My First Million - #106 - The Q&A Special: We Answer Your Questions Live

Episode Date: September 2, 2020

Today’s episode is a Q&A from the archives. Sam Parr (@theSamParr) and Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) host a Q&A on the one year anniversary of Trends. In today’s episode you’ll hear: Sam talks through how to research topics and businesses (5:15), Shaan answers Sam’s question “what’s a contrarian opinion you hold?” (9:45), Shaan talks about where an entrepreneur should focus their energy (20:52), a lister asks “what’s one thing that you believed that ended up completely opposite?” (25:38), Sam talks about one of the lead gen companies he sold (31:40), Sam and Shaan do a rapid fire questions (35:45), A listener asks about shipping logistics (56:30), Sam and Shaan weigh in on how to adapt your business to COVID (67:30). This episode is presented by Tempo! Check them out at tempo.fit and use code "TempoHustle" for $100 off. Joined our private FB group yet? It's a page where people share each others million dollar ideas or what they're already working on: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ourfirstmillion.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

What's up guys? Sean here. Sam is still out with his kidney problem and we're wishing him a speedy recovery. It's scary stuff. Hopefully it turns out not to be anything too serious. This week, in the meantime, we're going to try to fill in as best as we can with a few different guests, you know, big shoes to fill, but we're going to do our best. Today's episode is actually a Q&A we did for trend subscribers a couple months ago. And so in the trends community, it's pretty awesome. They bring in different speakers and, you know, you can do a Q&A with a small. group of people. And so they asked us questions like, how do you find interesting businesses? What are your contrarian opinions? What's something you were completely wrong about? You know, how would you validate this idea I have for a mental health app? What news do you consume? What other businesses do you own? How do you make great connections? Like, how do you build a network in the digital era where you're not meeting face to face? And then business questions like, you know, what are some big opportunities in the work from home world? What are your biggest failures in business. How would you build a newsletter from scratch?

And then book recommendations and some other fun stuff. So hope you guys enjoy this Q&A episode. Let's do it. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like no days off on a road. Let's travel. Never looking back. Okay. We will get going. We're at 70 people now. I think there's going to be 200 people here. Keep going. Okay, today is one year anniversary of, one year anniversary of trends. And Steph asked that Sean and I come here and just answer questions. We don't have much of agenda today. But for those of you who don't know, Sean, who you can't see, I don't think you can see

him now, but he's visible once he talks. Sean and I have been very close friends since probably 2013, no, 2014. And we have this podcast called My First Million that Sean created. And now I was brought on as a co-host. And Sean and I have an interesting perspective. First of all, I run this business or I don't run it on everything about it, but I started it. And so I have a lot of insight to advertising businesses and subscription businesses. And we're like an eight-figure company or whatever you want to call it. And so anyway, I've got that insight.

But what makes Sean and I kind of unique is we have this massive network of people who are significantly more successful than we are. And we also have this massive network of people who are way less successful than we are, but are more likely they're not going to be way more successful. And so we're able to see all these interesting things and behind the scenes of all these interesting stuff. And when Sean started the podcast, he basically just interviewed people. So he's got all these other insights.

And anyway, we just see probably more things than you guys do just because it's our job. So it's kind of a lucky job. And so what we can do today is answer questions on how. patterns or trends we see on what else Sean what can we talk about I mean really is whatever whatever people are interested and so we obviously on the podcast we're always brainstorming new ideas new opportunities trends that we're seeing or we'll break down a business and say hey have you heard of this thing they're crushing it here's their model so that's what we like to nerd out about but you know this is a sort of a community give back so hey you know we're here for an

hour whatever you guys want to talk about we'll talk about it's structured as a Q&A And there's two ways to do it. So you can either submit a question in the Q&A portion of Zoom. So you can type out your question if you prefer. Or if you actually want to ask a question live on audio or video and hop in, we can do that as well. So just type in the chat. Hey, I'd love to ask a question about, you know, whatever.

You know, get feedback on my pitch or I'd love to ask a question about how you guys, you know, do your hair, whatever it is. So there's two ways to do it. Either type it in or say I want to call in. Either way it works for us. And it doesn't look like anyone has asked anything. So what you do is, I think on the bottom left, like we see like those three dots and maybe it might say the word more. Click Q&A and ask a question.

So we got one or two coming in. We will let a few come in. What do you want to do, Sean? What do you want to answer this first one? I'm just going to say you can also up-bode questions. So if you see a question, you're like, wow, I'd really love Sam and John to answer this. mixture not put it so we get to the best ones. So okay, I'll ask the question for Alex.

So Alex asked a question which was to Sam, how do you do research? And I think this is a good question because, like normally if I saw this in a Q and I'd be like, how do you do research? What does that mean? But Sam, you actually have a knack for finding information and distilling information that most people don't have?

Well, I think we both do. I definitely think we both do. You're definitely better at it than me. Like you've taught me a lot by being like, yeah, actually here, you know, have you heard of this company? Here's what I know. Here's how I found it.

Here's where the signals I look for, which, you know, is kind of interesting. So talk about your process. Or I think rather than generically, if you just, what's something you researched recently and then talk about the rabbit hole you went down? Yeah. So the way that I research is I talk about this all the time. I talk about this with Steph and Brad. Basically, for me, researching is kind of like writing a song.

So writing a song, it has a set. There's like a handful of combinations, maybe a couple dozen that just work all the time. And the way that you come up with those combinations is you see patterns, but then you also, you might see like an interesting riff from like, maybe I could be like slash and guns and roses and I'll see something, I'll see just a Beethoven thing. I'm like, oh my God, that little like structure he had right there for that core, that solo. That's amazing. I'm going to steal that. Or maybe he'll like see a sign this like graffiti that says sweet child of mine like in a poem and he'll just like to take that. So that's what I do is I find interesting things. And typically what I do

is I have a variety of tools plugged into my browser. And whenever I'm looking on the internet, I just, whenever I see anything that catches my eye and that's interesting, I throw it through this process. So I use a combination of similar web, a combination of Wikipedia, which is anyone can use, a combination of annual reports

from publicly owned companies. And anytime I ever see something interesting, I throw it through that process of looking at similar web, looking at Reddit. If it's an app, I'll go on the iTunes store and I'll just read the reviews. And then what I try to do is just completely

deconstruct it to figure out exactly how it works because it's my theory that the reason why no one broke the four minute mile and then in the 60s I think it was roger bannister broke the four minute mile and five other people did it that year is it's a lot easier to accomplish things when you know what's possible so my logic is whenever i see anything that catches my eye i put it in similar web i put in h-a-refs which is a software for search analytics i look up the reviews on iTunes and i try to figure out how the business works because then i want to know what's possible and I'll add a couple other scrappy techniques. So you said, similar web, that tells you the traffic.

You can use app Annie. That'll tell you downloads. If you go to the Google Play Store and you search an app, you scroll down to the bottom, it'll tell you how many installs the app has. These really easy, simple heuristics to figure out how big something is. Another thing you could do, contact X employees. I've done this before.

I call them. I say, hey, X employee doesn't really have anything to lose at this point for that company. So I'll say, hey, I saw you ran BD for this company. you know, we'd love to learn what you found, you know, what worked for you, what didn't. I get on the phone with them for 30 minutes. And in that conversation, I'll ask something like, so like, you know, Ballpark, how big was this? Was it like 10 million in revenue or 100? I have no way to tell.

And then I ask a question like that to triangulate answers from X employees. I'll also, you know, in my- I do it all the time or I'll be like, it said here you guys did X. That's right. That's bullshit, right? And they'll say, yeah. There's no way you're, we did this yesterday on our podcast with this guy. We were like, there's no way your margins more than 30%.

right and you could say something like that and they don't want if you ask what is your margin you'll never get an answer but they'll be like they're like they're like you know we wish and then you know that's not even close or they'll say like that would be horrible if our margin was that bad and then you go it's way higher right exactly another you know i'll add some scrappy techniques that i did in the past so when i was 21 22 the first business i ever did out of college was this sushi chain this sushi restaurant chain we wanted to make the chipotle of sushi i want to make the chipotle of sushi i want to to know what our customers were, what our competitors were doing in revenue. And I did two things that worked. The first was we sat in a parking lot outside of their restaurant and we counted customers

and cars. And then that got really boring because we're sitting there for 12 hours a day just to try to get a sense of, is this a good location for restaurants or not? And then we found you could order on receipts. And you could go in and in the morning we would buy the cheapest thing and then the evening would buy the cheapest thing and we would compare the numbers of the order numbers. and we would know how many orders they did that day. By the way, you can still do this with e-commerce stores. You can go and we can get a Shopify receipt at the beginning of the month and the end of the month, you'll know how many orders a Shopify store is done.

I've also called and said, and that this was true at the time, I'm a student and I really want to learn about your business and write a report. Would you be down to answer 10 questions for me? I have a student at this university. They didn't know I was a student also trying to launch a business, but those were some of the more, I call it scrappy. Other people say, oh, that was disingenuous. but I'm trying to give you content that you're not just going to find everywhere

if you just Google how to do research. But long story short, the point is that you're just looking for little tidbits of information and then there's thousands of tactics that you can do to dig deeper. Sean, someone asks us, what's an opinion that you hold that is a contrary opinion? I hate this. I don't like this question because it's just asking to be controversial,

but why don't you answer it? Yeah, why don't you answer the shit question? No, it's a good question, but it's a hard question. So the idea here is what's a contrarian opinion you hold? So what's something you believe that few others? Let's make it business related or in that sphere. So I think, you know, as I've been doing the podcast, the thing I've learned that has the thing where my opinion has changed the most and I now view it as a controversial opinion is that starting a company is not the best way to build large wealth. I think that actually buying a business is the best opportunity in business right now.

So, you know, traditional path, go get a job. Non-traditional path, start a company in the tech world. That's usually like start a software company, raise money from investors, all this other stuff. And I've just now seen people, sorry, the other one is I'm a bootstrapper. I will put my own credit card money into this and I'll try to make profits on this. I'll build this organically myself from scratch. but now it seems like the lowest hanging fruit is to buy an existing business. I'll give me an example.

I looked at a business that does $2 million in revenue. It does $500,000 in EBITA. This business, you can buy it today for $1.2 million. Wow. So you can buy a business for $1.2 million. So it's about a two-year payback period, slightly over two years. And so you push a button that says, I'm interested in this business. They tell you everything about this business.

So you're just getting an MBA. first. Secondly, you don't have to put out a million dollars, right? You get an SBA loan because this business has existing cash flow. So how would you buy this business? You would put down about 10 to 15 percent as a down payment. That's about 100 to 150 grand. You can either put that yourself from your savings or you can borrow money from friends, family to buy this business that is already proven to be successful. And then you get a loan on the rest. It's SBA loan. It is personally guaranteed, but you're buying businesses that are mature that have existing cash flows and you should do your diligence to make sure this is durable. It's not a flash in the pan. You're not

buying a lemon. But you're going to buy a business that's doing $2 million a year in revenue, $500,000 in SDE, which is the seller's discretionary earnings. And you're going to be able to pay every month that you're paying off your loan, you're actually profiting. You have more net profits from month one than you would if you did your own business from scratch or you went and got a job. And so I just think that so few people, you know, the people who are doing this, they're like, it's obvious. I see some people in the chat like, hey, here's a great book on this. I agree with this. This is such an obvious path that is so underpopulated. It's like the best city in America that nobody's living in right now. There's like a hundred people there and they're like,

this is fantastic. Don't tell anyone. I'll say too. And one of them is the opposite of what Sean said. The first one is I used to think that the best product would win. That's not true. The best, whoever has The best sales and marketing process, I think, will win. And if your product happens to be good, that just makes sales and marketing a lot easier. And the second thing is I loved banking and finance and all that stuff. I think that shit is just, it is like siphons out all the soul of anything interesting. I think that like starting stuff and making stuff from a place of like act, like, just simply going after an opportunity because it makes money, I think I just can't stand it.

And I think it just sucks the life out of me. And it's so hard for me to do. So that's a little bit different than what Sean said, but it doesn't have to be different. Cool. So if I had one more contrarian opinion, it's probably not that controversial in this group. But I would say in mainstream society, this would be contrarian, which is that college if you're a smart kid who wants to be successful, you shouldn't go to college. Oh, I so disagree with you, Sean. I think if you can get into a top 20 university, you 100% should go.

I went to a top 20 university and I disagree. So that's why it's a contrary in opinion, right? Because I think most people would disagree with me, and that's why it's one of my contrary opinions. Damn, what if you can't get in the top 20? Do you still think you should go? I think you should go to a state school, but you should not go into debt, or you should go to community school, or you should just take two years off and just fuck around. I guess what I mean is I think that between 18 and 22 you should have the freedom and the ability to just be an idiot and be a fool and learn about yourself and sexuality and get drunk and have sex of people and try new jobs and do all that great stuff but you shouldn't spend 30 grand a year to do it unless you can unless you're like like my wife went to Penn and

she's a she's a thinker and academic we need women like her but I went to a school that cost $30,000 a year, and it was a private school. That was a total waste. Cool. Next question? Or where do you want to go? Okay. Let's, I don't want to talk about research. Gustavo, we'll talk about that in a minute. We already answered that. We've talked to similar. We'll come back to that, though, because it's highly. Does anyone want to call in? I'd love to actually just There was a couple of people in the chat. There was, Sean McKay has a mental health app idea. So, Sean, if you want to, if you want to talk, just raise your hand in Zoom. We'll get you on live. Adam Hasten, Hasten, also pinged us.

He's a full-time real estate investor. He might want to come on live. Okay, but your questions have to be fast. Short. Okay, and while you're pulling that person up, somebody asks for a broker, like where you find companies. I think Sean does as well. We use Quietlight brokerage, which is pretty helpful.

Yeah, there's several, you know, Quietlight is good for curated, a smaller number of high-quality ones, but you don't always get the best value there because, you know, you don't get the diamonds in the rough there. And also other people are fishing in that same pond. And so honestly, the best businesses are not for sale. So I like to go find a business that's doing well, contact the owner, and get them to see if they, you know, or sorry, not get them to sell,

but ask if they would be open to selling. And now you're bidding against nobody. Yeah, like, for example, I'm not trying to buy a company right now. because I have a job and I'm busy. But like, for example, Hemingway app.com, I think 100% someone should buy it. And just to like, because I can't help myself, I emailed them and asked if they would sell

and they would, in fact, sell. I don't mean if it's a good price, but they will sell. Nice. Okay, so we've got not other Sean, actually. Okay, I'm going to, Sean, I'm going to allow you to talk. I'm not sure if that worked. There you go. There's Sean.

John, feel free to go out. Hey, guys. Yeah, hey guys, how you doing? That's a hear from you. Great name. Yeah, spelling. Well, there's a lot of different ways. Yeah, I posted in the chat about an idea I'm toying around with.

Also, posting in the Facebook group of Wellback as well. Basically, it's a mental health app, I think calm app, but instead of de-stressing and calming yourself down, it's more guided sessions for improving your critical thinking, problem-solving, focus, motivation. Just wondering kind of where you would get started on testing the market if this is a viable idea. Can I just jump right into this?

I was just talking to my friend about this. Sean, are you finished talking? I shouldn't have cut you off. Yeah, go ahead. I was just talking to my friend about this. this where I'm like everything that's going on in the world right now, a lot of it boils down to like young men and young women not being good at processing emotions, whether it's good emotions or bad emotions, but like how to effectively process how you feel about something.

And I totally thought about this because I used to be, if you ask Steph, some people or Sean still say I've got a bad temper. used to be way worse where I would be angry all the time. And I started using calm. And it totally helped me identify emotions and try not to like be, what's it called, impulsive about it. And I think one guy who's kind of exploiting this opportunity in the good way is Sam Harris with Wake Up.

And I don't know for a fact, but if I had a bet, I would say that's a $10 million a year company that is almost 100% profit. So I understand what you're trying to do. I think it's incredibly interesting. And I think the way that these guys grow is by just do shit tons of paid performance marketing on the app store. Is that right? Sean, you think? I mean, Sean, Curry, what do you think?

That is how they grow, unless you're Sam Harris. Then you also have your normal audience to grow through. But the thing I would say is like, okay, cool. You know, that's a worthy problem. So it's like it's a problem worthy of your time. It is a real problem. So you're not trying to validate that part. You need to validate.

So the question is, what are you trying to validate? And really what you're trying to validate is, can I acquire customers at a profitable rate? And then secondly, you know, do I actually have a way to deliver this value? How do I have a way to deliver anxiety relief, stress relief to the customer? Right. So like, you know, what is my product? Is it actually, does it actually work? And then secondly, can I acquire customers profitably? All right. Today's episode is brought to you by Tempo. Tempo.com.com. Fit is the website. I actually use this. I've used this for a few months now. And it's this machine that has a touchscreen and this 3D sensor. And what it does is, they give you weights, like 115 pounds in weights. And it's for strength training. So what it is is it measures your body and it sees how much weight you're lifting. It sees how many reps you're doing and how much effort you're putting in, what your heart rate is. It's pretty amazing. And then you have a coach on screen walking you through what to lift, how many to lift, what workout to do, whether you want to do a 20 minute, 10 minute, 50 minute workout. It's pretty amazing.

But the best part is the leaderboard. The other stuff, all the features that they have, that's cool. But I'm obsessed with the leaderboard because it measures how many reps you're doing and how much volume you're doing. And you can compete with other people who have taken the same class. So it's made me want to work harder, lift more weight, or have more endurance. It's just pretty freaking fun. And the whole point of working hard is to have money so you can spend it on stuff that will make you live longer.

And this product, tempo, it checks that box for me. So they're our sponsor today. If you use the code tempo hustle, you'll get $100 off. So tempo. That fit is the URL and tempo hustle. One word, you'll get $100 off. So check it out. I use it.

If you look at me up on Twitter, you'll see I'm always filming videos where I'm talking to that company, saying I'm trying to crush their employees on the leaderboard because I actually love this thing and I use it all the time. So check it out. And so, you know, that's where you would, that's where I would focus all my energy. It's not about saying, is this a good idea or a bad idea?

You have to zoom in and say, what part of this do I not know that? that I need to know to be successful. And in this case, I believe it's, can I acquire customers profitably? And if I can, I agree, then I'm gonna grow this. I completely agree. There's not a question of do people want this?

You already have that. It's like, that's already, back in the day, that's already validated. I was gonna say, I wanted to make a dating app. Clarify. I'm not talking about an app that de-stresses and reduces your anxiety and calms you down and all that.

I'm talking about going the other direction, and kind of motivation. Yeah, all that. Great. So let's say all those are positive things. Fantastic. Same idea,

which is worthy cause. I believe you could do it. You know, maybe there's open space in the market. That's all great. I guess it comes down to do you have a growth machine where you'd be able to acquire a customer for a dollar and make $2.50 or $3 off them

so that you could plow $2 back into buying the next customers? That's really how these businesses work. I completely agree. It's kind of like when John Rockefeller started Standard Oil, like there was no question if there was a demand for kerosene. There was just a question, like his secret sauce for that he made a deal with the railroad so he could profitably get his kerosene all over the country. That's what this is. It's not about demand necessarily. It's about can you service demand profitably. Yeah. I would also just add that it's about whether people are willing to pay for everyone wants to be more productive. Everyone wants to be more mindful. Are people willing to put their money where their mouth is? And some industries, it's awesome. obvious in some industries it's taken a lot of time for people to be like, oh, I absolutely should spend 30 bucks on my mindfulness this month. And I do see a change in that, but you need to validate that people actually are willing to put money behind productivity. Yeah. Actually, even on that front, I wouldn't worry about that personally. I've failed to see any apps that people use regularly

that don't monetize well. So if you get enough scale, then the sort of, you know, the way mobile apps work, it's not like you're getting 50 or 100 percent of people, typically. to pay. You know, usually these apps are freemium models. Games are really extreme where all the revenue comes from 1% or even less than 1% of the revenue, the whales. And apps like Calm are a little bit different because they put a paywall up right in front and they sort of have just like the seven days of free Calm or whatever. But I guess like I used to do this with my earlier startups. I would try to validate. I try to prove everything. And some great advice I got was like when you step back, Which one of these do you really doubt is true?

And it's like, you know, some things you need to prove because you need to do them and actually show it's not just a thought. But as an entrepreneur, you want to focus most of your energy on the thing you actually don't know is true or not. And so that's where I would focus the majority of energy, which in this case is acquiring customers. One little pilot prototype of this. So a couple months ago, I put out a podcast that's called the nine minute morning routine because I do this. nine minute morning routine helps me with the things you talked about, motivation, clarity of thought, all those things, helps me be basically more successful. So I put it out as a podcast.

I think a podcast is a very cheap way to pilot an idea and build an audience. That's not an app because for an app you've got to get a developer and build a mobile app. That's a whole set of work that maybe you don't want to do right now. And another example to look at that's like this. I talked to these guys who build the sleep app. I forgot what it's called. Yeah, this shit's amazing. And they started out just by having a podcast where they would read

sleep stories. Actually, I think it's the opposite. They started with a website, I started with an app, and the app's gotten really popular, and the app does, you know, a few million bucks in revenue and it has millions of users. And now they're actually doing more podcasting.

They started doing podcasts to sell the app, to basically grow the app. But the podcast, they got way more users quickly. And so now he's like, dude, I love this. I don't even have to bother maintaining an app. Maybe I could just build this whole business on the podcast. And I never really heard anything like that, but that sort of leads me to believe that might be an interesting

prototype for you is put the content on the on on as a podcast, drive customers to that and see if you can get a huge base of hooked subscribers and you're not monetizing them yet. That's okay. Maybe through ads or whatever, but and then you could transfer that audience to an app if you needed to later. That's one way I would consider approaching this. Thank you, Sean. Let's go.

Thank you. See you. Can we answer? one of these questions. Yeah, absolutely. Tom Schmidt asked, what's one thing in biz that you believed ended up, what's one thing that you 100% believe ended up opposite of what was expected? I'm reading that funny. You guys get what I mean? Yeah. I'll say a few. I was with Ryan Hoover the day before he launched Product Hunt and he told me what it is. And I was like, that is so stupid. You're wasting your time. The second thing is I, when I started my business, I thought that,

like I was going to like, I'm going to be this operational powerhouse and lead it every single day, just like Jeff Bezos. That didn't happen. And I think that that doesn't happen with most people. The third thing is charge more money than you think for stuff and people actually are happier that way. Those are good. I like those.

I was also totally wrong on product hunt. In fact, Ryan had interviewed for a job at my company the week before he started product hunt. and we didn't bring him on board. I really liked him, but my team wasn't sold. And then he was like, okay, next week he's like, I launched this thing. So I'm user 15 of Product Hunt. And I remember showing my team be like, hey, that guy we interviewed, here's what he's doing. And we all just sort of laughed and we're like, this is silly.

I've been wrong many, many times on apps like that. My Snapchat username still has the word test in it because I thought this app's going nowhere. This is just a test account just to see what this dumb thing is that will be gone in two months. and here we are like seven years, eight years later or whatever it is. So I've been wrong many times on that. I was also wrong in some things I believed would happen in the future. So I'll give you an example. I thought that the way everybody, the way all these, you know,

when the web got popular, these services like Squarespace and Wix and all that, they let anybody build their own website. And I was convinced this is going to happen for mobile apps. And maybe I'm right, but on a way slower time scale. But I thought people are going to want to, like, you're going to have no code basically you're going to have non coders building apps just like non coders build websites and i also thought the way i have you know sean perry dot com people have their own personal websites i thought oh it'd be great if tim ferris just had the tim ferris app and he could directly connect

with his audience and he could push notify them when he has any blog post and i just thought that that would be great and it turned i was totally wrong on that as just like one specific example of things that i thought the future would be that it doesn't seem like it's played out that way great Nice. Can we bring someone else on live? Yeah. So Jackie, Jackie says he bought the largest towing directory in the U.S. I'll let him speak, but it sounds like something super interesting. Jackie, go ahead.

Hey, guys, how's going? What up? I know who you are. Yeah, I think I messaged you a couple weeks back. You too, Steph. Nice to meet you, Sean. Yeah, so I actually stumbled across one of these directories. My background's in the SEO.

So I managed to rank for like towing company near me, etc. So what we're doing right now is like we're essentially selling ad space in each city for like a flat one K in month for example. But now that I'm listening to some of these calls, I realize like the customer experience is so bad and like these guys have no idea how to run a company. And I was wondering if there's like some way to disrupt some way to disrupt. this industry. It's one of these like really boring, but I would say pretty lucrative industries. So what I have is a bunch of traffic. So essentially people looking for towing, but no one to fulfill it. And how would I rule it out in the U.S. when I'm based in like Germany? Does it make good money as is with the lead gen? I mean, I bought it last month at like 200 and it makes 200 bucks a

month. Last month, this month we're going to hit like two, three K. And it's just pure profit because it's just it's a website right wait so what are you trying to do sell leads to to troch companies so right now that's what we're doing I'm running Facebook ads and we're offering like 30 days for free just free calls we're tracking everything but what I want to do like the 50 million dollar 100 million dollar idea is be like the next triple A so I have a friend who built exactly that he tried to build the next AAA it's called swoop I think it got bought like maybe 50 million bucks something like that, by an existing tow trucking company.

So if you actually want to do this, I can connect you with him. And he could tell you everything about the tow trucking industry, why it's hard to disrupt and where it still can be disrupted. He was telling me, and I was just getting bored. But, like, you know, it's obviously highly relevant for you. So I'll hook you up with him. Just DM me on Twitter after this. The other thing that I would say is like the lead gen revenue just seems really,

really low for that business. Like I'm guessing that a tow job is like, I don't know, hundreds of dollars at least, right? What's the average job? Like $600? No, actually, it's depending on what they need. So flat tire is like 50 bucks. Actual toe is like 100 something.

Well, but that's definitely, there's definitely enough of that in America to build a big business. Yeah, so I would definitely try to like just, I would first ask myself, how big should this lead gen business be? And I would do it back of the envelope and figure out, is that two or three K a month? or is it 30K a month or is it 300k a month?

No, dude, it's $2 million a month. I mean, it can definitely be up to I calculated if we sign up one person in each city. I mean, major at least $50K a month. We're just getting to the sales side of it. Building the funnel is like everything's from scratch. I'm using some like janky SEO reselling platform right now. But Jackie, you're talking about that's not if you did something disruptive. That's just the lead gen business, right?

Exactly, yeah. But like the disruption is like rolling out in cities and offering actually like becoming a tow truck company. My advice, sorry, go ahead, Sam. Let me say this. I sold one of my companies, like it was a small exit to this, a lead gen company for apartments. And they scale, they bootstrapped it to about 25 or 30 million in revenue. and the thing about lead gen is it was it was very profitable it probably i think it did 30 i think it was probably doing when i had maybe two million a month in sales and like 400,000 a month in profit which is great and then what happened was they were buying all this traffic from search which is what you're going to probably do and they tried to rank on search

and they're like well shit we're doing all this transactional revenue with these companies who buy leads from us we have a few problems the first problem the first problem is if some of the, then you work with a combination of third parties, like Apartments.com and all these other places, and they give you a cut of the lead. And what the problem was is two things. First of all,

users were, they were coming to that website, and it's a very transactional relationship. And so when this company that I worked for wanted to build the relationship and create actual products that people would truly buy, the users were like, who the fuck are you? Like, I don't know you.

You've just been pawned me off to other people. And that will probably happen to you. The second thing is, if you are just selling leads and then you want to become a tow truck company, your revenue provider goes, oh, fuck that, you're going to compete against me. We're out. And they're going to quit paying you any money. And so in my opinion, this company, this apartment company that did this with us,

they should have just kept that going and just let it make $2 million a year in revenue and like $10 million in profit and just took all that money and gone and started something else. Or from the very beginning, they should have said, like, we're going to do it the hard way. It's going to take a long time, but it might be way cooler and way better. and because they got addicted to this lead revenue and it just completely screwed them over. It's kind of like at my company,

we've done a good job of this of doing revenue from advertising and subscription revenue, but it's really easy for people to get addicted to that ad revenue and they're like, no, no, no, we can't promote our subscription. So that is what would happen probably. Yeah, okay, we can sort of wrap it up, but I guess what I would say is, personally, I would just try to get the lead gen revenue

to 50K a month and I would move on. I would take that revenue and I would take the profits and I would invest it into other things. Unless you're really saying the next five years, I want to build a show trucking company. That's like the top thing you're most excited about. If you're not, I completely, I 100% agree. Don't turn, you know, something that's awesome into something that's shitty by trying to reach for scale. And, you know, doing 90% more work for, you know, some potential return. It sounds like for a little additional work over the next six to 12 months,

you can get this thing to be a cash cow that nobody knows about and you don't hire anyone and you just milk it that's what I would do okay yeah yeah because I was I mean I was looking for that 50 million dollar idea I guess I'll just settle for like an ex not really about settling it's sort of like if you're if this is really the 50 million dollar idea you want great go for it but um it sounds like this is an amazing 50K a month idea and um with you know a you know a you have a clear line of sight to that, it sounds like. And I would do that. Maybe when you get there, you'll reassess and you will be able to overcome the problem

Sam's talking about. Or maybe you don't. And you're like, you know what? This is actually a great cash cow. And my $50 million business idea is this other thing I'm really passionate about that I'm going to use my SEO skills to go do. One of my favorite companies right now, Flexport, that's exactly how they started. They had the software that was the, and they go, uh, it probably won't.

Let's not fuck this up, but let's just go start something new. Yeah. Also, one thing that didn't add up in what you were saying was that was like a really low ticket price. And you said you could do a lot of money through Legion and that just didn't add up. So I would go check those numbers and be like, all right, do I really believe this can do 50K and walk through step by step for that and get a second pair of eyes to look at it. All right. Next question. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.

Steph, can we rapidly go through some of these other questions? Yeah, the Q&A. I was going to say there's 36 questions in the Q&A. people could go and upvote them so we get the best ones to the top. Let's rapidly go through some of these, Sean. I'll save my answer in two sentences and you say yours and two sentences. How to make new connections. Wait, fuck, where to go?

Oh, how to make great connections in the, in a digital era, Twitter. Twitter and writing. Yeah, blogging and write. Email list, blogging or Twitter. You can get famous in six months from this. It won't be, you don't need a huge audience. You just need like a thousand really smart people to think you're smart. and that's actually trivial to do if you are smart.

Yeah, I would say Twitter. How about, okay, if you're trying to launch a popular blog, should you start wide or narrow? Narrow. Next question. You have a great blog post on this. I think it's called Nitches Get Riches or something like that. Go Google that.

You always go narrow. Someone said, Sam for the Hustle newsletter was the first generation, newsletter, or anything. It was a blog and then a newsletter. newsletter is way better. Sean and Sam, what other businesses do currently own? I don't know if Sean wants to answer that, does he? Yeah, I can't talk about it right now.

So yeah, can't talk about that. I own the majority of the hustle. I have partnered with my friend Ramon, and I'm a minority owner of a software company. Both Sean and I are advisors to a few things that we have shareholders in. I wouldn't say we're an owner, but we owned equity in. We own little pieces of. I have Angel invested in not many companies, five. Right.

So we own partially own those. Anything else? I've gotten like maybe three or four things that pay bills. Like I make money from each month, but they're all like tiny. Yeah. Also, I would just say my goal is not to own many things. Everything you own owns a piece of you, and I don't want to own many material things. I don't want to own many businesses.

I'd rather own, you know, nothing or one amazing thing. And, you know, I have this phrase. If you've ever seen Jerry McGuire, he talks about the Kwan, and he talks about, you know, basically like he wants the money and he wants the quality of life and he wants to have that it factor. I have a symbol or phrase, which is, I don't want to be bowling out of control. I want to be Kualen out of control and Kual is corny. but the quality of life.

And I say it to myself specifically. I have my brother-in-law, we always talk about the little things and the quality of life. He walks his daughter to school every single day and having the freedom to just go work out whenever he wants and travel whenever he wants. Those are wealth.

And I don't want to own businesses and I don't want to have money tied to things that take away my quality of life. Great. What media and entrepreneurship organizations, let's, okay, so media for me, I'm not going to say anything I'm associated with. I consume Business Insider and Hacker News every single day. I also go to TechMeem, and that's it.

The only media I really consume is social media. I don't read any news. I do listen to sports stuff just to kind of escape, mindless stuff. Entrepreneurship organizations, I pay attention to anything that White Combinator does. I pay attention to anything that a group called NFX, does and I pay attention to what's going on in India because I think there's a lot of

really interesting things there and I have a whole bunch of people who feed me information about the startup scene in India that's where I'm and I also have private groups so I have several private groups that are either just chat like messaging groups or we meet up once a month that are full of other founders and those are my favorite entrepreneurship groups and that's where I learn from I don't listen to the news or read anything I don't read tech crunch or any of that chip. Sean, what are some of the ideas that you've seen in India that you're surprised haven't happened in North America yet? I'll give you an example. So this guy, I should shout

him up because he's kind of amazing. I actually am going to just turn this into a newsletter. There's a guy who knew how interested I was in India and he just, he said, I'd love to tell you about it. His name is Sumitra Sengupta. So shout out to him. So he sends me this thing every week. So I said, send me one interesting business every week. And he just does and he was like, I'll send you a report. And I was like, no, no, no, no, just DM me on Twitter three things. What's the name of the business? What's the one line description? Give me three bullet points of why you think it's awesome and screenshot it for me

because I don't have an Android phone. I don't want to download this app and get it all set up. And so he does exactly that. So like he told me that just last night, midnight, he says, business called CRED. The founders, this guy, Canall. The idea is to create a virtual club, like a credit card club, like like, diners club used to be a popular one my dad had for the 1% of India.

So they launched in early 2019. They've raised $175 million. They're already processing a billion dollars of payments. They have two million users and it's valued at $500 million. This all happened in essentially one and a half years. And then he's like, here's why it's awesome. Here's my two cents of where it might be weak. And I just think it's great.

Hold that up. Hold that up. Let me read that. Step, let's make this a section in the trends email each week where we like list four things in non-American countries that are doing stuff interestingly. Sean, we had Nike reach out to us and ask us to pay us money to build this corporate, like paid information thing. And all we do is talk about shit going on in different countries. Yeah, I think it's great.

And so I'm super interested in about this. Hold that up. I want to see how he writes it. All right. Let me show you. So he's got little emojis next to certain things. I don't know if you could see it. Oh, my God.

And then it's just like, oh, wait, there you go. And then he has like at the bottom, he has like a little screen cast where he walks me through the app. And I'm like, this is fantastic. Like, this is business school. This is why you don't need college because you could do this. This guy does this in, you know, one week and I'm learning from it. So anyway, it's infinite ways to learn if you're motivated. That is amazing.

He just does this for fun, the guy. I don't know why he does it. He loves the podcast. He reached out and he was like, how can I help? And I was like, hey, I want this. And then he did such a good job of it that I'm like, okay, we're going to turn this into a thing so that you can, like, more people should read this. They should not be locked in my DMs.

Like, more people should benefit from this information. People are saying they'd love to see it in the chat. So this is a problem. I always end up competing with the hustle here. Now you guys are going to do it. This poor guy is going to get ripped off. Well, hey, no, there's a newsletter called Steno-Sism, I think it's called. And all they do is talk about this type of shit, but in China.

And I bet you that guy makes a million dollars a year doing that. Yeah. So I think that if you like could, we wouldn't analyze this crap. I mean, maybe we would. But like one person could do like a weekly newsletter just on the landscape of India, but for an American, and a lot of people would buy that. Yep. Okay, what else we got?

Let's say, I want to find something that's different. Here's one in the chat. I know you guys talked about the RX bar in the past. So someone did a test with their friend to imitate the RX bar in Europe. How would you approach differentiation in the protein bar market when there's already so many products that are super similar? We want to talk about what we talked about yesterday, Sean? Go for it.

You do it. No, you're better than me at. Okay, so we, did this podcast get released? I don't know if our podcast from yesterday. No, tomorrow. No, it gets out tomorrow. So we did a podcast with the founder of Liquid Death, which is a water, a canned water drink that's taking a totally different brand. And he was like, you know, this whole business for us is about branding because

clearly, you know, people don't buy water really because they can, you know, if you did a blind taste test of 10 bottled waters, people wouldn't be able to tell which one is which, which one's better than the other. So really you're working on form factor, you know, the bottle and the brand. And so they have a new form factor, cans. RX bar did the same thing. Their packaging is very, very distinct and unique. And then the second thing is like, brand, what do we stand for?

Who are we speaking to? What do we stand for? For his thing, he was like, you know, the water brands all try to speak to like yoga mom's purity. It's a picture of a mountain, you know, crystal geyser, like all that shit. It's luxury, all that stuff. And he's like, you know, he, him. himself was a punk rocker and was on tour and they used to, you know, be promoted by Monster

Energy. And he talked about how on the Monster Can, you know, they would be chugging these things. He's like, dude, the tour schedule is brutal. How are you out here in a hundred degree heat drinking monsters like, and they're like, oh, this is water inside. And it's called on the bottom of the can it says Monster Tour, like Tour beverage or something like that. And tour beverage means water in a monster can. And, you know, so what he was just trying to think of like, you know, it's true. There's no water brand that speaks. to fun and there's no water brand that speaks to these different demographics who don't necessarily want to be holding the sort of purity, clean, you know, brand while they're doing things.

He said, he said, like, we want to be like water that when you're smoking weed, like, go ahead, do, like smoke weed or get drunk or do drugs, like do something that maybe isn't always physically healthy for you, but it's exciting and also drink our water. Right. And you see this all the time, right? you, there's medical drinks to replenish and rehydrate you that are electrolyte drinks and they look like a Pia light and they look like a medical drink to rehydrate you. And then Gatorade came out and just refacted that same thing with the brand of this is what the top athletes in the world's in the world drink. And then, you know, there's, so you just take a customer first and then you say, okay, to this customer, is there already a brand in this category that speaks to that

customer that fits that customer's lifestyle and if not go for it but you know you need to have that clear insight about this customer uses this product or wants this product but there's not a brand in that category that knows how to speak to that audience I want to we have 43 open questions we're not going to get all these but I definitely want to try how can we do that stuff let's just power through them do people want rapid fire or do they want in depth of a few questions I don't know Okay, we'll try this one from Justin. Wait, hold on. Let's look at the chat. Sean asked a question.

Sean said, do you guys want rapid fire? Rapid fire. People are rapid fire. There we go. Okay. Steph, you want to read this question that we just rapid fire? Sam, you can go first on each one. Yeah, okay.

So with work from home becoming more prominent after COVID, what are your thoughts on the work from home economy? They seem to think there will be a market for benefits. Have any benefits at home? The big market, I think, going to be in helping set up different entities in different states. It's still very hard. We have a full-time woman who works at our company in ED who helps us with us. It's hard. I totally agree. There's a big economy. I don't think it's around benefits. I think it's around

things like teleconferencing, work collaboration tools, software like that, things like you talked about HR things to deal with this new world. Or I advise this company called First Base, which is providing actual like hardware to your home office. The company needs to give you a computer a desk and a monitor and a webcam so that you can actually work from home. And companies don't know how to do that. They don't want to deal with the logistics of that. These guys are doing it for them. And I think that's a awesome business too.

Facebook going remote with 20,000 people, the hardest thing is, I think, is it going to be taxes. It's how to handle the taxes. That's so hard. Yeah. Okay. Cool. So another question.

Any advice to one to four years just out of college, young ambitious people who are affected by COVID, either furloughed or laid off? Is it worth trying to intern? Or should they focus on finding a full-time job? What do you recommend people? All right. I'll answer first. If I was in that position, man, it's so fucking weird right now.

I kind of was in that position, and I moved to San Francisco, and it worked out well. The second thing that I did, and it also worked out really well, is I learned a skill. Most college kids don't have a skill. I learned the skill of copywriting, which means I was always able to have a job. So I would learn a skill set, and I 100% would intern. I think there's two answers. There's one if you're in the top 5% of people and your goal is to be sort of entrepreneurial or if your goal is to get on the career track, then go get a job or get an internship and start climbing that ladder. And so if your goal is more entrepreneurial, which I'm assuming it is if you're in this community right now, then I would learn how to make money on the internet.

I think that's an incredible skill that's going to be useful for a long time. And I think it takes a lot of trial and error. And I would be like, okay, I'm going to live like a cockroach very cheap. and I'm going to find a way to just cover my bills every month, and I'm going to learn how to make money on the Internet. It might take me two years to figure that out, but I'm going to find every model of how people are doing it, and I'm going to learn how to make money on the Internet.

Cool. Someone's asking, Sam, you said yesterday that you'd like to use research coming out of trends to eventually launch a business. How far would you deviate from the hustle or trends model, basically, like how far would you deviate from media, which we're in right now? Well, we're going to have this business. We do trends and hustle, and that will be one thing. and then we will invest in stuff. Our company has not invested in anything.

I, Sam Parr, personally have invested in some stuff that we've discovered. And I think that's what I want to do is either have a fun underneath our company arm or use our profits to invest in that. And we would invest in anything. Me and some guy built this hotel that Sean and I were riffing on the other day. And I need to see if the economics of that are as good as he, as good as it looks. But like something like that, I totally would invest in. And I have invested.

I've invested 50 or $70,000 collectively in interesting stuff like that. Sam, where did you get your shirt? Somebody wants to know. So I have a, I don't even want to even want to realize so much. Anyway, I got it from Target. Yeah. Okay, great. What's next?

Cool. So someone's asking about second, third order effects of COVID and obviously the protests. What do you see in terms of business opportunities given where we are? I think cities with good living, but typically we're like sea level cities like Denver or Charlotte are going to just fucking explode. And San Francisco and New York are going to crash. Yeah, this is too hard to do rapid fire. But we talked about this on the podcast, I believe. And there's a great PDF somebody put out there of second order, third order effects.

Someone in the community found it after we talked about it. And we'd look at that. And there's a bunch of ideas in there. Yeah, the guy that's name was Emmett. Okay, another question. So Sean, you mentioned on the Facebook group, Angel Investing, and now you're talking about buying businesses. What platforms would you recommend people find internet businesses? We talked about this a little earlier.

Quiet Light Brokerage is where I would start. Cool. All right. So George is asking, can you guys, this isn't a quick one either, but talk about some of your biggest failures, what you learn from them. I'll just say this. I haven't had many failures because I've not really probably swung as hard as I should. I'm the opposite. I feel like I failed on everything.

You know, the last, even the company that we just sold in all reality was a failed company. Like our ambition was to be, you know, the next Twitter, YouTube, Twitch,

etc. And instead we ended up selling to Twitch. And, you know, it wasn't like some mega, mega home run, you know, FU money type of exit or anything like that.

So from my perspective, I feel like my capability is here and my results are here and I'm trying to bridge that gap. And I would say like every business is that way. Your capability is here and here's a reality. Every person is usually that way. And you should be trying to, you should be trying to figure out how to climb up that gap. You know, the first thing I did was this restaurant business, you know, it failed. You know, the second business I did got a bunch of progress and bunch of funding from a strategic person.

I left and it failed later. I did an idea lab for five years where we were swinging for the fences to build the next big social thing. I do not own the next big social thing. So in that sense, I failed. I want this podcast to be the biggest podcast in the world. In that sense, I failed, you know, like my goals are here and my results are here. And the good news is my goals are so much higher than the average person that even when I'm failing, my results are so much higher than the average person.

And I completely agree with that. I've never failed, though, because I've failed in that there is still that gap, but I've never had like a run out of money failure because also kind of corny. I've played it safe. Kind of corny, but there's a great book called Win or Learn that was written by Connor McGregor's coach.

It is an amazing philosophy to adapt. You don't need to read the book. Read the cover. It's called Win or Learn. And all it says is whenever you do something and there's an outcome, there's a result, you just gotta say, did I win or did I learn?

There is no lose. And it's corny, but the reality is that that's the best people, they act that way. If they fail, they don't worry about losing or failure. They just say, what did I learn? And then that's winning in a different way. Cool.

Someone is launching a D-to-C product. We'll be in the market in beta in a couple days. They're wondering if they should do Kickstarter. And their concern specifically is whether people might steal their idea or basically launch it faster than them if they choose to do a Kickstarter. I'm not going to talk about that. You can go ahead, Sean. I don't know anything about that. It sounds like if your product's ready to go to market, you don't need a

Kickstarter or you don't need to raise capital. You already got to the starting line. You use Kickstarter to get to the starting line. Like, hey, I need some money to build the thing so I can get to market. Sounds like you're already there. So just start selling it, see how it goes. If it's going well, people will want to invest. If it's not going well, a Kickstarter is not going to save you either. So it sounds like you're already at the start line. It's time to go. Cool. I'm going to go through some of these just like rapid fire ideas. You guys let me know what you think of them. So one of them, hotel living. Team of cleaners come every day to do small things. Make your bed, take your trash out, fresh towels to give you that quote-unquote hotel feeling.

What do you guys think? Love it. Don't think you can make the economics work. Yeah, don't think the economics work unless you can get an entire neighborhood to do it. All right. What's your take on whether companies will or should start to move away from gig and 1099s or and move to W2? I don't have an opinion on that. I don't feel like I'm educated. Yeah, I agree. I don't have a real opinion on it. I would just say generally, I think the world, forget those labels. I think the world as a whole is moving more towards freelance and free agency than full-time one company.

Like we already broke the paradigm of work for one company for 40 years and retire on your sort of retirement plan with that company. That's gone. You know, average tenure in any high growth industry is like, you know, two years or less. So that paradigm already broke. The next paradigm is breaking is working from an office. When you're not working from an office,

you're not going to have the same sort of identity and tie to one company at a time. So full-time employment with one company is probably going to go away too. I think the ideal world is where you're paid for output and production and you can be working for one or more companies at any time. You can be one person or you can be a gang of four people who are known to be awesome at doing X and you're more like an agency. So I think the world moves more towards on-demand, you know, gigs and you get paid based on merits and output. Nice. Okay. We have to answer a few fast. Okay, next idea. Apartment rentals by auction.

I don't know. I don't know. Okay, cool. Sam, what's your advice for building a newsletter from scratch? Start, figure, fuck, I don't know. Advice. Pick a professional-related topic. So, for example, something that employees use, not something that is like sports or for fun.

Because you'll make more money that way and start very, very, very niche. So like people who are any sports newsletters worked to become huge. Yeah. Are there any really big sports daily newsletters? Well, maybe Barstool started that way. Oh, they did. Okay. That I know of, no, but Thrillis is a $500 million company.

And they started out as like newsletters for like men's clothing. So you definitely can do some of these fun stuff. But if you want to make more money and make it fast, do B2B. Okay. Rob is asking about sourcing manufacturers, whether it be in China or North America, seems like it's a blur to him to actually get past that step. I've heard about a lot from other people.

I can't talk about that, Sean. You can't. Yeah, I've been through that process. It's hard. I think it's good that it's hard. Otherwise, there would be so much more competition. You know, so if you're in the game, you want that barrier because only the few who climb over that wall will figure it out. I actually think that the bigger opportunity,

is to break down that wall. So if I was somebody, rather than trying to start a product company like that, I would say, oh my God, it's so hard to get through this manufacturing process and all the uncertainty. And, you know, like yesterday I wired 50 grand to China. You know how hard it is to wire 50 grand to China? It's like not easy to do these types of things. So, you know, there's so many pain points, finding a supplier, knowing if they're good, getting samples made, wiring money to them, and trusting that you're going to get your product back, figuring out how the hell shipping works, like all of that stuff is super complicated. I think somebody should create,

they probably are already like Sourceify as one of them, but you should create more companies that help people not need to know how to do that. Just like I can launch a website. I don't need to know how to code. AWS made it so I don't need to know how servers work. I can just get to my end goal. So I would focus on that rather than building one.

If I really wanted to go big, that's what I would focus on. Someone in the Facebook group asked why I don't like the course business. They said I hate it. I don't actually mean that. I don't truly hate it. I have very, very, very little experience with it. I just hate the idea that someone's paying me money for something and they're only paying me one time versus providing value and getting paid all the time. All right. There's still a lot of questions in the chat, but why don't you take a second to scan through your sandwich one see if there's any that you want to answer because we only got a little bit of time left. Yeah, and if we can just grab these questions, we could even do a podcast episode answering the spillover ones.

I can send these to you guys after. All right, I'm going to scroll. I'm trying to find a good one. What opportunities do you guys and gals see between community and law enforcement right now? That's a good one. That's a good question. I don't have an answer. I'm sick to my stomach every single night watching the news.

How many police officers are there in the country? Let's just Google Ruffick. How many? Let me guess. I think in New York there's 20,000? Yeah, so there's 17,000 agencies. So I wonder if there's like a messaging app or some kind of like secure messaging app that you could build for that industry like Discord built a messaging app for gamers. And there's enterprise messaging apps like Slack.

But I just would never want to. I would never want to sell to a government. That would be a pain in the ass. Not because I'm pro or anti-government, but so much bureaucracy. Oh my God. So I have an idea I'm going to talk about on the podcast next episode, which is around. things like this, which is this model where really hard sales cycle to get in, get in, you never get out.

Exactly. George said this in the chat. They're sticky. So there's a class of businesses like this. I've always resisted them because I'm impatient. I can't imagine dealing with the sort of bureaucracy and the sales cycle there. But then on the other hand, the reality is that stickiness and durability and the moat is what makes your business valuable over time.

So I'm going to share a couple of examples of businesses that have done this well on the next podcast. Great. let's talk about book recommendations. If I had to recommend one, to me, it's a biography of John Rockefeller. It's called Titan. The reason why I like him is he was a ruthless businessman. Yeah, he was a wonderful father and a wonderful husband.

And my issue, when reading about biographies, I typically read about men because I'm a man and I identify with them more. And they are either a good businessman. Rarely are they good at business and great at being family. And he was that. That's why I like it. Nice. I'll give you three quick ones.

the happiness hypothesis good book storyworthy great book if you want to become a better storyteller and the last one um is the game i think the game taught me more about people in psychology than any other book i bet step have you read the game i haven't oh my gosh it seems like something you would read it's so fun yeah have you heard have you read ender's game that's like i've read inders game too yes is that also about like two very different books ender's games is a sci-fi no the game is about this like underground world of pickup artists. Oh, interesting. No, I have not read that. It's so fascinating. Mary has asked this a couple times and I want to make sure we get to her question. What's the best way to validate a healthcare related business specifically geared

towards users age 50 to 75? And she's basically, she's asked a couple times, like, how do you target that user base? What's the best way to do that? Well, Facebook advertising, but I don't know like the legal, like if I'm just selling like bullshit online that is not like FDA approve or won't kill you or something. I just create landing pages even if the product doesn't exist and I accept payment form it. This is what I do with trends. It didn't exist.

I accepted payment forms and then I returned the money and I called them and I asked them why they bought. And I would do this. But when you say health related, I don't know, like you can't like pre-sell certain medicines. But Facebook, you can find them all on Facebook. Facebook is basically the best way to reach most people on earth. And that demographic, did she say women between 50 and 7?

That's probably like, Not necessarily women, just, oh, just people. That is the best place to reach that demographic. All right. How are you guys doing for time? I know we're a little bit over. I can spill over. I have, I think.

I can spill over a little bit. How about this one? 15 minutes. I can go, yeah, I can go about that. How do you start becoming an advisor paid or equity to companies? Somebody asked me and Sean this the other day. We got lucky start a podcast. ask and people email you and I say no to most every single one, even people who pay me money.

Yeah, I don't know if the question is how do you become it? You know, if you want to become an advisor, you've got to have done something. So like in this case, both me and Sam have built companies that are, you know, Sam's still running his companies. It's worth tens of millions of dollars. I sold mine for tens of millions of dollars. So, you know, do something that shows that you probably know what you're talking about or know a level above wherever they're at in terms of, you know,

this was martial arts, you want to be a brown belt or a black belt. That's how you get the opportunity. And then the real question is like, is it something you want to do or not? Have you heard of these expert networks? Are you an expert net? I'm part of these, one of these expert network. It's called like GLG. They give you $1,000 an hour or $500 an hour to talk to like a banker.

I used to do that. And it's so funny, even though like that's a lot of money. I'm like, oh my God, I don't want to do that. It kills me. Yeah, those are great. They've reached out, but then it's never come through. So I never got paid on them yet. We'll see.

This is an interesting one. Ray says that he's created decent and engaged following on Instagram sharing do-it-yourself healthy baby food recipes. He's not sure what product he can launch. He thought maybe an app with a baby meal with baby meal plans, but there's a lot of those already in the app store, potentially also recipe books. But those aren't very profitable. So any thoughts there? Yeah, DM me the page. I don't know what you mean by decently engaged following. That can mean a lot of things to a lot of people. You know, if you're talking about a page with a million followers and you're getting, you know, a lot of action, that you have different opportunities than if you're at 9,000 followers, which is definitely good. It's not zero.

But you still have a long way to climb. And I talked about this, I think, on the last podcast that I did solo, which is don't do bank shot companies or double miracle companies. Like, first I need to make a super influential Instagram account. And then I need to make a super great product after that. like don't plan for that. If you find yourself in that position, great. But like, if that's your plan, you should just go do the one thing that's valuable and put all your effort into that.

Because otherwise you're going to put all your effort into one thing. And you're still not going to be at the promised land. You're going to have to then go do this whole other really hard miracle thing just to get some value out of it. Unless you can throw money at the problem and you're like willing to burn through tens of millions or hundreds of millions of dollars, like a Tesla or something. Well, let's get, uh, Nassim has been, he's had his hand, raised for like an hour. He's in the hospitality business, seems to be hit hard by COVID.

Seem, feel free to talk to his live. Just gotta unmute yourself. Well, I can read out in his team's comment in the chat instead. So he said, we're in the hospitality business, invested in a web mobile platform. We were getting ready to raise money. But now with COVID, all hospitalities is, you know, not going so well. Many venture-backed hospitality startups are going through rough times. We made $2 million in annual revenue, but now with COVID, we're down. I'm not sure how much they're down, but they're just doing okay in the last three months. Thinking of pivoting. Can you talk to how you might grow the user base and customers for a marketplace such as this? That's a really specific question. We need to know more about what you

act, what value you actually provide in the hospitality space. Yeah, I don't even want to touch that. All right. Well, it's just, it's, I don't ever, I'm thankful people listen. to some of our advice, I would be very nervous about saying something in someone believing it. Yeah, we just need more context to even ask questions there. So that's a longer discussion. One time Gary Vaynerchuk said something in like some fucking thing. And I really admire him. And I like thought that that was like and I like built a business. I did like something. Like I based a lot of my life on there and like that money on there. And then when I was on his podcast this year. I asked him about that and he was like, what? I go, yeah, yeah. Remember

this thing? He goes, I don't know. I was probably just shoot the shit. I don't know. I was just saying shit. And I was like, fuck. I don't want to, uh, I've always nervous of doing that same thing with other people. All right. Looks like Edgar's got his hand raised. He has a question about the industry. Sorry, Nassim, by the way, but hopefully you get it. Hi, hello. Can you all hear me? Yep. Hey. Okay. Hey, how are you? Everything well? Yeah, sure. What's up? Awesome, awesome. Hey, so I've been, I've been watching all for a while.

I appreciate what you do. This is a super sick that you guys had these conversations. I'm in San Diego. I'm 21 years old. I run a family business. We have two restaurants. So, of course, you know, we've had restrictions, and so we're only doing carryout as of now. But I understand how, you know, or I guess I'm really intrigued on how psychology works and people are going to stay home more often. We hear about a lot of company shifting to, you know, to people staying at home and working from home. So I know that, for example, Uber Eats, Grubb, DoorDash, all these delivery applications, they charge a high commission for a lot of these restaurants, especially, you know, these are mom and pop restaurants. So I was thinking, you know, how can we, I guess, bring that to more of a, I guess, how can we support small businesses, per se in the delivery form? So how can we bring power back to the small businesses so they can, I don't know, I believe it would be some type of a platform that allows the community to connect to that certain business.

Does that make sense or I understand what you're saying. So I definitely understand what you're saying. Just to rephrase, you're basically saying, hey, restaurants need to adjust due to COVID. We're trying to do delivery. The current delivery platforms take such a huge rake. It's not great for the restaurants. They're still struggling. By the way, is that the sentiment?

Is that restaurants are angry at Uber? I wouldn't say that we're angry, but the restaurant industry, is pretty hit by the commissions. These delivery apps are charging, especially, you know, the average food margin for a lot of restaurants is around anywhere between 25 to 30 percent. Uber and DoorDash, you know, at the end of the month, are taking around maybe a 30, 40 percent commission, you know, total. So it's, it is a, it is a big, a bigger hit for them.

So, so what I'm, what I'm trying to propose is, is an idea. for a platform where actual businesses, actual restaurants can begin to create a, I guess, to collect per se different addresses, phone numbers of people who would want their food to be delivered to a home. No, look, so I understand what you're saying. And I think that what you're saying, you're saying the problem is, is that restaurants are upset with Uber. Sam, what you're really saying is restaurants are hurt and they need to make more money.

And I actually don't think that the solution that you're saying is actually the right solution to the problem. And I don't, I'm not in the restaurant industry. So it sounds like you are. I would actually want to know, has anyone ever made you happy as a restaurant owner? Are you ever happy at Yelp? Are you happy at Groupon? Are you happy at Uber? Like, who has done something that has made you happy?

Because that's what I would be curious about what solutions do make restaurant owners happy. because whenever someone talks about Groupon, my belief is that they hate it. My belief is that restaurants hate Yelp. My belief is that restaurants don't like Uber, but who do they like? Yeah, I agree with Sam. I think we should move to the next question,

but I think Sam said the right thing, which is the solution you're proposing, I think has a lot of problems. I don't want to sort of go into each one of them right now, but it's true the aggregators in the middle, DoorDash, et cetera, they have a lot of power. They're going to continue to have a lot of power.

There's not really much the restaurants can do against that. But you should try to figure out, instead of trying to create a new platform with one, one millionth of the resources that they have and, you know, no head start, instead just figure out what's something we could do to make money as a restaurant. What assets do we have that we can leverage to create value? And I'll focus on that. So that's my point, that's my point, Edgar, which is I do not think the solution is to take 10% instead of 30%.

I think the solution is what to me, it's like you're obsessed with the solution. You're not obsessed with the, you might be, but you are also obsessed with the solution and you are also obsessed with the problem. Fuck that. Only care about the problem. And I think you need to come up with the creative way. Groupon has one way to do that, but that doesn't make people happy. It seems like Yelp has one way to do that.

So find some other way that like maybe like someone's already kind of in that industry and it's kind of making them happy. And I would definitely like get out of this lane. You got to get out of that lane a little. Yeah. By the way, Uber Eats is a shit that goes, I believe. One last quick question before I let you all leave. If I do want to go into the wholesale industry, like the food wholesale industry, I would like to put, I guess, one of my recipes, you know, on,

it would probably be some type of like beans that we have that are really, really good. How would I take steps to start going into that lane? Do you know, are you actually couldn't hear what you said, Edgar, but why don't you just email me or DM me and we can go further there, but I want to make sure that we're able to talk to more people's questions. I understand. Thank you so much. Thanks so much, Dr. All right. I think a lot of people in this call will find your answer to this one interesting. So it's targeted specifically at trends, Sam, but I think we can expand it to like how you guys think about ideas for the podcast. So the question is what's on your radar for upcoming research reports and specifically what inspires you? to basically say like this topic is worthy of researching or sharing on trends and similarly for the podcast. I, Sean and I have a doc called MBD and we just fill it up. I just think that people are overestimating how little of a seed of an idea will come across

and then we'll just put it in there and then just go down this rabbit hole. I don't think people realize how much information you can get on Wikipedia or off of a tweet. Like I just see a tweet and like go to Wikipedia and then Google like. So I think people are actually overestimating our skill set. Something on the docket is a something Sean and I have talked about a lot is J.D. Power and this business model of like licensing like your your approval for trends. I'm trying to get Trung to write about that for the brainstorming sessions. Sean, he has this whole idea about business or sales channels that are really hard to go into, but once you get in, they're the best.

He already said that earlier. Yeah. Yeah, basically, if you want to be interesting, be interested. So whatever you're interested in or something that catches your curiosity where you're like, huh, that's interesting. I never heard about that. Or, wow, it makes that much. Anything that sort of evokes that type of reaction, just boom, write it down and then start researching it.

That's how I do it. But I think Steph does most of the research anyways for trends. So really, Steph, that's your answer. For trends, I don't fucking touch it. I read it the day comes live. My answer for trends is basically like if you see something and you think if I shared this with 10 random people, if any less than two people would already know that, then it's interesting.

And it's like worthy of trends or potentially my first million. But just think about like if I shared this with someone, how many people would already know this. if it's like more than 50%, it's probably not that interesting, because most people already know it. One question from Ellis, how could you imagine, this is an opinion question, but how could you imagine one of the Fang companies being unseated and specifically which one do you think is most likely to be unseated

if that were to happen? Right now, Facebook, the amount of frustration people have towards them is quite high. The angle that I think someone's going to take them is going to be two different angles. The first is, I think there's going to be an extreme version of saying all free speech is okay, anyone can come on this platform.

That's going to attract one group of people. And then the other end, someone's going to create a version where it's going to be like, we don't notify you too much. We curate your feed so you're not overwhelmed. It's more intimate.

I think something like that will happen. I would not be surprised if Duck, Duck, Go gets huge. I'm very fascinated with Duck, Duck, Go. I think privacy is very important to people to normal people in the America now, whereas before it wasn't. Yeah, I actually don't think any of them will be unseated. Oh, yeah, me too, by the way. I don't think any of them will be. I think these companies, they already sort of got disrupted three or four times and survived.

You know, mobile was a huge shift. Google buys Android. Facebook pivots the whole company and puts it in lockdown mode to get its mobile apps up. you know, social networking gets disrupted by, you know, photo sharing and messaging. Facebook spends $23 billion acquiring companies in that space, right? Like these companies- Facebook's going to be like four. They're going to be around for 100 years, I think.

And so, you know, I think what ends up happening is not that these companies lose what they have, but actually that a new thing comes up that just turns out to be more important or more relevant of where the puck is gone. And so the old phrase is, when you have a cast. and it's got a big, deep moat around it. The castle doesn't die because somebody sieges the castle. They cross the moat magically and then take over the castle. It's that somebody finds a small little shack on another piece of land 10 miles over,

and that land actually has more fertile soil. And then your castle becomes irrelevant. Nobody cares about taking your castle over. Everyone's more interested in that soil over there. So, like, you know, this is why Facebook's trying to launch its own cryptocurrency, Libra or whatever they renamed it to because, you know, it turns out that Bitcoin was the biggest value. creator in the last 10 years. And who could have thought? It didn't look like a photo sharing app,

right? Uber, Airbnb, these didn't look like Google, Facebook, LinkedIn, Microsoft. They didn't look like any of those companies. So the big opportunity was in a totally different space. And those companies missed it because they don't do that. That's not what their castle was about. So really, it's about finding the next fertile soil where the next castle will be built. And hopefully, over time, these castles become less relevant and less powerful because there's more castles out there. Yeah, and I would also say that a lot of, like all the fame companies are way more diversified than I think we give them credit for. They're making like a ton of acquisitions every single month, especially during COVID when prices are down. And so you might think of Facebook

is just like the community product that it is, but it does, it's invested in way more than that. So if VR takes off, they own Oculus, if, you know, like they own Instagram, they own WhatsApp. So they're not just Facebook. And so even though I do think there's concerns, obviously, with that companies. They're not just the platform that many people imagine them to be. My computer's on 1% guys. I'm going to have to jet. Yeah. I got to go as well. I think we're at time anyway. Thanks so much for staying over Sam, Sean. Thanks for doing the podcast every week. I listen to it every time. I'm sure everyone on here does too. So yeah, thanks everyone for joining. Do you feel like you know me even more because I'm in your ears? Yeah. We've had like people come up to it.

I had this one kid come up to it and call me a little bitch and I'd like, dude, I don't know you. And I, and I forgot that he thought he knew me, that we are friends and he called me a bitch. That's funny. All right. Well, thanks everyone for joining. See you next time. See you. Bye.