to twitch like great i want to be a streamer they’re like cool go go use obs what the hell is obs twitch doesn’t have a button just saying go live and uh same thing with youtube you go live on youtube nope can’t just go live on youtube with uh without like using more sophisticated software and so obs is actually an open source project maintained by a small community developer but really it’s just one guy jim and i met this guy and jim’s like you know i don’t know five foot seven and like long hair down to his kind of waist and he looked like an open source you know like app developer and he’s like extremely high ethics and morals where he’s just the app is 100 free he’s been working on it for a decade and it’s supported by donations of people who are like dude i i run my whole business off obs like sure here’s ten dollars you know and um and twitch twitch actually was paying him every month uh just to keep maintaining obs because it was like cheaper to just pay jim i don’t know x thousands of dollars a month than to like have 20 engineers trying to recreate this thing i think that that is cool i think that like when i hear that i’m like that’s badass like i love that that i love that that exists right but what was my what was my thing earlier i’m like cornrows and sleeve tattoos i i respect it and i think that’s badass i just don’t want it it ain’t for me i’m not wearing it uh and that’s the that’s my case with this which is i’m so happy that that exists i ain’t doing it because there’s a bunch of examples of this so another example is spicework spiceworks.com they were doing like 50 60 70 million dollars a year in revenue and they ended up selling and because they raised too much money it didn’t work out but they had traction and basically what what spikes or spiceworks did was they created uh software so if you’re like if you have like um um a thousand employees and you wanted to figure out which computers you needed they created software to help you figure that out which normally costs money and they actually made money through advertising on the website in my opinion that’s like neat but just charge people money for your thing because i’d like would you rather be photo p or adobe uh yeah i know what’s worse of course i know which one i’d rather be so i think it’s cool to actually do that free stuff just to get a ton of users but after a while like if i was photo p i would be like well if i just i should just hire more engineers and we should make some premium features and up charge and that is what i would do i would not do this well there’s another way of looking at it which is sometimes like free doesn’t mean no ambition so for example skype was like hey free international you know like calling and whatsapp same thing why did whatsapp take off because sms was actually really expensive you had to pay for every tax especially international texting it was super expensive so what’s that free was the growth hack and for these guys i would say free is also the growth hack but you know if you’re if you want to just be one person maintaining this thing and like whatever you’re where you do it matters so photoshop is still at least big but nowhere near as big as texting and calling was right that was like such a huge market and then the second thing is like if you’re gonna do free find some other way to capture a ton of value so uh skype and whatsapp we’re able to capture a bunch of value using a totally different method whereas photo piece just like cool here’s a here’s one banner ad um you know and that’s enough for me or obs is like hey donate to me and that’s it whereas obs could have like created you know either premium features or sold to twitch or you know could have done many things to try to capture more value out of the free thing that they made do you know the website unsplash so unsplash is a alternative to getty’s images so getty’s images uh everyone has probably heard that word not a lot of people probably use it we used it we paid them 50 grand a year and we were a small client getty images they pay photographers they buy right why were you paying so much because there’s cheaper or freer options for photo libraries gettys is the best um so a lot of free or cheap ones they don’t actually have images of of the people so for example if you want to write about elon musk a lot of the free ones don’t have good pictures of elon musk second once you get to the size that we were like we like which is not that big once you get past like 500 000 monthly uniques you probably want to stop doing things illegally when it comes to photos because there’s all these people that yeah and which is like a it’s the right thing to do right you you are using other people’s stuff so you shouldn’t do it it’s okay to kind of bootleg it early on but after a while you should pay for it uh and we were a small person we were and we paid i think 50 i forget tens of thousands of dollars and anyway there was this competitor called unsplash i think unsplash is dope i think they’re badass they’re just acquired acquired recently i got a little information where i like i found i heard a little bit about what they were doing they were only doing around four ish million dollar five million dollars a year in revenue even though like hundreds of millions of their images for being downloaded right and i was actually shocked at how small they were um if i had that much traction a i would have been far more aggressive about selling ads on the site and be far more aggressive about getting subscriptions and charging a lot of money for them because this website unsplash which from the outside appeared to be doing wildly well and i imagine they actually were acquired for a lot of money because if a proper person could get their hands on that they could crush it i would think but um if if you have that much usage like unsplash [ ] unsplash wasn’t ubiquitous but it was quite popular you can make way more money by charging money up front for all that stuff when unsplash giving away their stuff for free i think they’re only doing like 400 500 000 a month in revenue right right right uh okay yeah that’s a good that’s a good example of one i had one other topic i wanted to do um okay which one’s more interesting to you is it the affirm for x or is it game film for salespeople i’ll let you pick from those two categories uh a firm and i have a i have a take on there that you’re not gonna like oh okay good good all right so uh if you don’t know what a firm is a firm was a company started by um max levchin i think uh am i mixing this up right all right so max levchen the co-founder of paypal uh the firm went public i think this year or last year it’s about 17 18 billion dollar company right now and what a firm does is when you’re on an e-commerce site you’re going and you’re buying a mattress online you go to casper’s website and it’ll be like oh wow this mattress is twelve hundred dollars and it’ll say or or for you know 96 easy payments of eight dollars you can own this mattress right so it’s basically a pay-as-you-go software that lets e-commerce stores sell more stuff because uh if people don’t have the full amount or don’t or you know they’re hesitant to spend a large amount of money right now you can offer them pay as you go plans with a zero effort and then they take a cut so you know uh you know on on our ecommerce store we offer we use one called sell and sezzle will uh basically say great you could buy this thing for you know four payments or eight payments of ten dollars instead of paying the full amount right now and um and then they take seven percent and then they send us the rest of the money and so it’s kind of a no-brainer as a retailer because it just it really does improve conversion and for us customers were asking for it because they were used to buying it and it’s up it’s it’s publicly traded company now it does really well and so and there’s several of these so there’s after pay in australia which is even bigger after pays a 34 billion dollar company which is kind of normally australian companies are much much smaller uh klarna is like big in europe i think for this i think klarna is even bigger than all of them exactly so karna’s probably the biggest one and um so there’s kind of this war going on they’re all trying to like um like i think a firm partnered with shopify so it’s like built into shopify uh that’s a big move but basically okay pay as you go interesting space uh kind of was one of the big ideas that just came out in the last like 10 years is a good example of once it started working in the u.s it was not hard for people to just be like cool we’re gonna do we’re gonna do a firm for australia we’re gonna do a firm for the uk we’re gonna do a firm for india whatever right so i think generically that was a good business idea what i thought was interesting is what else could you use it for so i heard of one company in this uh this year’s yc batch that was doing pay as you go how did you get access to that bro big time investors like us that’s what we get access to actually yc still has not accepted me into the investor pool even though i’ve invested in probably like 10 yc companies at this point um yes but but uh but i have a friend who gave access so so that’s no problem um so anyways one of the companies uh what they do is they’re a firm for general contractors so another high ticket item you’re getting you know your garage redone or whatever bathroom remodeled or you’re building out you know a multi-family apartment complex or whatever um they’re giving the general cut they what they did is they went to the general contractor just like that’s their version of the e-commerce store and they say hey instead of charging your client 12 grand for this you can just offer them pay as you go and it helps your clients pay you money and you get a higher collection rate you have less less kind of late payments and defaults um and higher conversion rate because people can afford you this way it makes you more affordable and uh they were doing all right they had you know decent revenue and uh you know it was early still but i thought oh this is interesting are people going to do pay as you go in more more industries more more sectors and what else might be okay but here’s my tip here’s my take klarna after pay and affirm i like the people who start them i think they’re horrible companies for the world i think that they you they should burn down completely and not exist i think that why because it’s getting people in debt it’s getting people in debt it’s making you buy stupid [ ] that you can’t afford so where like where’s the firm like if you go to like fashion nova like people who can’t afford who people who want to do a firm for a pair of pants i’m like don’t buy those [ ] pants don’t use a firm don’t buy any of this you don’t need this [ ] don’t buy it do not buy it run and also if you’re gonna have to buy it don’t go in debt to buy it i think this is horrible and i’m actually shocked at a guy like max lipchin who i think is a cool dude he started paypal he started all this stuff that’s badass like i seemed like a nerd i love nerds what are you doing this is useless you’re just you know you know just started how he got the idea tell me he was um so this is the version of the story i know i’m gonna be you know somebody who was there probably knows a lot more details but what i had heard was there was an engineer who had uh so he had this lab like i had monkey inferno he had a lab called hvf hard valuable fun and basically it was an incubator where he said i’m gonna do any project that satisfies those three criteria it’s gotta be hard it’s gotta be valuable it’s gotta be fun and so uh and then they kind of like didn’t have um like i think they’ve had a few nice companies glow came out of it’s fertility tracker and then a firm was the big one and max like went all in and he became the ceo of a firm and all that stuff to take it forward but the origin story from what i heard was as an engineer who had come up with like a new uh like database technology or database technique he’s like oh look at this he’s like basically nerding out he’s like look at this we could do like so much computation and so little time and like with this new technique and i was like okay but what are you gonna use that for it’s just kind of like blockchain it’s like great your blockchain but like why do we need a blockchain what are we gonna use it for does it really make this better and like there’s you need to define an application so the way that blockchain found money currency as as the core killer app uh what he what max realized was he came into the this guy was an eir for him so for months he was just like working on this like databasing technology and how he was going to use it couldn’t really figure out an application and then one day max walks in he goes dude like credit scoring and credit reporting is so like ancient we should be able to if you’re a person today i should be able to take signals from the internet social social networking data uh publicly available data on the internet to do instant credit uh worthiness versus like the way that this works today with this kind of like you go get a credit score and it’s based off of like you know stuff in the past so his insight was there has to be a better way to determine the credit credit worthiness of a person and he’s like your databasing technology is actually perfect for doing that on the fly and doing that at scale and so they came together and he’s like great i’m gonna like basically create this application to do this and i think at first they didn’t want to do i don’t think the initial very initial idea was what they ended up doing which was like pay as you go on e-commerce websites but pretty quickly they realized that’s the use case that’s the market that needs this the most is basically instead of um like i guess my question to you would be do you also feel do you also use a visa and mastercard like because it’s just credit cards that’s all this is it’s just credit um so do you also hate credit cards the same way you hate pay as you go you want to know what’s funny is uh my credit my personal credit card limit is four thousand dollars um so i’ve got a i’ve i’ve never had any debt other i just got more are you one of those people that uses debit cards instead of credit i do it because lately someone has advised me to do it but for a long time no but i’m not against credit uh and i realize that what i’m saying is not entirely logical it’s definitely emotionally driven and you’re saying and i’m not like going this hardcore libertarian route which is like well i’m like against the government therefore all government is bad i’m like no no no like i’m gonna draw so what i’m doing right now is basically i’m drawing the line right which i get uh it’s does that’s not always the best but i think that credit cards in some cases are good and affirm in most cases are bad that’s what i think okay i think that’s you know that’s why because the people like do you know do you have any uh do you know like in europe like our friend ramon and a lot of my other uh friends from europe they were like you know credit cards we don’t use credit cards like in germany yeah like in a lot of places in europe if you want to use also we use bidets proper cleaning yeah which by the way whenever people were flipping out over covet and toilet paper i’m like dude take a shower like what the [ ] you flip it out over this why are you fighting over this uh anyway um you’re going to shower every time you [ ] could be twice a day but like it’s it’s the inconvenience is not bad enough that i’m going to fight over that that’s fine that’s right that’s what i’m saying i’m not going to like stab someone and like uh or i’ll just be uncomfortable anyway i just think like credit cards aren’t that common in europe uh there it’s definitely an american thing but long story short i am not in favor of a firm uh i think that that is a stupid thing to spend his life working on that’s my opinion i would love for him if i could go to him or bait him into coming on here and convincing me of otherwise because i’m open-minded but i think it’s dumb i think it’s stupid for general contractors that’s a little bit different but for buying like a 29 pair of pants like don’t [ ] buy the pants well i uh my family member trains his daughter in jiu jitsu and so maybe maybe we could use the the daughter jiu jitsu connection to get max on the pod uh very soon uh am i wrong though do you agree or disagree i disagree i disagree completely i think credit is a great it helps the economy move i i’m always a kind of don’t hate the player hate the game type of situation where i put the burden on the individual in the same way that i wasn’t like oh my god jewel or like you know like is you know is grey goose evil because it’s alcohol and alcohol causes problems no like i don’t think so i think it i basically for myself i live my life or i never blame a company for tricking me into like doing something i blame myself if i don’t have the self-control and the like thought process to do it and so that’s how i look at others too i will never blame a credit card company for um for somebody getting in debt now what i do say is if you’re not transparent about what the fees are what the charges are what the rates are then that’s shady right you’re withholding information you’re not disclosing you’re hiding the fees but um but in this case they don’t charge people more uh for you know for buying a lot of the times it’s zero percent interest because they they can offer the customers zero percent interest because they take seven percent from the merchant for helping them close the sale and so it’s actually an interesting model compared to that’s interesting i didn’t know i didn’t know the full depends on the credit worthiness like when i i bought a eight sleep mattress using a firm and i was like because i was like oh do i want to spend like two grand right now oh i’ll try this a firm thing and i was like oh this is cool i can just pay in payments and it’s zero percent interest because i had well i tried doing it i also have a sleep i tried doing it with there and i actually was gonna have to pay like a pretty hefty fee i was like oh no because you don’t use credit cards you don’t have high credit something like for some reason i don’t have a good credit my credit score is is not bad anymore but it was bad uh because i didn’t have history anyway well i have one one last idea on this um i think this is the same thing as like you probably know what layaway is i don’t even really fully understand what layaway is layaway sounded like a total scam to me it’s silly it’s silly basically like what it is if you want to buy a 500 thing you would go each week and you would give them a little bit of money and would start paying down your balance and then eventually you’d get the item right but it’s crazy because like with a firm you get the item first and then you pay later buy now pay later right that’s that’s well you have to remember there’s a one big thing which is like is that if if it’s gonna take you three months to purchase and you can’t if you don’t have the internet to buy stuff like you want to guarantee that they’re gonna like that’s yours right i guess for me it’s like our items really out of stock but apparently there’s a huge thing like walmart like in most parts of the country layaway is like a huge part of their business um and it’s a it’s a it seems like a pretty predatory thing in a way but i i don’t know too much about it so i shouldn’t really speak on but um anyways i guess my my point is why aren’t people doing a firm for retail stores so why isn’t this the same option every time i check out you know my wife goes and shops at i don’t know wherever you know nordstrom like when she checks out they’re like oh you know do you want to open a nordstrom card or whatever why isn’t it hey um you want to pay the full amount today or would you like to pay in installments and you could pay an assault now maybe this is already the case i don’t know but like it seems like something that should be built into the point of sale at retail stores i don’t do a ton of retail shopping so yeah this might be me being dominant actually is totally a thing does a firm plug into shopify yes and do a lot of people use shopify too but like nordstrom doesn’t use it but like a coffee shop might yeah not really they’re trying to do more that square is definitely trying to do a lot of like retail plus online like you know brick and mortar and online um so maybe square does it but uh but i think a lot of retailers just have their old school pos still this is like one of those rare topics that you’re bringing up and i’m like oh i don’t know like how do people buy stuff at stores i’ve done it yeah we should just smoothly exit this topic before we uh 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 let’s travel never looking back