My First Million - 3 Profitable Business Ideas You Should Start in 2022, Dog Food Billionaires, and Focusing on the Next Step with Steph Smith

Episode Date: March 10, 2022

Sam Parr (@TheSamParr) and Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) are joined by Steph Smith (@StephSmithIO) to discuss why you shouldn't think beyond step 1 when starting a business, how to identify 10X productivity employees, and how to automatically generate side-hustle ideas. ----- Links: * Steph's website - http://stephsmith.io/ * Steph's podcast - http://listenandlearn.co/ * Spring loading community - https://discord.gg/xhhFEwgWTf * NYT First Said - https://twitter.com/NYT_first_said * Nuuly - https://www.nuuly.com/ * MSCHF - https://mschf.xyz/ * Do you love MFM and want to see Sam and Shaan's smiling faces? Subscribe to our Youtube channel. * Want more insights like MFM? Check out Shaan's newsletter. ----- Show Notes: (01:30) - Chewie.com Billionaire (6:30) - Are you buying the dip (16:15) - New York Times first said (22:00) - MSCHF (27:00) - Is 10X talent real? (32:30) - Why Steph still works for an employer (40:00) - Nuuly (49:00) - The side hustle generator (01:15:00) - Why Steph still calls her fiancee her "partner" ----- Past guests on My First Million include Rob Dyrdek, Hasan Minhaj, Balaji Srinivasan, Jake Paul, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Gary Vee, Lance Armstrong, Sophia Amoruso, Ariel Helwani, Ramit Sethi, Stanley Druckenmiller, Peter Diamandis, Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan, Marc Lore, Jason Calacanis, Andrew Wilkinson, Julian Shapiro, Kat Cole, Codie Sanchez, Nader Al-Naji, Steph Smith, Trung Phan, Nick Huber, Anthony Pompliano, Ben Askren, Ramon Van Meer, Brianne Kimmel, Andrew Gazdecki, Scott Belsky, Moiz Ali, Dan Held, Elaine Zelby, Michael Saylor, Ryan Begelman, Jack Butcher, Reed Duchscher, Tai Lopez, Harley Finkelstein, Alexa von Tobel, Noah Kagan, Nick Bare, Greg Isenberg, James Altucher, Randy Hetrick and more. ----- Additional episodes you might enjoy: • #224 Rob Dyrdek - How Tracking Every Second of His Life Took Rob Drydek from 0 to $405M in Exits • #209 Gary Vaynerchuk - Why NFTS Are the Future • #178 Balaji Srinivasan - Balaji on How to Fix the Media, Cloud Cities & Crypto #169 - How One Man Started 5, Billion Dollar Companies, Dan Gilbert's Empire, & Talking With Warren Buffett • ​​​​#218 - Why You Should Take a Think Week Like Bill Gates • Dave Portnoy vs The World, Extreme Body Monitoring, The Future of Apparel Retail, "How Much is Anthony Pompliano Worth?", and More • How Mr Beast Got 100M Views in Less Than 4 Days, The $25M Chrome Extension, and More

Okay, first thing, super quick. So have you guys heard of this Twitter account? It's called New York Times First Said. You heard of it? No. Okay, so it's kind of just like this fun little Twitter account where they track all of the articles being published by the New York Times. And then they find words that are published for the first time. And it's just kind of like a fun thing because I'll send you guys this or I'll post it in the dock.

this is a link to a couple of the ones that they published. So like dead ass, for example, it was a word like first found in the New York Times, March 2019, doom scrolling, May 2020, Techbro, apparently it was January 2020. Like that surprises me. So this is just kind of like a fun thing, but I was thinking that this should exist for jobs.

So on Indeed or Glass Store or something, there's a really, really quick transition period these days between like just completely new jobs coming to market. And I think there should be an account that tracks these. Like, oh, this is the first time I've seen like, I don't know where I saw this, but there's like professional falconer. Like, what? Who does that?

How much does they get paid? I don't know. But I'm surprised to know it exists. And I'm sure there's many more practical jobs out there that are coming to market that people should know about. And so someone should just create the equivalent of this instead of the New York Times. It should be for Indeed. How do they do this?

How do they track every word and check if it's ever been said before? I think it's just a scraper. I mean, I don't know exactly how they set it up, but I don't think it would actually be that hard to do. And by the way, this has 200,000 followers. So for that person out there who's just been grinding, trying to put out great content and has like 3,000 followers, just know you could have been tweeting out like single word things

from the New York Times and gotten 200,000 followers. I actually think that's a great idea. Have you guys seen the, remember how we talked about this kid that was tracking Elon Musk's private jet on Twitter? Now he's tracking all the private jets and private yachts of all the Russian oligarchs. Great pivot. And shout out, shout out to you, kid. Great pivot, man. Also, Elon offered him $5,000 and he turned it down. He's like, no, I'm going to keep doing my

thing. But both of his accounts have a lot of followers. He offered a $5,000 for what? To stop. Stop tracking him? Yeah. Yeah, because Elon was like, I don't want people to know where I am. What a stupid thing. If you're going to, if you're going to come and offer someone money, do it right. Five thousand dollars. If you come like to care, you best not miss Elon. That's how you should have replied. Five grand. I think this is cool stuff. I actually think this is a wonderful idea.

I also think that companies would pay for this, right? As in like, companies that have competitors want to know what their competitors are doing. And so, like, we're launching something at HubSpot soon. And I've already gotten an email from someone who works at TechCrunch who's like, hey, saw this on your site or like they basically dug something up that we publish. And they're like, what's going on here? imagine you had the same thing where you're like, oh, I saw like Salesforce is, you know, hiring for these roles or I didn't know that was a role at Netflix. I think companies would pay for that

Intel. That's actually crazy fascinating. If you could aggregate, like let's say that you're in the when I was at the hustle, I cared about what like there's like 30 companies that I cared about what they were doing. It would be kind of interesting to act if I would have paid a monthly fee and I would have gotten a daily email with like the movement and people's job just job listings. Yeah, that's that's what I was going to say. I don't think it's, so interesting, like the Falconer or whatever. It's like, oh, whatever, someone made up a random job. But, oh, like, we see this a lot where it's like, oh, Netflix is hiring a Web3 engineer.

That means they're probably trying to explore something in that space and so you can kind of get a sense of what direction somebody's going. Oh, they're hiring enterprise sales. Okay, they're trying to go upmarket, right? So there's a competitive intelligence that comes from these. But I think that, I do think that exists. I've seen people tracking these. I don't know if they're just doing it for their own fun or if there's like a service that

tracks that. But it is kind of interesting. I like that. All right. What else you got, Steph? Oh, by the way, I should say one more thing. A little more thing about this. A hilarious story. I went into work one day, and my buddy Neil, who's like a programmer at our company, he was sitting at the coffee machine making a coffee. It was like 10 a.m. And I hadn't even said anything to him yet. We were just standing next to each other. And he just goes,

these are my first words. And I go, what? He goes, he's like, he realized he hadn't spoke that day yet. He'd like got to work and gone to the coffee machine and started programming like his commute he didn't talk to anybody at his desk he didn't talk to

he just started these are my first words and I thought that shit was so funny and actually it was great when he said that I realized how funny Neil is and so we've replaced

our marketing person with Neil he's our iPhone programmer and he wrote all of the release notes for our apps because he was just hilarious and he was like low key hilarious

but these are my first words I'll never forget get that. How does that relate to this? Because it's like a word tracker, you know, first time the New York Times said this word. So that's how I thought of that. First time, Neil spoke. It's interesting to think about what are your first words every day? Right. Like, what's coming out your mouth for the first time every day? Mine's usually like a grump. It's like a fuck when I say it up. You know what I mean? No, Sam, yours is always just sup to everyone. Just sup.

I always say, I always say sup, yeah, or I just like, am sore from exercise or something. And I'm like, oh, fuck. It's usually my first word. Well, that explains a lot. All right. And then I forgot to tell you this, but this is the most important thing. I can't believe we didn't talk about this earlier, to be honest with you. Because if you're listening to this and you like what you're hearing right now,

and you haven't gone and subscribed to the My First Million podcast wherever you get your podcast, then that's the thing you've got to do. There's nothing more important than. doing that right now. And don't do it because I said to do it. Do it because you want to do it. Do it because that's who you are. All right. What else are you guys? I guess related to companies hiring. So you guys have no mischief, right? It's this like company that does these crazy stunts. They're on, I think, stunt number 70. And their latest stunt I thought was really interesting and relates to this idea of just like creative hiring. So if you scroll down,

Tell me about what mischief is. I don't entirely get it because they raised funding. But when you explain what they are, I'm like, who, what grown adult would trust this child with money? It's like South Park or Saturday Night Live. It's a weekly show. It's like a weekly sketch. But it's just done through code.

They make a website instead of like a video making a joke. They make a website that's a joke. Yeah. But is it exactly. Does it make money? I think it does. I don't know how much they've made. They've raised $3.5 million.

So I don't know. like you're saying, I don't know who those investors are, what they're looking from mischief, but just to give like two examples. So one of them recently was, I think it's like called Tuntine. I don't know why it's called that, but basically it's called the game of death online, which you sign up, you get an account, and you pay $10 to join the game. And all you have to do is log in daily to stay alive. And the last person who stays alive gets all the money. So it's just kind of like these silly, quirky games, but the last one they did was, they also do like commentary through their game. So it was a commentary on, in this case, the MSAT. So they got people

to pay $50 to take the MSOT and the highest score won. It's basically like a, their version of the SATs. And the person who got the highest score won the entire pot. So they didn't actually have that many people did it. They had 500 people who did it. But it reminded me of something you guys talk about on the pod or have talked about on the pod, which is, you know, the power of like crowdsourcing things, like SpaceX. If they want to develop some new technology, they put out some competition. And that tends to attract more interesting people than, you know, if they hire a bunch of recruiters to go, you know, find the people in theory they're looking for. The example, the example I think you're thinking about is they were trying to figure out some, like,

were they trying to like decode some protein or something that helped with this AIDS medication and they like turned it into a video game and they'd spent 10 years trying to solve it and then like a bunch of video gamers got it done in like three weeks. Yeah. Well, there's the SpaceX. What's the SpaceX challenge? The one that everyone knows. Which about X Prize? It's just like they're. That's not from SpaceX.

Yeah. But there's also. Yeah. That's like a version of that where they basically just put out the bounty and then let people, let anybody sort of enter to try to win. Okay, there's a, I feel like there's another one that SpaceX does, but in any case, like, what I'm getting at is all, I mean, we work for HubSpot. There's all these companies that are trying to attract, like, quote unquote, top talent. And they're doing it in a way that, in most cases, like, true top talent. Like, are you going to want to be, like, DM'd on LinkedIn

and go through, like, a traditional interview process? Like, in most cases, no. And so my question is, why isn't there like a really like mischief style recruiting agency that puts out these challenges that the smartest people on the internet are like stoked to solve just out of like sheer pride that they then can funnel potentially into these companies. Maybe it's the case that these people just like would never want to work for these larger companies. But I just wonder why there isn't a more creative route to recruiting. I have something for you.

So this is one of the very first articles the hustle ever wrote. I don't even know if you can Google it anymore. It was literally like, we wrote it like two weeks after starting. And it was about my friend named Max. And if you Google, Ben, the hustle, Google interview or the hustle secret Google interview. So my friend Max was teaching himself sometimes. I got to remember all the details. This was like six years ago.

He was learning some type of coding, some type of language. And it was like a rare language. And he was typing in all these things on Google. Like, what does blank mean? How do you do blank? And after a while, his Chrome browser looked like the Matrix. And it said, you look like you might belong to one of us. And he says, we've noticed that you've been Googling a lot about this type of language,

and we are hiring for that. Would you be interested in applying here? That's amazing. And very few people ever saw this. But we wrote an article about this. This article got seen by millions of people. What's it say, Ben? What was the language?

Google has a secret interview process, and it landed me a job. That's the headline. And he ended up working there, and it worked. It worked. And it was wild. That's dope. And you know, only Google could do that because they own the browser and the search engine. But what if you were just like, what if there was just like an app that just sat on your computer that basically just tracked everything you did?

I know. Sounds great. But like gave you job opportunities based on what you do on your computer. Right. Like if it knows that Steph is in all these different like subredits and it's like and she's like looking at Google trends and all this stuff, that's like a signal for. or what type of person you are. Like, it's actually like a much higher quality signal in theory than any job interview you could do where you're just trying to like present yourself as a certain way

versus what you actually do on the internet, right? Like, oh, you spend a lot of time in Excel or what you actually do on your computer. It's like you spend a lot of time in Excel, you know, so we've seen what your capabilities are. Okay, if you're doing macros in Excel, you could probably qualify for certain types of jobs. And so I wonder if there's like a thing you could do like for college students. It's like, hey, put this on your computer and like, do you want your first job out of college? Like, we'll help figure out what that job should be.

We'll help get you like a job opportunity just by putting this like tracker on your computer. Quick interruption. Do me a favor. Scroll down and you're going to see a link to the hustle. So if you want to stay up to date on the tech and business news you need to know, check out the hustle. The daily email. I used to help write it.

I love it. So check it out. Scroll down below. Sounds very not evil. Yeah. I mean, yeah, I know. It's always like a, oh, tracking everything on your computer. thing. But the reason I thought of this is because I watched the Q&ON documentary and in it they have,

have you guys heard of like Cicada 3301? No. No. It's they covered it in the documentary, but basically it was like the epitome of these like crazy online puzzles. I think there's been three of them. The first two were solved. The third one still has not been solved. And they are like, you know, there's like a picture online and there's like a message and encrypted in that message. There's a bunch of numbers and then you have to know to like go to another website and put it in. The point is a lot of people thought that this was actually a recruitment tool for like either the NSA or the CIA. And so I was like, man, there should be something maybe not that crazy, but something like that online for companies. Did you guys ever do one of those?

I did this in college. We found this website. And it was like, you know, it said some like vague thing. It was like, the game has only begun. But have you realized it? Like, have you realized that it's begun yet? And it's like you have to like right click, view source. And then in the source code, there's a URL.

You go to that URL. And then it downloads an audio file. You listen to the audio file. It sounds like nothing. You listen to it backwards. All of a sudden, it gives you coordinates. You go to those coordinates on a map. The map would release you,

and it was like a 50-part game, like mystery game. And me and all my friends got totally obsessed with this. We spent like hours and hours and hours for weeks. I don't remember what the name of this is back in college. This is like 15 years ago. But like I remember at the end, the last puzzle we could never solve. And I think the guy just made an unsolvable. puzzle. Like, I just think there was no solution.

And his name was Mr. Wiggles or Mr. Squiggles or some shit like that. And he, um, he had this puzzle that was like the unsolvable thing at the end. But it was so much fun. And actually, now that I think about it, that is actually a great, like, filter and barometer for who might be good at certain times of work. Like the type of person that would do that for fun and solve that problem, I would love to hire that person, right? Because I know what. Well, could you, could you be like, uh, there's a person. this awesome like if you're that game maker mr wiggles or whatever like could you like do that as a service for a variety of companies uh and like make these games like hey we're going to try and find you but i bet it's like hey i bet we're going to do this thing this and this thing and i bet you we're

going to get you 20 new applicants every month yeah to these silly games but they're going to be high high quality step what's uh what's newly so newly have either of you guys heard of newly n u you l y I think this is just a quick one, but basically, so it's this company that is part of the Urban Outfitters subsidiary. So Urban owns Urban Outfitters, Anthropology, Free People, and Newly. And Newly is a different take. So all of those other businesses sell clothes in a very traditional way. What Newly is is a rental business. So every month, they send you six items.

You choose those six items on your own. They send them to you. You get to rent them for a month. and then at the end of the month, you have the option to keep them at, honestly, a pretty discounted rate somewhere between like 15 to sometimes up to 60%. And they've a ton of brands in there, including their own brands. And the reason I thought this was interesting is, you know, there's other rental clothing services out there. But this is tacked on to existing businesses that weren't renting clothes. And it spoke to me because it was kind of similar to what Amazon's done,

turning a cost center into something that maybe in this case isn't a profit center, but is way more profitable, I think, than the traditional clothing business that they have. So if you guys remember, I think was it Mark Lurr or one of your guests talked about just how many returns there are for clothing. Let me just pull up a stat right here. It's like 20% right? Yeah, exactly. And a return with clothing can cost up to 66% of the cost of an item. So actually a lot of these clothing stores were just saying like, look, you can you can just keep the stuff. You don't even have to send back the item. In this case, newly not only doesn't have to send items to people and not have them return because it's so expensive. I'm paying newly to rent

these clothes. So they're not losing money on the rental. They're now making money on the rental and they've structured it in a way where it's actually really compelling. And so I think newly's, I don't know the exact size of it now, but at least where I live, I've run into like at my co-working space, all of the girls there are wearing newly. And I just like, I wonder how this can be applied to other businesses. So like, what are those cost centers that could actually be turned into a profit center? Sean, what's the return rate on the things that you're involved in through investments or whatever? This is way lower. Way lower than the 20%. So like, you know, more like, and I don't know if that's, I don't know if that number is like what percent of your

orders get returned or what percent of your revenue, what, what percent of revenue is your cost of returns. So I'm not sure exactly what that, what that's meant to quote. But, you know, of course, any return is like a drain on the business. And so you, you know, any way that you could turn returns into, uh, to either a neutral or profitable thing would be, would be kind of amazing. What do brands do with returned clothing or returned items? They kind of like, so typically you sort of like there's like a, it's like an ER, right? So the patient comes in and it's like, okay, It's a lost cause. You just got to dump it.

Or it's like, oh, this could be patched up. Okay, so you just need to like retag it. It's in good condition. Retag it, put it back in a back in packaging. It's all good to go. Sometimes you have to like clean it, steam it, whatever. Like, and in fact, there's a guy, Sonny, who follows us on Twitter and lists us to the pod. And he has this thing called Rock Returns.

So I think he had an e-commerce brand. He had like a suit brand, like a nice men's suit brand. And returns were kind of like killing them because it's like a very kind of like heavy to ship and it's an expensive product and he's like, well, what am I supposed to do with this? And his 3PL or like his warehouse was not like, they weren't willing to like reprocess the suit. And he couldn't send out a questionable suit. So he had to know that this is like if it did get, if it is going to be set back out, it's in good condition. And so he actually created his own returns warehouse.

And he's doing it for himself and now a bunch of other brands, right? Same as the AWS model. So he turned his cost center, angel profit center. And I think this business is better than his e-commerce business overall. And he's just becoming an expert of like, oh, yeah, like, here's the efficient way to handle returns. And now he's doing it for himself and a whole bunch of other e-commerce brands. And he's like nerding out about it hardcore. He's like, dude, I found this new way of like steaming the thing that like makes it, you know,

where we get extra 10% of them back into circulation because they're, you know, they're better now. Or like we could turn it around at this cost. And they just charge like a cost per return processed, basically, for for the brands. Damn, that's bad. Because usually what makes you good at processing returns is not the same thing as what gets you good at like warehouse, a general warehouse with a bunch of pallets and boxes and shipping orders out. It takes like a different skill set in a way. Can we talk about one other idea? Yeah.

So what you talked about, Sean, reminded me of. So there's all this real estate and I'm sure this is like a overdone idea, but there's all this real estate that people have access to. And not everyone knows what it can be used for. So maybe it could be used for a fulfillment center. Maybe your garage could be rented out. And there's a couple examples that I came upon that I thought were interesting. And I wonder if someone could aggregate all of these different ways that real estate or parts of real estate can be used to gain some income. So let me give you a couple of examples. A lot of people have heard of solar panels. So companies will pay you so that you can install solar panels on your roof. You'll get into a licensing agreement and they'll make money off of that. That's why they'll often install it for free. Another example is churches.

So apparently, due to the height of churches and specifically the steeples on churches, different telecom companies will pay these churches for access to their steeple. So an example is the National Cathedral in Washington is paid, guess how much actually, guess how much they're paid by Motorola every single year? I would have thought, like a thousand a month? So 100,000 a year just for access to their 234 foot tower. And some churches are even building steeples. They don't even have a steeple, but they're like, look, I heard this other church is getting 100K a year. We want that.

So that's another example. One final example I'll share is surfline. My partner, he surfs all the time. He uses these surf camps, so check, you know, how the waves are every day. Well, where are these surf camps? Apparently, they're actually in people's backyards. So if you have a backyard that is in a strategic area to see the surf, you can either sign up yourself or you can recommend or refer people to be like a surf cam house. They'll come,

they'll install it. And then I believe you get, I'm not actually sure in this case how much, but you get paid a certain amount to have that surf cam in your backyard. So those are three examples. I'm sure there's many more. But I feel like there should be a site that says like, oh, you've got a house in this area. You have a roof that gets this much sunlight or it's this tall or it's this much square footage. Would you go as far as to put this into cars to? One time years ago, Sean and I listened to this pitch of this guy who created a, you know how cab, cabbies have like advertising on top of their car? He was doing that for Uber drivers. And I don't actually know.

I see them everywhere, but I don't know how the business, what happened with the business. It raised a huge valuation. So they definitely got some traction. I think it's like a multi-hundred million dollar company now. It's called Firefly. What? Wow. Yeah.

And there's another one that has like the screens. Have you guys been in Uber's where it's like a screen and it's. It's just playing ads. Those ones are, I feel like the execution on that has been terrible. But like that's another example where it's like, oh, you actually have valuable real estate,

which is the back of this car seat because you have people's attention. I have an idea for you. New side project for you. It's called the side hustle generator. And we'll put it on the My First Million podcast website. And it's a side hustle generator. It's just a giant quiz that leads you into a list

of potential side hustles you could be applicable for. So you're like, you know, in your thing, it's like, do you own? a church. Do you live by the surf? Do you have a car that you don't use all the time? Right? Like, there's all these different ways. Because I think, you know, people, people don't realize the number of opportunities that are like literally at their fingertips. It's like, do you own a phone? Do you know

you can get paid to test websites for companies? All you got to do is just go to the website and just talk out loud as you try to use their website. UserTesting.com. Right. Like my mom didn't know that and then she knows that and that like kind of like changed her life a little bit, right? She like all of a sudden had this thing she could do every day that kept her busy that made her some money and she enjoyed it um then you know Airbnb I remember telling my parents about Airbnb it's like you know took some you know somebody had to educate them about it but now they make six figures a year Airbnb being their home and so there's like how many of these your parents do yeah where do they go uh they just go like you know to a hotel they'll go vacation they'll just leave the city they'll come

to my house they'll go anywhere like they don't care because because they can get like you know $700 to $800 a night for their home. And they'll go rent a hotel, you know, if 40 minutes away or an hour away, they'll go to wine country or whatever and rent a hotel for $200 and they, you know, they pocket the difference. Did you guys remember the company? I bet stuff you do, the penny hoarder. Yeah.

So the penny hoarder started as a blog. It started by this guy named Kyle. He spoke at one of our events. He's a cool dude. And then his business partner is a friend of mine. And anyway, he started it in 2012. And he started it where he would just talk about all the side hustles he was doing. for example, he would go on TaskRabbit and, like, get people's groceries.

And he would talk about how much money he was making. He would become an Instacart driver. He would talk about how much money he was making. He would do an Uber driver and how much money he was making. And he got really good at getting traffic. And eventually he goes, hey, for every new driver you refer to us, we'll give you $2,000. Instacart did the same thing. TaskRabbit did the same thing.

User testing did the same thing. And then like a person who like, you need to answer surveys. And so that's what he did. And he built this business, this digital ad business. when he came to the event, he brought his dog. And I was like, oh, how'd you get your dog on the plane? He goes, oh, I fly private. And I was like, what?

Are you crushing it that hard? He goes, yeah, we bootstrapped it. And we'll do about 70 million in revenue this year. And he owned 100% of the company. And he recently sold it for, I forget the exact number, but it was in the hundreds of millions of dollars. And the whole premise was just on like talking about ways that you can make, it was mostly lower income people, like people, like maybe a mom who's just trying to like

make ends meet with just like 10 hours that she has available. instead of taking care of kids. And he killed it. This business crushed it. You've never heard of the penny hoarder, Sean? I've heard it from you, but I never went to it. So I never, like, used it. It's just a WordPress blog.

That's all it is. Sorry, I was looking at Steph's doc and realizing how many interesting ideas there are in here. Steph, we have to do it two-parter. So let her come back. A couple more. Give us one more. I'll come back anytime. By the top of the list was the worst ideas and the middle of the list was the best ideas.

So that's my feedback to you. Well, why don't you tell me, what's an interesting one that you have your eye on? I'm looking at some of these like trend success stories. I think those are pretty interesting. That's one I was kind of looking at just at the moment. Which one of those is your favorite? Well, I feel like, okay, so let's call out a couple of them real quick. So last time I was on, I talked about like this idea of like,

your listicle is my opportunities. A couple people have actually taken action on that. They've created these sites that identify the healthiest versions of not very healthy things. So one guy started a TikTok. It got hundreds of thousands of views in the first. few days. And then someone else tweeted about this. Actually, just last night, let me see what they did. They're called fast food cravings where basically the headline says, eat what you want, not what you can. And it lets you put in a specific restaurant and find the healthiest version of the food at that

restaurant. We talked about insider trading on one of the very first episodes I was on. And this guy, after that episode, I think this actually existed before the episode, but Connor DM'd me. and he was like, so there are these sites that track insider trades, but there are specific types of insider trades that are more interesting than others. And specifically, it's stock grants to executives. It's not obviously a sure thing, but he said, he was like, typically what that signals is the company trying to invest in a particular thing. If the executives hit certain targets, it's generally a good sign. Obviously, not investment advice. But he created this community called spring loading. And what he does, is he started a scraper that looks for all the insider trades, but then specifically vets them

for this particular aspect. Like, is the company granting a buttload of stock to a group of executives? And he just, he basically shares these. And then he, I shared an example in the chat, but he basically, he sends the financial report. He sends the grant details. Then he summarizes it. He says, look, these people are getting this grant. This is what I have, you know, what additional information I have.

And then he gives a conviction rating. So some of his conviction ratings are like, one, like, guys, this is probably nothing, maybe something. If you want to take a bet, go for it. Some of them, he's like, this is a five. So I shared one, again, not investment advice, but he shared one, for example, for Cloudflare a little bit ago. Obviously, Cloudflare with all the other tech companies is tanked recently.

But he was like, this is one of the biggest performance grants I've ever seen with pretty massive price targets. I don't think there's any news in the near future. But I do believe that Cloudflare has massive potential and the stock is down 30. 5% over the last month. And then he shares, again, the exact grant values, what targets they need to hit. So, for example, these execs have different price targets similar to, you know, you guys discuss like Elon Musk's like crazy price targets. If they hit, I think Cloudflare today is at $95 or something like that. Their first price target is $156. And it goes all the way up to $979. So this is what these

execs internally are tracking towards. So I don't know. I thought that was like another interesting example. I think he's, I think this community is pretty successful. He's charging people a monthly fee. I'm intrigued by this idea. Did you bet on this? I haven't, Cal, my partner, he's been in the community. He did actually, I mean, again, not financial advice, but he bet on one. And I can't remember what company it was, but it did one, one day, like, go up to X. But this was also in the, anecdote. Don't even tell me more, actually. Just leave it here and I'm convinced. Don't even, I don't need anything else. Well, I was going to say, I definitely, like, don't want people to be going and gambling their money on that one anecdote. But it is interesting to even just, like, be in there. And what I've

found, because I'll just, like, dabble in the community, I haven't placed any bets, but to see what, like, I'm learning about a bunch of different companies that I've never heard of. I'm seeing, like, how these different companies are structuring stock grants and, like, why and someone commenting on it. And then, of course, there's just, like, a bunch of people commenting, like, are you betting like, oh shit, like I'm 50% down. Like, how are you doing? And it's, so it's kind of like a fun community as well. Do you guys have a, this is awesome?

Do you guys have a like a degenerate budget or like a learner budget where it's like, okay, this is my fuck around with money that I can try different things or do you guys not do that? Sam, you're shaking your head, no. I don't. But do you? It sounds like you do. I do, yeah. How much?

Well, let's talk about like in percentage terms. So it's like, you know, what would that be? it's like no don't do percentage terms like literally how much like like fifty thousand dollars no more than that uh wow yeah for sure and so what will you do with that what's an example of your of a dumb of a risky thing that you've done uh like i think i've told the story before but i remember watching so the idea with these is um i'll just tell the story first i watched a youtube video of this guy no idea who this guy is.

Some Wall Street, some some hedge fund guy. Basically, he's a prolific short trader. It's kind of like the vibe I got from this video. Couldn't tell you. How tall was me? Couldn't tell you his name. Couldn't tell you what his tracker was. White guy looked reasonable enough. And he basically was like, he's like, yeah, I'm, he's like, my short pick of the year is Tutsi Roll.

And I was like, I was listening. I was a white what Tutsi roll? I didn't even realize it's a public stock. He's like, Tutsi Roll. He's like, first of all, who the hell eats Tutsi Roll? He's like, do you think Tutsi Roll is growing? He's like, no. People eat Tutsi Roles are like, you know, 50 and up.

They're a dying market. Kids don't want Tutsi Roll nowadays. They want like all these other candies. He's like, Tutsi Roll has zero innovation. They refuse to change their product. And they don't come out with anything new. He's like, and then it's also poorly run and not going to be sold. It was like owned by some woman who was like...

I think it's owned by like a 92-year-old lady. Yeah, she passed away now. But at the time, this was like five years ago or something like that. like that this happened. I don't know where this was. This was a while back. And I remember watching that video and I was like, oh, this guy's totally right.

Titsyroll's fucking dead. And I went that day and I bet against Titzerole. I made a bunch of money just on this like zero thought process, zero diligence. Like, just like take a punt and, you know, do something on a whim. And so that was the first time I realized like, actually I want a designated budget. And with crypto, this has become like, you know,

kind of a necessity. With crypto, you basically, you basically have like you have so many new things that are all interesting and you can't get to high conviction because they're new is rapidly evolving like the opportunity is in front of you today and so you don't have time to diligence all these you don't have time to get to high conviction but you do know like where you can sort of sense certain signals like if a bunch of smart people are looking at it if you see you know developer activity in that space if the premise is like you know interesting it might hit might not hit whatever you can basically take punts on things in crypto and you get paid off

unlike the stock market, right? I think on the Tutsi rule thing I made like, I don't know, 20, 35%, something like that. In crypto, you can make like 20x when you're right on these things. And so with crypto, the odds just shifted your favor where, yeah, it's super fast moving and things can go to zero. But the upside when you hit is so high, it pays for all of your other bad bets. And so I basically created a budget because I was like, I can't, I can't overthink this. I need to intentionally underthink this. So what does that mean?

It's like there's been, the last five years, there's been so many examples of things that I've come across my radar in crypto that I don't take action on because I feel like I don't have enough information to make an educated decision. And actually, if I had just made uneducated decisions, I would have done far better than my like educated decisions turned out to be because the space is just where there's a lot of progress being made and you can't keep up with all the different projects, all the different tokens. So I basically set out a budget where I said, if somebody tells me something that's interesting, I have money that I could just like dump in. into that. It's a small amount of money. I don't care if that money that money goes to zero. And I'm not putting it all into one. So I'm taking like a portfolio of these. And let's just see what the happens. And in doing so, I get to actually learn how these things work. And so, you know, like I did one the other day and I put it in the milk road explaining literally step by step what this, what this project was and why I'm going into it and how I have no idea of

this is like a great idea, bad idea. I didn't audit the security of the project. Like, I don't have time for all that. I'm just like, trying to learn how these things work, and I'm putting small bets in a bunch of different areas with money that I can afford to lose. Do you do that stuff? So I don't. Cal does. I think it's smart, though, because, like, Sean saying, these are the type of investments where, like, if you don't have money sequestered for this, it's going to capture your psychology. That's actually why I don't dabble in these things, but he's done that a lot for NFTs, right?

So at first, he was like, Steph, I'm just going to buy one. Obviously, he's bought more since then. but he has a certain amount and like that's all he's willing to invest. If it goes to zero, he's happy with it. But he's also probably sold a lot too early because he has a concentrated amount. So he's like, oh, I got to sell this to buy another thing. Sean, did you get into proof? I feel like that was a big.

No, I didn't do proof. That's a great example of one where I'm like, oh, interesting. Kevin Rose is doing this NFT thing. I should, you know, I should take a punt, right? Like it's, I'm seeing this before most people. Um, I should go in and like, again, like with these things, it's not going to, it's not like going to go to zero quote unquote. It's like, you know, so I can trade out of the thing if I want to in, you know, three months from now. But like to weigh each, I don't want every decision to be heavy.

And, um, and I, you guys seen this meme that's like the, it's like the curve. I think it's called like the midwit meme. It's basically like there's an idiot on one side. There's a genius like a, so the on one side is the idiot. He looks like a troll. It looks like, you know, like, whatever, Trek. And on the other side, there's like a Jedi master. And then the middle, which is like the top of the curve is like the average person.

And it's like, you know, like, for example, like, oh, like the idiot would be like, oh, that monkey looks like, that's a cool looking monkey. I'll buy. All right. The genius is like, oh, this, you know, this has a chance to be an iconic, you know, like, whatever, iconic NFT. Buy. Like, didn't think about it more than that. And then the like middle guy is like, you know, but why would anybody buy this picture of a monkey and like, how, how. do the tokenomics work and they like try to like analyze the whole fucking thing and they're

hey they're just paralyzed that's some sort of analysis paralysis where they don't they don't take action on anything and they overthink things so they miss the like the big simple opportunities that are in front of them a lot of times and um i heard the guy from yc who michael sybil talking about this he goes he goes this is often this case with startup ideas he goes a beginner like you know you out of college when you don't know anything about anything you just think it's all like you don't know how hard it's going to be you don't know how to vet opportunities you just be like oh that sounds cool like let me try that

and then same thing with the Jedi Master the Jedi Master's like oh like you know would it be cool if it could take a rocket to Mars let's try that you know like that's also the like you don't need to analyze it beyond that at the beginning it's like the fundamental decision is pretty is very simple and then like the person he's like the person I hate talking to talking to is like the second time founder

who's trying to like over-optimized their cap table and like try to get like really complicated about the like the valuation and this and then that and then they're trying to do like this lean startup validation about every single thing and it's like that's the hardest person to deal with because they're they know too much but not enough to know how to keep it simple and he's talking about like the best ideas the best startup ideas they go to like that that idiot genius category where it's like you know like you should make cars that are electric you know like we should we should sell books online yeah yeah what if you can buy a book online

And it's like, that's it. You don't need to go too much further than that. What's that video called? It's a, it's one of the Y Combinator. It's Michael Seibel and this guy, Dalton Caldwell. They do like a split screen side by side and they just talk about something for 30 minutes. And this is one of them. I don't remember the name of the video.

Do you know the name of the title? I want to listen to find it. Real quick while, while you guys talking. But I don't know. By the way, Steph. Do you guys believe in that? Like this idea of the sort of like idiot genius. Like don't overthink it thing.

Well, I just did the idea. I just did the idea. Well, go ahead. step. I'll let you go first. Well, I was just going to say quickly, like, yes, I believe in it. And yes, I think it applies to, like, different things. So I would say I'm the, like, would you call it like mid-twit or something? Somewhere in the middle for like midwit in, in finance. That's why I don't dabble because I'm like, I overanalyze things. I hear one piece of news. I'm out kind of kind of deal. But I think it applies to like with startups, I think I'm

maybe not that with other things. I certainly am like just just terrible. And so I think it, our friend Jack, which is a great example of this, right? Like, he saw NFTs and was like, oh, that looks cool. Like, I'm going to buy one. I'm going to make one. What should I make it of? I don't know. Like, this, what about this diagram I already have?

Like, you know, it's like the simplest shit. And the guys have millions of dollars this year. How much you think he's made off those? How much you think he's made on it? Is he, do you think he's like wildly wealthy from those? I don't know. You know, he's done well for sure. I think, you know, he bought apes.

He bought a punk. I think he's bought some of the like the projects that went up from like. For sure. You know. And plural. Like you said, like apes. Not like one ape. He's bought multiple of all of those.

Yeah. I think those were like priced at like, you know, $1,000 like, you know, 18 months ago. And now each one is worth like, you know, $250,000. So I don't know if he held. I don't know what it was. But even just the stuff he made, right? Like I know a lot of people that are like, oh, Web3, the Metaverse.

I need to create an empty project. It needs to have this and that and utility, blah, blah, blah. he's like, hey, I minted a picture of like a, you know, a thing that says not, like, not like right click save as. You know, it's kind of like just making fun of the space. Sold it for like $50,000. Right. Like did that in an afternoon. And that's like the, you know, instead of being the midwood overanalyzer, logical, you know, processor of all, all things, you know, he went to the kind of the idiot genius zone and just took a punt.

And because he's in the idiot genius zone, it's not heavy. It doesn't take a lot of time or energy or money to like try it. And so I specifically carved out a portion of my investing budget to say, look, this is my gamble. Like, you know, I'll get rid of my gambling energy. I'll learn by doing this because I'll do things that I wouldn't otherwise do. And I'll have skin in the game, so I'll actually pay attention to it. And like, who knows? You know, maybe I'll maybe I'll have some hits out of this.

And I bet I honestly think that that part of my portfolio is going to do better than the well thought through, quote unquote, part of my portfolio. By the way, Sam, I think you do this really well when people, like, I've seen people come to you, and they're like, Sam, I'm thinking of like starting this business and like, I want to cover this topic and I want to blog and all this stuff and you're like, all right, like, what's your first step? Or like you'll be like just right or something like that which just like simplifies to the like idiot Jedi like just do the thing, not like over analyzing the like 50 startup articles. It's when Sam says dog, dog, you just need to do. He goes Randy Jackson on him. Well, I just get frustrated. I think because I think that it's good. So if like building a business is Step 0 to 10 and 10 is like you're this billionaire or like your vision has been achieved, you know, you, you own all this property, whatever that it is. It's good to have number 10. And then a lot of people are like, all right, that's step number 10. And then like steps three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine. I got to figure those out. In my mind, I'm like, no, well, the only thing that's

important is 10 and one. And one, after you get done one, you'll figure out number two. Just but until you get to number two, don't even think about worrying about number three. It's not important. Dude, I have the same exact thing. I call it A, B, Z. Literally, like, word for word, your thing. And I went on Jack's community.

He asked me to give a talk to his, like, visualized value community. And this was the one thing I told them. I go, you have, you're at A. That's where you are. Z is the vision. It's the dream. It's good to have that.

It's good to know what that is. That's like the North Star. And, like, without that, you know, you don't really have the motivation. I don't really understand, like, what the hell we're trying to do. But wherever it gets paralyzed is they think they need to know a step B, C, D, F, G, H, IJ. And it's like, and then they get paralyzed or they start thinking about step D when they haven't even done, you know, A to B yet.

And so I go, A, B, Z. It's all you ever need. It's like, where you are, you got to know that accurately. The next thing you need to do, you need to know that. And then you need to know the end vision. And everything else is irrelevant. Like, just do that. And so you just literally said the same thing with your own, like, with numbers basically instead. That's awesome.

Great minds think alike. I mean, that's exactly how I feel. Because every time I've ever had any bit of success, or even when I've done something and it didn't work out, I just think that like if you just start and you're going to see so many things that you didn't even expect or realize were an opportunity or that weren't an opportunity.

You're like, oh, I thought this. It's actually way different. But that's cool or that's not cool. We got to quit. You know what I mean? And that's why you just have to do something. I have this. And I get really frustrated with inaction.

I've been saying this lately. I love thin books and quick silence. And so what does that mean? Like, I love a thin book. Did you make that up? I love a thin book because a thin book is like a simple idea presented without the fluff. And that's it. That's the value.

You don't try to, you don't need a thick book for everything. So I'm a big fan of thin books now. And then the other one is a quick silence, which is I call my buddy Sue Leo about every business question I have, basically. It's like, oh, we're starting the milk road. Hey, what do you think about this? And then there's a quick silence. Like he says his thing. It's obvious.

That's the answer. And I was like building up in my head. I need to like, oh, man, I really want to sit down with him and talk. It's like, within three minutes, we've reached a good pause where it's like, well, I guess nothing else really matters until we go do that, right? Yep. All right. Well, I guess I'll just go do that obvious thing. Yeah, check you later.

And like, and so that quick silence to me is like now what I want. Whereas I used to want to fill that silence with more detail, more analysis, more planning, more nuance, more. more like if then statements and like you don't really need any of that. Like we talk by the end of my sentence, he says his sentence. Sorry, I guess we didn't really need a call. I guess I could have just done a text and I guess I kind of knew this to begin with. Like maybe I didn't need to call you, right? But that quick silence is really showing me like that's when I'm on the right track is when I get either a thin book or quick silence.

It's like when I'm on the right track. And when I need more answers, typically I'm just, I'm actually going in the wrong direction altogether. Dude, that reminds me from coding. If you run into an error and you're on like stack overflow or something and you're just like you can't find your answer, it's probably because you're Googling the wrong thing. Like you've completely messed it up. You're in the complete wrong direction. And I feel like that applies in most cases.

If you find yourself asking like 10 questions, it's like hold up. Like you're just like going in the complete opposite direction that you should be like pull back and revisit. How many people reach out to you after each one of these? episodes goes live, Steph, and said that they like want to pitch you on something or they want to recruit you to come join something. Well, it grows. And some of your buddies reach out, which is always fun. But I feel like, um, what are we talking about? What are we talking about? I don't want to drop any names. Re-wired. Dummy. That sounds like a story. What's, what's behind that? No, no, I just mean like it's, it's cool because, well, also I should say like some people that

I've really looked up to. I don't want to call out their names because I don't, obviously, these are like private messages, but people that I've looked up to that I was like, oh, I used to read your stuff, or like, I've literally read your book or like, I, I, one day would have cold, Andrew Wilkinson reached out to Steph Snow and said, hey, step, agree. I'm not naming Eddie names, but it's been cool and it's grown obviously because you guys have grown the pod a lot. So, yeah. Well, there's few people I'll get a fistfight over. You are one of them, Steph. So let me know who, uh, who, you haven't broken your contract, Sam. So you're good.

I'm good. Well, good. I'm happy you came. You have so much more to cover. I think we should wrap up here, though. Yeah, sorry. I actually apologize to everybody who listened to this, because Steph had a bunch of gold,

and I feel like I took it in these really random directions. So to make up for it, we're going to do a second part of Steph if you'll come back, and we'll do more of these ideas rapid fire, and I'll shut up. Yeah, I'm down. Let's do it.