My First Million - #163 - Plugins Making Millions, Gumroad's Crazy Valuation & Why a Studying App is Going Viral

Episode Date: March 24, 2021

Want to be featured in a future episode? Drop your question/comment/criticism/love here: https://www.mfmpod.com/p/hotline/ --------- --------- Sam Parr (@TheSamParr) and Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) discuss: (3:38) Shaan talks about his CNBC appearance (6:45) The opportunities and riches in Chrome plugins (33:03) MFM is upping its social game (37:34) Gumroad is raising at a $100m valuation -- crazy? (49:55) Is studystream.live the future of remote studying? (57:01) The post-show --------- --------- Have you joined our private Facebook group yet? Go to https://www.facebook.com/groups/ourfirstmillion and join thousands of other entrepreneurs and founders scheming up ideas.

Dude, a freaking plug-in. Who would have thought? And he kind of had like a funny shit eating grin on. And I was like, how big are you guys? He was like, we do over $100 million a year in sales. And I was like, would you ever believe it? He was like, yeah, I thought it could be done. And then I go, you just raise money.

He goes, yeah, we raised $100 million the other day. I go, why? He goes, because it's north of a billion dollar valuation. 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 day. What's up, everybody? We just recorded the pod. We talked about, I was on CNBC today. So we talked about going on TV, going on CNBC. We talked about a bunch of business ideas that are Chrome extensions, which is kind of like a niche that nobody really talks about. But Sam's super into it. And we brought the fire. And then at the end, we shoot the shit about a bunch of random things in maybe the last 10 minutes talking about, you know, some of the stuff from the Michael Saylor episode and some cool stuff we have. going on. We just shoot the shit at the end. That might have been the best part. So stick around for that

last 10 minutes of the pod. All right. Enjoy. All right. Great. What's going on? Congratulations. Do you want to talk about family stuff or no? Yeah, sure. Had a kid four, five, eight, four days ago, I think now. Congratulations. What are the details? But baby boy is here. His name is Banks. And Banks? Why Banks? I don't know. We thought of the name a lot when we were trying to name my first kid. And her name's Blush. And so I just thought Banks and Blush go well together. I don't know. I just thought it was a cool name.

Wanted to do something. It's a cool name. It's a cool name. It's just a unique name. So I was wondering if there was a reason. Yeah. At least this one is a name. The first one when we named her blush,

we Googled like, oh, blush name meaning. And there's literally like, it's like, that's not a name, bro. So what is Banks? Banks is a popular last name.

And because of that, some people started doing it as a first name. Hillary Duff's kid is named Banks. I know that. That's pretty much the, extent of the popularity of it. I don't really care to pick a popular name. I'd rather pick a unique name. But I could tell like when we tell our family, they're like, what? Is there a nickname? What are we going to do with this? No, Banks is good. My nephews are named

Avit, like the Avit brothers and Jude, like hey Jude. And now they have a girl named Billy. So I'm team odd names. There you go. We can't all be Sam's, right? Or, well, people call you Shen. Yeah. There's people that just straight call me Shane and they just keep calling me that and I just have not correcting them and I've just now it's like we're years into the relationship. It's like vendors that I work with. Well, congratulations. So you're a year and a half older than me. I am 31. I for the longest time, I was like, I'm going to wait to have kids. But then a few things happened. The first, so my wife Sarah is 28. The first is that a few of my friends, one of them, comes 39 and I think your wife's older than you, right?

Yeah, by a year. So like early mid-30s and a few of my friends are late 30s and these women are having kids and they're like, oh my God, it sucks so bad. I wish I would have done it when I was younger. Right. So I've changed, but I've like, I've thought about having children. Wait, the guys saying that or the woman? No, the woman.

Well, the guys are like, it's definitely harder to parent when you're in your 40s than when you're younger, but mainly from the woman, they're like it's just harder on the body. And second, I had a friend. And he was like, dude, have a kid now. I was like, why? Like, I wouldn't have all this freedom. He goes, it's way different. Once I had a kid, I realized the later that I had it, the less years I'm going to be able to spend with him.

And now I'm just going to die sooner. And I wish I would have had 10 more years. It'd done it at 25 than 35. And I was like, oh, that's an interesting perspective. So my opinion has been changing lately. I might have a child soon, but we're still deciding. Yeah. And by the way, before we get to the first idea, congratulations on CNBC.

You were on there today. Did anyone reach out to you? because they saw you? Not really. Only people who knew me already. My mom was probably the most excited. You know, basically like people who are 30 years older than me were like,

this is amazing. CNBC, this is the shit. I was on CMBC for two and a half minutes or three minutes or something like that. And so, but nobody, you know, like, I don't know.

If I go tweet something, I'll get a lot more messages than going on TV, which is weird. But it definitely was a cool feeling. And like, I don't know. It's like one of those things that like I woke up before my alarm clock because I was like, okay, today's a good day, today's a big day. I got

something to do today that I've never done before. These broadcast networks, like you think they're huge and they are huge and they have reach and all that. But like the average viewers is only like 200,000 people at a time. It's not, it's not like crazy high in the world of social media. Yeah. Even the big ones that are like half a million or a million viewers, they are, it's like kind of like a background thing. And you only get so little time to talk that even if they're was a much bigger audience is hard to get like it's hard to really make any headway in a three minute segment um yes so like it's i it's prestigious but it's definitely not nearly as impactful as just the actual tweet that you're coming on to talk about it was right or this podcast right more

people will listen to this podcast and i'll get more mileage out of this it just doesn't have the same it doesn't feel the same it doesn't get the juices flowing in the same way that being on cnbc does but i also say this i this what i think is more interesting for anybody who's ever done this um Have you ever gone on? It's such a weird experience. Have you ever gone on a TV thing? So you get connected in and it's like a Zoom call basically right now. And you can't see them.

So on TV it looks like you're all like split screen. Like you see your face, their face, another person. But in reality, you have no, there's no facial expressions because you can't see each other's video. So you're only hearing each other. You don't know when it's your turn to talk. And then the thing I screwed up because I was like, I was going on this checklist of like worry. I was like, okay, is my home internet going to be good? All right.

Is my, you know, is my hair going to look stupid? Am I going to say something stupid? Am I going to? And then like, it's never like the things you expect. It's always something else. So as soon as it started, I was like, like 10 seconds in, you'll look if you watch the video. My eyes are like darting around everywhere because I have nothing to look at.

They're not on video. And so I'm just like looking around my stupid like home studio garage thing. And I look like a, like I look like a suspicious character because my eyes are so shifty. And then like 30 seconds that I realized, oh shit, I need to be staring at this camera because that's what will look normal. And so that was like a weird thing I did. And the other thing was I said Kim Kardashian's butt and I said I know. I thought that was funny. I said some stuff. Maybe I wasn't supposed to say. No, they came. It was good. You were a good interview. It was great. I watched the whole thing. It was good. Thank you. All right. You want to talk about the first idea?

Yeah. Let's do it. You want to do this thing too can? Yes. Okay. So I, I, along with Joe Spicer, we, I'm kind of following in your footsteps a little bit. We created this thing, HamptonVC.com. And we're just investing in, we're just investing in companies again. Why Hampton? I grew up in a bad neighborhood on this street called Hampton, and Joe is wealthy and has a house in the Hamptons. All right.

And we were thinking about names and I was like, I grew up on the street called Hampton. You live with the hampids. And it's just your own money or it's a fund? We're mostly are my own money. But him and I, Joe's an investor in your thing. And he would like, man, I want to put even more money in.

He goes, you just want to invest with me? I go, yeah, sure. And then he's like, you want to do a rolling fund? I was like, no, that sounds like a lot of work. He's like, you want to do a syndicate and you can just pick some deals. I go, okay, cool, I'll do it with you. So it's just like a deal by deal basis. So we created an angelist syndicate, which so then basically whenever,

whenever you invest in something, Sean, you have, you have to tell me and then I'll invest. Yeah, dude, I have a much. Also, I heard this great description of Angelist, which is like, it's substack for VCs, which is like, the easiest way to kind of like spin up a little investment fund the same way. It's great. Subtac lets you spin up a little newsletter. It's awesome.

So, yeah, we did it. And like, so we, I found a company already. And we invest. And I was just going to invest like, I was going to do like maybe 10 to 50 deals using my own money a year. of like ranging from really low to $5,000 all the way up to $25,000. Yeah. I was just going to do a ton of stuff,

but all low prices. And he was like, why don't you just do this syndicate thing? And I was like, all right, let's try it. So doing that. But can I tell you about the first company

that we are about to finish with? So I know about this company, but give the, what is your kind of like two sentence description of it? It's called Tukan. And it's basically the really dumbed down version is, it's like dual. Lingo, which is a language learning website, but it's a Chrome plugin.

And it changes a handful of words of every article that you're reading into the language that you want to learn. So it's contextual learning. More complicated than that, but that's the simple version. Right. Yes, exactly. So it helps you learn a new language without the effort. I would say.

It's kind of genius, honestly. The founder, what's your name, Taylor or something? She's magical. She's great. She's been a fan of the podcast. She messaged us a long time ago, like before this fundraise, being like, hey, the pot is cool. Check out what I'm doing. Or maybe I did you really? Oh, I can't believe I missed it. And so I, so I've been following it since then. I kind of thought about investing. I didn't pull the trigger. Maybe I should have. But I thought the idea is kind of genius because the biggest, it's okay, so here's my thing. Anything that there's a lot of these things that people want to do. You want to work out. You want to learn a new language. You want to like become blah, blah, blah. You have all these kind of like,

I should, I should, I should. And as Tony Robbins calls it, you should all over yourselves because you're just not doing the thing. And the biggest friction is not that it's that hard to learn a language. It's hard to make the time to like sit down, open the book or download the app, open the app, and focus and just do do a lingo for 30 minutes a day. It doesn't sound that hard. But in practice, it's like it's a separate thing to do. What I think is super smart about what Tuchan is doing is you don't have to make it a separate thing. It's like you're already just browsing the internet.

So why don't we just let this thing automatically shift a few words on every web page you're visiting. So you don't have to go start a separate activity to learn the language. You'll learn the language in bits and pieces while you're browsing. So I thought that was actually like pretty goddamn genius, to be honest. And you also like the space of Chrome extension. You kind of tip me off on the power of Chrome extension. So actually, I don't even know why I didn't invest. It seems like a great idea.

Maybe I'll hit her up after this and see if I can get in. Have you taught? Yeah, do it. If you don't know her well, I can try to. introduce you and you can just do it directly with her. But this woman's a superstar. I met with her and like within five minutes, I was like, oh, well, you're going to be the CEO of a billion dollar company. Oh, really? Okay. I hope it's this one. But like she was just so put together. She was so poised. She was charismatic. She just, she just oozed CEO.

Interesting. I've never heard you say that. Who else have you felt that about if there's, does anyone come to mind? The guy from superhuman. Whenever I heard him talk, I was like, oh, yeah, like you are a, I would bet on you for just about anything. Yeah, whatever he was going to do. If he said, I'm going to write a book, I'd be like, oh, it's going to be great. Yeah, I was like, you know what I mean? I'm pretty sure you're going to be successful.

Yeah, so I felt that about him. When we met with the Shopify guy, Harvey or Harley, Harley, I kind of, but obviously he's already hugely successful. But like, there was a handful of people we've interviewed. Dude, Harley, when he came in, he just had camera quality like nobody's business. And so he just had this good looking guy and this great. great looking office with an incredible camera. And I feel like, you know, he didn't even say a word.

I was like, oh, wow, this guy's like a power player. Yeah. And so this woman, I felt that with her. I was like, oh, you, she just was on top of it. I just felt great. Another person, and this is a little bit early on in their experience, was this woman named Payall, I think that's her name, who started Class Pass. Payal.

Pyle. When I talked to her, I was like, oh, you're really special. So, anyway, this woman Taylor met with her. I was like, oh, you're, whatever. Yeah, sounds good. I'm in no matter what. And so, but I started like also, I mean, let's, we'll just, we'll move on past too can, but it's joined toucan.com.

The reason it's interesting is they have this like heads. She worked at headspace. So they have this like headspace cute branding shit. Right. By the way, we should say, T-C-N is like the bird, T-C-A-M type of thing. It's not, yeah, it's spelled like that, T-O-U-C-A-N. Yeah, T-O-U-C-A-N. Yeah, too, I don't know.

Which, I don't know. Maybe. Maybe that might be it. Yeah. So do you have any kind of stats that you can share about them? Like, give us a sense of why you feel like this is working. I didn't ask her for permission to talk about that. But basically, Duolingo does like $200 million a year in sales and has like, I think,

5 million users or 10 million users or something like ridiculously high. And I just thought that. And what I want to talk about in this segment is Chrome plugins. And I'm like, well, this company, Duolingo is very successful. It's a $5 billion company, I think. I've been thinking about Chrome plugins. What I think is do two things. One, look at successful companies already that do over 100 million in sales and just say,

well, how can I do this in the form of a Google plugin? Or two, which behaviors do people want? But they don't do it because there's a little bit of friction. And how can I use this plugin to alleviate that friction? Now, there's a ton of downside with Google plugins. You know, you're a Google plugin. So Google can ruin you. but it's incredibly, incredibly, incredibly interesting to me.

And that's what I wanted to bring up was some Google plugin stuff. And so basically what this, I don't know if this is how she did it, but she basically, or the way that I look at it is you just look at what is, what behaviors are people already doing. So, for example, learning a language. People already want to learn a language. You just change the text of the article to a different language, or at least parts of it. Grammarly did this with grammar.

So you just fix it as you write. one that I use all the time is similar web. So it tells me the traffic of someone's website. Passwords. You use passwords on a regular basis. So a plugin just inserts different passwords. And Loom is another one. Have you heard of Loom?

Oh, yeah. My buddy was with the guy who started it. Isn't that worth like a billion dollars? Not yet, but getting close. Several hundred millions, I think it was the last round. And all it does is a screen recordings. Yeah. So they basically say, oh, you want to show something on your screen.

Here's a click. Boom. record, share. So the two famous ones that everybody kind of has heard about is Honey, because Honey sold to PayPal for several billion. Four billion dollars. So Honey had, I think, 17 million users when they sold. And what Honey does is if you're about to go check out on some website, Honey will go in the background, it's looking for, is there a deal on this, is there a coupon for this or a sale for this somewhere else or a coupon you can use right now? And it surfaces is a discount. Okay, that makes total sense. I don't have to take an action. I have to remember to go

look for a coupon. It's just going to do it. And the honey sign just glows whenever it has a discount available for you. So that was one. Gramerly was another that I think shocks people because Gramerly does over $100 million a year. So the Gramerly founder spoke at HustleCon and he's an engineer. He's like a very by the book like straight shooter engineer. He's really cool. His name's Max. And I was like, shoot the shit with them. And I was like, dude, a freaking plug it. Who would have a thought? And he kind of had like a funny shit eating grin on. And I was like, how big are you guys? He was like, we do over a hundred million dollars a year in sales. And I was like, would you ever believe it? He was like, yeah, I thought it could be done. And then I go, you just raised money.

He goes, yeah, we raised 100 million the other day. I go, why? He goes, because it was out, it was at a one north of a billion dollar valuation. Yeah. I was like, oh my God. You pulled it off. Yeah, they did it, exactly. So those are like the big successors, but there are some other ones, right? So we have Pinterest was started as, I believe, a Chrome extension. So it was the pin button that basically was able to get all the content for Pinterest to be a cool app. You needed a quick way to pin while you were surfing the web. So that was one. And then there's others that like, for example, if I look at the plugins that I have installed, I have ad block or you know, you block origin or whatever, that's definitely one of them. And so I think, I think, I think, this was one of those non-obvious ideas because it kind of feels like not a serious company. It's like, dude, you're just making this plug-in. And definitely there's a lot of people like my mom doesn't know what Chrome extensions are. She doesn't know there's a Chrome extension store. She doesn't really know how to install them.

Like she knows apps, but she doesn't know Chrome extension. So you're going to get a little bit more of a tech savvy audience. You know, it's a smaller market overall. But the friction is a big deal. I actually want to change your opinion of that. So I went and looked at the numbers. There's 1.6 billion iPhone users. Okay, 1.6 billion users.

2 million iPhone apps in the store right now. Chrome users, 3 billion Chrome users, 200,000 plugins. There's a ton of opportunity here. I hear you that like your mom doesn't know how to do this, but does your mom, if she saw a commercial on TV for Gramerly, I bet you she would know what to do. You just go to Grammilly.com. Actually, she does not Gramerly.

because of that. She saw it and she's self-conscious about her English because she learned English later in life. And she doesn't want to write something stupid. So she downloaded a grammarly for that reason, actually. And so that's why when I saw this TUCAN thing, I was like, oh, you guys just run a commercial for this on TV. That's easy. You're going to get so many users. And the plugin, the reason why the plugins are interesting to me is the churn is so low. Churn on plugins are so low compared to iPhone apps. And we both have plugins. You have a plugin for the hustle. I have a plugin for my one big thing framework of just like

what's a turn on it? There's like no churn on it. Do we have like thousands of users now that the engagement's not super high like they don't always use the thing but they leave it installed and it's like you know so we both dabbled in this not seriously I would say neither of us took it super seriously but we were interested enough for both of us to build a Chrome extension and get it out there to you know five 10,000 people. It's interesting and I think that I just think that people discount it.

And I think that it's far more, it's far more interesting than most people realize. And so I actually had a bray you pull some of the biggest plug-ins. So it's ad block, ad block plus, Adobe Acrobat. What do you use Adobe Acrobat for? I don't know. Probably like Flash or something. I don't know.

Safe price, which is a deal thing. Video conferencing from Cisco. Google Translate, which is kind of an indicator for Tucan, which is interesting. Honey, Pinterest save button, Skype. What's Tamper Monkey? I don't know. It looks like it's time to keep you safe.

There was a cool one about ghostry back in the day that would just show you who's trying to track you on every website you go to. That was kind of cool. And we'll try to shut that down. There's also these paid ones. Was there anything interesting in the paid group? No, but tell me about the ones that you've invested in because they're actually similar. And so in this document that we have, I said screenshots would be great.

And you said, oh, I invested in this thing called Bubbles, which I remember you tell me about it. But what is that? Bubbles is a lot like Loom, which we talked about earlier. So the idea is how do you easily share what's on your screen with your co-worker who wants to see it and be able to. And so how do you do that? Some people just take a screenshot, right? They use the hot key on their keyboard. They take a screenshot.

And it goes into their desktop file. Then they have to go grab that. Then they drag and drop that to their friend. And then the friend has to comment on it. But they can't comment on it. They have to like send it back as another file. It's kind of annoying, right? So what Bubbles does is much simpler.

It says it's a little Chrome extension. And on any page you go to, you can say, I want to record a screen recording, like a video. I want to take a screenshot. Or my favorite one is a scroll screenshot. So like, you know when you're on a website that like is long and you want to take screenshots of the website, you have to take like eight screenshots and then send them as separate files to somebody? Yeah, it's a pain. With this, it just takes one long screenshot and sends it to the person.

So it's easy to capture what's on your screen. You can then comment like bubbles. So it's like a speech bubble. So you just click anywhere where you want to point something out on the screen. Like let's say for the hustle, you want to make the trends website better, you would click bubbles, you would record a screenshot. You would tap on the part of the screen where you're like, this thing is stupid. We need to change this.

And you would write this thing is stupid. We need to change this. And then the whole file is a link. You just share a link with somebody else. And they can comment back like a Google Doc. And so it's doing well? Yeah, it's doing well. It's doing well specifically.

Actually, the initial niche that they've done well with is agencies. And so agencies, like creative agencies, there's always. creative people within the team that are sending ideas, mockups, concepts back and forth with each other. And then they have to share with the client also. And the client has to give feedback. So there's a lot of showing screen stuff and commenting back and forth on it. And so that's where they're getting an initial foothold. And I think it'll kind of break out from there. So it's like Loom, but it does more than what Loom does. And what's Dashworks? So Dashworks is a company I've in that is, it's like the homepage for your company. So this is a Chrome extension that's sold to

companies. So let's say somebody joins the hustle, you give them their laptop. If you work with Dashworks, when they open up their Google Chrome for the first time to use the internet, they would not just see like the generic Google like new tab page. They would see like the hustles branded page. And that page can do three things. One, there's a search bar. And you could type in anything into that search bar and it will find the file inside your company. So like most companies now use Slack and Google Drive and Dropbox and Asana and GitHub and like all these different tools that are all in the cloud. So like if you're ever been on your MacBook and you want to find a file, you just use like the old Spotlight search finder,

right? You just type it into Spotlight. It finds the file on your computer. But the thing is now with the cloud, none of the files you need are on your computer. They're all in the cloud. So this is basically that search bar for all your cloud apps. So what it does is it helps any employee find any file that's in your network without knowing where to go to find it. It's just like searching. Is it working? Yeah, this is cool.

So then the second thing you could do is you can search anyone's name. So I could be like, oh, what does Steph Smith do with the hustle? I type Steph. It'll show me her profile, show me what she does, who she reports to, and that sort of thing. And then the last thing is that you as the kind of CEO or your admin as the company can post announcements or updates that will show up in their Chrome, like new tab bar. So you can be like, oh, welcome these new employees or like, happy birthday to this person or, hey, remember this Friday, we're all doing, you know, happy hour or whatever. And so it's a kind of a communication

pipe also. So that I thought was cool. They're taking the Chrome extension to deliver critical internal company stuff, a search for people, search for files, and internal announcements. So this is interesting. And another one, I actually don't know how to say this company. but you wrote it in here. How do you pronounce that? Luster. Jack, our friend Jack, was one of the early users and I think invested in it.

And he says that it's awesome. But basically they look at wirecutter, Amazon, and dozens and dozens of other sources. And anytime you have a product in front of you, it tells you the average review. Kind of interesting. I don't know how it gets a little better than that. I think what they do is you say yourself.

Yeah, my description was about a year ago. I think what it does is you go on Amazon or whatever, and you search for flat screen TV. And, you know, there's so many products out there. And all of them, you know, great, it's four stars. What do I make of that? And so what Luster does is try to make the buying process simpler. So it'll basically say, here's the recommended option for what you searched for.

This RRA has searched all the reviews, all the different websites, has all this data to tell us that this is the most popular result for what you're looking for. And then here's the high-end version of it. And here's maybe the low-end version of it. of it. And so I don't know if the product has evolved too much since then, but that's what it kind of did at that time was it would help you figure out which product should you actually buy using data. And again, you didn't have to remember to go to Luster. It was a Chrome extension. So you're just on any website shopping. You can go to Walmart, go to Amazon, you go Best Buy.com,

wherever you're searching. And Luster will be like, hey, here's the product we recommend and here's why. Here's what the reviews say about it. Summarized automatically for you, which I thought was pretty cool. I think that this could be a good product. When he pitched it to me and when Jack told me about it, I was like, this is stupid. I'm not in. I understand though. I actually, I think I was wrong about it. It's really cool. So the founder's really smart. And for this one, he showed me a chart, a graph that was doing pretty well. So here's some other ideas of things. So those are ideas that we've either invested in or seen. I have a couple more for you. So let's use your framework of take a popular app like dual lingo that shows that there's a need or a demand. People want to learn a language. And you make

it a Chrome extension as the user experience instead of a mobile app. So at least one of the main widgets or main points of distribution. Right. So let's take meditation. Right. You have headspace, you have calm. Why don't you have a Chrome extension, a Chrome plugin that will basically say it'll see, you know, you've been on, you've been browsing for two hours straight. You've had, you have 85 tabs open. Hey, let's take a minute. Would you like to earn some, earn some, some mindfulness points and take one minute quick meditation. And it just, you tap the thing, it turns on because of the clock. And there's like a guided voice that's doing a guided meditation for you.

I think meditation delivered through a Chrome extension could work because it's so popular as a mobile app. But again, for a mobile app, you have to remember to go do it. Whereas this could just kind of like as you go, it could pause you and help you out. That's great. I think that has legs. I'll keep going with this game. Do you know the, you know how, do you on your iPhone, what's that thing called where it blocks you from using a website after a certain amount of time? Oh yeah, like time something. I don't know. Do you use that? I never use that shit. No. Do you? Yeah, I mean, I have it installed. Screen time. I think this is what it's called. Screen time. I used to have this Chrome plugin called nukeum. I think it was called nukem. Or the option was called nukem. Where after a certain amount of time, you would nuke your website and you cannot go to certain websites. So you can only go to like Google Docs, email.

and that was it. I loved it. So similar to meditation, I would 100% try to create more of a, of these, what do you call this? Change your, stop using stuff app.

Right, right, right. Yes. Defend yourself against yourself. Okay, I have a smart idea and I have a gimmick idea. Which one you want? It's a smart one or the gimmick one? Smart one first.

All right, smart one first. Okay, we had the founder of, you mentioned the founder of superhuman. He's the guy who built Reportive before that. We both loved Reportive. It doesn't exist now. Some people might not know what it is.

But what Reportive was doing was when you were emailing somebody, as soon as you typed in their name or their email, a little sidebar would pop out of your email that would just show you their name, show you the last few tweets. It was like, at the time, it was like magic. We were like, how on earth do they know all this? It was crazy. It just makes you a more thoughtful person because you can see the person, you can see what they're up to.

You can click their LinkedIn and get a little more information. And it kind of did the, like it's sort of. served it up. It was like you had an amazing assistant, executive assistant who was like, you know, by the way, sir, you need to know this about this person. So I think you could take reportive all around the web. So I think you could make it where anytime it sees a name on a web page, it just highlights it yellow. And then if you just hover over that, it'll just tell you something about that person. So I think you could bring this idea of like, anytime you see a name, tell me a little bit more about that person. I think you could turn that into a Chrome extension

rather than something that was just for email. How would you make money off of it? Um, ads, boom, that's my easy answer. I don't know. Oh, all right. Okay, but here's my gimmick one, which definitely needs ads. So I think there should be a Chrome extension. Let me take that back. I don't think this should exist. I think this would be funny if somebody tried to do this. So if you ever remember a million dollar homepage, it was kind of this cool idea of like, here's a web website.

There's a million pixels on the page, buy a buy pixel and sponsor it. Okay, that's cool. I've always thought about similar ideas. How could you make a million bucks of something simple and goofy? And there's this concept in the Bitcoin world of, I think it's called a fountain or a tap. It's basically a website where you go to. And then sometimes there's like to think about like a spout like a fountain. And sometimes free Bitcoin comes out.

And so a bunch of people like to go to these to, so some projects use these to say like, go to collect your coin for my new coin, go there and get some. And you like go to the website and you like collect some of the new coin that you can get. And then other people have done this to be like, hey, sometimes something comes out. Sometimes it doesn't. It's a game of chance. It's like a, what do they call this? They call it a, there's this company that did this with candles.

We talked about them. It was called like diamond candles, I think. And at the bottom of every single candle, we're talking candles like a wax candle that you burn in your bathtub or whatever. It was like cool candles. That's fucking the only way I don't know how to use fucking candles is what I'm sitting in the bath. I like that you start dropping F bombs to like. Like get masculine real quick while talking about bathtub candles. I don't fucking.

Dude, I use my bath bombs or what are they called? Yeah, bath bombs. Anyway, I've got all of them. I'm a sensitive guy, man. And anyway, they at like one in 10,000 candles probably has a $1,000 diamond. Right. The rest have like nothing. Right.

Something, but like a like a cracker jack ring. And what you could do with this is you could always have coupons or discounts off of something. And if you redeem them, you get the Chrome extension gets a kickback. But every once in a while, one out of X does get a Bitcoin. Right. Yeah. So something like that where basically every time you open a new tab, there's a little package

in the middle of the screen, you give it a quick click. And then you're either going to get nothing. You get air. You get, you know, a tiny little something. It's like a puzzle piece or, you know, maybe like a little something. I don't know, something. Or you can actually get some Bitcoin. You can get little Satoshi's, basically.

And so it would just become this little like the little hamster game where every time you open a new tab, are you really going to not click the thing? And so I think you could get a lot of people to install this to try to get free Bitcoin while they just browse the internet. Every time they open a new tab, it's like a little mini scratch-off lotto ticket that they get to scratch off that might have some crypto inside. And you can give away little shit coins. You can give away micro amounts of Bitcoin. You can give away little puzzle pieces. And if you get it right, it's like the Monopoly game at McDonald's, where you actually earn the Bitcoin. if you get all the pieces.

You can make a game out of it, basically. And then the rest of the screen, you just plaster with ads. Or sometimes what comes out of the box is just an ad. And I think that's how you make money off of my gimmick Chrome extension. Well, I hope someone tries this because I think it would be hilarious that they create a product out of your joke. So, long story short, we'll move on to, we'll move on from Chrome plugins. But I think it's so cool. I think people are underestimating this space a ton,

and I'm excited to see what comes out of there. The last thing I'll say on this is the general idea here is just, there's a platform with 3 billion users, and it has an app store. There's going to be winners. Now that I look back, isn't it obvious? Like, I still stand by, hey, there's only 200,000 Chrome extensions, and there's 2 million apps, right?

So it's 10 times less. But, hey, like, that doesn't matter. There's several winners that we've talked about here. So I would say how many other platforms are like this, right? So like, you know, there's, everyone talks about apps and, you know, Google Play or the Apple store. But what else is there, right? Like HubSpot has a platform. You know, Salesforce has a platform.

Slack has a platform. You know, where are all these platforms? And there's going to be winners. Like once these platforms reach a critical mass, somebody's going to build something that's frictionless on top of it that is able to generate revenue. So I think there's, there's money to be made. and the unconventional app platforms that you don't really think about first. Yeah, and I could go on forever about it, but I think it's WordPress.

I think there's Google Sheets. I think there's Gmail. I mean, it's a lot of Google stuff. But I think there's way more than people think. Right. All right. What do you want to do? Let's do, what's the update on social stuff?

What is that? Oh, I was saying just like our videos, man. Our videos are crushing it. we're the guys Henry and Jordan or Henry and Dylan who are making these we made an offer to them to make dozens and dozens a month

like are they doing it because I love their videos I think they're going to do it so we're going to do like I asked them I'm like send me a quote to do 30 to 60 of videos a month right so they'll do our stuff I actually think that they can reduce the quality a little bit like they're too good well like they take a long time I think that

I think they can reduce the quality on YouTube because I think people watch YouTube a bit more passively. I think and they should continue with the high quality on Instagram and Twitter because it's only two minutes long. So we're, so people need to subscribe to watch the videos because they're not just, it's not just a video of what we talk about. It basically takes this hour long thing where we're just shooting the shit. It finds the most interesting two minutes. It edits us down so that we sound smart and it animates over the top of it. So it's actually fun to look at and it makes way more sense than just hearing us talk about. So where do they go to actually watch the videos?

Because we need them to subscribe to the video place. So there's a few ways you can do it. The first is you follow either Sean and I on Twitter and we share them a lot personally. The second is the Hustles Twitter, which is just the Hustle. The third is the Hustles Instagram, which is the Hustle Daily. The fourth is our YouTube channel, which we actually have to figure out how to do this because we're using our old YouTube account called YouTube.com slash hustlecon. So just Google the hustle My First Million on YouTube.

You'll see it. But we have to figure out how to manage that because they're actually kind of getting popular now. You know, five or 10,000 views of video. And if we do three a week, which we're going to start doing, that's kind of, that gets to be somewhat interesting. Right. So we got to figure that out. But those are the ways that they can find it right now. Yeah.

I like that I go through the YouTube one. I like YouTube myself. And so. But they're getting a ton of comments. Yeah, the comments are great. and I love responding to the comments. Right now, it's early days, right? I'm responding to all the comments because it's fun.

They make fun of me a lot. Soon there'll be more than you. Soon there'll be too many comments to respond to. But for now, I think there's like 17,000 subscribers. So I want to like triple that just off of the listeners from this podcast. So go to YouTube.com slash hustlecon, like hustle con, and then subscribe to that thing so that you get the videos from us. And there will be a video. So video will have only 5,000 views, but like 100 and some odd comments, which is kind of been crazy.

And then the Instagram is getting stupid amount of engagements. And I think, Sean, you're actually crushing me in terms of clips with hits. So a handful of your clips have gotten close to 100,000 views. We had one with Zach Crockett, one of our writers, and he got 70,000, I think, the other day. Nice. And so we're going to start churning them out. And we're going to do way more of these. I think we're going to launch a few more podcasts.

It's TBD, but there's one called, like, how X makes money. So, like, Steph wants to break down how something makes money. And then a similar podcast is the economics of blank. Well, we'll talk about the economics of something else. What else are we going to do? I forget a few. But anyway, we got to, like, we're going to just churn out these clips.

Yeah, it's way better to listen to, honestly. Like, when I listen to those, I'm, if I listen to the podcast, I kind of cringe myself because I'm like, I hate hearing my voice. and also, you know, we wander. It's an off-the-cuff, unedited conversation. But the clips, they're great. They're just great. All right, anyways.

What else we try? Let me wrap this up one thing. And I just want to say this now because I think I want to like look back and remember this. I think that in one year from now, and maybe two years from now, these style of clips that we're doing on social are definitely, they're kind of their own genre. Would you agree? Like, it's not like we're changing the world here. So I don't want to like over.

No, we're going to get copied. if that's what you're getting at. Because already, every time I retweet one of them, other successful podcasters or like YouTubers are like, holy shit, who's making your clips? And I'm just like, dude, you don't know their name. I forgot. I swallowed that key and that box is locked because I think they're great.

I think they're better than everyone else's and I don't want everybody copying us and having the same shit. But it's what's exactly going to happen. It is going to be the beginning of a new genre. Do you agree? Like no one makes high quality shit for a Twitter video. Yeah. And it's like,

easy, it's easy pickings basically for us now. All right. We'll do one more segment. Yeah, let's do it. What do you got? I got two quick ones. So first, Gumroad just raised $5 million through a crowdfunding campaign. I wanted to get your take real quick.

Let me can go quick on. I don't know how much we have to talk about this, but good investment, bad investment. And then second. Yeah. Secondly, I want to know, because you raised crowdfunding also. So I want to hear your thoughts on that. But I'll give the two seconds on Gumroad. So if you never used it, Gumroad's awesome as a prize.

It's the easiest way as a creator. Like if I make an e-book or if I make a PDF that I want to sell that has a bunch of information on it, I'll go to Gumroad all in 10 minutes. I'll have a website up that can, that I can sell my digital product and I can take payments from it. So it does two things, right? It lets you sell a digital product. So like Shopify is not great for this.

Shopify is more for like physical products. And it's just simple. It's like, I'm just selling one thing. I don't need a complicated store. and I want to like have to like write code and also like I just want somebody to be able to come and pay with a credit card. And the other cool feature they have is you can make it like kind of like pay what you want. So it's sort of like a tip jar essentially for something you make. And so some people have made, you know, a lot of money doing this.

I think some people at the hustle. I know Steph did a book on I think Gumroad that did like $30,000 in sales, maybe $50 or something like that. It did $70. I've made tens of thousands of dollars on Gumroad. What was your product you sold on Gumroad? how to so before the hustle I owned a roommate matching business and I mastered Craigslist and in cities like San Francisco in New York, a person on Craigslist will get hundreds of replies to their apartment. And so I just taught people how to email people in order to get an apartment on Craigslist. And it was so successful that on the first date with my now wife, I asked her how she got an apartment. She's like, oh, I just used some guide online. And she bought my guide. I mean, I sold a lot of them. So that was my product. That's hilarious.

I didn't know that. Yeah, so Gumroad is called on. By the way, I'll plug it. Gumroad, the Miracle Craigslist template. There you go. Okay, so it's for that kind of thing. It enables a different kind of seller. Been around for like, I literally think 10 years now.

They went through this crazy story where they came out, got hot, raised a bunch of money from like big name VCs. Then things didn't go so well. had to basically unwind the whole thing. So like laid off or let go or employees left or whatever, went back to like kind of like a one to three person operation, I think. They went to like kind of bootstrapping it and went back to kind of like focusing on profitability and because they realized they couldn't raise any more money. And then now they're back 10 years later. So that was like, you know, a 10 year arc. And now they're like kind of restarting it again. Like we're going

big again. And they have some pretty interesting metrics. So you pull up their, go to their fundraising The metrics are, it doesn't make that much money, but it has a, so basically the way Gumroad works is people post stuff for sale. And so in terms of gross transactions, I don't think they report that as revenue. 200 and something million, 220-ish million dollars in GMV, which is a big, a month or a year. Yeah. For year. Yeah. So pretty high GMV. It's growing like crazy. It's a really good product. I love it. But the actual, not the net income, but like the net revenue, it's not significant. It was like, I think I just read it. So, so I'll pull these up. But, over you go get the Republic, their fundraising page. It has all the stats on it. But basically,

if I remember correctly, it's like eight to nine million dollars of net income last year that they got to keep. And then from that, they had one million dollars of profit at the end of the year. I don't think that it's that high. But that would be cool. cool if it were. The business basically exploded during the kind of like COVID bump. So you can check out this fundraising page real quick. We'll just, we'll just yeah, go ahead. Read off the stats. And then I'll tell you my opinion. Well, I'll just tell you my opinion now while you're looking that up, which is I would not invest in this at all. I would run away from this. Okay. So I'll give you the numbers. I'm going to explain why in a second. Last year, I was a little high.

So last year, 73 million. This year, 143 million. And then their revenue off that was nine million. Their gross profit, they say, is 2.6 million. And the net income at the end of the day for them was $1 million in 2020. And it was only $1 million because they only had one employee. So of that two, so they really had $2.6 million in revenue. And the only thing they had to support was one or two employees and server costs. Nine million in revenue. Nine million was their take off the total transaction. And then they have more than one employee now. I think because he kind of like rebooted the company to grow again. And so nine million is what is what the company made. But they're raising, I think, at like a $100 million valuation or something like that.

Got it. I would not invest in this at all. I've really butchered the numbers here. Sorry. Yeah, me too. Sorry. We should have prepped this one. I would not invest in this at all. And I'll tell you why. I was a fan of Gumroad since 2012. My friend Nathan Barry told me about it because he had a book there. And he went and spoke at the Gumroad office. And I went to their office and watched him speak. And I was like, damn, this is great. What is this whole Gumroad thing? This is awesome. Yada yada. I started, I began as a gumrod user in 2011. But the founder was like a prodigy. His name's Sahel, I think. It seemed like a cool dude. Real smart. He left Pinterest as the third employee to start this. He was like a prodigy. He started the company at 19. But he failed, which is great. That's fine. You know, you take swings. It doesn't always work out.

And he raised $16 million. He got the investors to write it off saying like, all right, we'll give you back all the equity. This is dead for us. And then he went and worked on it. up working on it, which is cool. But now, none of the investors or the employees who previously worked there, all their equity got completely canceled out because somehow in good faith, they said, we're out of here, fine, you could have it. And it's actually going to turn out to be something. And I wouldn't want to invest in this person for two reasons. The first, I don't think that he cares about investors. I think that he just cares about creating cool stuff and making his lifestyle great, which is no, no problem. I'm like that as a little bit as well. But,

I wouldn't want to invest money at $100 million evaluation, someone with that attitude. Two, if he takes money and doesn't give money back to the people who gave equity to and tries to build this thing to sell, I think that that's unethical and I don't want to be part of that. So that's why I would pass on this. Interesting. Yeah. I heard somebody else talking about that as well. I don't know the whole situation.

So I can't say, you know, exactly how those conversations went down and what everybody was on board with and whatnot. By the way, I don't know the whole situation either. A lot of what I've just said is, is, is, that's the public summary. I've heard rumors and a lot of it is hypothetical, but that's what I think is, I mean, if you, if you just read publicly what's going on, you can kind of, it seems to touch true. So, that's in line with what I've heard. So none of that's out of line. I don't think that he did it to screw anybody at all. I don't think so.

I think literally the expectations of the company were too high. It wasn't going to continue growing at that pace. It wasn't going to go to rate of money. I don't think he tried to pay or he was like, either, we shut this down, we set fire sale this or we kind of. unwind it and get it back to a bootstrappable company. But if we're going to do that, then this whole venture structure and all these employees don't make any sense anymore. And I'm great with that. Right. I'm great with that until. Right. Now, now we're going back to the growth story. Now, the reason I wouldn't invest is just

pretty simply, I don't think it's a great business. I don't like businesses like this. I don't like Patreon. I don't like substack for the same reason. I think they are amazing products. They are good for the world, but they make for crappy businesses. If you just look at the numbers, if, you know, these guys are doing $150 million of GMV, 10 years into the business, and they're making a million dollars of profit at the end of the day still. So that million dollars of profit, you're valuing it at $100 million today, which means for me to get 10x on my money, which is what I need for a illiquid, early state startup, this has to become worth a billion dollars or more.

And so you're telling me that this company that's doing, you know, sub 10 million in revenue, you know, like about one million in profit is going to be worth a billion dollars. I find it like, I think it's a bad bet. And you're not getting paid for the risk you're taking because you're already paying up at a $100 million valuation. Why? Because he's super popular on Twitter. He's super well connected with other investors like Naval is an investor and all this stuff. Because they're friends and whatnot.

And so I think that I don't think the retail investor is getting a great deal here. I think that's also, I have this general thing that's kind of unpopular, which is crowdfunding. is the bottom of the barrel of companies. Like the best companies, the ones that are hot that are growing, get picked up by professional investors. And the stuff that you end up seeing on crowdfunding sites, I don't think are the big breakout companies in general. Now, I know the hustle actually did a small crowdfunding thing,

but yours was a little different. Yeah, I can talk about that. You raised from real investors, and you could have raised all the money from real investors. You raised most of it. You just opened up a small amount so your community would feel like bought into the product. I think that's a different thing than raising your business.

But I actually regret doing that. And I wish I didn't do it. And I wish I didn't do it because when you do that, you now have a whole lot of people who are going to ask you questions and things like that. And it's quite distracting. And also. Did they get paid out by the way from this deal? The Hapshot deal, they all got a check. So they all know what the thing sold for then, right?

No. How are you planning to keep it a secret if they are all going to get some multiple of their money? Because the multiple that they get was, because the total consideration was. Oh, like the retention of employees and all that stuff. they don't get that. Yeah. Like, I personally am going to make a ton, like, maybe more money just off the retention package than the cap table package. Right. Um, so there's things like that. And also it depends. I'm not saying for my deal, but for some deals, it depends how the notes structured. Yep. Um, but it's, it's not fun, I think, because you have to report to people on a

quarterly basis about certain stuff. And so it's basically like you're a publicly traded company. Yeah. It may not be worth the hassle. I don't think it's worth the hassle. And I do agree that a lot of them are bottom of the barrel. Not all, but a lot. Right. Yeah. That said, if you're okay with the not having privacy, which some people are cool with that, I do actually think it's wise to get some users to invest in you. You know, this is actually how Samuel Adams beer company got started. They let their customers buy shares in the company before it went public. And in their case, they said it helped them a ton. I agree. I like when you raise from customers. I don't. And I think that's a totally different thing than just going on a crowdfunding platform and saying, hey, person who wants to invest in tech,

but you don't have the network and you don't have the know-how and you're not in any of the funds. Like, you should just invest in my thing. You're not a customer of it. Whereas like, let's say you're Samuel Adams or next week, next episode I'm going to talk about Ben and Jerry's. Ben and Jerry's did the same thing. They did a share offering to their local customers in Vermont so that they would be more likely to shop at their store. Continue to come back to the store because they feel like a part owner. What you guys did with the hustle? You let the readers invest. I think that's very different than what you see on most of the crowdfunding sites, which is basically when you show up on a crowdfunding site, it's typically I struck out with real investors. So this is my last shot, you know, and that's why I say

bottom of the barrel. That's not nice. And, you know, I'm sure that's not the case for all the companies. I have friends that have done this and the friends I've have that have done this, that's exactly what happened. They struck out with the sophisticated investors. So they go to the unsophisticated investors and try to patch together $3,000 checks, $5,000 checks or whatever to get. And it doesn't mean that they're not going to be successful. It just means they weren't, they couldn't get it done in the truth. It means where the business is at today was not juicy enough where these hawks, you know, professional investors are like hawks. They circle these companies that are that are high growth potential that could be big, big winners. And they pounce on them. But you can't

even, you know, before they even start fundraising, they'll often get picked up. And so, typically, if you're at the crowdfunding point, that means you've not only not got scooped up early by the Hawks, you probably went and pitched them and they said no. And now you're on the retail investor. Great. Well, you want to do one more topic or? Yeah, let's do one more. The other one is this idea or something cool that Ben showed me called Study Stream Live. Have you heard of this? No. So somebody tried doing this for, working, but it's basically like, hey, everybody's working from home remotely. It can be kind of lonely. And I forgot what the name of the work related one was, but it was basically, I had one.

It was called peak. And it was horrible. Dude, there was like times or like, we had this one plug in where it would take a picture every 30 seconds or every two minutes or something. So you could like see your coworkers and stu shit. But like there'd be times like, like, look, this is, this sounds like broie and embarrassing. But there's definitely times where you, you're shirtless, where you're on the toilet using a computer, where you're like walking around in your underwear. And there was times it caught me like shirtless in a peak. And I was like, oh my God, this is right. Like you're late in bed like playing on the computer or like you're looking a bit of a different thing. All right. So I know what you're talking about there. That's like a

kind of like spontaneous, like it's kind of like a passive way of sharing what you're what you're doing. This is different. This is you want to focus. You want kind of like a study buddy. And so you say, all right, for the next hour, match me with someone else. I think focus mate is the name of the one I was thinking about, which is it matches you with one person and you get to work together. You're both going to work on something at the beginning. You're like, oh, yeah, I'm working on my email newsletter today. And the other person's like, yeah, I have this report I need to give to my boss.

Okay, cool. I'm on this right now. I'm on their website. I already know what's going to happen with this company. So let me explain what it is first. So you get paired for the hour. You're supposed to focus and get something done. So it's supposed to increase your productivity because you kind of have like a buddy

who's holding you accountable from just drifting off and doing nothing. And you also can meet people. And it's like kind of like a speed dating thing where you're going to end up bumping into people and you're not just alone all day in silence in your house. So that's the idea. Focusmate was trying to do it for work. This study, the study thing, what I forgot? Study what live? It's study stream.

Dot live. So these guys are doing it for studying for university students who are doing remote learning. And it is blowing up actually. And so if you go there and you try to join one of these rooms, they have like, 10,000 person rooms, like you can go join like a server, like, okay, I'm going to join this server. There's a thousand spots. They're all full. Like go, go. I'm trying to find more times. They're full. Most of the, most of the day. And which is interesting. That means there's about 10,000 people like concurrently using this product at any given time. How did Ben find this? He said, oh, this thing's

going viral on TikTok. And so that, they might be like a temporary thing where they're full right now because they're going viral on TikTok. But, you know, TikTok is kind of a younger generation. And they're basically it speaks to them, which is like, hey, you know, you're at home. It's kind of lonely. It's kind of boring. And you don't meet any, but you don't get to see your friends. You don't get to meet any new people. And you want to focus, but it's hard to focus. I wouldn't say it's going viral. The most video has 35,000 views. But they do have traction for sure. Like every video has 7,000 views. So yeah, I think it's other people talk. It's not their own videos. I think there's other people talking about it that went viral. That's how people discovered it. Somebody

was saying, I'm on the website right now. I go to their website. It says boost your focus, join a 24-7 virtual room. I click a room to join. I click a focus room and I click a room to join. It just takes you to a Google, a Zoom room. Right. Like I just click. Don't do it. It's going to mess up the podcast, but don't join it. Well, I just clicked it to, and it like prompts you for a Zoom room. Now, am I weird or dirty in thinking, I think this is just going to become like this. This is chat roulette. I mean, I think that the younger people, the people who use this, are like better internet people than our generation. So I don't think, I don't, I actually, like our generation, I think would default to thinking it would be dicks. I think that this, these folks would not default to that. But is, this looks like a really innocent

and lovely internet community. Is it going to be ruined with that? That's, that's, probably. Wherever there can be dicks, there will be dicks. Right. So I think, I think that definitely there's going to be some people doing it. They're going to have to figure out a way to stamp that out. one thing might be, you know, the big thing here is, can they, can they pull off a subscription? So can they get you to pay to have this, this, you know, study buddy kind of set up where you get to focus and you get to meet some new people, will people pay? I am skeptical of it, but I found it interesting. This is new. I don't know how to feel about it.

And so I think rather than judge, I'm just kind of like, I'm going to watch this one and see what happens. So a whole bunch of media dorks that I'm friends with, they're all like, oh, media is like the future of education, commerce and community. like they use these stupid-ass buzzwords and they say all this bullshit no or they say like we're going to create like a 3D thing so you can it's like no no no no you guys are thinking about this whole like first of all colleges are always going to exist and we're always going to need them whatever yeah but this company that i'm seeing uh study stream this is a crazy unique gen z like the people who i'm talking about who say this are typically in their 30s and 40s um this looks like it was created by an 18 year old who's in the know

And it's totally unique. It's so interesting. I don't care if this fails. I think it's a really good swing. Very unique. Very, very unique. Very great brand. I think this was like a student project.

I don't think this is meant to be like a company necessarily. Like there's kind of like an about page on there. You can probably check it out. But it sort of said like this was made by the student group of whatever like some place. And it just seems kind of like a humble side project that is getting a little bit of momentum. And it kind of tells you like there's something interesting there. It's not easy to get that level of traction. I don't know if it'll stay.

It's probably not going to be the biggest thing in the world, but I thought there's a pretty neat idea. I think that this is an incredibly successful project. Who created this? I'm looking for it. Is it a guy named Paul Scott? Did he create this? I just like am Googling the URL.

You can't find anything about it. People on Reddit are talking about it. This is crazy. That's, yeah, this is super. interesting. It's still a very underground. Yeah. Here he is. I thought this is cool. That's all I kind of have for today.

I have two good ones for the next pod, so I'm excited about that. I found it. This thing has funding. It's like a company company? So I googled study stream. Dot Live and I went to a guy's LinkedIn page, and he's the co-founder of a VC firm. It's called Knowledge Collective is a venture builder focused on global impact by disrupting health, education, and sustainability.

And he has study stream. Dot Live as one of their portfolio companies, along with StudyPow. Dot Live, Young Leaders. Digital and KC. Dot Institute. I think that's all for this episode. Let's wrap it. Abra, you, what did you think of this one? Oh, by the way, everyone said that the recap at the Michael thing was the best thing.

So I guess we should do those more. Yeah, I thought that was good. I hope people stuck around to the end because we didn't. I think we probably should have put a line in at the beginning that was like, hey, this is an interview with Michael Saylor. He's an awesome guy for this reason. And, you know, the interview was a little bit weird. We actually debrief it at the end of the show.

If you want to skip to the last 10 minutes or you want to listen to it, that's the last 10 minutes, but blah, blah, blah. I feel like there's probably a lot of people who got five minutes in or 10 minutes in and we're just like, what's going on here. Yeah, I'm going to listen to something else. I'm going to go do something else. but the people who did make it to the end gave us a lot of good feedback on it. By the way,

some of the feedback that we got was like, why did you guys try to bro out with them at the beginning about cars and shit? Like, he didn't want that. Like, dude, we actually, what's so funny is we like plan that?

We're like, what should we like do icebreakers? And we said like eight ideas. And I was like, I can just ask them about cars. Right. And we're like, oh,

that's the best of the worst. Just ask them about cars. Yeah, I would agree with them that it didn't work. But I would not agree that you should just like, not try to get the guest into like, like to shake out their PR speak, right? Like it, you know, more times than not, it's better to get somebody feeling loose and comfortable and laughing and talking about something that they're genuinely like something

about themselves than them just showing up for their, you know, eighth interview of the last week and just saying the same thing again, which, you know, for a guy like him, he does a ton of interviews. So, you know, if you want to listen to one of those, like I've listened to many of them. they're all the same on YouTube. You can go, listen, they're good, but they're all the same. And so I was hoping to shake them. We failed at it. And I actually had a kind of interesting learning afterwards that I'll tell you about.

I was thinking afterwards. I was training. I went and worked out right after the thing. And my trainer could tell my head was kind of somewhere else at the beginning. He's like, what's up? And I was like, man, we just had this interview with this guy. I was so excited about it because I think he's a baller. But honestly, the interview was kind of awkward.

and I felt like he was a little bit flat. It didn't seem like he wanted to be there. And then I feel like, you know, I thought we could shake him out of that. I thought we could make it good no matter how the guest comes in. But like, it didn't work or the shit we tried didn't work. And he was like, he asked me a question. And I sort of thought about it.

He goes, you know, he got me thinking, there's this woman named Glow, who is the executive coach for a bunch of the top dogs at Twitch. I think for the C-O-O, she's, been her exec coach for like 14 years or something like that. And she always comes and does these, like, with the exec team, she'll do this like team building thing with us where she'll come to our offsite. And normally, if you get all the execs in a room, it's just very type A. It's like, we need to talk about our problems. We need to talk about our goals and our plans and like how we need

to be more cross functional and blah, blah, blah. And when Glow is there, she won't let you just like stay in the logical part of your brain. You have to like get real a little bit. You have to be like a more of a human being, more open, more emotional. You have to be able to say if you're pissed off at somebody, she'll get you to actually say what's on your mind and not just stay at the surface. So she's like a master. And this woman's like, I don't know, 80 something years old. So she is like, she is so good at this. Like I remember the CEO Emmett, he has this like Twitch type, like a tick, like kind of like a speaking tick he has where when he's thinking hard or if he's like disagrees with you, he'll start like kind of like grabbing this thing on his neck. And he'll just do this for like 10

while he's talking to you. And I noticed it. Many people noticed it, but nobody's ever going to say anything to Emmett about this. Like, I'm not going to be like, dude, what are you doing? Or like, hey, you know, you do that? Like, I would just never say it. And nobody ever says it. So he always does it. But it's like, and so this was the first time I knew she was a baller was as soon as he started doing it and one of the big exec kind of off sites, she was like, Emmett, knock it off with that thing you're doing on your neck. And I was like, I was like, whoa, this lady is. And like, that was just like, she was just, she didn't even think about it. She said it and she said it in such a like harmless way. He took no offense. He's like, oh, yeah, thanks. He just moved on. And then for other, and then she'll like actually do like some

pretty sophisticated techniques where you say something and she'll be like, you know, you kind of hesitated when you said that. And I know you, you're a confident guy. You typically don't hesitate. What's, what was that? And then you like start pouring your soul out to glow and she like gets you. She opens everybody up. So anyways, I was thinking, what would glow have done if she was in that interview with Michael Sailing. And that's when I realized what we should have done. We should have just five minutes in, we both recognize like, hey, this is not going super well.

And I don't know about you. That's how I felt. Would you say the same about five minutes in? Yes. And so what we should have done is just been like, you know, Michael, like, I'm, I've watched a ton of your videos. You are super smart. You have taught me a lot about this space.

And honestly, I was really, really excited to have you on. I'm like, I'm a fan of yours. And I don't say that about most of the guys. And I've seen you when you're switched on and like, you know, when you explain something, it just, it's so spot on and it really resonates. And I feel like you're not fully switched on right now. Like, and we should have just addressed it and just been like, hey, like, I know you probably do a ton of these. But I've seen you at your best and like, can you give us your best?

Like, can you give us your A game? Can you? And we should have, I don't know what the phrasing is. it doesn't really matter what the phrasing is, to be honest with you. But I think we should have at the beginning and not in the debrief, while it was happening, we should have found a way to just, just open them up, just say, hey, look, let's call what it is right now. Like, what are we doing here?

And let's make this great. You know, there's people out here who have never heard. I've heard all your interviews. There's people listen to this that have never heard of you. They've never heard. We should have 100%. And I think what a lot of people don't realize and what I didn't realize until I got into this game was

we're like try to be like friends with these people or at least cordial friendly and it's really awkward to be like this is weird isn't it? Like it's like imagine just like having a conversation with a stranger at a party that you met. I mean that's kind of what we're doing.

Yes. And it's really uncomfortable to do that. But we should have done that. And that's what we should do more of. And even now while I'm rambling, I'm not saying the right thing. Like it's not coming out.

outright. But what I do know is that was the move. That was the move. And there's no, there's no, that was the lesson. That was the, that was the big gain of that. Like, I thought the episode was going to be amazing. Frankly, I don't think the episode was amazing, but an amazing thing came out. I really like it. I know. But for me, it wasn't something I'm proud of, but the thing I, the amazing thing that did come out of it was we got into an uncomfortable situation and we got a rep trying something that was hard to do. We kind of fit. at the rep, but because of that situation, I now know next time what I will do if I'm ever in that situation again. And so like that was the, that was the goal that came out of that for me.

I wanted to share that. Yeah. And I actually want to interview more crazy, interesting off the wall people. I think we just need a few more reps to get to to get in there. Most people we've interviewed have been pretty easy. I mean, Ty Lopez was hard. And I think we actually kicked that one in the ass. Yeah, I thought we did on that one. That one was also challenging. And I was thinking, I actually think you're really good at naturally doing the thing, which is naturally warming the guest up because I think you're very informal. You're very casual. So that just like, they're like, oh, that's the tone of this thing. He's not trying to like give this polished intro. You'll just be like, you're like, you're like a interesting guy, right? Like, you're cool. And then

they're like, what? And you're like, you know, you're like a cool guy. And you're clearly smart. And like, you know, and then you do this thing. And like, I remember with the guest who came on for Deep Sentinel, you were like talking about how you wanted to like convert your truck into an overlander. And then he like had that in common. And it actually worked out amazing to just talk about like some, you know, something that was not just, hey, tell me about your company and why it's so great. Because he knows that pitch. You'll go into it'll go into autopilot. And you got him talking about something that was not autopilot.

And with like others like the David's T's guys or whatever, you were like, I think you called him like a handsome dude or something. And it's like, you know, he's like, it like gets them into. They get some laughing. It gets them out of there. I called them really good looking. Yeah, you're like, you're really good looking. He doesn't expect that. And so I think you do a good job of it.

But sometimes, obviously, it's a swing. It didn't work, dude. Michael Al-Alphaed me so hard. I was like, yeah, I got this card so fast. He's like, yeah, I got a jet. He's like, I prefer jets and yachts. I was like, all right. Right.

All right, Daddy. You got me. Abraeu, what do you think about today and last week, actually? One of the comments on that video was is I've seen dozens of these videos and nobody's ever asked him about that ship. So there you go. Sam was the first ask about the ship. I think we should have them back on. I think second time around my feet better.

Yeah. And I think, Sean, one thing that I don't think I'm handling well and tell me if you're struggling with it is with these videos getting out, we're getting way more comments and becoming a little bit more public figures. It definitely is not. I think I'm a pretty tough guy, like, in terms of, like, I don't let a lot bother me. It bothers me sometimes. Does it bother you? It's definitely the case that one negative thing, I hear it 20 times forever. You know, it's like one negative is worth 20 positive comments.

It doesn't even be negative, just like, because often it's like something totally true and or it's just something, you know, ridiculous. But a negative thing does, like, sit in your brain a little bit more. And I think that there's probably some like getting used to of that where eventually that'll just wear off, right? Like in any public speaking or any kind of like, anytime you put yourself out there, like, you do develop thicker and thicker skin as you go. For us, we weren't like, I wasn't podcasting. I don't know, like over a year ago, right?

I didn't, I didn't make content. I didn't put my face on video. I didn't put my name behind ideas that are good or I didn't try to like go, you know, interview a billionaire and do all this stuff. I wasn't really trying to do that. And so definitely getting thicker skin. I would say like on the whole, I don't feel like I'm too sensitive about it because,

like I spend very little time thinking about it. But if I'm honest, yeah, a negative comment definitely does, you know, reverberate in my ears 10 times more than a positive compliment, which I just kind of brush off immediately. I don't even care about positive compliments. They like they might as well not exist. I don't even see them.

But and it's not to the point. ruins my day, but it like gives me, it's like a shitty half hour. Right. It's like a shitty half hour. I also think I'm more hoarse than anybody, right? Like when I did the C&BC thing today, I watched the video in the first 10 seconds, I'm like, why the fuck do I blink so much? What do I do?

Do I always blink this much? If it makes you feel better, I think you look cool. I think you looked cool. The way that you look now is like a hundred times cooler than you way you looked a year and a half ago. Yeah, my hair. out past the awful zone of growing it out and now it's like okay no and you're like you used to have a baby face you just look better i just think you look like a cool person oh thank you appreciate that

the facial the facial hair i think you look like a cool guy uh i say you back i like compliments right there we go i'm back i'm back in the game right up bray you am i wrong he looks way cooler now the one he's the thing that you probably don't like is when they compare when like one of them likes if like if they love you and they hate me or they love me and they hate you those are the ones that suck because It's one thing just to be a hater. But if it's like, no, I like that guy. I just don't like this other dude. It's like more personal than just being like, you guys are idiots.

It's like, yeah, whatever. What's interesting, though, is I don't think there's a favorite so far. I think that you, I think they hated you more. And they liked me more. And I think it's slowly shifted a little bit. So now I actually think we're equal. We'll see. I think we're equal in terms of the dislike and the likes.

Yeah. It's good practice. though, to do this kind of thing. I really recommend to anybody who, I don't know, like, if you got time, if you got like that extra hour that you're spending on like just watching TV, like make content. You'll learn a lot of shit making content. You'll learn a lot about yourself. You learn a lot about what makes other people like resonate with something and not. And you have to like come up with interesting things to say, which means you need to become a more interesting person. So I really think making content is something everybody should go do for a period of time just so

that they experience it. What do you think of Bray, Abra, you? I think this part was almost better than the podcast, the last 10, 15 minutes. I don't know if that's an insult or a compliment. No, the podcast was good, but this part made me, this part made me smile and laugh. And when the podcast can do that as well, that's great,

but this podcast did it, although it was informative. Yeah, I think you guys should take the good with the bat, right? Like, being out there, Sean, you've been able to create this big newsletter. you raise the fund. You got all this positive stuff. So like a few bad comments. Like, I don't know.

The positives outweigh the bad, I guess. So I think that's the way of looking at it. Do you have a big newsletter now? That's like the same. It's like a, actually the thread that went viral just now, the clubhouse thing, that added a few thousand people to it. Let me see what it's that. I think it's like a 22, 23,000 subscribers now.

I will say it makes, I feel so validated in my sense of self-worth that I was doing newsletters five years ago and now all the cool kids like Sean and Greg and all, every cool kid. And I literally thought it was stupid what you were doing. I was like, what is he doing? Finally, finally, all of the cool kids get it. It took, it took them forever, but I do feel validated. Yeah, and you did it right. You got it big and you cashed it out. And I think that's the, you know, that's the, you went full you you're lapping us at this point like you already did the whole thing and all of us right now are still like oh we got to make interesting content then we got to capture that person we'll get let's get their email address that'll work like that's a good idea and then like let's let's hit

them up regularly with something and then let's figure out how to make money it's like you've already done like eight of those steps we're all just like no i think i think there's there's room to build significantly bigger things and significantly shorter times but i 100% feel validated i mean I'm wrong all the time. This is just the one time that I've been right. It makes me feel validated. My sense of self-worth has just boosted. By the way, I tried this thing.

Okay, so check out this thing behind me. This Vesta board. Have you seen this before? No. Is that a Bitcoin ticker? No, no, no. I don't know if you could see it because my camera doesn't auto-focus on it.

I tried to have this behind me. So on the thing behind me right now. So for those you are listening, you can't see this. I basically have this giant, like board and the board is like if you go to a train station and you see where it's like you know like those little like flipboard signs where it's like you know this train is at station six and it's like and it's switching it's like train departs at station eight now it's like so it's one of those it does that thing and so you can put any message on here so you can program it where like

I could put like you know today's revenue and it'll like keep updating every hour on there I could put a message. I could put like a quote that I like on there. So it's like a piece of art that kind of changes behind me. But I tried to get this up for the CNBC thing because I was going on. I bought the domain, that dude on TV.com. Because I was like, oh my gosh, that is awesome. Great idea. I was like, what if I can get a chance to shout something else? Like, oh, dude, I do my name. No one's going to spell that. No one's going to remember Sean Puri. Sean with two freaking A's like that's not going to Great idea. So I got that dude on TV.com.

If you go to it, it just redirects you to my website. And then I just had it behind me during the interview so that anybody who saw it could go to it. But the guys on TVC were like, hey, we need you to move over to the middle. I was like, oh, shit, it's going to block my sign. But he's like, no, you need to be centered. I was like, oh, okay, whatever. But that was my little attempt.

Did it again, I need traffic? I don't know. I haven't had a chance. This morning's been so busy, dude. I did the CNBC thing. and then I'd take care of my daughter. And then we had this crazy, like, situations with my wife's e-commerce store where there's, like, you know,

like crazy theft going on in the warehouse. We're like trying to deal with that and trying to feel like, okay, how do we do with that? So, you know, there's crazy stuff going on. But I'm just trying to get back to my, like, paternity, dad life and just chill with the baby. That's what I want to do. I'm basically just going to chill with the baby for the next few weeks

and just try to record this podcast, you know, for, you know, one hour, one hour a week or whatever, two hours a week that we do this. Well, Abraeu, A, B, C, D. Hey. Ah, all right. We can never leave without. Brady, you're like, kind of like, you tell us the bedtime story.

We can't get off the air until you give us the validation. I feel like I can rule the world. I know I could be what I want to. I put my all in it like my days off. I'm on a road. Let's travel. Never looking back.