Episode of My First Million with Sam Parr and Shaan Puri.
Transcript
Note: This transcript was auto-generated from YouTube captions. It may contain errors and lacks speaker identification. A full Gemini audio transcript will replace this.
Kind: captions Language: en i don’t care if i only had a hundred thousand i’m spending 50 000 because this is the whole point of working really really hard is spending my money on stuff that will make my family happy and they’ll talk about forever i feel like i can rule the world i know i could be what all right welcome to the episode we actually talked about like maybe eight legitimately wonderful ideas we talked about privacy startups we talked about ghost.org which is a wordpress competitor that we actually think is going to be a 100 million dollar plus company we talked about bird flow.io which is a new business that just started like two weeks ago that’s quite interesting what else did we talk about uh we talked about ikea hacking which is the art of souping up and upgrading your basic furniture into something dope using ikea parts and what you know that little trend that might actually be something that you could build a little build a business around this is going to be an interesting episode because we actually rattled off a ton of stuff it just went from thing to thing to thing to thing uh damn sam tells you why you should be spending three times as much on your engagement ring as you’re planning to five times as much i spent five times as much and i don’t regret it at all and i actually think everyone should so listen to the end that’s the uh that bits at the very end at 54 minutes i think give it a listen and also go and click that subscribe button on itunes and that follow button on spotify because we’re going to be launching some more episodes that are interesting next week and go subscribe to the youtube channel we just had our first video that had a hundred thousand views on youtube so we’re getting big over there let’s do it um all right sean grab your iphone for me i’m gonna talk to you about something but first i’m going to show you so all right go to your iphone go to settings type in privacy and click privacy type in privacy all right all right and if you’re following along on an iphone do this for me this isn’t like a track that’s like a real thing all right click location services and then scroll all the way to the bottom where it says system services yep all right after you click that scroll halfway down to where it says significant locations do you see that yeah click that and it asks you for your password probably it just face id’d me all right all right now your lotus your latest location it might say vegas or nevada or something click it yep so what you’re going to see is my precise location your precise location is tracked forever so since you used your phone and you could clear your history but you see how it’s like tracking all your stuff by the way i i clicked it it says arrived via 27 minute drive it’s like it knows exactly when i arrived and how i arrived because it used apple maps or like it uses a bunch of stuff it’ll tell you like how you got there it’ll tell you what apps you’re using when you’re getting there it’ll tell you all types of interesting stuff now the reason i’m talking about this is i want to tell you a story about privacy and i wanted to show you like why this is crazy because you like knew that like if i told you like intellectually you’d be like yeah of course oh your iphone tracks you yeah of course uh so i just wanted to show you it is weird to see it like that it’s weird to see it and the reason i’m bringing this up is i read this story about this guy named kyle mcdonald and in 2011 he basically did this story where he well actually let me tell you this first so he was interested in in privacy and he thought he read this line and it said can you imagine living a life without any private information where with no private bank statements no private files on your computer um it’s hard to understand right but what if you actually ask that question a little bit differently so do you trust the government do you trust large banks do you trust facebook do you trust google do you trust these large entities with your information because that’s kind of like the same thing it just asks a little bit differently and so he did this first test where he created this thing called key tweeter and every 140 characters on his keyboard automatically tweeted uh so like there was no privacy because he wanted to see what was the world like without privacy and he took it a step further and so he went to an apple store in brooklyn and they had 50 computers and he installed an app on all 50 computers that automatically took a picture every like 30 or 60 seconds and any time it detected a face it would send him the pictures and he published it as like an art exhibit an art thing of like look at what people look like when they’re looking in computers at a laptop in apple and after publishing that the secret service raided his home uh and apple apple contacted the service they raided his home they took his computers they did a thorough investigation they declined to prosecute but they definitely could have done something and i thought that that was amazing when i started thinking about that i’m like isn’t that crazy that i am i would be i would be upset too if someone took my picture i wouldn’t be upset to call the police but i would be upset i wouldn’t like it isn’t that crazy that i’m upset about that but i like type in all my information uh throughout the web or i let someone track me and it’s quite an interesting way and i thought what’s another way and so i discovered this little hack i’m like when i see that it actually changed my perception and so there’s this issue going on where i actually think these privacy startups are going to be huge in 10 20 30 years now my problem that i’m having personally is i’m actually struggling to find different solutions that need to like different ways to solve or different problems that need to be solved but i agree with this general premise of like when i just did that experiment where i showed you your tracking stuff and when i just like read this guy’s uh art story i was like yeah i’m totally not okay with that i don’t like that right but you’re trying something out that was like this you go say your tweet you go imagine if you walked into go ahead yeah so let’s just say that you’re walking around the street and a company walks you into their office and they go check this out and they give you a file cabinet you open this file cabinet and there’s 10 000 pictures of you and your family taken throughout the last five years and you had no idea those pictures were being taken how would you feel about that of course you’d feel violated now they would say they would say look you were in public and i would say yeah i know i i was in public i can’t be too angry but i still don’t feel right about this now that’s exactly how what happens with your data you know that you’re opting into things you know you’re you’re consenting but sometimes you don’t realize what you’re getting into and you if you actually truly knew what was happening you might regret it and i think that the next generations of humans uh like the guys who are five and ten years old now i actually think that they’re not gonna like this stuff and we’re gonna see a lot of products that come out that fight it because i think that like when you think of like oh wow you used to be able to smoke in a restaurant in the 1990s i mean i remember when i was a kid i could smoke in a restaurant or you you’d be smoking a restaurant now we think that’s asinine i think that the privacy stuff now we’re actually going to look back in 20 years and be like i can’t believe that that was you’re able to do that so anyway i wanted to start it off with that uh that experiment i like that uh i like that story a lot and i’m with you we’ve talked about different quote-unquote privacy-focused startups ranging from like privacy.com to duckduckgo and how that’s actually privacy.com by the way become like a real kind of like sort of competitor to google in a obviously in a niche but hey it made it it made it out after you know 10 years against google um and we’ve talked about different different versions of this whether it’s browsers uh phones a lot of the crypto stuff is based on these these same principles right like you own your data um and you just you custody it yourself rather than trusting this like kind of central company to do to hold it for you and um so i’m definitely with you that i think that some really big companies gonna be there because people really give a [ ] about this and you could tell people give a [ ] about this like it’s ironic you were saying go to your apple iphone settings because if you want if you go down the street in san francisco you’re gonna see huge billboards and it just says privacy and it’s just apple and there’s a phone blocking out your face like this like somebody holding a phone and you can’t see their face and that’s their whole ad and that’s their differentiation that’s their shtick about like what they care about at the super bowl they had that ad of somebody just looking at their phone like typing like kind of like a text message to somebody they’re just laughing uncontrollably but they never explain what it is because it’s like hey that’s your information and um and so apple is like basically bet the farm on privacy as like their core attribute that they’re going to be providing to customers like the number one value prop now and but you know here you go you go into you go into your phone settings and it’s like hey yeah we’ve tracked your location and you can share that and here’s here’s all the different services you’ve shared that with um you know here and they are trying to fight back like you’ve you’ve probably heard the facebook stuff that happened but if you’re not advertising on facebook you you shouldn’t actually realize how big of a deal it was you should explain what’s going on because even i i don’t own an advertising business anymore but i did even i was a little bit under under educated but it’s actually a an incredibly big deal and this is an incredibly big deal for a consumer but also as business people last week we talked about this inflection with the ncaa athlete thing this is actually a new inflection it actually helps guys like me who owned an advertising business but i don’t not anymore right yeah so so basically facebook’s this you know obviously it’s the advertising juggernauts facebook and google and with facebook facebook relied on having obviously detailed targeting information about you people always said oh it’s creepy um you know your iphone my iphone’s listening to me and uh and by the way do you know the explanation of why of how that works it’s like dude i was just talking to my friend about this and then you know and now it’s showing up in my my facebook ads and like the reason why is because your your friend has searched for a thing or interacted with a product and then they know that you were close to your friend your phones are in close proximity and so they start showing you ads that have been like your friends that your friends have been interested in because they know that that works and there’s a chance that you had talked about it and then you know out of 30 times that that you didn’t talk about it you just saw an ad it just went by you and then the one time it’s the thing you guys were talking about it stands out and you remember that and you think facebook’s listening to you but nonetheless um facebook basically had the biggest targeting machine in the world right you could segment by state by religion by whatever and then they’ve slowly stripped away some of those things as they got in trouble for you know like privacy with the election about what what sorts of things you can target on but fundamentally facebook knew more about you than you knew about yourself facebook knows before you’re pregnant right facebook knows you’re pregnant before you know you’re pregnant and it knows based on your behaviors it knows based on your interest and knows based on many things uh you know a lot of stuff about you and so what happened is apple basically stripped the one thing facebook needed it lets you facebook basically lets you opt out of data tracking so when you update to the new ios or sorry apple did when you update to the new ios system it says hey do you want to share all your data you’re just like no and that one no took away facebook’s entire like kind of like knowledge about you as a customer and so you’ve opted out of this tracking and so now when you go visit websites facebook doesn’t get that data back to it it doesn’t get that that information back and so as a facebook advertiser if you’re in ecommerce right now all the numbers just show sort of changed overnight uh like even when you send it you show a facebook ad to somebody they click it and they go buy a product from you facebook’s only catching like 60 of those conversions it doesn’t know about the other 40 because they’ve opted out of tracking or it didn’t work and so uh facebook all of a sudden it’s kind of like scrambling to figure out all right how the heck are we gonna like deliver the same value to our advertisers which is our main business model without the it’s like you know fighting with one hand tied behind your back now uh halfway through the fight and so that’s that’s sort of what apple did to facebook and facebook tried to fight it in court and they tried to do all this pr where they’re like you’re hurting small businesses and in reality they are you are you are yeah but you know net net it’s good for the consumer to not have facebook just build this like super rich profile of your every move and your every taste and your every tendency uh just so that businesses can advertise to you better so if you’re listening and you’ve got a privacy or or something like related to this idea i would love to learn about it reach out to us i’m i’m interested um i got i got a few more ideas do you want to go you want to you want to go after one uh yeah go for it you do one all right i’m gonna tell you one interesting one i’ll tell you two um the first is called ghost ghost.org have you heard of ghost.org i’ve used ghost yeah okay so i’m interested in this ghost it’s a wordpress meet sub stack is the best maybe explanation so it’s a wordpress site uh it’s its own platform so it’s a wordpress competitor but they offer a handful of features like you can accept money for a paywall uh article they have a few more features i actually don’t know all the features that they have and why people so let’s say the use case is you want to spin up a website for yourself you can use ghost you want to spin up an email newsletter that’s either free or paid or both you can use ghost instead of substack or you could want to spit up a community a paid community you could use a ghost and so basically ghost is this open source version of sub stack it’s this low cost instead of let’s say subset they take 10 of all your revenue ghosts just says hey pay us 10 bucks a month and we’re happy and so they don’t take they don’t take a percentage of your revenue so for a lot of people that could be thousands of dollars a month that you’re saving if you use ghost and they have different tiers so 10 a month 30 a month 80 to 200 a month and so there’s a few interesting things about it but first like the guy behind it is intriguing so he launched it as a non-profit which i actually think is stupid but it probably was good for like pr and a lot of people actually worked on it for free to help him i think definitely he should switch but it’s actually making three and a half million dollars a year and he uses a ton of people like free labor like people who just want to contribute and i think he actually has um staff but what he does is if you go to ghost.org slash about you he actually reveals all of his revenue and i think that’s interesting because i was going through this and i uh i’m a an investor in a in a company called convertkit maybe you are too i don’t remember but um this company called convertkit they do something like 30 million in recurring revenue right now they’re in the value of like you could say that maybe they’re worth 200 to 30 million dollars based off of like public comp so 10 times um revenue-ish and i was looking through ghost.org’s numbers they’re very similar to what convertkit was about four years ago when they just got started and so my prediction and i want to go on record by saying this is a i think this is awesome and b i actually think that this could be a multi-hundred million dollar company in the making and you could watch this guy build it in public and i think it’s interesting also he had one major quote so typically people who build these types of things are kind of like nerdy and engineer-like and which means they’re sometimes like reserved and held back and i which i which i like but he had a great quote that i read he goes someone goes what’s your major advice for people getting started he goes honestly my single biggest piece of advice would probably be to stop looking for so much advice and shut the [ ] up and go build so what do you think about this company do you agree in my prediction that this could actually could be a multi-100 million dollar business okay kind of boring but i agree right it’s more entertaining when we disagree but i i totally agree i i used ghost for many of the reasons you talked about a i was intrigued i thought their story was interesting i liked that they’re kind of like kind of like pirates they were sort of like just going against the grain on a bunch of stuff that they were doing product is good uh not super simple to use it’s kind of like i also find you know frankly i find wordpress to be a little bit confusing if you want wordpress is incredibly confusing yeah like it’s kind of like easy to get the first thing going and then to get it to do what you want takes like a lot of stuff um i’m surprised this is as small as it is so 3.7 million annual run rate i’m surprised it’s that small because ghost has been around for a while four years so so i don’t think that’s i don’t think it’s that impressive where it is but it’s sort of like a duck that go uh where i’m like i believe it i first i believe that these guys are not going to quit so i think that’s like you know the first thing these guys aren’t going away and when they don’t go away they are very differentiated and uniquely positioned where they’re going to pick up like 10 or so of this entire wave of like like self-publishing that’s going on with sub stack and others um and i like i’m more excited about this business than i am about substance uh 100 i completely agree with you and i i i the the reason i’m bringing this up to listeners is not necessarily this is a new idea that they can go and do but if you want to go and watch this person build uh he updates the blog every month and he reveals most all their revenue they’re also a non-profit so if you dig around if you google like ghost foundation 501c you probably can see their total financials because nonprofits disclose that but really cool company that you could watch being built it’s still small now but it’s going to be fun to watch this being become huge over the next four years yeah i’m with you on that um all right i got some uh ideas so one is from trends actually this ikea hacking thing so yeah um so so i saw this in in y’all’s trends like whatever the weekly newsletter thing that you guys put out and um i thought this was pretty fascinating so what is ikea hacking ikea hacking is when you buy something that’s sort of like a basic looking piece of furniture and then because ikea is like a what’s it called totally modular store like any piece of any piece of furniture it’s like all the wheels are kind of like they accept this one like one peg so you can go swap 50 different wheels onto the same piece of furniture or same thing with the handle or the facade or the like you know the top the table top the glass top whatever right so it has like this um uniform nature to it which lets you just swap parts almost like minecraft or roblox or something like that and so ikea hacking is the art of taking something that’s sort of a simple plain jane looking ikea piece of furniture and then you go to the store and you just buy different little uh upgrades you know like you’re souping up a car on uh on pimp my ride and then you but you’re pimping out your your your dresser or your your desk or whatever it is and you make something that looks pretty sick and actually it was just like you know worth of random ikea parts that if you assemble them correctly they take you from this before picture to this after picture if it’s the youtube video put up the before and after that’s in from the trends thing it’s awesome like it just looks so simple like very basic looking thing to like a really cool looking thing and this was all just done using ikea parts so i have some ideas around this but did i first did i even accurately describe it yeah you described it correctly and the way that we discovered this or i i think i mean i i used this four years ago when we first started our company basically i found this subreddit called ikea hacking and what i did was i bought a 150 kitchen countertop it was basically like a a really nice wood block that’s all i mean that was like a like a countertop but i and then i just went and got some legs from from like a whole totally different thing this countertop you’re actually supposed to lay on like granite or like a like a like a countertop and i just but i just screwed legs on it and i put it in the middle of our room and that was like our kitchen table at our office and that’s and i think i started talking to stuff about ikea hacking it’s very fascinating i don’t know what the business ideas are though okay so here’s the business idea so first it’s r ikea hacks it’s got 78 000 members on reddit so back to the episode we did with greg eisenberg where he talked about unbundling reddit this is a classic example so shout out to greg basically i would look at a community like this and i’d say huh these people are pretty passionate about what’s uh what they’re doing here and like these photos are kind of amazing these would make for great ads this would make for great content just seeing uh seeing this right and so i would just go to r reddit.comr slash r ikea hacks and then i would sort by like top top post you know for the year or something like that and just go get a sense of like what’s there and then click comments and read all the top comments of all the top posts so i think you could do a few things here right i think you could do so i would then take many of the proven business models and then i would like apply them here so if i was getting started what would i do to start i would start by saying look i don’t know the exact business model but what i do know is that this is great content so i would create an instagram account right away right because the first thing that you got to know is that most people don’t bury their head in reddit they’re not going to find all these new subreddit even someone like me who uses reddit every day i didn’t know about this subreddit and so let alone my sister who will never use reddit and she’ll only use instagram and so like the first thing i would do is i would immediately create an instagram account that’s just posting the ikea hacks the best pictures from from reddit basically just plagiarize it and just put it there and then just credit the username from reddit in every photo as a photo credit just just just so you don’t get in trouble yeah just so i would say what are you talking about i was given credit right there and it’s like dude you’re ripping this off um so that’s the first thing i would do i would try to get that to like 50 to 100 000 followers on instagram because that’s now my asset that’s my audience that’s interested in this thing that i can then leak out different products so it could be a course like a simple 100 200 course that’s like your guide to ikea hacking it could be like individual courses it’s like the bedroom course the the off home office course the home garage you know the the garage gym course or whatever right like maybe different modules that i would do so i would maybe think about courses i would think about maybe i could sell these as kits so like maybe i could save you the hassle of having to go to ikea but like figure out oh i need this knob and then this little paper thing and then this other thing and then those three together are what you use to like make this vintage looking dresser maybe i would just sell the vintage looking dresser kit and it’s it might just be as simple as a recipe walk into ikea go to the section 198 point c and go pick up this item right um and so it might be something like that i don’t know what i would do but i do think there’s like a small bootstrap business and this is a good business for somebody who is genuinely passionate about this right so like how do you take what i’ll call your like okay this is not meant to be offensive but like there’s a lot of hobbies that are like basic [ ] hobbies so what’s a basic [ ] hobby basically tommy is a hobby that you think is unique to you it’s like saying like no you’re [ ] disgusting no offense uh like any time you say no offense it’s like it would be just brace yourself for some offense yeah no don’t [ ] hate me no offense so so no events here so like for guys the basic [ ] hobby is like sports oh bro i love i love the nba yeah you and 80 million other people right now right so it’s not like a unique hobby so you can’t how do you turn your passion into business well it’s not a unique passion so you’re probably gonna have like a me too business unless you think of a new angle and so another basic [ ] hobbies like oh i love interior decorating it’s like cool you and like 90 90 million other people who like to watch hdtv and just judge stuff or like you’re happy to scroll on instagram pretty looking things and push like well i think that’s why if you if you look at it from this angle with like ikea hacks you’re finding a niche and you’re building your own audience on that on that like that one kind of trend and then maybe you can release some kind of subscription product education product ddc product like something to that audience and now you’ve turned your basic we already talked about the basic [ ] version of this for us which was the knees over toes guy um yeah another another example of working out dude yeah another example of this is phillips hughes phillips hughes light bulbs crazy subreddit that is like has a rabid fan base i’ve actually like lighting or something right what is it phillips hues it started as just a bulb that was and you would say alexa make the bulbs or you know make the living room purple um but then they have like 50 other products now and people like have all these blogs and they’re actually making good money i bet you like apartment therapy or like one of these bigger brands actually owns one of these blogs i’d have to scroll down and look at who the copywriter owns the copyright but basically it’s blogs on where to put the lights like under the bed in order to make it feel cool right an example of who did this well is house of highlights i don’t know if you followed them on instagram but they’re they’re big basically they they took espn sportscenter which was like this 30 minute television show highly produced and all i was doing was showing you the best highlights of the day and so back in the day you know like sports would happen all day and in the evening or the morning the next morning you would watch sportscenter to catch up through the best highlights right it’s like just the sugar and house of highlights smartly realized hey you know we can just post those as like 10 second clips on instagram as soon as they happen all day and like i can basically have like two people two like people who like the nba just run this account and this account can grow to like a million people so the guy like omar created this thing i i i think literally owns it yeah so he ends up selling it to bleacher report and uh and runs it there they run it now i bet you whatever you sold it for you sold it for way too little um and so like you know overtime did kind of the same thing um but but anyways that’s like an example of taking these like how do you take this content that’s not your content it’s not original content uh it’s in this like kind of basic [ ] hobby and then you turn it into like a media media property that you own and then you own that audience and you can figure out what you want to do from there so there’s this couple who uh they got popular because right before the pandemic started it was a french guy and his american girlfriend who are now husband and wife and they started baking croissants in their apartment and then they brought it to work and they like sold them to their friends or their co-workers uh and then eventually they created an instagram and they went viral and the apartment that i’m staying in right now bought like pre-ordered you have to pre-order eight weeks out because they’re sold out for weeks and weeks and they’re just baking this these croissants and cookies out of their apartment and the guy who owns my got them and then ended up going out of the country and he’s like hey you can actually have my order it’s like 90 of like these fancy croissants and so on sunday i’m going to get those fancy croissants and i invited dave nemets the founder of bleacher report and his wife to come over and eat these like i was like hey you want to cut these are like fancy girl croissants like i don’t unders at the time i didn’t know the story but like for some reason i think this is a big deal you want to come over and eat these with your kids so i’ll be eating croissants with the founder of bleach report on sunday and i can ask him the story about house highlights that’s yeah do please do it’s an amazing buy by him like like mad credit to them for picking this up before before espn or anybody else i think by the way he listens to the podcast or at least he like talks to us on twitter a bunch um and so he seems great and bleachy report i saw his talk at hustlecon very impressive um like the way they kind of like won and they survived i just remember this one anecdote he told which was he was yeah we basically like every other content site was kind of like okay i might butcher this just because i’m trying to remember a talk from three years ago but here’s what i remember him saying every other sports news website was just talking about whatever was interesting to them they’re all kind of putting out the same he’s like we needed to be smarter right like we needed to say every hour a writer is going to spend we don’t have the same number of writers or budget so they need to spend writing articles that are going to get more traffic than anybody else and so he would just reverse engineer it so he like they would just study google searches and they would say oh everybody’s searching when what time is the nfl draft he’s like so we would immediately like have like the number one ranking thing on google for what time is nfl draft where to watch it and how to watch it and what’s going to happen in the draft just like this kind filler content on a website and he’s like people really like the draft okay we’re going to go like all in on the draft and we’re going to write 10 times more content about the draft because that’s what there’s a big appetite for that espn is like under serving and so i thought it was pretty awesome how they took kind of like a supply demand approach to it instead of like an artsy right like an artsy approach of like oh you know this is what this is we’re a journalistic publication and we should uh we should write the hard-hitting pieces about whatever or like you know well here’s what i’m passionate about it’s like no they like took a science approach to it which i liked and then the other founder went and did that he had a non-compete after he sold bleacher report so he couldn’t do sports anymore but he started a media company called bustle which is like women’s content so all types of articles but like an example of his long tail search strategy he deployed the same strategy so like if you google like what happens when i get my period while i’m on the beach like bustle will show up number one it’s like there’s only gonna be like a hundred people a month or something that’s searched for that if i have no idea but like that i think i had heard through him that was one of the examples or if you google things like that you’ll come across bustle and they do like over 100 million in revenue and so it still works right and by the way one insert was just pivoting off the instagram thing we talked about this in the past but there’s some new news so we should bring it up we talked about this um this woman who’s an influencer she’s a fitness influencer on instagram kayla i think it’s cenes or something i don’t know exactly no i think it’s it’s every woman listening to this is just gonna be like what the [ ] guys i think it’s it’s new what there was something else we we tried to pronounce that we just like couldn’t it was just like a like i don’t know some some fancy luxury brand uh for purses or something like burmese yeah yeah she wears herpes of bags um so anyway she has this app so she basically took this instagram following it was just posting like workout clips on instagram and stuff her and her boyfriend i think or her husband i don’t remember who was well before the app they were just selling a pdf sarah my wife exactly she bought it for 29. my sister-in-law has the pdf and she was just using this pdf for like is it like the the beachbody or if i don’t forget what it’s called it’s like some some kind of like 30-day program yeah that’s our 30-minute workout that was like you know from from this girl and she was buying the pdf then they turn it into an app right so they turn it into an app app starts doing great um my wife is a subscriber you pay 100 bucks a year and then you open up the app and it’s basically like from what i remember you open up the app there’s like five women who are like the trainers and it’s like one is like very muscular one is like very just like thin one is like half kind of like toned or whatever another one has like a huge butt it’s like which body do you want and go follow their program and so you would just pick it and then you would get like daily workouts kind of like a video that was like very good and so anyways that app was doing like i think they had done over 100 million dollars revenue i don’t know if that’s annual or cumulative but they just sold so i don’t know if you have the details in front of you but they just sold for like 400 million dollars or something right like they just exited um exited the app this week yeah for 400 million they sold to this company called ifit which is about to go public they said they were doing 100 million in revenue um pretty amazing no-brainer to buy definitely worth it i think and it’s pretty weird that 100 million if you’re doing 100 million in revenue you uh you know you sold for for only 400 million so it’s pretty low multiple for like a digital product but uh yeah they’re probably not i don’t think so probably spending a ton on on marketing okay um yeah i i maybe maybe not i mean she had 13 million followers and it is based on her uh thing on her uh on her following um can i tell you about an idea that someone just sent to me and i thought it was pretty amazing okay look at the thing called bird flow in the dock so it’s called bird flow dot io did you click on that i saw you text me about it this morning but i haven’t checked out this so tell me about it okay so this guy said it to me he goes hey i had this like software company and it was trying to do all these problems and solve all like it’s called crowd flow or something like that and he’s like it’s a i spent three years working on it and then i just said [ ] it i’m just gonna create a really micro small app i’m gonna build it in two weeks it just does one thing really well it’s called bird flow and if you click it it says marketing automation for twitter but basically i’ll i’ll tell you like it does three different things but the main thing is everyone who clicks follow on your profile it automatically sends them a message and you could say anything in that message like hey thanks for following or hey thanks for following check out my website and i installed it he’s charging 29 i installed it and it’s awesome it’s awesome it’s awesome i love these little micro sas tools i think it’s so neat this is exactly how buffer got started and that’s a multi-hundred right yeah i like the the micro sas tool that does one simple thing that helps you win on a platform you’re already like trying to win on that’s the key right so like i’m already trying to win on twitter i’m trying to win on instagram trying to win on reddit whatever and if you could build the micro sas tool it’s like here’s you know other examples of them uh there’s uh what’s it called jungle scout which is for amazon so let’s say you’re trying to win as an fba seller on on amazon so you’re selling a product on amazon jungle scout is this app you can use and basically when you’re searching any amazon like search search result you can use you can open up jungle scout and it’ll basically tell you how much that product is worth how much how much search volume there is for it how competitive it is to be in that niche and how much money they think that product is making so that you can find winning products that are like high demand low competition and then you could build a fba you know an fba business in that niche and so it’s a simple sas tool i think jungle scout does some stupid amount of revenue too because they were recently partially acquired by pe in the hundreds of millions of dollars of valuation greg mercer is good friends with neville and in austin and uh he like uh this is i guess public i mean he’s got like a plane and [ ] uh so whatever it was sold for like neville will post pictures going to like tell you ride in uh private jet and i’m like dude who’s the jazz guy or he’s the jungle scout guy the guy who sold part of the company who started it gotcha yeah so so super simple tool that just helped you in there and they just built they just kind of like dominate that one niche of like fba you know fba selling or in this case twitter automations right so oh somebody and so i like this a lot i need something like this uh for me because i’m trying to basically grow my audience on twitter and then cool the less work i can do the better right like i love digital sales people all right a digital sales person that’s what i think about when i think about landing pages or like this like little like automations that’s a digital sales person as somebody who’s going to work 24 7 for me for zero cost or you know in this case whatever it was 29 a month um that’s their salary and they’re gonna do exactly what i say every single time predictably and uh they’re just gonna generate more value for me and so i look at my landing page like a digital sales person i look at my automations like convertkit things like that as digital sales people yeah this is a really cool one i like this a lot now you can see this getting really annoying i mean people hate getting these auto dms but uh it still will work yeah yeah it it might be annoying but i actually just made mine it just says hey exclamation point thanks for following now here’s the problem that i already found so i it’s already sent out a couple hundred messages for me i guess i get maybe 500 to 1 000 new followers a day this uh i feel like a douche saying that this let’s say it a couple women replied yeah so a couple like really attractive women applied and or replied saying like hey what’s going on you know like your work basically they apply yeah so like these like attractive women replied and i was like [ ] i don’t want like anyone to get the wrong idea to think that i’m hollering just at them or that i’m hollering at all you know and so i didn’t reply to them but i was like oh my gosh like let’s see i actually might be able to this could definitely get me in trouble a little bit i could totally see it right when that when that kind of i sent you that message it was kind of weird right it was hilarious um yeah i could see you know the same thing with somebody else pointed this out too which is like let’s say you write a thread that goes viral you might get 5000 followers you’re going to send out what 5 000 auto dms and then get like 2 000 random replies back it’s gonna like kind of ruin your inbox and maybe get you banned from twitter i don’t know because it’ll just rate limit you so so i think there’s some problems with it maybe maybe this guy’s built in some rules like for me i would only want to do this i would only want to dm somebody who has over x followers or that i you know i already follow or something like that so then it kind of like limits the number of people that does it too you need it to be like hey you know only if it’s a you know farmer looking white boy then send this so i don’t get in trouble with my wife you know like i needed to be like this guy needs to have like you know patel or gupta at his last name if it’s gonna send this auto dm so my indian fanboys can uh can get these messages from me but not everybody else yeah i could see it get me in trouble um all right you want to do another one yeah let’s do one uh okay little idea that i think is kind of interesting um i don’t have a ton to say about the business but it’s more like this is a cool way to get ideas so this is my first time traveling with uh with babies and uh traveling babies it’s like you know all the things you would expect like on the plane you know kid pooped through his clothes had to change it you know like on a tray table because we couldn’t stand up because the fastest seatbelt sign the person next to us looking at is like we’re gross and that is disgusting i mean you are exactly i know i know i agree um but there’s a bunch of problems so like we had to take our car seats right because you can’t just like be like i’ll get there you know i used to pack light i used to be like cool i’ll get there i just need my phone i’ll call an uber get to my hotel if i’m missing something i’ll just buy it there and with this with kids it’s like the opposite it’s like can’t even get in an uber because you have to like have a car seat all that stuff so i saw this business called baby quip that i thought was kind of cool it’s again one of our like telltale signs is any business that shows up at the top of a google’s a popular google search but the website looks like it was last updated in like 1996 um those are businesses that print money and so it’s like congratulations you have identified a money printer and so i don’t know how successful baby clip is but i would suspect it’s pretty good as a bootstrap business and what it does is it’s basically a marketplace so i could say hey i just landed in las vegas i need two car seats i don’t want to lug two car seats check them in uh you know like on the fly like you know drag them to the airport check them in take them home just meet me at the airport with a car seat that i can just install into a rental car or i can saw into it to an uber or whatever uh and then like let me rent it for four days and then when i’m leaving come pick it back up from the airport and so that’s what baby quip is it’s a baby equipment but it’s a marketplace where people will bring you what you need you need a stroller i got a stroller for you don’t plug that heavy thing around just use mine when i’m here people are making a lot of money just google searching i was like i was google searching and again it’s a very good content play i was google searching baby travel packing list so i was like what do i even what am i forgetting here and so they had a blog post i was like here’s all the things you need to pack for your baby and then at the bottom it’s like by the way if you don’t want to pack your stroller and car seats because they’re heavy as hell like you know you could just use baby clip and get it when you’re there and i was like click through and i was like this is cool and so i just thought this is like a very clever business that is a look for problems look for annoyances look for inconveniences and then those become your opportunities if you can design a solution around them so i just have a clever little business this is awesome so baby quip is actually it’s a peer-to-peer marketplace so i don’t think you actually said that i thought it was the company that would give you stuff no it’s just like jane whose kid outgrew her car seat and she realizes she can make you know 200 a month just renting it out to people as long as she’s willing to go drop it off and pick it up from the airport i have these guys raised money they’ve been around for a while they haven’t it doesn’t look like they’ve raised money um but yeah they you know they are basically like just a kind of like a uh looks like a bootstrap business from everything i could tell launched in 2016. they’ve had over 30 000 orders uh i think they did a crowdfunding campaign at some point so maybe they’re and they’re on shark tank this is kind of interesting now i i’m not convinced that this is gonna this can be a huge huge thing but what is actually what is actually interesting is let’s go to new york it tells you how many reservations someone has ever had i bet you that there could be like some mom who’s just dominated like a la or a new york scene like can just rank really high on all the uh all the big cities and lend out all their stuff and so what it does is it tells you how much it so what basically what happens is you land in new york you but before you land you tell baby quip you hire camila shannon who’s the top in new york she’s rented her stuff out 773 times and she’ll bring you any gear that you need and you could see all the gear that she has and she costs 40 to 60 to deliver the stuff to you plus there’s gear for there’s a a car seat for ten dollars a day there’s a play pin for forty dollars a day there’s 15 pound dumbbells for five dollars a day there’s a this is crazy this is awesome this is awesome this is a great find yeah so so another example of this by the way have you used or or probably not used but you’re familiar with them i’m assuming teachers pay teachers no what’s that you’ve never heard of teachers pay teachers no why it doesn’t doesn’t matter this is just like one of those things that you know about because it’s just awesome and uh so google teachers pay teachers so what this is is oh my god if you if you remember like a teacher spends a huge amount of time every teacher spends a huge amount of time like creating their lesson plans and quizzes and tests and they have to like keep recreating like content basically for their little classroom of 30 people it’s pretty inefficient right so you go you you teach kids all day already kind of an exhausting thing now you go home and you um you have to grade papers you have to come up with tomorrow’s lesson plan and then you have to design the quiz for thursday’s quiz then you have next friday’s test so you have all this stuff you’re just constantly this content treadmill and what teachers pay teachers did that was genius was they said look that’s a lot of effort and you may not be the best person at coming up with the lesson plan or the quiz for this science topic so why don’t we just create a marketplace where any teacher can list their lesson plans their quizzes their tests and you can just find go instead of just making your own go on here for 10 bucks and go buy the best science thing for a fourth grader trying to learn about you know geology right now and you just go buy the thing for 10 bucks and you’ve saved four hours of time and so it’s like a great trade so teachers pay teachers is a marketplace doing this some teachers were making millions of dollars just creating their uh putting their content up for sale here the business itself does i think 300 plus million dollars a year in revenue and growth and gross revenue yeah yeah it was bought by a private equity firm and like just look at their traffic on this thing man it’s like over 30 million yeah yeah so it’s an insane business um beautiful business too because it’s like wow you turned some teachers who created amazing lessons and amazing tests and quizzes you turned them into stars and millionaires which is fantastic i think the best teachers should be millionaires in the age of the internet uh there’s just no reason not that they shouldn’t be on the other side you saved a bunch of money uh and a bunch of sorry you saved a bunch of time for all the other teachers so that they’re more arrested and uh can go into class and perform instead of being you know like kind of falling behind constantly on the content treadmill and so i thought this is like you know an amazing idea same it reminds me of the baby equipped thing obviously this is much bigger much more successful but it’s like these nice kind of like pain points turned into you know marketplaces solutions this is badass maybe you could also do this for speeches i uh i remember doing the uh my brother john um gave her wedding speeches he gave a great best man speech and that’s a great idea three people uh paid him money to write their speech uh and i think that you could do that for uh i think you could start with just wedding speeches but eventually do all other types of speeches dude that is hilarious and there’s absolutely do that because there’s a ton of googling right like when you have to give your speech you’re like oh god pressure super high rep like how many reps have i had doing this zero um okay let me go to google and let me try to get some inspiration let’s try to get the ball rolling people go to youtube and they try to watch like you know best best man speech ever right best bridesmaid speech ever and then you’re like okay like what am i gonna do copy this not quite but if somebody created these with templates um that could be pretty good i like that yeah i actually think you could do that there’s this company called book in a box started by tucker max who was one of my investors before it was uh when they did book in a box they would you’d pay them any number from 20 to 100 000 on a bunch of different options and they would write a book about your life so you could like get speaking gigs or you could give to your kids or like whatever for any different reasons you look like an expert be a thought leader and then a lot of their authors started getting speech offers you know they would someone would pay 10 20 30 000 to have someone come and talk about like best practices and meetings because some guy had wrote a book on how meetings suck and how to make them better and then they created a new subsidiary that would write you do your powerpoint and presentation for you and you’d pay more money for that and i was like that’s cool that should probably be the business more so than just the book thing right uh and so i think that actually teachers paying teachers you could also do speakers paying speakers i mean you could do the same thing there’s another uh angle to this which is i think that teachers are sort of extremely teachers and nurses these are two workforces that are very very large they have a unique set of problems they’re extremely like kind of word of mouth heavy and i don’t think that the existing solutions were great for them so on the podcast a long time ago we had uh the founder of like incredible health come on which is basically like a kind of like a job marketplace thingy like a kind of a link danish i had four nurses that was right before uh covent how’d that do uh they raised a bunch of money i don’t know if they’re doing well or not but i can’t really say but um but they’ve raised a bunch of money because the opportunity is large meaning there are so many nurses and there’s a shortage of nurses and there’s high demand for nurses so there’s nurses so there’s a lot of fees paid for placements so nurses want great jobs and then hospitals and and clinics basically are happy to pay to place nurses and so there’s a lot of money to be made if you can build the right network there if you can build a vertical linkedin for just nurses and i think there’s a similar opportunity for teachers not in terms of placing teachers because it’s not the same level of demand for like hiring teachers or but i do think that i do think that if you build like a professional networking thing for teachers that’s better um they don’t necessarily want or need to use linkedin i think you could build a custom solution that is for teachers it’s like how do teachers how are teachers going to engage with like kind of like their peers all right what do they need to do are they going to do they need to share tips do they are these job opportunities is it content like teachers pay teachers i think if you did a brainstorm if you were in if that’s that’s the niche you were in i think there’s a lot of opportunities for teachers just because they’re such a huge workforce and the generic solution like linkedin is not going to be tailored to them how much do you think teachers paying teachers got acquired for i would say if i was gonna put a guess i would say 500 million dollars yeah i i would i would guess 400 500 because it is kind of a monopoly in its niche or more or more even if or rather if you said it’s worth more than that now i wouldn’t be surprised yeah a week in research i didn’t research i didn’t plan to bring it up but but we can look it up it might be it might be out there publicly no i don’t want to upload your twitter two more uh yeah i don’t have much more what do you have i blew my load early i have one uh okay so we can we can end on kind of like this life wisdom thing so so last night uh we’re hanging out we’re talking uh you know i’m hanging out with with some other folks who are traveling with us and uh yeah family members and so i i was i asked this question i said all right um i said what do you think i said let’s take fast forward you’re so how old are you 31 something yeah you’re 31. i said all right fast forward you’re 90 years old and let’s say your life like you have your life as it’s gone so far and then let’s just kind of like project forward like it just keeps going the way that things have been going like the on the track you’re on let’s say you continue on the track you end up at 90. um what do you think if you look back you’re going to be most happy with the way you lived your life and then what do you think you’re going to regret the most about the way you lived your life so far and so i was curious after i asked that question i got some answers from the group i was curious i was like i’m going to ask sam this because i don’t know what he would say i think it’s a hard question to be fair but i’m curious what comes to mind uh for you um i would say that i let my temper control things you know i i lose my temper easily sometimes you know you’ve seen it sometimes when i get mad at you or when i get mad at dan or someone else and it’s like it’s sometimes they’ve actually done something that is warranted um oftentimes it’s like it’s not that big a deal and so i get super [ ] frustrated and i’ll hold grudges over like a relatively small frustration and i let my emotions control some of my decisions and uh i’ve lost a lot of money and a lot of friends because of it so that’s what i regret is that and i work quite hard to fix it but i i wish i would have been even more aware of that early on what else do i do i regret that’s a great answer do i think that i’ll regret um i i wish i didn’t spend years neglecting my health thinking like oh i can get to it later on like i should have fun now i wish that when i was a kid um my parents instilled uh healthy eating habits because i think that like that still kind of [ ] with me right like eating a lot of bad sugar what else um what about the other what about the what about the flip side what’s the one thing you’re gonna look back and you’ll be you know glad glad that you you you lived that way or you did that thing or you you made those choices starting at age 20 i wrote this down i said by 30 i want to i want to have started and started something that will make enough money that when i have children i won’t ever have to worry about how to give them what they need and also i’ll be able to spend time with my family even though i didn’t have a family or anything like that i was like that’s what i think i’m gonna want by that time i’m 30 so i’m gonna work against that and i achieved that and so um i’m most proud that i now can can only worry about the emotional aspects of the family even though i don’t even have a family right okay i’m most proud i got that problem out of the way the the the financial problem what do you think of that question is this uh is a good question or is it it’s a really good question i i actually changed it around i ask myself this all the time well it’s quite similar i go i think like how what can i do today that will make my future self proud and not regretful right and so i thank myself for and and and i say 10 years but i would actually change it to six months because often times how many times and the other question i ask myself is in six months will you wish that you have done this or wish that you had started trying to do blank so it’s like losing weight exercising is a really good one sick in six months will you look back at yourself and be like [ ] i wish i already had started learning how to speak spanish i wish i already would have read these books i wish i already would have done this so just [ ] do it make your future self proud so um that’s the question i asked i think it’s a great question and what was your answer what do you regret and what are you proud of so i had trouble with the regret side i was thinking about it and i was like okay i went through some i said i couldn’t think of an easy answer so i said okay what happens when you can’t think of the answer right away you you just start throwing out what might it be right so that it doesn’t have to be this but what even comes to mind and so i was like oh well i regret kind of like spending too much time working okay it’s possible um no i don’t think so i mean i think you got you’re pretty healthy with that you worked really hard when you were single or not married yeah i work like three times harder than i work now so something that made that shift well i was like will i regret um like working on the wrong things like oh you just worked on this like like right now i’m building this dvc business it’s like oh well like you know this this frankly this is a business that’s meant to make money it’s not like the joy of my life like this podcast is more like the joy right this is the fun and it’s building up into something that’s big but like the business i’m doing is i’m doing it as a business so maybe i’ll say uh why didn’t i go try to like change the world in a bigger way maybe i’ll say that i started brainstorming these and what i realized was that the only things i think i’m going to regret are either going to be health related but even then when i by the time i’m 90 i don’t know how much i’m going to care about that if i you know if i got to 90 so it didn’t quite work but i think if i asked that question for like 50 or 60 i would say definitely one of the top answers would be taking care of my health better um you know just just prioritizing that number one um number two was like any when you’re i think when you’re 90 you’re short on so you’ll probably i’ll probably look back and think [ ] i pissed away a bunch of time on the wrong stuff and so i that’s what i that’s the second category is like where am i pissing away that when i look back i’m gonna say i can’t believe i wasted those precious years on the wrong stuff or the wrong things caring about the wrong things or even in the moment focusing on the wrong things the last one is relationships it’s like i think ultimately so my answer that i came came to in the end was i’ll probably regret not having more kids because i think the older i get the more joy i’m gonna have like the most the most value and joy in my life is just gonna come from my kids and i know right now it feels like oh my god i can’t i couldn’t plot i have two i couldn’t possibly have another because why it’s already so hard with two how’s your wife she’s young it’s not the it’s not the biological clock it’s like the workload it’s like oh my god like how am i how do i have another kid with these two kids with the business stuff with the podcast with the 10 things that i do you know and in two years you can sure i’m not saying dylan i guess what i’m saying is i think that’s the one thing if i look back i’m probably gonna wish i had more kids because it’s probably gonna be from age 65 to 90. it’s probably gonna be the number one thing number one source of fun in my life is gonna be my kids i think you should uh you should address that i told sarah i want five and so we froze our embryos listen to this we froze our embryos and i’ve got six kids the reason uh i don’t know okay sarah’s got this sarah’s got this thing sarah’s got this thing there’s just a net genetic component that we made sure we didn’t want to pass on so the kids were healthy and um i got five kids all girls and so uh i’m asking her if i can go and do it and do it again because i would like to have two boys two girls right and so i’ve got five kids waiting for me but they’re all girls so anyway um i actually think that that’s a good one i asked my twitter following how many of you uh how do you feel about kids and age and you almost unanimously the people who had so this is like a biased survey you’re right so it’s like what do you mean how do you think about kids in age what does that mean uh i forget well i forget the exact way that i asked it but i said do you wish that you’d had kids sooner or later in life okay gotcha and uh and of course like there’s like a bias here like people who are already bought into one category will likely answer and support that category or support that decision but almost unanimously i feel like the answer was i wish i had my kids sooner in life and that actually shocked me because particularly in new york silicon valley la the coastal bigger cities it’s actually versus like missouri where i’m from it’s actually more normal to get married and have kids at 21 22 23 whereas on the coast coast it’s like 31 32 33 and you’re constantly told you know just wait just wait even like andrew wilkinson told me a couple of my friends told me and i guess you’re you you have consent you could actually give your opinion most everyone said i wish i had kids sooner and one guy actually changed my perspective on everything he i go why why do you think that he goes because now i’m just going to die sooner and i wish i could have spent more time with them yeah i don’t i don’t know the answer i think whatever i think it works either way it’s not really i don’t really i don’t think there’s a right answer there but uh but i i kids are great they critics are really great um so so i like that question i like the one you had too so i guess like if i was gonna do i recommend people do this after the podcast if you’ve listened this far i would basically write down both i what’s the thing i’m gonna thank myself for and what’s the thing i’m gonna regret when i’m 90 uh about the way i’m living my life right now and and if i just project it forward and then there’s the one you said which is six months from now what’s the thing i’m going to wish i had started doing now or stop doing now yeah i’m still gonna wish i’d done it then there’s a lot you could do in six months and now you’re not gonna maybe have a life-changing thing but like you can lose 60 pounds in six months maybe you can um learn a little bit of a language enough to like go and speak maybe in a different country and you could read a bunch of books you can learn a new you could learn how to play the piano in six months i mean you could do a lot of like interesting stuff so yeah you could go uh you know repair the shitty relationship you have with your dad or whatever you know you could do you could do many many things uh i guess that’s the other one i thought about for for for the regret is like uh not having maybe spent more time or being kind of like just like nicer to my parents like i know i’m gonna miss them a lot when they’re gone and they’re gonna go like it’s gonna happen and once they do i’m just gonna i think that’s probably gonna be one of the things i’m gonna wish why didn’t i why didn’t i you know talk to him more or spend more time or you know tell him you know thanks you know something like that is probably going to be one of my answers for that so i’ll wrap this i’ll wrap this up with a quick story that hopefully will change people’s change people’s perspective so do you know who ramit sethi is safety he’s got this business book business slash book a huge brand called i will teach you to be rich he’s a good friend of mine and whenever i have money like doubts or questions i call him and he kind of like so for example and he always like thinks about everything like very thoughtfully and i was talking to him about buying a ring from my wife years ago and i go how much should i spend and he goes uh like i told him i wanted to spend 5 and he was like no no no no and he like told me a budget way higher he goes trust me and he explained his reasoning and i and i listened to him i went and bought a ring that was i i spent 27 000 on the ring and i didn’t have that much money what was his reasoning though his reasoning was like first of all it’s your wife like whatever she wants like what’s the point of working hard it’s to make someone like your wife proud and happy and she’s going to want to show this off she’ll just make her happy second if you’re going to be married to her for potentially 80 years who gives a [ __ ] over 20 grand divided by 80 grand or 80 years um and he goes just don’t be cheap on the stuff that actually matters this probably really matters to her now some people doesn’t matter but then the second thing was i called for me and i go hey ramit you took your family to europe one time to italy he goes yeah uh you want me to plan yours for you and i go well yeah but what do you mean he goes well like i love doing this and i’ll plan yours for you but i only have one rule i said what he goes i’ll plan it for you but you have to have an unlimited budget i was like what the hell he goes dude the whole point of traveling with your family like you’re very so i’m taking my mom and dad and my wife to italy my parents have really never been out of the country other than one time to visit me in australia and he goes i’m gonna get you got to give them on a limited budget i was like dude i was gonna spend like fifteen thousand maybe and he goes no no no we’re gonna spend 50 at least and i was like that’s so much money he dude you’re never going to go out of the country again with your family and i’ve done it before like one time it’s the one thing that they will never stop talking about and i don’t care if i only had a hundred thousand i’m spending fifty thousand and i was like you’re right i need to quit being a cheapskate i’m gonna just so i bought my mom and dad first class they’ve never been first class first class tickets to europe um we’re gonna like have a great time and it kind of changed my perspective on spending and being tight so that’s my quick little story that’s amazing i love it alright we should we should end on that uh all right good episode dan what do you think this was good i’ll give you guys a nine and a half no okay good i’ll take that last one was an eight but or an eight and a half all right that’s the episode i could be what i want to i put my law in it like no days off on a road let’s travel never looking back