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 what’s up guys Sean here Sam is out today but we got my friend Greg Eisenberg filling in greg is a great dude you guys will like him a lot he’s been a founder of a couple companies sold two of them one to stumble upon one to we work he’s at we work now he said investor in companies he’s a cool guy you guys would like him a lot he’s got a real brain for designing products anytime there’s like a social or consumer product he’s one of the best thinkers around and I think you guys will see that we spent the first half of the conversation talking a little bit about his background and then the second half case we go through a bunch of random ideas he has on his you know Notes app on his phone just for fun so I think you guys will like it tweet at me Sean VP tweeted Greg let us know what you think about the episode as always enjoy hope everybody’s doing great out there in the quarantine keep hustlin building stuff keep yourself busy with with good things all right take care enjoy the episode okay so I should introduce you so Greg is on the podcast greg has a homie from I don’t how long over ninety few years at least we you know I guess the world probably now knows you for your haircut website right explain what that is what is the URL do you probably need a haircut you probably need a haircut calm yeah we’re the the busiest virtual barber shop on the internet dude so what happened okay so people aren’t quarantine they need haircuts and how does this idea go from a little germ a little little sperm in your head to and a real idea out there I mean you know me I like you know I get sort of excited about stuff that goes by Roe and I was talking about buddy of mine he’s a stylist out of work couldn’t pay his rent I was like I need a haircut I like to look good you know built the MVP and then just threw it on product hunt and before I knew it and when I was on The Today Show ABC and basically the way it works is pretty simple like for people who need haircuts they book an appointment they get connected to a virtual stylist and they could either cut their own hair or they can have a friend cut cut their hair for you this is a dope idea when it came out I was like who’s behind this I know I feel like I know the person behind I don’t know is you when I was like I feel like it see they do its Alex - all right it’s like you know one of you sort of viral meemers of products yeah if you’re like actually generalize hours brainstorming with you before I feel like for you to get excited about building something it’s got to start with some emotion like either you think of something that makes you laugh and then you’re just giggling and but you’re serious about it once you start laughing or is something like really sad story and you’re like okay this is an injustice in the world I wanna go salt but is that a fair is that a fair characterization of you yeah I mean I do like things that kind of go viral and like for me you probably need a haircut I mean I was I told my girlfriend I was like I’m a hundred percent sure this is gonna go viral and she’s like well how do you know how do you know and I was like well like the name and and kind of you know where Brad and it was the timing like you just seed it with a couple of journalists and you know throw it up on product hunt and like before you know it like I don’t know we probably had 150,000 uniques in the first 24 hours how many actual haircuts probably more probably over a thousand at this point yeah yeah definitely more than we have one Silas you did 200 so yeah more now any public speaking thing where they like hey can you send me like your bio this absolutely needs to be the first thing you know I you know conducted I’m responsible for over a hundred thousand haircuts and the crazy thing is that people like actually look good like I’ve I guys you don’t have a haircut right now you’re growing it out they’re crazy try booking a haircut right like this weekend if the site is busy now I’m an entrepreneur I’m out here I gotta say I got a make it happy bit of people I love it there’s a reason I have this hat on because you know your boy butchered himself with his own two a.m. haircut keepers without using your website and you can’t declare so that’s why all right so let’s give people background and then we’re gonna shoot the [ ] as we do there hi Greg first do you remember when you became a millionaire do you remember the day of course you always remember the day but I actually like you know where I started actually and I’ve never publicly said this word where I started I think you might know this where I started to actually make a little bit of money was really as a teenager doing affiliate marketing oh absolutely and like the underbelly of the Internet yes and you know not people not a lot of people talked about you know there’s a lot of actually great entrepreneurs who who actually came from that area area I think Julian Smith you know is also was in that area as well but I actually remember 2008 it was my I think was my 18th birthday and I was doing affiliate marketing basically I was doing deals with you know the eHarmony is the mash comms that in and Zynga’s who were like they were willing to pay you three four five six bucks for every install you generated for them and back then there was this Arbor I mean there’s still arbitrage now but there was this arbitrage where if you could you know create a landing page and cost you 10 an hour do you see that tweet no I think you wanna you want to make like 100 an hour like charge companies or something like that I’m butchering it here but if you want to make a thousand not like 10,000 an hour creed create a new category and be like the leader in the new category and I think like I’m always interested in like new categories like virtual Bert you know barbershop new category like yeah may not work but it might work and if it works it’s gonna work big uber new caddy it’s really just like a new on demand like using technology to bring a car to you like new category like boom yeah for sure so what’s something that’s free that could be it could be charged for so for example water is a good example you know when you first said that my brain was like oh air but actually air is also charged for air purifiers diffusers things like that humidifiers there’s pee there’s ways that people have found a way to essentially charge for air in a way their process processing it but they’re doing it what else is free that could be charged for so content is I mean the [ ] or put another way like what are the things that we take for granted as human beings that we can charge for and that opens up like a whole other set of products and services and so forth because those are blind spots right you have to actually think hard because they are just embedded in the world you you don’t even realize that they’re sticking out because there you take them for granted by definition absolutely and that’s what I like I was before we were chatting I actually someone called me and was like Greg where do you where do you see can’t like the consumer Internet going and I was like it’s that this stuff comes out of nowhere the stuff literally comes out of nowhere there’s like you can look back in hindsight and be like oh yeah like we can connect the dots for these reasons but I think like the dots are actually pretty messy to connect if we actually look at it and I think like the best actually consumer businesses are kind of like somewhat random there’s someone random it’s based on like an entrepreneur just like being obsessed with like like I been Ruben for example the founder of house party he’s an architect he thinks of you know house partiers is these rooms sort of physical space you know digital representations of these physical spaces the guy is like spent years being you know studying to be an architect and obsessing his like entire teenage years about like presents Ryan what that means so like it’s not because that in like 2016 or whatever 2015 like the live video was like important why you know it was like no the guys literally been like thinking about it forever and he’s like the expert in the world on it have you ever seen there’s this video of Evan Spiegel from snapchat he’s in a kitchen and he’s explaining snapchat on like um you know like a notebook they’re just like a note pad of paper and he’s got like you know he flips it three times and it’s like those are your slides essentially have you seen this video I have it’s actually everyone should watch that everybody should watch this video because it’s he’s taking when you go through that it’s like I’ve never met him but he’s such a like you just realized that he’s amazing because he’s able to distill a really quote-unquote complicated sort of like he just makes it so simple and I think the beauty of it is like everyone on this team could look at that and like oh yeah then they repeat it to other people yeah what snapchat oh it’s so hard to use no actually it’s so simple right exactly yeah the video the video was amazing even like I just never one detail in it on the design he’s like yes so he explains first you know why why you know it opens up to the camera so you could take a photo and it’s meant to be he’s like basically photos today are thought of as memories you take a photo and you’re stashing it away for essentially your your keepsake he’s like but we use photos for communication we just think if you send someone a photo it’s a great way to communicate you know what you’re doing how you’re feeling if you take a photo of your face it’s you know it’s better than typing in many ways like first snapchat is just using photos and videos for communication not for memories it’s a boom insight one insight he’s like and then we created this thing called stories and he’s like four stories you know what we wanted to do is like every social network is reverse chronological so you open up your feed and you see sort of the latest thing first music but that’s not how our brains are really wired you know we communicate through story and that’s what we remember and so you know when you click on a snapchat story it starts from beginning then it goes middle and end and it sounds like obviously duh but that was counterintuitive Twitter was reverse chronological Instagram was reverse chronological Facebook was reverse chronological your email was reverse chronological and so that was the you know with stories he’s like when do we do it beginning middle end you can you know you’re potent or when somebody clicks your thing they’re gonna experience it the way you are wanting to tell that story and I was like okay guys a genius like that’s what that is it’s taking complicated things making them simple we’re taking things that seem simple on the surface and it’s shot and showing how much is actually below the surface how much thought went into crafting that simple experience yeah I think what I like about that is like he starts with the key insight well it’s it you know pictures worth a thousand words is one way of looking at it so communicating through photos is a richer way of communicating through then through text or calling somebody right and so yeah great and people do do this and that’s sort of like the immediate hater is well I can just I can go to iMessage I can upload a photo and then I can face right send and I can send that to you and then sort of so the first insight is people use photos for memories they should use it for you know it’s really effective way to communicate that’s the insight and then he changed the how which was like well we reduce the friction to zero so like you could open up iMessage click your friends name click the camera button click the gallery button find the photo then hit Send and then they get it and like then they view it or you open up our app the cameras already open you push you know you take the photo and then you send it to as many friends as you want one too many and like boom that’s done and so they change to how lowered the friction of getting people to do what they already wanted to do alright so I think it starts with the it starts with the key insight next it goes to like what is who what is the community that has a burning need for this like instead of like a long you know mistake a lot of people make is they create software and then they find the community versus like finding the community and then building the software right so like you know with this particular key insight the way it relates to the community I mean snapchat started off in high schools in Los Angeles had like preppy preppy preppy country 50,000 year high schools and these people were sending you know their kids they're sending like naked pictures they're sending pictures of drugs they're sending things that their parents don't want them to see or just like making or just basically things if their parents don't want to see so election obviously should change one think the unique insight wasn't just that the user for communication it's that wins photo stick around forever people you know it's a hesitant to share it sucks and so there's a whole bunch of things we want to share that we don't want to stick around forever and so that ephemerality was the was sort of the key mechanic so second second piece burning you know what is the burning need for the community and then third I think is like okay how like what is okay now you you want to build software now explain to me how that ladders up to one and two and why this is the most beautiful and the fastest and you know and then if you have those three like forget Dex forget like business plans like just show me one two and three and if you show me one two and three two and three like the market for you know when people looked at uber and them initially people like on-demand black cars San Francisco come on right such a small market what are you talking about it I know I know people who've done who did that and it's like yeah like but sometimes small markets you can't always pick a really big market sometime so small markets actually expand to be new categories in really big markets so I think you got to play the field I think you got Austin you got to look at small you got to look at medium and look at large and I don't think that if the market is small you should be like I can't do this right and I guess if we're being honest with snapchat they didn't realize the high school was the community that they that would need this the most because I think what ended up happening was they had it they built it while they're in school summer hit usage was pretty flat they were thinking like Oh college kids will want to do this which ended up being true college kids did want to use it to send photos from parties and whatnot photos you don't want to stick around forever and then somebody you know to introduce it to their knees or something that something like that and they basically not in the school I think they were using it it was am i right on iPads to send sort of in classroom iPads to send you know messages to each other across classrooms or whatever and the teachers couldn't catch it basically because the message destroyed Burn After Reading essentially is that it they do I have history correct yeah that's it that's it and then with uber same thing where I think they also probably thought it was a small market because neither Garrett nor Travis ran the company initially right they hired a guy they you know guy off Twitter wants to run this yes sure come on over and he became a billionaire you know but like I think if they knew whatever becomes they probably run it from day one themselves I think they sort of observed over time holy [ __ ] there's a lot of poll here and then this could go even further and so you know it progressively stacked up from there I agree and I think like for for the people listening I think it's important to like when you're thinking about what do you want to spend your time doing think about like what have you spent your time doing like what have you spent your life doing and why why do you have like this unique advantage or these you know what are some key insights that you can have about the world that that you could so what was the answer for you for I mean I have a law I had you know I think every person has had unique insights like for example like or unique backgrounds like my my family used to own like store you know stores in Quebec for I don't know 100 years and I grew and because of that like every Saturday my mom would drop me off at the mall where my dad's store was and I spent a lot of time in the mall frankly because that's my mom was there my dad was there and my dad was working so I kind of like walked around I got to know them all really well and I've learned I have a unique perspective on the world in terms of like Commerce in terms of like what is the mall even represent as like a meeting point for people to like you know young people and old people and why are they there and like what what are the types of restaurants there why is there a restaurant why is the food court here like why are things you know how are things merchandise you know I think one of the big reasons I became a product designer was because I saw that you know if you put like a product by like I remember like yeah basically like if you put products like near you know the lineup like people will buy them and I was like wow like the ui/ux you know the interface and user experience of the physical world is a real thing and that just led me to digital right yeah for sure so I like that basically there's one one school of thought and I think this is a Paul Graham school of thought is where I sit [ __ ] this idea from but he basically says if you want to invent the future just live in the future and then invent what's missing and it's not sort of this crazy thing it's like back to this there's some quote but it's like if you want to paint the perfect painting become perfect and then just paint my idea is like if you already do something in your lifestyle that is unusual that is sort of forward-thinking in some way maybe you're somebody who doesn't own your house you you rent any rent your car and you rent everything then the sharing economy is quite obvious to you right if you go and do couchsurfing and you think that's normal Airbnb is normal is a normal idea for you even though it's abnormal to others but to you you're like no I live in this future where this is true right I push button and my groceries appear not everybody does that today but I live in that future where that that exists and I'm going to sort of enable that for more people all right and so one way of looking at it is what one of the things that are normal to you it's normal to me to record something and have hundreds of thousands of people I've never met listen to me in their ear balls every morning while they commute to work and they feel like they know me that's a normal thing for me but not for most but like maybe there's something that I could sort of make that make that make my normal normal for others so that's one way think about it and when you said it sort of the the the counter to that or the compliment to that which is you know don't try to get interested in sort of new things to try to create a company look at what you're already interested in the life you've already lived and there's embedded insights and domain expertise and nuance that you understand because you lived that way and then think how do i how do I start something that leverages those insights and that experience that I've already had yeah and and be mindful of the fact like oh hey like why why am I so why do I love this P like why do I love spending time at the mall or like why do I love looking at like how things are merchandise and stuff like that Wow like I I have an eye for that and let your imagination go wild and be like oh you know it would be cool if you could do this you know like what if you could do that and then then that's when you start like oh yeah wouldn't it be cool if you can like create that something and that's when a business is created to fill that void what are some of the most interesting either products or startups you've seen invested in do notice existing things what are some of the most interesting things that have caught your eye lately so I'm sure like pull up my phone there's an app have you I was playing with it today it's all it's me do you know it's me no this is a yes okay I think I have but I forgot what it is yeah so it started it recently started to kind of take off but the way it works is you login with snapchat it pulls your bitmoji and you see your age if you want to meet with like girls or guys or both and it chatroulette style like you press a button it connects you to someone it so it says a bit about like where they're from who they are and you see you're at the Avatar talk so like you're like you're you're talking but you see yourself as an avatar yep and I think when I find you know like what is the key insight there is that like then like being you know if for a lot of people like being in a physical form be it even on like a zoom or face time or you know literally physical is tough for people yeah and having that like wall is nice as like an icebreaker to eventually get you to meet in person etc I like that let me connect that to the last idea so when I first started working in this kind of twitch ecosystem to live Khmer ecosystem I saw this get one guy his name's Manny I think his handles like the one Manny or something like that and Manny it streams on Twitch but he's a dog he's not actually a dog he's a guy but his avatar is a dog and so he's one of the few twitch people who their little webcam areas not themselves it's a it's a dog that he uses this you know obscure app or a cup I think I might've got bought by now but it's called face rig at the time so face rig was this obscure app you have to have a Windows machine go on Steam download face rec pay 20 bucks for face rig then you get the dog and the dog will mimic your head movements and your mouth movements while you're streaming and so for him he was like oh yeah this is way more comfortable for me than putting my own real face out there as the like kind of the show and and so I saw that and then I tried it and I was like wow that really does make me feel way less anxious about kind of like performing if I if I just have this little you know goofy looking dog as me instead of me and so that's another one where it's like okay it took today it took a lot of extra work yet to go find this app download it pay money blah blah blah set it up on a PC book but once you've experienced the magic at the end of that you're like okay magic is here now can I make this way less friction I've lived in the future I take I saw what life is like and now I'm gonna bring that back to the present and make it accessible to more people and it sounds like these guys were guys and gals were building this app might have done that they might have made it way simpler for somebody to have that same experience yeah absolutely and it's simple it's fast and magical and I think what I'd like about it I like about your story actually is that like that dude was like he was unique and he was like yeah I'm gonna do this I don't care what people think like this is what I'm gonna do and he like pushed the envelope and did something weird and it turns out like weird things are actually like head-turners I had like head-turners are actually create word of mouth and word of mouth actually creates audience and creates buzz and creates all these things so like same with snapchat right like that and it's obvious now that like a message would disappear a photo would disappear a video would disappear but at the time like no one that didn't exist it's a new concept so like people like you know listeners like tap into that like uniqueness about yourself and don't be afraid to do it because who knows you might be on the verge of a snapchat or anything like that and people will doubt it there's a reason my snapchat handle is still SVP test because I was like this happened going nowhere right like I don't to worry about making a real handle here I'll just do this test account because I just want to try this silly fad and then you know this will be gone in a month and of course famous last words yeah absolutely let me give you let me give you an idea that's sort of like that okay so my friend Damien he's the founder of a company called doodle have you ever heard this I haven't it's like a British based company due diligent due diligence so basically they surface private company information in a way that's I think the EU has different laws of what you need to disclose so he can provide like you know revenue information employee information so you can get a lot more information about companies there so he built this platform it's like fin tech guys doing fin tech things it's a super group at the super valuable company I think it might be a billion dollar company and anyways he did that and so the other day I see him on Facebook any posts like hey you know you know I you know I've left and I was thinking about my next thing so I come up with this new thing called Battelle and I was like oh [ __ ] what's Patel is this like some neo bank is this well you know what is this new FinTech product he's like it's not FinTech it's a remote sleep school for parents and basically he's like I met this woman and what she does is she teaches parents how to put their baby to sleep and you know so they get a good night's sleep and the parents aren't up all night feeding every two hours and whatnot and she doesn't use what's called the crying out method which is the normal way you do this but it's like really hard on the parents to fight through and let their kid cry it out she's like she doesn't use the cried out method and she's a you know she's like the dog whisperer it's amazing I watched her work her magic on two hundred families and I thought okay I'm gonna help this woman scale her her you know magic too you know as many families as I can and so he created this remote sleep school it's basically cost a thousand bucks but you're gonna teach your kids gonna get a good sleeping program so it's like you know what's that worth to you and like I don't got enough to know this I had a kid eight months ago so now I'm in that position and so I was like oh dude I'll beta test this now because you know I'm going on three hours of sleep right now and damn I would love if I could you know do this and so I think that there's these fringe sort of weird things where it's like what people really pay a thousand dollars for this woman to zoom call you and and teach you how to put your kid to sleep like you know but I think that that's one of these products that is just weird enough solves a real problem and like adds a lot of real value in his chart is charging for something that normally this advice is just like a free mommy blog telling you hey try this and instead it's like no here's a super high end version of that but we're gonna guarantee the result in in a better way than the average blog would do what do you think of that idea I think it's actually really like it I think like I'm a big believer in you know come for the tool stay for the network I like the way I look at it is like come for the tool stay for the vertical network where the vertical here would be parents yes like the fact that he's capturing such a high like you're just in the beginning stage is my friend and like you're you're about to buy a whole lot of products and services for your child and maybe even more children if you have so like the fact that like here's the thing here's one thing I'll tell you if if they help you with this problem you're definitely gonna be wow that was amazing so bottom will be like 1,000 points you know right so that's what it is it's like when you're looking at like building a vertical something in a vertical it's all about like what is the trust quotient you can have with the vertical and I like that this particular task will give you a lot of a lot of you know a lot of cred for this business yeah man I think like that's the other thing is like it could I could see it being like a million dollar a year business but I can also somehow see it being a billion dollar right business and so it's worth a shot yeah you know the math I think works where he has both options where it's like you know thousand people paying a thousand bucks a month or sorry thousand bucks for the program that's a million bucks and can he find a thousand parents to do this I'm very confident just through Facebook ad so I think he could bootstrap two million dollars in revenue very quickly with sort of like 30 40 percent margins on that and and just pocket that so I think very low-tech easy to start bootstrap a bull into the single-digit millions let's call it between one and nine million or what you said which is like cool if he thinks about this bigger like how do I now that I have trust with these parents and I've solved one problem for them the problem they had during their first seven months of their baby how do I help them with their next phase in the next phase in the next phase and you know could go good go bigger from there so I like I like having those options on the table where it starts with sort of those humble beginnings and it might just be a great cash flow business or goes for the sort of home run yeah man tell them to keep going well well I don't think you I don't think it is my my encouragement to keep going that's the best entrepreneurs donate any advice I invested in this resident lamb to school and afterwards I was talking my friend we get it together and I was like here's three reasons you know here's what I want out of this investment I don't know if this will make us money or not but you know I want to learn about like this idea of this trade school thing for education I want to hang out with the founder you know monthly and be helping problems I think will be really interesting and you know lastly I hope we get a return on this he replied he was like all I care about is the return don't give a [ __ ] about the rest but hey to each of their own and on my end I was like and ironically the return is gonna be there but for the first - like Austin doesn't need my help doesn't ask for my help you know if I text him something I'm actually just taking up his time and it reminds me of kind of what an investor told me which is the best companies don't need us that's the reality of the value add services is that the best companies rarely need your help and the worst companies you can't save anyways and so there's some in the middle where you can help influence their trajectory but this idea of investors really helping out or encouraging entrepreneurs or whatever else is sort of overblown marketing I totally agreed I think I actually last week there's a spanner he's just like literally crap he crushes it like for years he's done ten percent year-over-year growth and I started month over month growth and I responded to his investor update keep it up and then he just responds right away he's like as if I wasn't going to keep it up [Laughter] I picture myself smiling and sent it back then that's so good it's great alright we should wrap up kind of weight over time but yeah anything else we do one last spin of the one last bit of the idea well let's do these get one more than we're out of here throw it notes boom okay so this one is a quarantine H idea but it could last beyond quarantine it's an idea that basically I called it chef's table and it's this idea that like I don't know if you saw a car bone then the restaurant in New York City is not doing they're just doing one meal per night and then it sells out so it's kind of like a drop yeah which builds a lot of buzz and demand and it sells out and every night this idea is that like it's it's it's a drop for strong but you have a live stream with the chef telling you about like if it comes with wine or or the meal it's like this is how I did it and it's more of an experience live stream is after you order order so everyone the way would work is you would you would order it everyone which is everyone would get the meal at the same time I don't care if you want and then chef comes and he's like listen like I you know pick these these you know carrots myself and Hudson Valley and here is explaining it and I think like that's what I miss most about sort of restaurants I guess is like the the stories behind right and then this the experience behind it which you don't really get if you're just like frying up some eggs in the morning for sure okay so here's a twist on this idea you're a high-end restaurant your business is gone right now like you're a Michelin star restaurant what do you what are you doing you can't do anything and so here's your your pivot you go live on Instagram before the drop so you live before and you're showing the prep it's the you know you're in the chef's kitchen they're talking about it they're drinking wine there and you're seeing it being prepared and people I think like to see as the show chef's table is shown people like to watch high-end food get made a real skill you know that that sort of thing as long as you have a personality with it and and then basically by the end of the 20 minutes the the meal is ready for the drop the drop goes live and it's you know it uses the new Facebook shop thing that came out yesterday you'll push the button and it orders it basically and it is like a hundred dollar meal and it's you know it's the stuff you don't find on post mates or GrubHub or whatever which are all kind of like the bottom of the barrel so you come in at the very top end of those and it's like the delivery experience is gonna be you know the packaging is gonna be amazing and whatnot but you're gonna get what you just saw on the IG live and so you do these like 100 or 150 drops you know I’m for high-end stuff through the through the delivery network but you go live before to build up that that anticipation of QVC but for high-end cooking I like it I think we kind of merge the ideas that’s right it’s nice to have co-founders okay great I’ll incorporate it and we’ll get this off the ground so we all right great where should people find you if they like your your style they want to hear more of you if you want to hear more of me check me out on Twitter my name’s at Greg Eisenberg GRE G is e and B ERG check then just holler cool we’ll put it in the show notes - all right all right well I got a run but there’s been yeah good catching up yeah you too take care I’m at sea [Music]