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 describe your approach like okay you’re starting a company from scratch i would say like it’s just a question of priorities and i would say this versus priorities is building an awesome team they’re recruiting like high-level people and then like really setting a cultural foundation around that so that’s like the that’s the non like non-poking fun way of looking at it is like that’s that’s their priority so what’s your priority when you like start an endeavor [Music] did you see this email i sent you so i forwarded you uh and then like an investor update i got uh did you did you see that email i know from who uh well i can’t say but because i was sort of like you know this person’s smart they actually sold the company before which address did you send it to uh i don’t know maybe you’re like hustle one i don’t know but just see if you see an email from me anyways i’ll just explain to you you don’t even need to read the email basically this is like i was like this is so different than anything i would do and i was like if if this person wasn’t already successful like they did they built a cool company before this they are a smart person i’ve met them before but they um you know their their company updates or their investor updates are highly like um aspirational like so they haven’t launched yet the team is like it’s like oh the team is growing we have like i don’t know i don’t know how many people they have like 30 40 people now um we did our you know a second off site because remote work you know it’s hard to build our bonds and on our off site we played these games and we did this mission statement thing and here’s our values and then like on top of the values we’re thinking about like how to build a culture that’s really you know transparent collaborative and like again haven’t launched yet no revenue no nothing uh but like a professional photographer but yeah have a professional photographer the update is like super robust and like again on one hand i’m like when i read this i’m just like oh no like this is this is like it’s like watching a car drive off a cliff it’s like this is like all the parts of a startup except for the important parts um and like i know they must be doing the important they must be building the product too it’s not like they’re not uh but like i would never prioritize these things in my own companies i know you’re the same way where we’re both a little bit like you know brash and like you know you’re like no the office doesn’t have cups like we use these little kids yeah like can you put your hand like this yeah like they don’t call me sam hose water park or nothing like grab the hose and suck them down like if you need some i’ll bring it to your desk so you don’t have to waste time he’s convenient the hose is 18 foot i sprung for the big one and so i know you’re like me where like we do this like very bootleg company building and like you know oh like we look up and it’s like oh [ ] we have 18 dudes okay diversity yeah okay like we’re you know we’re gonna change that or it’s like the company culture is like oh yeah um come to my come to my house tonight i’m gonna cook for you guys i don’t know what like so can you guys just stop at safeway and just buy like a bunch of chips like everybody likes chips right it’s like yeah all right everyone like subscribe everybody go buy your favorite bag of chips that’s what we’re doing tonight like you know it’s like these kind of company building at the minimum and it’s like the as you go style and then i see this and i’m like either like either there’s just like many play styles that’s how you you can win in different ways or their way wrong or i’m way wrong i don’t know what do you think about this sort of thing i think that for a very particular type of person i wouldn’t be concerned about this type of email i think that you should most likely assume you are not that person not even like you but like anyone anyone they should all they should default today or not like if you are uh you know like uh some like big swinging dick some big deal here’s the analogy it’s like steve jobs didn’t like you know he was like a perfectionist he would like build it and then release the perfect product he wasn’t trying to iterate he didn’t ask consumers for feedback you know like early on early and often he was a product visionary genius okay but like to assume that you’re steve jobs-ish yeah that assume that you’re that is like dangerous that’s a dangerous path to go down i think this is a horrible idea you and i have a friend that started a company and when they were only two people him and the business partner they hired a ceo coach so they could help with culture building and uh that’s another sign but yeah i think and they would go to like retreats like for like right this type of stuff so no i think that this is not a good sign it’s not very good at all have you um i guess like what’s your describe your approach like okay you’re starting a company from scratch priorities and i would say this person’s when you like start an endeavor so yeah i’m doing that now so like i’m gonna start getting into it and we can talk about it but i’m gonna start getting into something and i’m thinking like all right is this something that i want to build to sell or is this something that i want to run forever because that actually kind of matters on how you set up your entity um so i think about like what do i want personally what type of life do i want and how long do i want to operate this for so that’s what would you do differently let’s say build for bill own forever or build a sale what’s the what’s the core difference well if you want to pay yourself from the business as you go an llc makes sense um if you want to sell the company and you’re willing to not pay yourself a little bit or you only want to pay yourself as a w-2 then you want to be a like a c corp and if you want to um i guess you could be an escort but if you want to sell your company in in five plus years and take advantage of qsbs which is ten million dollars of sac or sorry three million dollars of tax savings then you for sure want to be a c corp because you can’t get that on the other two so i i would think about like that like what type of structure do i want this to be of course i have a history of getting hits so like if you don’t have a history of like making money then like i wouldn’t even worry about this [ ] you know what i mean like i’ve proven to myself that like if i say i’m gonna do something i follow through you know i’m not you don’t want to be the nerd that just buys business cards before you even have anything done great point okay so that’s like literally a company structure but um and by the way i i think i told you this i one of the kind of like tax slash uh lawyer people that’s like kind of advising us they gave us a pretty great structure that gives us best of both they’re like just have a c corp that owns the business assets and that’s what will be eligible for qsbs down the road but then uh the c corp will pay your llc’s uh you know your llc’s for each you you know the co-founders uh like as a management thing and so you’re gonna get you’re gonna get personally paid out through your llc um and then but you still retain the long-term benefits of raising money or selling a c-corp yeah that’s but is the is the stock owned by the c-corp uh yeah so the company well c-corp is the one issuing the stock it has the stock that’s the stock that we want to so if you do a stock purchase and we can either we and then the llc doesn’t need to own that stock yeah that’s the right management company that’s like savvy [ ] that i would have to like look into make sure i’m doing it right because there’s a there’s a clock you need to own it for five years additionally what you could do is you can issue shares to family members in different trusts so many many people could take advantage of the qsbs and other uh long-term capital gains things like that so i think a little bit about that stuff um and i i think like what right now i’m every business that i’m thinking of i’m think about how many employees do i need to run this and what type of employee am i going to have to hire because when you go big with some ideas you’re going to hire these like smart ass ex harvard x facebook type of folks um you don’t have to but you know like that like that type of thing or is this like no i could actually hire this like 60 000 a year person but where are they going to be coming from and do i actually want or not want to work with that type of person right so i think about who am i going to have to empl employ and what the business model is going to be and so how stressful will that be advertising was really stressful because we had to go out and well you’re you’re in it now you got to hunt every single month and that could be a that can be a bit stressful and so now i’m looking at what it’s a little bit more recurring which is less stressful so i’m thinking a lot about business model i’m thinking about what type of lifestyle i want and i’m thinking about who i’d have to hire and you’re thinking about these things but that’s not your priority list right so like i mean like in terms of action right so that’s thinking and planning cool that’ll take you a couple days to be kind of noodling on that stuff in terms of how do you like that’s actually the hardest action that’s actually the hardest part is figuring out because that’s what ben said that’s figuring out what figure out what you want but in terms of the action i figure out i narrow it down to what’s the one thing that can make this fail or work and so let’s just say that i’m creating um uh let’s say i’m creating uh hubspot let’s say i’m hubspot a few years ago i’m creating hubspot so there’s like a few items that could that need to work or at least i would think they need to work in order to make happen so like can i recruit engineers is probably one um do people want this um and are my engineers even capable enough to create this and so if i’m hubspot well salesforce exists so i actually think that um people can build this like it’s i’m i’m able to build this product and number two i know a bunch of engineers and i’m pretty good at sales i think i can um i think i can recruit engineers so then then it’s like well but do people want this so that’s like the the like okay boom that’s it that’s the thing where it’s like i have to figure that out before i move on to the next steps and so i go out and try to solve that for a company like hubspot i would actually just do tons of phone calls and i would make a judgment call based on that for this like little small copywriting thing the try copy that dot com that thing that yeah i i just no with that i just put a pre-sale on there and i got five thousand dollars of pre-sales and i’ve with trends we had fifty thousand dollars of pre-sales so depending on how easy the transaction is if it’s a thousand dollars or less and transactional value i can probably create a landing page and pre-sell it we pre-sold this uh thousand dollar thing for trends and we’re gonna charge 10 grand for it when it came out we pre-sold i think we got a hundred thousand dollars so we got a thousand dollars from 100 different people to launch it and so if it’s under a thousand dollars my first step is selling it and giving me giving me myself one month to pull it off right yeah that’s exactly right i to me i simplify it like how do i make sure like how do i figure out do people want it step one do people want this and that’s either pre-selling talking to people just kind of my own gut do people want this second thing is where will i get customers okay i think i could probably get the first 10 customers from here first hundred customers from there but like on an ongoing basis do i have like a repeatable way to get customers and if i know they answer those two questions then i just go and i don’t do other things besides those two things i build the thing that they want and i give it to them and see if they want to see if they actually love it or if they just kind of like it and then i see if the way to get customers actually works and once i do those two things i don’t really want to do anything else besides those two things for like a long period of time and like all the other stuff raising money company culture hiring you know corporate structure naming branding uh packaging design all comes after yeah and you have to my opinion is not only do you have to not you have to like say i’m not going to worry about that at this point but you also have to say i’m actively actually going to avoid it so it’s like i’m going to like actively not care about it you know what i mean like you have to like and you kind of have to like take that stance um and i think there’s actually some products where the question is not do people want this so like there’s some stuff that i’ll create that i’m like well i already know people want this like i know they’re gonna buy it the question is like can i even get customers to this repeatedly um and then that’s actually gonna tell you a couple tactics that helped me with this yeah i wonder if you did something like this so i have learned that it’s actually best to be a little bit what i’ll call brutal about this okay so what do i mean by brutal about this it is very easy like when somebody hears that oh yeah you you first figure out do people want this and you try to like you know pre-sell it or offer it to them and see if they sign up for the wait list or they they pre-buy or whatever and then you figure out where am i gonna get customers repeatedly and like you test that marketing channel and like those only two things you do you say no to everything else that sounds so simple and then you like tell someone go try to build a startup and they’ll do everything else besides those two things that’s because that’s like the embarrassing hard stuff yeah because it’s the hard stuff and if they if it doesn’t work the car doesn’t move anywhere whereas you can do a whole bunch of other stuff and it feels like you’re moving but the reality is you’re not moving forward you’re moving sideways and so but at least moving feels like you’re moving and so people will gravitate towards those things so let me give you some examples um yesterday there was a tweet about furkan who was my my old co-founder my last startup and furcon is like you know a man of action you know a few words a lot of action and um you know like if you ever asked him like when do you think he could do this it is rare for him to not be like i should be able to ship it tonight now he only hits the tonight thing like i would say thirty percent of the time like thirty percent of the time nothing happens seventy percent of the time he gets like a crappy version that’s like not ready but like he’ll at 2am there will be a message from him be like here’s where i left it you know like 10 or 20 times he actually finishes the thing but he almost never says anything besides like yeah we should do that tonight um and so i learned that from him and every engineer we hired learned that from him we’re like you can’t give him a timeline that’s not tonight he’s if you say something besides tonight he’s just like what the [ ] are you talking about so he now has this new like incubator thing uh called f dot inc what was that picture of that dude it looked sexy as hell right like he bought this ten thousand square foot or at least ten thousand square foot space in fort mason it was beautiful when everybody was leaving san francisco and uh and then remote work shut down all the offices and schools and in-person events he was like the only buyer he was like yeah i want a big space uh i’m in the middle of san francisco in the best part of san francisco so he’s like you could see the water the bridge he got ten thousand square feet he’s like i’m gonna put a robotics lab a hardware lab desks i’m just gonna have a bunch of engineers come make stuff here you don’t have to pay me rent like just come back and it’s like beautiful like it looks like he’s been renovating it so it’s like it started with an empty blank shell and now it’s like looks awesome so does he make a story does he make money from that or is he just spending money hoping that one of the companies he he’s like he’s made a bunch of money and he’s also just like he invests in the incubator company and the companies that are there invested a bunch of them and like those are already doing well so somebody tweeted out somebody who’s working out of there they go uh one thing that furcon does around the office is if a developer spends like more than a day i think it’s like if you spend more than a day on localhost which is basically just means like you’re building your website project but you didn’t ship it to the world like nobody else besides your laptop can access the site if you spend more than a day he’ll just start calling you localhost until you ship it here stop using your name and he’ll just call you localhost because you oh you’re just local host now right like you don’t want people to use your products so you just all right local host you want to get lunch and like i wanted to tweet this out i knew people would take it the wrong way but like that is a style we kind of incubated at our last startup it’s sort of like bully management and it’s not that you’re bullying people it’s that you’re bullying your values it’s like how do i like live my values instead of just say we care about you know like building things fast it’s like no if you don’t build things and get it to customers you will get ridiculed here because that is not cool in our books you want cool you want respect then you got to do the thing we respect and like if you don’t we’re going to tease you until you do it i was giving a guy a hard time in the trends group because he posted hey so i’ve got six podcast episodes already recorded can someone give me an answer on which hosting platform is better and my i reply to go well that’s not really the important question the important question is why did you record six with like just release one and and right and just post it it was like well by the way so i started this podcast when i started this podcast what did i do i message you on facebook i go hey i’m starting a podcast that i think you know is gonna be awesome uh you know here’s the concept at that i was literally making it up as i was i made up the name made up the concept right there on the spot i knew i wanted to do a podcast generally and i go i go um you know you have this awesome audience but no audio content i’ll make great audio content if you’ll put in front of your audience and then i was like i’m gonna send you the first i’ll send you the first episode later today there was no first episode i then go book a studio record the episode and send it to you within 24 hours in order for you to like see that i’m like being legitimate it was live like uh two weeks later right yeah i was like okay this is ready to go like here it’s nobody’s listening to it but it’s in the store you can go listen to the podcast if you want to the guy was like we got we got six done and i’m like but that’s not the question that you d like the question is why do you have six done and done none live like that’s just crazy right because people default to they it’s embarrassing and it’s to post that [ ] so let me give you some other examples of this of being brutal about it uh at monkey inferno when when we were working there we would sometimes let like kind of interesting engineering guys like just hang out in our office and they would we’d just like just work from here no you don’t need to pay us it’s not a wework it’s like the sick office we got extra space just come here and work just bring some good energy and so these guys came and they uh they were working there they had this idea that was really cool and then they were like they would always ask us questions that were like that like uh this investor is interested well you know we’re thinking about raising money you know how should we think about this can you look at our debt can you do this and that i’m like and it’s like hey is your guys you guys product do you have your product built like do you have users it’s like it’s just like those are more important than this fundraising stuff but like i get it it’s flattering when an investor wants to give you money but like now that investor just took over your day like and now your day is all about that instead of like the main thing right like hey guys and whatever happens so then no so then they get they get into y combinator they’re like oh we got into y combinator and we’re like awesome those guys will keep you on track and then over the next six weeks it was like yo um you’re nyc like what’s going on what’s it like to be an aussie i’ve never done it like heard it’s awesome and they’re like oh yeah the office hours are great they’re bringing up this and that and we’re like hey so how many users you guys got and they’d be like um and they would like they didn’t know the number oh my god and me and fer khan just looked at each other like all right new rule if we ask you how many users you have how many daily active users you have you don’t know the number like 10 push-ups and they’re like haha we’re like no we’re serious about that and then they they still didn’t know for two more days and they had to look up the dashboard and we’re like all right bishop’s not working so we took a marker and we started writing a giant zero on the like the wall behind them and we’re like this is the number of users you have according to us because you don’t know so we’re just gonna keep putting zero here and like it’s your job to like change this to be like the number of users you have every day when you come to the office you’re gonna see this giant zero above your head until you change that and like again this worked and like all of a sudden they started thinking about how many users they had they wanted they didn’t want that giant zero hanging over their head and i’ve just seen many versions of this i’ve heard a story about peter thiel doing this too peter thiel’s values were all about like focus and so his thing was everybody at paypal when he was the ceo of paypal would have one thing that they were responsible for and the list could only be one they had one big thing to care about and if you try to talk to peter like hey peter um you know yeah the market you know the marketing stuff’s going well but had this idea around this feature he would literally just leave the room if you ever tried to speak to him about the non one thing you were assigned he would just ignore you he’s like oh that’s not a remember we decided what’s important so by definition this is not important so by definition i’m just not going to talk about non-important things i’m going to leave right like i don’t know how hard i don’t know how real that anecdote is because i wasn’t there but like let’s just say like directionally it’s true i think that that is like a really important way to like operate a young company what happened to the guys from your office they ended up getting into yc they ended up uh getting better they kind of grew but then they lost like like once the growth wasn’t like instant here’s my read of it they pivoted they pivoted and disbanded they’re all doing different things now one guy one guy’s like you know working on a different company another guy’s working on a different company and the third guy i’ve never heard i don’t know where he went and um probably found some cocaine somewhere and he had told me something once which was just like he was like you know once he was like like they were building a marketplace of supply and demand and like they the reason they we were all excited about them was because they got this huge amount of supply really quickly they just posted on reddit and like people really wanted the thing and so they started posting but the demand side was slow and he was like he’s like when i he’s like with the len with the supply side it felt like i stepped on a land mine i just like did one i took one step and it just blew up he goes i want the demand to feel like that too dude so on one hand i respected that on the other hand i was like dude sometimes you got to like figure out how to get no to work i don’t respect that and the reason why is you know we’re taught like you know people can change we can evolve and i’ve actually i think last year i actually made the decision i’m actually going to assume people don’t change the way you are is the way you are and you’re never changing and that that way of thinking how hopeful of you it’s actually been amazing because like i’ll meet someone and i’m just like oh you are a loser and you’re always going to be a loser you say you’re going to do something you don’t do it you don’t have big dreams you don’t work hard like innocent until people yeah yours is guilty until proven 100 and then i meet someone who’s just like a baller like steph smith i’m like oh well you’re just a winner so just like maybe sometimes you’re going to swing and miss but you’re always going to swing therefore i’m on board forever with anything you do because i know exactly how you are and people never change and you’re just a winner you win consistently whereas there’s a bunch of other people i there’s this great article it’s called losers exist avoid them and it’s the founder of bleacher report brian greenberg or goldberg and he writes a blog post about how he interviews people he’s like yeah see i just think that losers do exist and like not everyone’s a winner and i’m just gonna try really hard to avoid those types of people and his way of doing it is he would say i asked you about the bottom fourth of your resume so where you went to school so if i’m interviewing a candidate and she can’t tell me like passionately about something that she studied for four years it’s like oh you’re just a loser like you’re not into you you don’t care about philosophy even though you studied that for four years you’re you’re uninteresting and thus are a loser but you interview this other woman and she could like passionately tell you a story about something and it’s like well i don’t even care about philosophy but because you entertained me like you clearly you are curious you’re a winner so anyway uh my way of thinking as of late is just uh people never change my sister has a great phrase unless you guys uh people will say that people don’t change they change for the worse so her default is even worse yeah this person will change over time they’re going to get worse they’re going to decay basically and like harden in these like bad patterns until proven otherwise um i think that’s actually a pretty good way of thinking about things dude can i tell you about this last thing like this experiment i’m doing that i think relates to this which is like losers exist how to avoid them so here’s my it’s a good line right it’s brilliant here’s my my inversion of that winners exist here’s how to attract them and so um i put out this thing the other day i tweeted out this i was like 50 000 thing yeah i was like yo we just made 25 grand uh like a wire just came in for milk road for 25 grand i did not think that was gonna work i want to give it all i want to give it away and i said that you know crypto has is full of speculators there’s too many speculators not enough builders so if you want to build something here’s the i will give away uh one one each which is like three thousand dollars i was like i’ll give you 3000 no strings attached no equity to build whatever you want like you’re you scratch your itch and um i just want to give it to builders here here’s a link to apply um go and two kind of amazing things happen of how like winners exist here’s how to attract them first a bunch of people who are winners were like hey great idea i’ll put in money too it was just an excuse to touch base with like a bunch of these so the prize pool is more than doubled already and like now we’re giving away more money to more people because people are like oh this is cool it was like the calm guy it was fur khan yeah the founder of com furcon was like we’ll match it and then like there’s more people but we were like hey let’s just give away this first batch and then like if this is cool we’re gonna like we’ll do more we can just grow this into a self-sustaining like builder grant it’s philanthropy but like i don’t instead of charity i’d rather give to like people building [ ] and like i’m sorry to you know people who are like no there’s people suffering out there like yes but also like this is where i want to give money to is something like this um and by the way the whole like a wire came in today that was all [ ] like that was just like for the story like we just i was just like i want to give away this i’m willing to give away this much money people need to realize that lying for the sake of a story is actually okay have you remembered the book that we read uh about storytelling yes which one story were the story story worthy and he was like he’s like just lie like for example if you’re talking about like yeah so i was in the car at my teacher and she started flirting with me like and he was like well there’s actually like three people in the back seat but like i couldn’t say that because that wrote the story the thing was like uh don’t lie to ad lie to omit details yeah details just omit details that don’t add to the point of the story and um and so yeah but mine was like i kind of just framed it as like oh a wire just came in and because everybody’s a wire could have came in oh it kind of came in and it did come in in pieces like the money did come to me somehow you received and so like so but basically i told like this came on a whim so i told you we heard that new guy safwan and i was like cephalon uh sappho is 22 i think and he’s awesome and i just like having winners around me like young awesome energetic people who want to like make [ ] happen and i was like yo um i want more people like you around i’m not going to hire all of them but like how do i just get more like you know what those peter thiel did that thing where he like took like young people’s blood and like put it in his body i wanted to do a legend yeah i want young young blood in my in my body how do i how am i gonna do that so i was like all right let me just put out a grant for builders this will attract people who a can build things b like know what one theory one eth is and like want one ether like and the three thousand dollars like mean something to them that this could like unlock like a month worth of like it’s like an excuse to go build that thing right so what happened almost a thousand applications came in in a week and how long was an application it was like a form that was like you know uh who what’s your i was like what’s your story i was just like kind of open-ended and it was like uh what do you want to build give me the tweet pitch of it why do you want to build it um you know what’s your handle what your address with your email what blah blah blah and so people wrote in and i’ll share the air table with you it’s kind of amazing all right so there’s like a bunch of junk we shortlisted um like about 150 people out of the like close to a thousand as like strong like this person’s kind of like either their story or their idea is strong and then we like kind of got to the finalists which are like these 35 people that are like okay these 35 people they all seem like kind of worthy of getting this and we’re ultimately going to pick like i don’t know 15 or something for the [ ] for this this batch of grants and um and i think doing this like this whole thing is going to take me i think maybe three days total to like of attention to pull off but what it’s going to create is like just a bunch of young awesome energy young being just like not your literal age but like more like people who like psychograms somebody who yeah it’s like somebody who has an idea has energy has optimism um and like doesn’t think of all the reasons they shouldn’t do it instead they like uh yeah [ ] yeah apply i’m gonna do this and so they’re gonna be around me and i like i i think this is gonna be so roi positive in the long run that it’s like insane dude i’ve done these things before and i think you did it before when you gave a business to someone right yeah and i’ve never had it work out yeah it just kind of like went on the back shelf or they just kind of forgot about it yeah it could be uh and like you know that’s why the main filter is like are you gonna actually do anything or are you just talking about it or like is your day job or your you know your student status whatever gonna just trump this and you never get around to like actually making [ ] happen that’s the number one criteria here um but dude the stories are like amazing of like who writes in it’s like it just reminds you of like oh wow the world is way bigger than the like the amount of people that i interact with on a day-to-day basis are you giving the money all to one person no no no there’s gonna be like 15 people who get the grant and it’s like a few grand each yeah all right well i’m eager to see what’s happening what’s gonna happen when are you gonna decide uh we’ll decide like in the next five days who gets it and then we’re just like setting up like we’re just gonna run the whole thing you know just like a telegram group or something like that and uh and yeah we’ll see what happens but guys my point is do things that create that like attract winners to you um is this which is the opposite lesson of like losers and how to avoid them that’s great advice i think actually slightly less great advice is winners also exist here’s how to get near them get around them get them around you and like figure out different ways to like get them around you this is one that like you know not everybody can afford to like do a grant program or whatever but like yeah but if i had no if i had no money i could have hustled and created this grant program instantaneously i could have said i could have emailed you know 50 people and been like hey will you put up a thousand dollars um for this here’s all the benefits you’re gonna get and which is how by the way i hired safwan he initially emailed me saying hey you should do a grant program here’s five reasons why and i was like oh that’s actually a great idea will you do all the work he said yeah i’ll do all the work did you ever read uh uh san francisco’s subreddit no all right so i used to go to the subreddit for san francisco all the time and there was this guy it started like five years ago he just said hey everyone and he posted a picture of himself holding a beer he goes i’m at this bar i forget it was in hey ashbury i’m at this bar come down and your first drink’s on me and he just posted that and like people made fun of him and then he did it again the next week and he did this for literally like 60 weeks in a row and then he like became famous for the guy he’s like oh you wanna have a good time this guy seems really nice everyone goes to talk so he’s a really cool dude it’ll buy your first drink whatever you can’t if you do that with like building cool [ ] it actually works out quite well where it’s like hey i’m building this thing tag along for the ride uh it tends to work well the guy does it all the time it’s great it’s uh he like became famous for like oh come have first drinks on me i’m down here i wonder how much he spent dude we used to do these mixers these roommate mixtures uh in san francisco and we would like only spend five hundred dollars but we were like the man like we were like the most popular people for a long time we did it every week for like two years well hey what were you doing 500 bucks went to doing what i bought everyone beer at a bar or at a bar you’d host them at a bar and i would just like hey can i get two dollar beers and i just come every week and i’ll spend at least 500 and i’m like all right cool and so i was like all right here’s my card stop it at 500. it was pretty sick can we turn the ship around we need to circle back business term let me tell you about a cool company that i just discovered and the guy told me to tell you hey so dude i don’t know if you know i don’t know if that was like he’s a fan or if or if he actually knows you have you it’s called uh so i i am i’m linking to it in here in the doc i’m highlighting it right now it’s called um getcyberleads.com have you ever seen this no who so who’s the guy uh well i don’t i don’t know i don’t even know his name i just dm’d him on uh alex alex westco okay uh yeah i don’t think i know this person he said tell sean i said hey alex west is his name i didn’t know if he was saying it as like a way that he knows you must just be a fan all right let’s get cyber leads the reason it’s cool is it’s just him and basically what it is is you pay let’s see how much is it is it so you pay between 100 and a thousand dollars a month for a different a bunch of different versions but basically you every month just one time every month he sends you a thousand plus hand-picked companies that just raised a lot of money and are highly likely to go and look and look to outsource whether it’s technology or design they’re looking to outsource stuff and if you’re an agency owner you sign up to this and every month you just get a bunch of new leads and the lead list it includes the ceo’s name the ceo ceo’s contact information what this person is likely to outsource where they’re located how big they are and how much or how much money they just raised and the reason why this is cool is because it’s so freaking simple very clear value it’s just one person it’s making three hundred thousand dollars a year so or sorry yeah three hundred thousand dollars a year so it’s making um in march he said he did twenty he did twenty thousand dollars a month with a net profit of seventeen thousand dollars it’s now gone up to like 30 000 a month but i just thought this was unique and i love these types of businesses because the value proposition is so clear if you just one of these things closes a deal it’s worth it and i actually think that you could do this for a bunch of different verticals you’ve never seen this before no i’ve never ever seen this how does he do the like what they’re likely to outsource is he just guessing basically so i asked him something i go are you doing this hand-picked he goes yeah every report takes me out uh a hundred dollars to do the whole leads list and he sends one email per month and if you go to the website and you click live demo uh you can basically see what he sends you it’s it’s just like an air table an air table table uh and you can kind of see all the information wow that’s kind of cool all right this is pretty cool right yeah good for him um and i it’s just him and he’s like i was like can this scale he goes i think i can get a million dollars a year pretty soon and i’m not sure what i can do after that but i think just me this could get a million dollars and honestly i totally agree i think this is a beautiful business i think this is really really cool so he said okay let’s just look at his march numbers all right so he said march revenue 20 000 cost 3000 a month net profit 17k profit margin 85 last march for example he was basically five times less so revenue was four thousand and now it’s twenty thousand and so this is pretty good this is what basically basically one guy and a va can run this yeah one guy and one guy and a va can run this thing and it’s providing like you said it’s providing clear value in the sense that like if i pay for this i’m likely to get more customers and make more money so it’s like it pays for itself and like it pays for itself is actually a pretty valuable thing which is like there’s a bunch of things in my businesses that i’m like uh yeah i want to do that but you know i kind of have these other priorities and i was like well i really do just need to look at all these things as like can i hire somebody and it be immediately value like you know a creative in the next six to 12 months because that job that i’m hiring them for is not to just make my life easier it’s to literally generate revenue and profits and so like there is no way that if i hire this person if they are competent this has to be an roi positive thing to do and you know the only thing i need to consider is like do i have the do i ha have the bandwidth to hire this person and so um and so to me you know like that’s and then there’s products like that too this is a product like that where it’s like yeah i paid 99 or whatever 199 a month whatever this thing costs and like if i can’t make more than 199 off this like that’s just my own incompetence at that point it’s sick man it’s really sick and so it says it says there’s a thousand leads if you go to pricing for the prices range from two hundred dollars to two thousand dollars and it says let’s see it says you get uh a thousand leads maybe that includes like all the past months uh it’s pretty this is pretty cool by the way check out this tweet i put in the chat uh this is a good example of like content that’s not like um it’s like this is the easy easy mode of creating content that people resonate with so this is just a beautiful tweet all right so this guy tweeted out december 21st he goes one year again one year ago today i was fired for my job making two thousand dollars a month today i’m making six thousand a month with my own business and they post more importantly he posts a screenshot of his like calendars planner and it says fired extension point last day at work that’s like on the 21st on the 22nd day one is self-employed man expectation point and it’s just like you kind of root for the person and you know what’s in this content it’s nothing but it’s like by showing the raw like planner uh and like what i wrote to myself that day like these are like these these have like an emotional impact on people and i think that’s one thing that most people get wrong in content is that content is about emotion not information and something like that it generates like a feeling of like rooting for the that is like most people i know are really smart and so they try to like outsmart everybody on content and so you don’t need to outsmart everybody you need to trigger an emotional response whether it’s outrage it’s like compassion it’s like um you know awe-inspiring whatever it is and uh this is a great simple example of how you can make somebody root for you is you know a little tweet like this this guy’s a good find i think he kind of so there’s this guy that for contacts for the listener there’s a guy named peter lovells who i’ve been begging to get on the pod and he keeps like saying yes and then ghost and yeah so but anyway this guy peter lovells he’s not exactly a one-man operation i think now he’s got contractors but he’s got like four or five different businesses they’re basically all the same thing like job boards collectively doing like four million or or so in revenue and he posts like cute cool insightful content on twitter and blogs this guy alex west is kind of like in the same ballpark as that as that guy peter levels right like he’s it’s like cool well designed it looks like he’s like a like a nomad as well uh but uh somebody needs to make the list i feel like steph smith needs to do this she needs to make the definitive list of these like solopreneur freelancer digital nomad basically like the peter levels this guy where it’s like yeah this person’s on some journey they’re trying to get to 100k a month in like personal revenue but they have these principles like they’re not trying to raise money they’re not trying to build a big team they live nomadically they’re like just a good enough engineer and just good enough designer and just a good enough copywriter to make it happen and they’re like doing it all in public and like there’s like 20 of these people that i found on twitter all of them are entertaining to me and i feel like most people just don’t know who those people are and like actually like a good service would be to just aggregate them and put it in a newsletter be like hey i’m following all these people doing this thing check this out this guy posted an update about this thing and like you can just make a newsletter following their work and probably like you know build an audience of 50 to 100 000 people following you following them which is sort of you know meta do you ever read indie hackers uh i don’t personally go there much but i have for sure in the past indie hackers is awesome it’s started by his two guys cortland and channing um they’re twins yeah i’ve become friends with channing over the years basically indeed it was like a forum for this weird genre of entrepreneurs called indie hackers but they sold it to stripe and i have a feeling that each brother will make in the world of 20 million dollars when stripe goes public i wouldn’t be surprised if it were a little more but i can’t i actually think it’s above 20. they’ve never told me i just i’m guessing because because of when they sold to and if they sold for a million dollars it would have gone up by like that much so anyway uh i on their website they list interviews and they list all the revenue of the companies and it’s pretty amazing and you can sort by revenue and you can just find like a list of companies that basically you want to like get inspired by or copy right yeah that’s cool uh and by the way just look at their traffic like their traffic shows about a million million to a million and a half monthly visitors so you know good good job by them of like this is like real scale and in fact this is probably like like for milk road i should go tell our story on indie hackers and product hunt i could probably add 10 000 new subscribers with one day of one day of like just crafting a story that goes on just posting on both of these i completely agree i’ve done it both times we did it for trends we made a lot of money i like it hopspot allows all our teams to work together seamlessly so no one’s falling overboard unless we want them to um okay what else you got i don’t know you tell me what do you got i see what another says wait i have a question all right yeah let’s let me ask you i think i see this question you’re about to ask me all right you ever seen those movies where they are it’s about like drug lords and [ ] and do you find and you see just like a normal guy in a boat off the coast of florida and he finds like a brick of cocaine yeah like if you’re like seeing that like premise my question to you is if you because i’m reading this book uh have you seen the movie no country for old men um so it’s like a movie i’ve heard of it but you know what it is that name to me sounds so boring that i will never click on that no it’s not a boring one at all it’s like a thriller but i’m reading the book and basically the premise is this guy like comes across a drug deal gone bad everyone’s dead at the scene and there’s two and a half million dollars as well as a truck full of cocaine he takes the two million the drug guys look for him and that’s the that’s the book and my question is if i came across that cocaine what would i do and what would you do if you came across like i have no idea how cocaine is measured but like that movie scene where you come across like a hat yeah or many bricks i guess what do you what do you do with it take a picture put it on instagram be like oh my god get the social clout and get the hell out of there i am not picking up the cocaine i’m not becoming a drug dealer i’m not gonna figure out how to flip this you could also replace that with like oh i find uh you know a large supply of copper wires which have a like decent market value i don’t know i’ve actually been down this path before once i think i talked about this on the pod where we met a guy who had this giant comic book card collection yes and like we had this opportunity to buy it for like probably like 10 cents on the dollar of what it was like what the individual like some of all the parts would have been but we had to like figure out like what the hell to do it’s like here’s a warehouse you now have the cost of this warehouse and you have all this stuff and none of it’s graded and none of it’s like categorized none of it’s inventoried it’s like you know you gotta go do that like you know american picker style like junkyard flip type thing for this stuff and when i kind of like i got excited at first because it was like it would have been a like multi-million dollar flip if we had done it how did that end it ended with me realizing this is not worth the time and energy to go do this like this is so much energy well so the story was basically you came across a guy who owned a warehouse and he used it really old guy really old guy who was like finally ready to like sell his thing he’d been collecting for 30 years like tens of millions of like baseball cards or something yeah like he had millions of cards most of which are useless but for sure some of it is valuable and like the question is like and you had to buy the whole lot you had to buy the whole like thing and then what did you do with it deal with it i think he did no nobody bought it because again nobody wants this headache and like even the discount like i was like okay let’s say this is discounted you know based on our estimates this thing’s discounted like 90 even at a 90 discount the like mental overhead the literal overhead and like some people out there like dude i would have done it and like you should go do it if you have no better options get you should go do this but for me i was like wow this is a lot of work so i would not i wouldn’t do it in the legal case let alone the illegal case of figuring out how to flip these bricks of cocaine is kind of my answer what’s your answer to that it depends what stage of life i’m in um like all right so let’s take it by decade you’re 20 i’m 20. and like one of these bricks if could they be worth like two million dollars let’s say the whole thing is worth uh you know six million dollars if you if you you know sold it all at like street value so let’s start at the end of you having all this cash let’s say you have as you know we do we do move straight to the end i’m moving straight to the end assuming that i had six million dollars in cash i wouldn’t even know what to do with that if you buy a if you buy a if you buy property with six million dollars in cash how can you even do that are you even allowed to do that i mean where would you keep that money yeah i don’t know what you would do you’d have to like figure out how to like launder it basically to like legitimately own it or you’d have to figure out a way to like do some you know off uh off over-the-counter transaction of like gold bars or something else or do you just live a cat like a cash life forever yeah you go under the mattress you just pay for everything with tens of twenties uh this is breaking bad right this is the plot of breaking bad basically so what would i do if all right if i was 20 and i found it i i i don’t even think i’m taking it i don’t even know what i would do i i would not be maybe when i was 20 maybe i wouldn’t be opposed to trying something but i literally would have no idea where to start where would you even start i don’t know people who do i don’t even know i don’t know people who do cocaine i don’t hang out with anybody but you’re in the moment you have to make a split decision in the heat of the moment i would have bet we’ll figure it no i’d have to call the cops i think i would call the police i wouldn’t know what to do i wouldn’t even know how to execute this yeah that okay so that’s one uh if you’re not gonna do in your 20s you’re not going to do it in your 30s yes i don’t i don’t think it matters what stage of life you’re in uh there is a couple other you know methods here right so like let’s say you’re in this what was the the old white country for old men or something like that like you know basically the guy finds the briefcase if i find that briefcase i’m taking 15 of the cash out i’m leaving the rest there because who’s really going to chase me down for the 15 percent so i think i get like you know 80 you know i get like really none of the work is the easiest so i did the math so the book was set in 1979 and it was two and a half million dollars which is the equivalent of like eight million dollars today so finally eight million dollars today and this is set in el paso texas and the guy lives on a trailer like a mobile home so seven million dollars might as well be 700 million dollars it’s just a world world-changing thing if i’m that guy like that’s easy you just find it you get the car and you just never go back home and you just you’re just gone yeah but i’m i’m what am i gonna do sleep you know with one eye open every night wondering what’s gonna happen if i see that 2 million i’m taking 247 000 out no they’re they’re never going to they’re going to not even understand why 247 we’re 247 000 short and i’m living a happy calm lifestyle just as my life was but with an extra 247 000 that’s my that’s my move that’s so funny i i don’t think i could take 15 i would yeah i would definitely take the whole thing i was thinking about this the other day this came up uh i watched survivor yeah i’m like still watching you know season 48 of whatever survivor that’s that’s going on and and shout out to the survivor casting directors i’m i’m getting in shape so that i can go on survivor soon um but they have this new twist where they have this thing you find normally it’s like survivor you go out in the wild and they have this this little prize called the immunity idol if you find this thing you’re safe from the vote you won’t get voted out this week so people always want that thing and they when they find it it’s this joyous moment they unroll unscroll the scroll and they’re like yes i found the thing but they added a twist this time which it says on the top of the scroll it says beware like this is called a beware advantage like you know there could be something good this this comes with power but also you know some drawbacks and they say you could just put this down right now and you can go on with the game as it is or if you open this you have to you know you get the power but you get the disadvantage as well you get the advantage and disadvantage 100 of the time they open up the scroll and i’m just thinking there i’m like you know the game theory here is that this is going to put me in a sticky spot they’re not giving me something that’s gonna give me like it’s mostly great with a tiny downside it’s gonna be like potentially great later with a downside today right like if i’m the game that’s how i’m organizing this game but everybody picks it up and everybody opens it and i thought what are the things in life that are like this which is like you pick it up you know you shouldn’t do this you know this has like drawbacks but you can’t resist you just do it anyways because you know yellow and like i started thinking about like what that is in real life right like there’s that with food like most junk food is that way you know pleasure now pain later um you know but what are the other areas of life you know what is the career version of this this is like that you got that really great job um but like now like you know you were thinking about maybe you wanted to start your own business or do your own thing but then you get this like you know job at mckinsey and you’re tempted to take it because it has the prestige and it has the money but it also comes with a sticky trap of like this is for sure going to set you on a path for multiple years in a direction that you don’t think you want to be your end goal but you do it anyways and so i’m now looking out for these what i’m calling the beware the beware advantages of life the big takeaway here though is with you wanting to go on survivor so let me tell you about something so there’s this podcast called dead eyes do you know what dead eyes is no never heard of all right so years ago tom hanks was the producer of band of brothers you know it was like the tv show on hbo about world war ii and there was this one comedian who was like an extra of one of the guys who was shooting or something and tom hanks like looked at him and then whispered in the producer or whispered in his assistant’s ear and said like hey hey man you gotta go uh tom hanks apparently said that he had quote dead eyes and he wanted him off the set like he just didn’t like him as an extra something that probably happens all the time he just thought and so flicks yeah it wasn’t working out and so this this guy created a podcast called dead eyes and the whole podcast was questioning why he got kicked off like a beta brother that same guy okay yes the whole podcast the whole premise is like he’s interviewing people on band of brothers like asking like why do you think i got kicked off like what like let’s talk through this dude how did you find this sounds like the most obscure of the obscure well eventually tom hanks goes on it oh my god that’s amazing and he lands tom hanks and he comes on out again as a guest and he explains like what what was happening from his perspective and what we need to do with you wait hold on what was the explanation what did he say or he was just like i don’t remember he yeah he was like i i don’t like i’m sorry it wasn’t let me see he’s like hey this has haunted you for 24 years yeah he was like this i guess it just it just wasn’t even like a he didn’t really think about it i believe apparently he said that like it maybe even it was like a mistake like maybe he said the wrong thing uh to the wrong person but like it was just it just dismissed him like it wasn’t even like an issue in his life and this guy has this whole podcast called dead eyes you’ve not heard of this it’s hilarious no that’s that’s hilarious what were you gonna tie that in you said i should do something well so with you wanting to be on on survivor we need to like have you go through the whole process and you’re likely going to get turned down at the audition but we got to like do like a whole series of episodes of you going through this process of getting on survivor and documenting it and getting off that’s a great idea that’s a great idea and we like what you need to do is comment get the person who does casting for survivor and act like you want them to come on as a guest and we could do it just to like humor them but like on air be like so can shawn audition yeah i have auditioned before already so i’ve been rejected once uh so i already got that under my belt now oh no we gotta have them on and we’ll do it like funny like you know i think i said this earlier like wouldn’t it be funny if we just started kissing right now like wouldn’t that be hilarious like that’s gotta be it’s good if i was on yeah like it’s just hilarious can you imagine if i came on the survivor and if it would happen yeah is that allowed yeah would it be funny dude what is the exact line though wouldn’t it be funny what would happen we just kissed right now maybe there’s that there’s that one and then there’s the other one that gets me so bad is like you’ve heard have you heard this joke where it’s like and then everybody started clapping okay so basically this is it’s like a recurring joke that comes in when like if you tell a story yeah like it’s like when somebody tells a story and by the end of the story you’re like you’re sort of like wait what was the point of the story then you realized the point of the story was them saying them just saying how cool they were in a way that was like not even like the stories kind of exaggerated or not really believe it’s like yeah we’re at the restaurant and then this guy was choking and then like but like nobody heard him but i just saw it i was on my way to the bathroom and i just kind of like you know whatever just did the heimlich but i’d only ever watched a video and like you’re like what is the story where is this going why are you telling me this and then and then you basically like it’s an awkward silence at the end of the story and they’re like and then they basically they realize the story didn’t do it and so they have to one-up it and just say and so it’s it’s this genre of stories these there and then everybody started clapping stories my verses also crack me up when i see someone get stuck in a story like that i’m like oh yes it’s happening they got themselves trapped in a and then everybody started clapping story and they’re about to start exaggerating because the story itself didn’t hit and now they’re stuck my version of that is and then i found five dollars yeah exactly dude okay so i have a crazy story like this somebody tweeted this at us they loved your orlando bloom story by the way oh that’s i mean that’s the one where i did i didn’t want to get stuck in that that spot but that story is all true so so somebody tweeted at this this at us and they go this seems like it’s up your alley and that’s when you know you’re winning when somebody sends you something really weird and they say i think this is up your alley and it’s 100 of my alley this is my home address is in this alley and so he sent me this post and it’s like a forum post and he goes what i’m doing is insane so here’s what it says it goes i have a bot running 24 7 that is buying and selling for zero target profit just to just to waste the irs’s manpower and money i print and send the irs all the documentation about every one of these trades in paper form so that they can’t automate it or like you know just like get through my my report in an easy way he goes i will sometimes mix blank pages double print ghost print use mark use black and white i will number the pages and put them in out of order i will have people randomly scribbling drawings of dicks into the into the pages um i will send it as a whole palette of paper trades i even to send this palette i have to hire a guy with a forklift just to send it um and i want it to be in a pallet so that is maximum actually like troublesome for them and then it says like you know um is this real yeah i don’t know if it’s really nice it’s like some forum posting goes this cost me thousands of dollars every year and i make sure to send them an invoice so that they know that i’m paying real money on top of the pallet that i’ve sent them um so whoever’s in charge of this knows that i’m wasting the equivalence of two months of their wage on this asinine behavior on top of wasting their time and i was just like this needs to go to petty court it’s like who are you why are you so troubled and like okay you know if you just wasted a little bit of your own time that’s offensive to me but if you waste all of your time and money at this point it turns into respect from my point of view and like i don’t know what your mission is i don’t even really understand it but i i respect the mission-drivenness of this like of this initiative there’s no game it’s just mutually assured destruction on both parties it’s like have you seen our uh south park where cartman is dressed up like steve jobs at the at the keynote and he’s walking around and he goes um instead of saying thank you he just says [ ] you [ ] you [ ] you and the whole presentation is ways that they’re wasting money and uh he’s sitting around walking around the stage and he goes but we didn’t just stop there you see we moved the couch from the left part of the room to the right part of the room and the whole presentation is just how they just reorganized the furniture in his office that quarter that was all they did with all their money and this is a good example of that you