My First Million - #17 - Keto Ceral, Specialized Job Boards, Digital AA Meetings

Episode Date: October 14, 2019

The Hustle's My First Million presents: Million Dollar Brainstorm. Host Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) and The Hustle CEO Sam Parr (@theSamParr) sit down and discuss what side hustles, trends and big business ideas that's keeping them up at night. This week they shoot the sh*t about hyper-focused job boards, digital AA meetings, D2C hunting & fishing brands, GaaS (Ghostbusters-as-a-Service), keto ceral, miniature cooking sets, payroll software and a live unboxing of Sam's sperm... If you enjoy this and would like a weekly briefing on super in-depth research in these trends, Sam has offered a discount on The Hustle's Trends newsletter, go to https://trends.co/million.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Oh, really? Yeah. Okay, right. We are here. It is, I don't know what the name we're going to choose for this, but right now it's called Million Dollar Brainstorm. I had people tweet at me using that name. That name.

Okay, good. I think the expectations are a little high. I want these to be ideas that may or may not be million dollar ideas, but we're back. We got good feedback last week, so we said, let's do it again. The idea with this is every Friday morning, me and Sam get together. and instead of getting breakfast, we sort of shoot the shit on different ideas, different trends, different businesses that are cooking in your brain. And so you and I have access to a lot of people that, quote, normal people don't have access to,

just because we, and so let's just use the stories that we're hearing, and we can kind of put two and two together and tell everyone else who doesn't have the same access. Yeah, before this one, I was like asking for permission from a bunch of people. I was like, hey, can I talk about that idea you said? Or this week I'm not going to do those, but by next week, hopefully I have. But we have friends who run or own multi-billion-dollar, companies or companies have sold for no big deal yeah like these like huge they're either friends or acquaintances enough that we like are like I heard this guy is trying this thing those guys that

I call friends and they like half remember my name yeah yeah well but we definitely have insider information that we can kind of uh okay so what is this box you just put yeah I just put a box on Sean's desk it's my sperm uh so last week last week we talked about sperm banks it's all clean okay so you can open that box up it's clean everything's everything's good it's called Daddy. Is this real? Yeah. So take that white bit off. Okay. And then you can open the box. Oh, man. This is a total unboxing. This is great. Okay. Open the box. Okay. Now, don't touch that thing. Okay. I reached the final blast. Yeah. So I went and tried it. It's going to be $100 a year. $100 a year called this service called Daddy. D-D-I-S-E. Yeah. And this looks good. This looks like an Apple product here.

It looks like a pair of headphones or something. Yeah. And so inside is your sperm and you're going to freeze this for how long? I don't know yet. I just, we talked about it last week, and I think it's a really good idea, so I'm going to try it. Okay. So we'll see. I'll know maybe in two weeks. What did you see in there? Do you see a bunch of other people? Were they all people of different ages? Like, did you notice anything else while you were there? Oh, no. Oh, they mailed this to you. They just mailed it to me. Oh, okay. Even better. Yeah. And I actually talked to loads of men who are my age or even younger, and a lot of them are doing it. So I think that this whole sperm bank thing is actually way bigger than I actually anticipated. I'm going to pay $100.

a year for. I went into it thinking to pay for 20 years. Right. Okay. Wow. All right. Awesome. Okay. So that's one. That's a follow-up from last week, really. Yeah. And I have one more follow-up from last week. So we talked about looking at competitors. So there's this woman on Twitter. Her name is Jane Wong, but her handle is Wong M-Jane. So W-O-N-G-M-J-A-N-E. All she does is she reverse engineers apps. Yes. She's like Facebook's Cryptonite, right? She always finds the new Facebook features before Facebook rolls them out. Yeah, she's great. So that's a good follow. My friend Patrick texted me and showed me that. And then another great tweet that I found. There was a study. I found it. I went through Patrick and this guy named Cameron tweeted it out.

So they did a study, I think, tens of thousands of men. Most men above age 50 claim they felt masculine. Most men below age 35 said they do not feel masculine. And we were talking about TRT stuff. And I was like, I think it this stuff's going to get more popular. And I think that's one data point that shows that it might be bigger that we had said. Yeah, you know, not all the ideas that we say on this are like great ideas. That's like, you know, it's a brainstorm. But unless the sperm bank for me, the TRT one, I'm like, oh my God, that is a great idea. There's another name that I want to find. So I'm going to try to have Google while I'm doing this. There's somebody on Twitter who is, you were talking about competitors. There's a woman on Twitter who talks a lot

about e-commerce stuff. And there's a lot of accounts on Twitter that are sort of like, I make six figure's doing drop shipping. You should too. She's kind of like that. She sells guides, but she puts out a lot of free content on her Twitter that she tries to sell more of on the guide. And her free content's actually pretty good. So she was talking about like, how do you find who supplies the brands that you buy?

What she was showing was, you know, they all get manufactured outside of the U.S. usually. So they have to come in through customs. So you actually go to these two customs registries. You search the company's brand name and you can see who they're receiving shipments from. You go look those companies up and, oh, what? you know, these tend to be the manufacturers of that product. I would love to see that.

And so you can go work back because you can find those exact suppliers. And it's pretty clever. And a lot of times I've noticed you can do that when you, so I'll like want to know who is suppliers and I'll buy the product. And if you look inside the box. Right. You read the label. Yeah.

If you look in the box, like in the cardboard box, a lot of times or you can reverse search the sender mailing address. Anyway, there's a bunch of really cool things that you could do. We should actually talk about that. Okay. Another time. Yeah, cool. All right.

What else you got? We got to go quick today. We only got 20 minutes left. Okay, so some new ideas here. You want to talk about that? Yes. Okay. Oh, first of all, we had a ton of people sign up for trends after this,

and I got in trouble for giving out a code when I shouldn't have. Okay. So if you use that code, you better hurry up and use it now, otherwise. It's going to go away. It's going to go away. And if you want to sign up, we put a special offer at trends.com slash million. Okay. And so we'll be in there, or I'll be in there.

I think you are too, and we'll be talking. But that's like a special discount code for people. Otherwise, use the other one, but I'll get in trouble. that we said last time. Okay, so two things happened over the last week that we had written about in trends. The first thing, or like a follow-up, the first thing, rig up. Yes. Okay, so I've had this hypothesis for a few months now that I think hyper-focused job boards, there's a huge opportunity. The reason why is in 2011 or 9, or Fred Wilson wrote a post saying that Indeed.com was one of the best companies he ever invested in. I think he said it was the best. Indeed. Yeah. Indeed. And he was

explaining the mechanics behind job boards. And it was pretty amazing. And so. And what's the mechanics? It's just, here's a bunch of job postings. So the way a job, a lot of people don't actually understand how a job posting works, but basically there's like two or three models behind it, but they're all great. The first one is, so as the job board, you have to attract traffic. Yes. So you need people who are looking for that job to come to your website. Okay. To make money, what you have to do is you do a couple things. The first thing, which is what Indeed does, I think they mostly do this, is an employer will signed up and for every click or email that they get from a high intent job seeker, they'll pay indeed a certain amount of money. Right. For every lead, it's a lead, it's a lead gen site.

And a lot of people don't even know how that works, like lead gen site, but that's basically how it works. So as a business owner, I own a business, I'm more than happy to pay money to get people to my careers page or to send me their email of highly interested people. And then if they send me 50 people, I can pay them $50 an email, and then I can go and try and close a handful of them. Right. The second way it works is, and I think this is how it works in Behance, is they pay a subscription.

The company itself pays a membership, basically. Yeah, so you pay $500 a month to have your job posting on there, and they promise a minimum number of email sends to an email list. Right. Okay, so job boards are good, been around forever, but rig up it seems like it's a job board just for one niche. I believe it's in the oil and gas industry. Oil and gas industry. And here's why that's interesting.

I think that the formula for finding a job board that would work, you got to do an equation. This is how you'd rank what's interesting, which is how many openings there are. available in the field. Okay, so how many openings there are in a field? Multiplyed by the salary of that job, multiplied by the amount of friction it takes to get that job, okay? So, for example, self-driving car engineers, right? They might make, on average, $500,000 a year. That's probably on the high end, but let's just say that that's true. Okay, so if they make $500,000 a year, what's the supply of those folks? How many of those people are there in the world? Probably not a lot. Right. Person hiring a self-driving car engineer would probably be willing to pay $100 or $200 just to get an introduction to someone

who is open. Yeah, much more than that. Much more than that. Right. Thousands of thousands of dollars. A company who's Google when they hire a self-driving car person, you know, the base recruiter fee is like 30 grand if they place the person. And I think for niche jobs like this, it can go upwards of 50, 100 grand. So maybe they would pay $1,000 a lead. So if you can create, the idea here now is if you can build this audience of high intent self-driving car job seekers. If you can build that audience, you can earn for this argument, and it might be true, $1,000 per applicant that you sent. And they're not, they don't have to land the job. They just have to show that they're interested in the job. Right. And so you have to do this math to figure out what's interesting. One thing that's

incredibly interesting, and I said this was interesting a few months ago, was the oil field industry. The reason why that's interesting is you can have minimal education. I don't think you need a bachelor's degree. There's a whole bunch of those jobs available. and the salary is like 100 grand. That's amazing. So high amount of supply, huge demand, pretty good salary. And so Rig Up came along and they created us a whole bunch of tools to attract these job seekers. And now they're charging the companies on the back end. And they just raised maybe three or four, like hundreds of millions of dollars from Andreson Horowitz at like a multi-billion dollar valuation. Yeah. Shout out Jeff Lewis. The original investor in Rigup is one of the best unknown investors are underrated investors out there.

We're not really buddies. He wrote a term sheet to us. He was the first guy. You know, we did a, it was Christmas Eve or something like that, which everyone says, investors, you know, they go away for Christmas. Yeah, they do. But if they're interested, they'll hunt you down. I was in Argentina.

You know, we did a Skype call and 24 hours later he put a term sheet down. Like, this guy moves quick. He was at Founders Fund at the time. Got it. And now he's got his own fund. We didn't end up taking it because we had a cheaper source of capital. But I remember being very impressed with him. And he's built a badass portfolio.

He's got Wish, Lyft, Hillray, which is like this company in Canada that's, it was a weed company that went public already, unless I'm mixing up the names. Jeff Lewis? Yeah, Lambda school, rig up, like this guy's got a killer portfolio. Anyways, so rig up's good. Also, Incredible Health, which was, Iman was on the podcast, that's a vertical, that's a niche job board like you're talking about, where nurses is her field, where people pay, nurses is a great one. Huge demand. And so a lot, well, but the thing is is that a lot of people will see these companies and they won't actually understand what they're doing. They're like rig up or incredible health. They're just offering all this free stuff. How the heck do they make money? Right.

it's on the jobs. Right. Like that is on the job. So let's talk about other jobs that are interesting. Okay. Airline pilots. I was doing research. I think there's a nice size shortage of airline pilots.

They're going to exist for a long time. There's not that many of them, but, and I don't think there's a significant amount of people studying them, as well as the job boards that I looked at seem pretty antiquated. Right. And this is like one of those things like a dating site where if you built the tool, the platform, you could actually like white label it. You could just rinse and repeat it with other verticals. Let's say you did it with pilots. You probably don't need too much different functionality to try this again with whatever, consultants or whatever the next vertical you want to try.

So either. Oh, yeah. So you could just clone your product, the technology you built. And that's exactly. If you go to tiny boards. So tinyboards.com, it's my friend Andrew, he has done this for designers. He's done it for like four or five different verticals. I don't remember all the verticals.

I think AI engineers. And he says it's doing wonderful. Excellent. It's doing great. Okay. Okay. So pilots are interesting. Construction workers, I think, are interesting because the average pay, I would imagine, for a construction worker is at least $25 an hour.

You need a lot of construction workers to get a project done. I imagine rig up would actually go down that route. And then finally, something that I've actually tested is truck drivers. What do you mean you've tested? You actually tried this up. I built a website, and I drove paid traffic to it, and then I spoke with someone to buy the leads. And I've actually researched it. So there's a handful of companies out there that do $100 million in revenue, and their main business is lead gen for trucking companies.

And how did your experiment go? It made money. So I do all these experiments all the time. Rarely do I actually like follow through, like make them big. Right. Because I already have a job and I'm happy. But I like to do these things for fun. And sometimes maybe we'll hire some people to run them.

But anyway, so I went and contacted people who could buy the leads and I go, okay, how much would you buy leads for? They said we'd buy this type of lead for $10, this type of lead for $100. So I got a range of $10 to $100 for truck drivers that have commercial licenses. If you read about, there's a huge truck shortage right now. truck driver shortage. There's a reason, the reason why there's a truck driver shortage is they're not making a ton of money and it's a really hard job and young people aren't doing it. So that definitely puts a kink in that idea. But if you think about what America does, one of our biggest things is

logistics. We have a huge country and as commerce goes up, that's going to just grow with it. Right. And my father owns a company that works with truckers. I have a lot of insight to this. So trucking is incredibly interesting to me. Okay. So, all right. So we're going to put a pin in this one, specialty job boards. Interesting idea, number one. Give me another idea. Did we talk about paywall software last time? No. Okay. I'll reveal some stuff. Okay. So at The Hustle, I think we're paying three grand a month for a paywall software. It is awful. What does this do? Okay. How does this work? So there's substack out there. Substack is cool. They just raise money. They are a paywall software for newsletters. So you can really easily collect money and send people exclusive newsletters for a monthly fee. Right. Great. I talked to the founder. I go, hey, are you going to open this up to web-based stuff? Because that's what I need. He said no. And so the idea here is if you go to the New York Times and you'll see how some stuff's paywall than some isn't. They built.

that software from scratch. I think they built it from scratch probably because they were using the provider that we're using now and they realized how horrible it was. I went and spoke to business of fashion. You know, business of fashion? It's a great website. They just raised money from Financial Times.com. They had to build their own. Wall Street Journal built their own. The economists built their own. Like, so many people are building their own tech crunch I've heard is spending north of six figures in software fees in order to use this vendor that we're using as well. It's a pain in the butt. And so it's asking for a challenger. Oh my God. It's so like I will give someone right now $5,000 a month if they made this.

To try to start this. Yes. Right. Okay. Love it. What else you got? A.A. We wrote about this a while ago. Okay. There's something like 20 million people in AA. I got to go look at the exact stats. But we wrote about this idea of A.A. There's so many alcohol is anonymous. Of course. The amount of people that have a drinking problem in America is huge. A.A. is the biggest one. They have tens of millions of members. If you've ever gone to an AA meeting, it's

intimidating and it's old school. I mean, it's just a bunch of people who come from various walks of life who are all screwed up and they're just sitting in a room, a circle of 10 people, explaining why they're screwed up and helping each other. It's pretty effective, but we wrote about this company called Tempest that is creating an online version of this that costs a fee. So it's like an app. Yeah. And they just actually raised a round of funding, I think, in the last few days. I'm quite interested in this whole addiction thing and how we can help people get through that. The problem is, is if you have an addiction, there's like a huge barrier to entry in order to try to fix your addiction. And that barrier to entry is mostly embarrassment

or having to go to like the sperm bank because that's like weird, right? And so what I'm interested in is how will that be solved for digital? Right. Can you do it more personal, more intimate, more sort of frictionless, more conveniently? Yes. I think that's going to be interesting. And I didn't realize how big the demand was. Either as a replacement or a supplement to the in-person stuff. Yeah, and what you can do is you can go to AA's website and you can see I'm almost positive. They might have like 50 million members. When I think of ideas, one of the ways that I think of ideas is I look at where's demand.

And work backwards. And work backwards. There's a ton of demand there. Okay, I got an idea for you. Came from the Trends Facebook group. So shout out to Ben Curtis and Alan Tucker. All right. So they brought up this idea of a hunting and fishing DDC brand.

So you posted about meat eater. Meat eater. I had never heard of this. Huge. Of course, because I'm like. you know, snowflake in California that doesn't know

anything about any of this. My testosterone's low. I don't go hunting but I look at their traffic. Their traffic's not big. I have to figure out where the revenue is coming from. But they have a lot of revenue,

you're saying. They raise money at a huge valuation and I talked to people who were investors and they said the revenue was big. Okay. So that was kind of interesting. I didn't know about it. And then these guys brought up

in the group, they were like, hey, hunting and fishing is this underserved category asking essentially for a D2C brand. So go back and listen to the podcast with Moyes, who started native, deodorant, and basically think about

okay, that appealed to a certain set. You know, native is mostly for women who are, you know, health conscious and don't want to have aluminum in the deodorant. The hunting and fishing vertical, which is very much brick and mortar today, can you create a digital brand that sells either accessories? And Yetty did it. Yet he did. Yet he built a phenomenal success. They built a $3 billion company for a hunting cooler. Right, coolers, exactly.

Specifically, like a hunting and fishing one. And what these guys were pointing out was that you could first just make content. And so this is kind of like, you know, our buddy Ramon, who does this with, you know, Facebook, how he did it with Facebook pages before he, he's got an episode two, I think, where he talks about how he built fan pages about soap operas, then built a blog about soap operas, and then sold that for $9 million. Same sort of thing you could do here. You could build fan pages around the hunting and fishing lifestyle and then start to sell products

into that group. And this is very much a middle America thing. So which categories? I don't know enough about hunting and fishing to know what is the product, but I would just, you know, go in what you were saying, go from the demand and work backwards. That's what I would do. Guess how many Americans consider themselves hunter or fishers? How many? Okay, I'm going to say 15 million. Okay, according to some preliminary research that I've done, a third.

That's like 100 million. 105 million. Wow. Yeah, we were talking about this at our company and some people who are hunters and fishers said, I said, I can't believe this is such a niche. Right. Well, what's going on? I was like, I was like, this is such a small niche. I can't believe they, and they're like, no, it's not small. And I'm like, well, it doesn't seem big because I live in San Francisco, of course. they go and they were did some research right there and some studies said 105 million Americans. Yeah, this is a, it's like a mega niche. It's like I work at Twitch right now and Twitch is, this is niche product live streaming for video games and gamers. It's a mega niche. But it's a mega niche because there's so many gamers that you can do hundreds of millions of monthly users off of just gamers. Yeah. And if you want to learn more about this, there was this guy named Ryan Dice who I know, this isn't the same category, but there's a lot of survivalists like people who, and, That's the niche within hunting.

Yeah, like this survivalist category, they think that the world's going to end, or they just don't want to rely on the government, and so they want to prepare for apocalyptic type of things. And anyway, he built this blog for survivalists, and it crushed it. If you don't believe in that type of stuff, I personally don't believe it. I respect you. If you do believe in it, I don't. And so I would never want to, like, make that stuff.

Okay, I wrote down another pseudoscience sort of one like this that you guys wrote about, which is this Ghostbusters thing. Did you read the story? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So the story was basically there's a service. There's like, I think it's an insurance service. And one of their sub offerings is a ghostbuster service. If you believe that there's your house is haunted or there's a ghost, they will come to your

house and they will check and they will do the methods that don't, you know, don't mean anything. And people are paying for this because a lot of people are spooked. A lot of people believe in ghosts. And I just had to. How many people do you think believe in ghosts? Dude, I think it's the same. I think it's like a third of people believe in ghosts. I don't think they're all afraid of ghosts or think their house is haunted.

But I think a third of people. believe in ghosts. It's crazy. I don't. I'm not part of that category. I believe in aliens, but not ghosts. Okay. Tweet at me if you believe in ghosts. That's what I want to know at the end of this. Or if you'd be willing to pay money for someone to come and get rid of ghosts. But I just had to like, pay respects to the person who was like, you know what? Let's do it. Let's sell ghostbusters. And you know that's actually true is because one of the most popular shows on TV for a long time was the paranormal activity shows on TLC. Yeah, exactly. It's entertaining. It's a very entertaining thing. Okay. And the people who do believe they're going to pay, right? The people who believe that their house is haunted, they're going to pay because it's like this, you know, incredibly like tense and stressful thing.

You just got to get in that televangelist. It's like, ugh. Okay, give me another idea. We got four minutes left. Okay. Let's get two more ideas on the books. A company just launched two months ago and we covered it on trends. I think we actually wrote about keto cereal before it launched. We looked at the search traffic and keto cereal was climbing like crazy. Magic Spoon. Have you heard of Magic spoon. I've heard of this because I've tried keto three times. Magic spoon. It's a serial. I have a friend who, like a friend of a friend and they told me their stats booming. So I looked on LinkedIn. This is this is not insider information. Anyone could do this. I looked on LinkedIn. Looked at what the founders were doing before. It was something like a DDC thing that from the outside, it seemed like it failed. And then they like pivoted. And I have seen the traffic for keto cereal search like the amount of people who search it as well as the amount of posts on Reddit. I'm super fascinating. If you go and read P&G, Tractor and Gamal or all the other, Calog, all the other serial makers, serial accounts for, like, huge. I mean, I imagine, like, it could be like $50 billion a year. Yeah, and it's like soda where the actual thing costs so little that all the money, the cost is all just marketing. Yeah.

And so they marketed it through TV, TV ads and everything else. And so the modern day version of TV commercials is Facebook ads. And I know people who have done this. So someone who spoke at HouselCon, which a lot, actually, a lot of these people who are talking about are going to be at HouselCon, you should come. Like, for example, we're having the guys who started Method soap and Ali supplement. And so we'll talk about those stuff. But anyway, this magic cereal, I went to their website, super basic, slick, but basic website. I think that thing's going to crush.

Right. So Halotop only raised a million dollars. I think they're going to do north of a billion dollars in sales this year. They paid off dividends to their angel investors. One of my guys who on Bud's with told me that he, like, made a living off that dividend. Yeah. Halotop is huge. I think this keto cereal thing will be.

be in the same category. Yeah, and it might be that there's other things like this, like, my wife is vegan, and so we buy all this, like, there's this candy company called Unreal. That's all vegan candy, so it's like, you want Reese's, but you're vegan now. Well, guess what? We made the closest taste to Reese's, that's vegan. And same thing with Eminems, and same thing with other candies. And so vegan candy, is keto cereals. Eminem even has dairy in it? Chocolate, milk chocolate, right? I know, but that's what it's called. I didn't know if that was It's not considered vegan, from what I understand. And so even if it is technically vegan, it's sort of a person who's vegan says something

about their lifestyle. They usually don't want to be holding a bag of M&Ms. Even if it is vegan. Even if it technically is, and they would prefer to have the sort of more organic, the more made of real ingredients version of it. Got it. I'm willing to actually pay three times as much as M&Ms for it. And so I wonder, you know, paleo, keto, vegan, I wonder which lifestyle you can piggyback

off of and make one of those products that they repeat purchase all the time, like cereal. I think this magic spoon thing, like my early results show, I think this thing's going to go to the moon. Cool. I like, all right. I have one more from trends that I like and then you're going to finish this up. So miniature cooking set. I saw this on trends. It made a lot of sense to me because people love the miniature version of anything.

There's something to seeing something that's, you know, you normally see at full size, many pots and pans. And I think that as more people live in apartments and condos that are smaller and smaller, especially in cities, and people want to cook. And as the, you know, I think Tasty came out with their own skillet. to pair with their recipe book or whatever. And we wrote about that, yeah. And that was a clever idea, but I really like this idea of miniature modern cookware. I think something can be quite big there.

It's not the business I would start, but it's one where if I see that product, if I see a good product that fits in that, I would invest in that because I believe in the premise and I believe that anybody who does something innovative in cookware will stand out from the pack because everything is so bland. That's a big business, I think, too. It's just creating really high quality cast iron skillets and things like that.

Absolutely. All right, last one. Can I say one more? Yeah. Okay, we have Wade Foster, speaking at HustlCon. Wade started this company called Zapier. I call it Zapier, Zapier, something like that. Million dollars raised. I think they're in the $60 million ARR, which means they could be worth a lot, like $500 million. Correct. It's only four years old. But this whole connecting APIs and this no code economy thing, this whole no code economy thing, if we want to call it no code economy, whatever, that's going to be bigger than this whole sharing economy. be stuff. There's Webflow, Zapier, if this, then that. All these things, it's, we should, we should do a whole section on No Code next time. Next Friday. We'll do it. I think it is just the coolest thing I've ever seen. And No Code websites still suck. And shout out to Cindy, big listener

of the podcast and Original Investor in Zapier, and talks about it all the time because that company's kicking ass. I love it. We just give them more money every month. Yeah, great. All right, Sam, we got to run. Let's get back to life. Hopefully you guys like this. And also, we're going to do a Q-N-A episode. So if you made it to the end of this, you're probably hardcore. We're doing a Q-N-A episode. So I want you to email me your questions. It's Puri.shan, P-U-R-I-Shawn at g-mail.com. Send in your listener questions. We're going to do a full Q&A on those. All right, we've got to go. See you. Thank you.