Sam and Shaan run through six “drunk ideas” — half-baked but real business concepts worth exploring. Ideas range from reviving Milo (a local in-store inventory search engine), to a branded Zoom waiting room experience, a B2B office personality store, Discord property management, fit-through-the-door furniture, and haters-as-a-service. The episode is a fast, loose, energetic brainstorm.
Speakers: Sam Parr (host, co-founder of The Hustle), Shaan Puri (host, founder of Milk Road)
Reviving Milo: Local Inventory Search [00:00:00]
Shaan: Okay, this idea is called Milo. What is it? So Milo is a company that got started back in the day. A guy who came on the pod — Jack Abraham — started it. What Milo did was a very simple thing. Milo said: if you said “oh, I need to go buy scotch tape,” you would just type it in. It was a search engine for finding where you can go buy a specific product in person. So you’d be like, “I want to buy a Philips razor or something like that,” you just type it in and it would say, “it’s in stock at this Target near you.” So it took where you are, it knew all the stores’ inventory, and it just told you if the product was in stock right there.
And look — the world is moving toward e-commerce, yes, but there’s still a very healthy slice of people who go shop in real stores, or they want something now, today, and they don’t want to wait for it to be delivered. So this idea of Milo — Milo got bought by eBay for like $75 million after a couple years, and then it kind of faded away and disappeared inside of eBay the way many acquisitions do. But this idea is still a great idea.
Sam: Dude, I completely agree. I tried buying something the other day — chairs or something — and I had to go to like eight different websites. HomeDepot.com, TractorSupply.com, Lowes.com, Walmart.com. And even when you go, you’re seeing the generic thing. You’re not seeing, “does Home Depot carry this specific item?” You have to go to Store Locator, type in your zip code, then do that for each one. It sucks.
I needed kids’ cough medicine and I was like, dude, I just need to know: do you have kids’ Robitussin or not? And then usually CVS or wherever — you type something in and they’re like, “this isn’t near you,” because up at the top it says my zip code is eight hours away from when I was on vacation. You don’t have an easy way to just search. It takes forever.
Shaan: I completely agree. I was trying to do this the other day. It’s a pain in the ass. I was using Google Shopping but it’s not easy.
Sam: Exactly. And I know it’s hard to build, right? Because you have to have real-time inventory of physical stores.
Shaan: Yeah, but that’s not that hard. If you go to Target and ask for a vacuum, they go to Target.com and type in that vacuum to figure out where it is in the store. So it’s in some system. You need to build integrations with the major backend inventory systems to be able to do this — and you have a really strong reason why they should give you that access. It’s like, “hey, I’m going to send you a customer, I’m going to send you foot traffic to your store.” Is there anything a store wants more than foot traffic? I don’t think so.
To me, Milo is a great idea. And by the way, this is a general thing: companies that get acquired and then dissolve inside a big company — just go restart those companies three years later.
Sam: Yeah, I actually think that’s a fantastic idea.
Shaan: That’s one of the best business models. And I’ve said that I hate the advertising business model — I don’t entirely hate it, but I do hate that when you’re a publisher you sometimes have to say stuff you don’t really want to because of an advertiser. But I love non-publishing advertising models because it’s perfect alignment. With Milo you have a site that gets lots of traffic, and then you allow someone to pay on a per-click or per-view basis. It’s very fair, it’s the easiest sales process. I’m all about that.
Sam: Alright, you’ve got some more random ideas?
Shaan: These ideas are a little more like the tipsy, drunk ideas. We might have to do a full drunk ideas segment. These are very loose.
Sam: No, these are like Milo again. Good bad ideas — I’m giving you the good version of a bad idea.
Shaan: Dude, have you ever asked Jack — could we just email him and be like, “is this cool? Would this work again?”
Sam: Oh, I didn’t ask him. Yeah, we should ask him.
Shaan: But also people should know this: when a founder goes into a space, they can tell you a lot of things about it, but they have so much scar tissue that nine times out of ten they’re going to tell you “don’t do it.” You shouldn’t necessarily listen to the “don’t do it.” You should listen to all the reasons why they say don’t do it, and then assess: are those still true? Or do I have a compelling reason why they’re no longer true? But yeah, we should ask him.
Drunk Idea: Zoom Waiting Room Experience [00:06:30]
Shaan: Alright, here’s drunk idea number two. You take Zoom calls, right?
Sam: Yeah.
Shaan: What’s the experience like? Let’s say you had a meeting with me before the era of Zoom. We were meeting in person. You come to my office for a meeting. What’s that experience like while you’re waiting — just the three minutes before the meeting starts. What do you get?
Sam: Lately? Nothing. But I recently did something where they had an ad on Zoom and I thought that was intriguing.
Shaan: No, no — in real life. What do you get? What’s the best version of a real-life meeting?
Sam: You show up at the building — you’ve done this at bougie New York places — someone attractive greets you, asks you if you need anything to drink, gives you the drink, you have a seat. You look around and they’ve got art everywhere. You start to feel like, “wow, this company’s pretty cool.” Look at that wall with all the little cool handbooks.
Shaan: Yeah — I went to one the other day where the bathroom sign, by the way, didn’t say “Men.” It said “Batman” and they had a little cape on the guy. I was like, these guys like to have a good time, they’ve got a great sense of humor. So I got all this persuasion before I even went into the meeting.
Zoom needs this. Zoom needs a waiting room experience. This is a feature for some product manager at Zoom — we need a dope waiting room experience. Or even, it can be built on top of Zoom. There’s like a trillion Zoom calls a day. Give me a dope waiting room where I can send somebody that’s connected to the Zoom call, and then when they’re ready they can come in. But before that they get a branded experience — a virtual office, a virtual vibe of who they’re dealing with, what that person’s all about. Create a little website space for them to hang out, have some fun, enjoy themselves.
Sam: I did this call with a company — I forget what they were making, maybe a game — and I logged in a little bit early and they had a one-minute teaser video. Because they were the host of the Zoom, it automatically played. So when I got to the meeting I was pretty psyched up. It was awesome. And it almost felt like — I was like, “is this a new feature? Was that an ad you paid Zoom to play?” And they were like, “no, they have this new feature where you can show like a hype video before the meeting starts.” It was really cool.
Shaan: But dude — the fact that Zoom has been around for two or three years of a pandemic and it’s the same thing over and over and over again. No new features and the stock cut in half. What’s going on?
Sam: Yeah, this is not good. I’m more mad about one of those than the other — I’ll let them figure out which one.
Shaan: And there are so many people who land on that page where it says “click here to open up Zoom” and it’s just blank. There’s so much real estate there. I get there after I’ve already clicked a Zoom link — I want to open Zoom. You didn’t have to re-ask. On SimilarWeb, Zoom.com gets 1.7 billion visits a month. It’s the 26th most popular website in the world. And that page is just blank. They could make hundreds of millions of dollars a year just in ads. Like, the new Batman movie should play a 15-second trailer to everybody today. That’s what needs to happen.
Sam: For real. I do think with so much wasted space — I’m more in the waiting room bucket. I want you to be able to say something about who you are by showing what you’ve got. You can decorate it, you can put little drinks there, a little interactive thing, you can play Jenga, you can do whatever you want. Make it cool.
Drunk Idea: Office Personality Store [00:14:00]
Shaan: Alright, so that’s one idea. The second one is what I teased a second ago. It’s called “I Don’t Have a Personality — Give Me One.” Or: “I’m Not Funny — Make Me Funny.” It’s a store, like Spencer’s back in the day. Remember Spencer’s?
Sam: I just went to a Hot Topic the other day.
Shaan: Yeah, it’s awesome.
Sam: Alright, that’s the actual joke — for me and Sarah we had a date night on Friday and we were like, “you want to go walk around the mall and go to the food court?” So we did. It wasn’t date night. It was awesome. It was so much fun. Spencer’s is still a thing, yes. And Hot Topic — we went to both of them. And this shirt I’m wearing I bought from Abercrombie.
Shaan: Dude, Abercrombie’s cool right now.
Sam: I believe you. I believe you.
Shaan: So my idea is: it’s the B2B version of Spencer’s. It’s just stuff for you to put around the office that’s going to make your office more fun and interesting.
Sam: I think we should workshop that name a little bit, though. What was your name?
Shaan: “I Don’t Have a Personality — Please Give Me One.” Maybe there’s an acronym in there. We want a word that’s like Botox, but it’s for injecting personality into your company instead of filler into your lips.
Sam: Botox for your company.
Shaan: Basically what this does — it takes all the common items of any office: bathroom door plaque, bathroom door signs, the exit sign, the emergency exit sign, meeting room things, little chachkes on the table, the welcome desk sign-in mat, a little bell — all items like that. And then it makes you seem like the fun, interesting version of your company. Because we just take the common and do it uncommonly.
We had this exit sign at the Dojo where over the exit sign someone wrote “IPO” — because that was the goal. The exit was an IPO. So we had an IPO sign instead of an exit sign. It was pretty awesome.
Sam: I completely agree. There’s an opportunity in the bathroom mirrors, there’s opportunity everywhere in your office to demonstrate a little personality. One time when I went to VaynerMedia they had Vayner-branded bottles of water. It was awesome and I still remember it.
Shaan: Have you been to a company that had their own branded bottles?
Sam: No. But I also — I don’t feel like I would have thought that was awesome. Why did you think that was so awesome?
Shaan: I just thought it was weird. It was quirky, it stood out. It was just a normal cheap Costco bottle of water and somehow some company — they probably paid a quarter per bottle — just wrapped it with their label. I thought it was neat.
Sam: I remember when I went to Twitch for the first time, when we were trying to sell the company. They were like, “you want anything to drink?” And I opened the fridge — it was my first time ever seeing boxed water. I was like, “boxed water, fun!” I thought it was their gimmick.
You ever drank boxed water? Tastes nasty, by the way. Tastes disgusting. And also you’re drinking from an old-school milk carton. It’s like drinking orange juice out of a metal thermos. Just doesn’t taste good, doesn’t taste right, doesn’t look right or feel right.
So now I’m in this meeting trying to sell my company — biggest day of my life — and I’m like a toddler drinking from this little carton of water, the thing getting all wet and disintegrating. I was like, oh god, do you have a trash can I can go throw this away in?
Shaan: It’s like a paper straw.
Sam: Exactly.
Drunk Idea: Discord Property Management Agency [00:22:30]
Shaan: Alright, here’s my next drunk idea. The next one is — I don’t know what to call it, I need a catchy name — I’m going to call it “Discord Property Managers.”
So basically, there’s a ton of discords out there now. “Community manager” is already a job title. A lot of people have communities, communities are all the rage, and there are tons of discords — especially in the crypto world. They’re so hard to figure out: noisy, spammers, scammers, new people coming in who’ve never used Discord or crypto. Confusion all around.
I think somebody should build the best property management company for discords. Just be like, “dude, we are the best at managing discords. We will manage your discord for a flat fee.” Build a brand around being an amazing property manager for your digital spaces.
Sam: That’s a great idea. So VaynerMedia — when they started their whole thing, social media was new and they were the guys who knew how to handle it. Most of their early job titles were community managers. Basically they’d just comment on everyone’s comment. If you’re Oreos and someone makes a comment about Oreos, we just reply. They got big that way. I bet VaynerMedia makes $200 million-plus in revenue. It’s a big-ass company.
You do the exact same thing — but now the new “social” is community. You’ve got David Spinks.
Shaan: Yeah, of course. He was just early. If he started that two years ago instead of seven years ago, that would be a hundred-million-dollar company right now.
Sam: He was early. David Spinks had this company called CMX Summit — originally it was a conference for community managers, then an online community. He sold it. The big idea was: you have a CEO, a CTO who handles technical things, a CIO, a CMO for marketing. All these C-suite titles. His belief was that community is going to be a big part of companies, and you’re going to have a Chief Community Officer at the C-suite level. Then a senior community manager, then a junior community manager. This is a whole new job function. And he was right.
Shaan: He was totally right and totally early, which is the same thing as being totally wrong. And that’s what sucks.
Sam: He was totally right and totally early. It felt like ten years ago. But I think this is a good idea. It would be a pain in the butt to run an agency, but this is an agency that could crush.
Drunk Ideas from Bill Simmons: Fit Furniture [00:28:00]
Shaan: Let me give you two ideas — these are 100% stolen from another podcast I heard. I listen to Bill Simmons’ sports podcast. Bill has his buddy Kevin Wilds who comes on and does half-baked ideas. He’s like — we need to get him on this pod. He does drunk ideas and he’s been doing it for years. He only comes on like twice a year, but when he does, he’s got amazing ones. He’s even better than me at pitching these.
Can I give you the two most recent ones he did?
Sam: Yeah.
Shaan: First one is called Fit Furniture.
You might be wondering — what is Fit Furniture? Do we make the highest quality furniture? No, we do not. Do we have the best prices? Sure don’t. Do we have furniture that fits through doorways? You bet your ass we do. Because moving furniture is a requirement of furniture, and all furniture is built as if everybody’s home has just open walls you can drag things through.
So Fit Furniture is furniture optimized to fit through the standard doorway width.
Sam: You know Lovesac? Of course. So they’re huge bean bags, right? But their new thing is furniture that fits through a door. It’s modular — it’s a couch you take apart.
At my Airbnb — the way it works, these guys are idiots, they put a spiral staircase going to the second floor and that’s the only stairs. You can’t carry anything up a spiral staircase. So I was like, I can’t get a couch unless I can take it apart.
There’s a company in Texas — the couch guys — and they take apart your couch just for this problem. They take the whole thing apart and rebuild it wherever you want it. So I looked at Lovesac. They’re interesting but they’re like three or four grand for one couch. I ended up going with a futon because I could build it upstairs. But dude, it was such a pain finding a couch that could fit through certain doorways that wasn’t over five thousand dollars.
Shaan: I completely agree.
Sam: If you want to pay five-star prices for that college experience — Sam’s short-term rental: sleep on a futon. But we don’t call it a futon. We call it a pull-out couch, because it’s basically a mattress you can sit on sometimes. I was embarrassed to call it a futon, that’s for sure.
Shaan: That was your nickname in college, right?
Drunk Idea: Haters as a Service [00:34:00]
Shaan: Let me give you his second idea. It’s called Bulletin Board Material.
I think this is for you. I think you are the target market. It’s for somebody who’s got a little chip on their shoulder and likes it. If that chip on your shoulder is what made you who you are today — there would be no Hustle if there weren’t any doubters.
Sam: They say chips on shoulders create chips in pockets. Exactly.
Shaan: But what happens if you grew up around nice people and you don’t have a chip on your shoulder? Or maybe you had that chip, you sold The Hustle, and now everybody tells you you’re so great. Or you were so unlucky that you had a healthy father and a mother who treated you well. You could do anything — but that’s such a disadvantage.
Sam: Because I grew up in an emotionally healthy household — the biggest disadvantage there is.
Shaan: With money, we help solve that problem. We are for the healthy middle-class family who has lost their edge.
And what Bulletin Board Material is — it’s haters as a service. What we do is we go and find the people — okay, my first people: we love the podcast every day, people love the podcast — but guess what, in some corners of the internet there are people who hate this podcast. So what Haters as a Service does is compile that information, take out the real toxic stuff that’s going to give you nightmares, do a little filtering, and just drip to you a little motivation every week. Just a reminder that some people believe you can’t do it. Some people say you’re not so great. Some people say, “Shaan, your camera’s not working — you’ve got to get that sorted.”
It just gives you that healthy dose of haterade. And we hire a bunch of immigrant moms whose children are grown and who have some free time. They’re like, “well, you know, your brother’s a doctor, Shaan, you know…”
Sam: I actually know two women who could run that service single-handedly. I’m not going to name any names. They can serve thousands of customers. “It’s not too late to go back to school.”
Shaan: Yeah. So haters as a service — what do you think of that idea?
Sam: Yeah, I’m down. We’ll call it… you’re just naked people all day.
Shaan: Exactly. And it’s ImmigrantMom.com.
Sam: Live like an immigrant. There’s a reason why immigrants are always the best. ImmigrantMentality.com.
Wrap-Up [00:38:00]
Shaan: Alright, those are my drunk ideas. You’ve got to do drunk ideas.
Sam: I feel like I’m not creative like you. All my ideas are just legitimate money-making ideas. It’s hard for me to come up with bad ideas.
Shaan: How do you do it?
Sam: Yeah, I’m like the Lady Gaga of ideas. No deep cuts — hits only.
Shaan: Alright, that’s it. That’s the episode.