My First Million - #34 - CES Highlights, Cloning US Startups & Compliance Education

Episode Date: January 12, 2020

The Hustle's My First Million presents: Million Dollar Brainstorm is back. 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. We're going to try and keep these consistent -- about every Thursday and even maybe even 2 a week. Today Sam kicks it off by telling some of the most promising technologies he found at CES 2020, meeting some D2C guys and being astounded by their insane growth rates, the 3 bro's shamelessly knocking off US startups and getting rich, how lucrative trade shows/membership programs/courses can be, why compliance education packages could sell for $$$ to large companies & Shaan reflects on his decade goals and talks about what he wants accomplished by 2030.  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Yeah, what's up, dude? How are you? Hey, happy New Year, all that good stuff. How was he yes? Yeah, I'm pulling up my notes now. It was amazing. They had... Had you been before? No, 200,000 people. I'd never been to Vegas. Okay, all right. You went for that fight. Had you been before? I've been to Vegas many, many times because I'm a degenerate gambler, but... Wait, are you really? Yeah, like, poker craps. I played with $500 and lost it. What did you play with? A lot? Like, when I used to go to Vegas a lot,

was when I was in college and I was like stupidly trying to like make money by gambling, which is like the dumbest thing you could do. But I was, I'm good at poker and craps you can't really be good at. You can just kind of break even at. It's poker blackjack too? Or is poker like poker? You're playing against other people.

Got it. And you just pay a table rake. Blackjack, you're playing the house. You just have a defined disadvantage. Anyways, I love gambling. How long would you face a lot?

Like when I was younger, I used to play like, I'd bring like 500 bucks. And now, even though I make more, money, I still play with like $1,000. I've only two X because now the thrill of winning that money has gone down. Right. But the agony of losing money when I know I could have spent it in other ways or like just the time that it takes, like just being there for eight hours gambling, I'm like, this was a shitty use of time now.

I was with a friend, my friend, I don't know how to play. I was with my friend and he was showing me and he had 20 grand out. Wow. And I played with him. He was aggressive and I lost all my money an hour. It sucks to play with a friend who's playing different. stakes because you don't feel the win together. If you're both winning, that guy just won $8,000 and you won $80 and you feel like a schmuck when you get up from the table, you don't feel like you won.

You don't feel like you lost. And even when you lose, like, it just doesn't feel the same because you're like, damn, I feel kind of awkward because you just lost a car. And I lost $100. I don't feel too bad, but like you lost a car and I don't know how to treat you now. Well, the good news is he has a host or whatever at the casino. So we went with dinner and I pulled out my credit card to pay for dinner. It's like, oh, no, no, it's handled. Have you ever played credit card roulette?

Yeah, he wanted to do that there. That's just where you have a really fancy dinner and you pull out one card, right? Yeah, basically. Instead of split the check, everybody puts their card in, and then the waiter comes at the end, and the waiter starts pulling out cards. If a card gets pulled out, you're safe. Last card in, pays the whole bill. And so I've only played it once, and I lost and paid the whole, like, $350.

I did not want to do it. You know, it's Vegas. Everything is expensive, and we went hard. And so, like, a three-person dinner was like $500. Right. So I didn't want to do that. So he just paid for it. Even better.

The host did. Do you want to hear Highland? lights? Yeah, please. All right. So there was 180,000 people there. It was very overwhelming. I said the MGM grand, huge, mind-boggling. So I'm writing a report actually on the hotel industry because it's really fascinating. Right. Takeaways, the Chinese are ridiculously amazing. And so what I would do is we would go, I had a friend who was interested in the sleep industry. He goes, let's go find sleep products that I want to launch. We saw Whittings, you know, Wivings. Yep. They make fancy scales. I think they're owned by Nokia. Beautiful products.

He found one that he loved. It was $100. It looked awesome. They go, we think this is going to be big. It comes with an app. He goes, okay, sounds good. Walked next door, there was the Chinese knockoff making the exact same thing. And he said, white label?

And they go, yeah. And they go, how much? And he goes, $20. And he goes, great, found it. Got my thing. Done. Versus $100. Amazing.

So very impressed with Chinese. Remote work. I've talked about remote work a lot. Amazon had a huge booth, and they had four target customers. And it was like the home cook. Home cook. Okay, kitchen. Kitchen. The busy parent. Right.

And there was one other one that I don't remember. And then the at home office worker. Interesting. And so if this is one of Amazon's four that they chose as personas, this is, they know. None of the products were impressive. I didn't, I didn't see one remote thing that I thought was awesome. Interesting. What do they even try to do?

Like your desk, your, what does remote work even have? Yeah. So it was basically a good setup for doing calls. So a nice big widescreen that was affordable. the Alexa camera and then the Alexa speaker and that's it. Nothing fancy. Gotcha.

But they're going after it. There was nothing fancy. What were some more? Oh, neon. Have you heard of neon? No. Mind boggling. So they had 12 to 15 TVs that were 6 to 7 feet tall

so life's hives and they had people they're talking on the TV. They looked like real people. There was a park ranger who was giving directions. He was talking to the camera. He's like, hey, welcome to the park and he showed his map. Right. They were 100% fake. They weren't real. people. Okay. No, I mean, they weren't actors. Like they were...

Avatars. Oh, yeah. They look totally real. You look at it, you're like, oh... So neon makes the characters, or they make the screen, or both? The screen's just a TV. Okay, screens just TV. That was amazing. So they want to do what? Sort of like virtual front desk people. What are they trying to do with that? I mean, look, the obvious thing is going to be porn. Because porn rules everything. Westworld, real world. We'll get past that. I don't know what it's used for, to be honest, but it was cool. It's cool in the how believable it was. Yeah, it looked real. There was a version of this at the Cowboys Stadium that went viral on Twitter.

Did you ever see this? So if you go to Dallas Cowboys, the football team stadium, and there's like a screen that looks like a mirror, it just looks like a camera of view. And if you stand there for a second, out will walk in the screen a bunch of Cowboys players. And they know where you're standing so you can go with a group. You can just be one person. And the Cowboys players will come pose for a photo with your group. They'll basically move around you to pose for the photo. And it'll take a photo for you and you can share that out.

And I was like, this is a really cool interactive display. Yeah, that's amazing. And the final thing was Delta, the best booth there probably. For real. Delta Airlines? Yeah. What are they doing? Okay, so they give you a ticket and you put it in your pocket.

You got to sign up to do this. And so they would have five people stand and look at a screen. I would stand here. Someone would stand four feet to the right and then four feet to the right, another person. And each person would look at the screen, which was supposed to be like the ticketing thing, like when your flight leaves. And they look at the same screen. They each see different things. So it would say, Sean, your flight leaves at 4 o'clock.

And then I would stand next to you. And they would say, Sam, your flight is 30 minutes late. Okay, that sounds like magic. And, well, do you remember when you're a kid in like those books would have these things where you like move? Yeah, the angle changes. And you see, I think that's what it is. It has like dozens and dozens of them. Right.

And it follows your ticket and it knows where you're standing. Right. Amazing. I like that. That was the most impressive thing. And why did you go to CS? You just wanted to check it out or you had like a purpose? I wanted to go to

So I had stories for this stuff A couple of our investors were there And I had a free ticket and a free hotel Okay, gotcha, can't lose You know what I've never done I've never exploited the whole Media Pass thing Not once I've ever signed up for a Media Pass So I would have been gone free probably anyway

Had I signed up for a media Exploited in a good way, not a bad way But I didn't sign up for that Super Bowl's coming up Not too late Yeah, well I went to the UFC fight And I try to sneak in with the Media Pass And they're like, oh, you didn't sign up

But then I realized, wait a minute I could have just, I'm not a liar. I am in media. Right. I'm so used to just lying and sneaking in. Yeah, I'm trying to like scheme. I'm like, wait a minute, I'm legitimate. So that's why I went.

But I'm not going to name names. But we talk about D to C all the time. Yep. I cannot get over how fast some of these things grow. And I want to know what your opinion is. I was with one guy. First year of sale, about 40 million. 40 million.

Revenue. Year one. Yes. Second year, they're trying to get 150. Jesus. bootstrapped. Break even. Can you say the product?

Category or no? No, I'm not going to say anything other than that. Okay, let me ask you this. Were you surprised that this would do so well or that there's even a market for this or that there's an opportunity? It's a common item. It's a common item. A lot of people use all the time.

But it was only an okay product. Right. Just all marketing. And then Moy's, this is public. He tweeted that last month, either last month in December or November. So at Huston, he said he had 20 employees on. Twitter, he said last month, they did $800,000 per employee in revenue for that month, which comes out to be $10 million in annual sales per employee.

Right. Crazy. Right. 200 million a year. According to his tweet. Right. Crazy. Right.

And so what do you think? But they now have the target boom behind them, too, because now after the acquisition, they got into normal retail also in addition to all. Yes. But he was doing similar numbers when they. I mean, he wasn't doing $200 million, but the same revenue, similar revenue per head, I imagine. Right. Or at least per non-customer service head.

Right. And so whenever I hear this, I'm like, oh, man, I got to do this. I don't know. But then I have this thing in the back of my head. I'm like, this is a bubble. So I don't know. But the cost of entry is so low. So, yeah, maybe you're wrong.

Or maybe it is a bubble. Maybe the Facebook ad prices are going too high. But who cares? It's not as easy as it sounds. But you've got to ask yourself, what's the cost of entry? So is it a high cap-X commitment? A month worth of time? Yeah, exactly.

At most 50 grand. And then you've got to ask yourself, what's a month worth of my time worth? And for most people, that equation will say, give it a shot. It's amazing. I have a story to tell there, but I have to wait five months to tell it. This is a bad teaser because it's too far away. But we will clip this part of the audio. And then about someone failing or winning?

I will tell the story in five months. Okay. That's interesting. Yes. And one of the folks I was with was telling me about Rocket Internet. You know about Rocket's Internet? I know about Rocket. So Rocket, for those who don't know, two brothers, basically.

Three. Three brothers, yeah. And they're in Germany, is that right? Yeah. And they basically clone U.S. internet companies typically and launch them in Europe or Brazil or different countries. And they're like not ashamed to be like, oh, Airbnb, good idea. Here's ours. Here's our Airbnb.

It's called, whatever, Home Away or whatever it is. And they've created actually quite a bit of success doing this. And Silicon Valley loves to hate on them. Yeah. And the more specific story is Ali, the boss. The middle brother, when he was 21, he went to Stanford for a month or something and hung out and like saw Silicon Valley startups. When he was 22, he cloned eBay in 90 days. They sold it for $50 million, I believe. They used that money to clone a ringtone company. Sold that after three years maybe for $200 or $300 million.

And then they used all their winnings to turn it into a clone factory called Rocket Internet. Right. And their HQs in Berlin. in and they have a chief scientist, I don't know what they call him, and he studies all of their clones, and he's like, emails the CEOs, he emails to Amazon of the Philippines or Amazon of Africa. It says, hey, Amazon changed the color of their buttons, go. Right. And they cloned Groupon, and they got so big that they actually beat Groupon to the point of saying,

oh, this business model is not going to work. Groupon, come buy us. Right. And then they got so big that their Zappos clone got too big and they couldn't sell it. So now they're- They have to operate them. And a lot of them are publicly traded. Right.

They have a big one in Latin America. It's like Amazon for there. I forgot what it's called exactly. Yeah. And I was with a friend who started one of their companies. So they have CEOs. Right. And they went from him to 10,000 employees in three years.

And what did he say? He liked it. He hated it. Because they're known to have a pretty brutal culture. It's both good and bad. There's a lot that can be learned and there's a lot to avoid. Yeah. He said that it was like operational excellence.

And they demanded it. And they made him exceed expectations. The downside side is they burned a ton of capital to start their companies. A lot of them didn't work. Apparently they've burned a couple of their investors. And I think they've done it in a rather unethical way as opposed to like, and we're in good faith trying to grow big fast. And that's okay, actually.

So good and bad to learn from him. I heard a story about one of the CEOs or one of the brothers flew to Asia. And he got 20 of the CEOs in a room of their companies and goes, you guys got to work harder, you've got to be more aggressive. You see that guy in that room. Every company has A, B, and C players. I have them firing on the phone every C player right now. And then the guy who's in the other room making the phone calls gets done firing with people,

walks in the room, and the guy goes, all right, now you're fired. And so there's like dozens of stories like that. Right. And it's just really fascinating. That's some scarface shit. I like it. Okay. And so, CES also, you're interested in these like trade show conferences also, right?

You like study these things. I wrote a big report on trends about trade shows. I didn't include CES. I included other ones. They're huge. I mean, the guy who started CES, he originally called it Comdex in the 1980s, and then he sold it to SoftBank for a billion dollars. And that guy, his name is Sheldon Aedelson.

He's worth $15 billion in is one of the richest men in the world because... He's a hotel guy, right? He's a casino guy. During his conference time, he goes, we need bigger space. So we started, I think, the Sands Hotel Corporation, which is now huge. Right. Super fascinating. If you told me that this conference did $500 million in revenue, I wouldn't be surprised.

Right. And so what do you think about that? Because you run a conference. Do you think that, you know, this is a model? Do you guys think about applying this model as you guys do? Yeah. So the way our conference set up is like a conference. The big bucks is in trade shows.

That's the big money. Because you're selling. So what's a trade show that you think could exist, you know, because... Remote work. Okay. Remote work trade show. Yeah. Yeah.

What else? Construction, the construction industry. I read a whole bunch of publicly traded annual letters from the biggest trade show businesses in the world and a few markets that are consolidated and there's not a clear winner as a construction industry. Right. And I wrote about that in the report, yeah. Okay. Cool. If you're listening to this and you had a trade show idea, email us.

I want to hear your trade show ideas or if you're working on one even better because you're not talking about. Yeah. And Blackstone, the biggest private equity firm in the world, just bought a bunch of trade shows that for huge multiples. They bought one in the digital marketing space for nearly $50 million and they only did $6 million in revenue. that's an outlandish multiple, but they're really good cash-full companies. I like it. Okay. So that's CES.

I figure you're going to have a couple things. So it's a new year. Do you do resolutions? Yeah. What'd you do? I have three traits that I want to embrace more of. Okay. I like that you said that rather than resolution.

And I haven't done like income goals or anything like that. What are the three traits? To be a better leader, to be more bold. And I'm not going to say the last one. Okay. Why bold? I feel like you're bold. I don't think I'm bold enough.

Do you? I think you're bold. Yeah. I think you're bold in the sense that you take action very quickly. So when something comes into your head, you will like instantly begin the action that's required, massive action to take that thing. I don't think you're bold in the like range of things that you do.

So you can probably do more things. But the things you decide to do, you take like very bold action on them. Yeah. Like this podcast room we're in right now, like we will be talking like we should do podcasts. and then it'll be like, you're on the phone, you're still talking to me,

and then you're like on the phone with somebody being like, buy everything you need for a podcast, email, Sean, buy everything you need, and let's set this up. And like, it needs to be where you walk in, push a button, and it's a podcast.

I don't think that's boldness. That's impatience. Okay, fair enough. That's another way of looking at it. But I like it because I think most people get held up on action. The people that we roll with, I think are like crazy bold.

Like, they tell me the stories about what they're doing. And I'm like, oh, God. Well, there's different kinds, right? There's just insane risk. So, like, our buddy Suli is that who I'm thinking about. So he's very bold. But he takes also, like, some insane risk.

Like on the, he's the very first episode of this podcast. And he tells the story of like when they ran out of money and then they take a loan and then they run out of the loan. He takes his entire net worth a million bucks and secretly puts it into the company to buy them like two more months to try to see if this thing can survive. And he was just willing to wipe out totally. But he was not willing to. live with like not seeing the product launch.

He's crazy bold. That was a big ass risk to the point where he was like, I will never see this money again. He's also good with taking action quickly. And so is Ramon. Yes. Crazy bold. Yes. They're all immigrants.

Do you think I'm bold? Well, I think that you have a good way of thinking like, well, why can't I? So in a sense, that is, yes, that is boldness. I think that a lot of people, they have ideas and they're like, but I can't do it. I'm like, well, why not? And you do a really good job of like, well, I'm going to do this and then this. And where... It's like, well, why wouldn't that work?

Where do I lack in boldness from what you've seen? Sticking with something. Yes. Sticking through it, even if it sucks at first. Yes. And I've told you that. Totally great. And you have told me that.

I think that that's the only part, I think, where you lack in boldness. But you have very bold ideas. I think we can talk about this. You did a deal. You told the company. The way you went about that, I felt was very bold. Yes. I told the story at Hustokan, actually.

I told it. And what I feel is the closest version of truth that I can tell it where you can't tell all the details. always, but I told like most of the detail. I felt that when you told me about that, my jaw dropped a little. I was like, what? You had the confidence to make that happen. So yes, I do think you're both.

Okay, so I want to share something with you. That's, and by the way, in two years, if you have a company that is a unicorn or some like bullshit where it's like popular and like a I 100% expect that. You're not surprised. So you're going to be a CEO. You're the CEO type, I think. So it's end of the decade, right? And I went back and looked.

So I'm 31 now. I was 21 at the start of the decade. And so I did a look back and I was like, I was like, yeah, I was living in Boulder at the time. Or Boulder. Just graduated from college. And so I was like, what were my goals when I, what were my decade goals back then? And I didn't really write these down, but I know what I kept saying over and over again.

And so I did a check in on those and be like, how did I do? So I'm going to read you my what I thought I was going to do in my 20s and what actually happened. So here's how I did. Okay. So I had number one, I said, I want a million bucks in the best. bank like available to me uh to investable assets exactly like liquid i can liquidate it instantly or it's already liquid cash so that one is a check number two was marry a girl who rocks my world so that one's a check then comes some cringy ones that i feel like looking back i'm like fuck i i really want this was

my goal so one was forbes 30 under 30 which which by the way anyone who is not on the inside track or like like that's total bullshit totally it's 100% bullshit at the time i didn't know i thought Forbes? That's where, you know, Forbes had such a big brand that they like just pissed on. It's all that who you know game and a lot of the people on there are fucking idiots. I referred somebody this year who made it and no knock on this guy. He's a great guy. He's my friend. But like the fact that I could just refer this guy and he just made 30 and 30 for nothing as shows how much. They asked me to do it. Insider game. Yeah. So anyways, that was on my list. It was on my list too. Given an epic TED talk. So that was a fail. You gave an epic hustle kind talk.

Yeah, but I always liked Ted growing up. So Ted was one there. Do a 10-minute stand-up comedy set in front of 100 people. Forgot about it. Didn't even attempt it. Could have done it, but didn't. You kind of, didn't try. You kind of. The HustleCon talk counts.

Well, you're an entertainer. Yeah, I know. But like, I'm just going through, here's what the goals were. It's actually more interesting what the hell I thought was important back then versus what I think's important now. So my other ones were go play and win a season of Survivor. I tried out. I auditioned.

Didn't make it on. But CBS, I'm still out there. Play the World Series of Poker main event. So the 10 grand big buy. in tournament. Didn't do that either. Find an excuse to live in Australia again. I did that. And then my last one, because I kind of, back then even, I kind of knew, like, is this what I should be trying for? My last one was come up with better checkpoints of the next decade, right? So I would tell you the story. So I have this hack, which is I'm at Twitch now and I'm on this, like,

I don't know, the top 18 people of the company are on this, like, what they call the ET team, the extended Twitch team. Are you the only blab guy on there? I'm the only Bebo guy on there. Evo. And so these are all really great smart people. And so I have this networking hack that I recommend to anybody, which is these are all cool people. And one of the things I want out of my time at Twitch is to meet awesome people and have them respect me and maybe we can cross paths again in the future.

But with all these people, everyone's so busy because they're all an executive managing their part of the business. And so we barely interact. So what I do now is every Sunday, I just send an email out to just the exact team. And it's just me rambling about like whatever the hell I want. I just sit out for an hour and I do it in this format. I stole this from James Clear. James Clear,

do you know who he is? He's the Habits guy. So he sends out this email called 321. So mine's 1, 2, 3. It's basically one photo, two thoughts, and three links that I find interesting.

And I send this out. And it's kind of funny because when I first started doing this, it felt a little bit awkward. But now that I do it, people love it. People love it. And they have something to talk to me

about all these people who I never interact with. You can tell they're like, hey, this guy's actually pretty interesting. He's pretty smart. I like this guy. And so one of the people on this list is this guy, Ethan.

And so Ethan is, is actually not even at Twitch. He's the VP of Amazon Prime. And so he's just on this list because when Amazon acquired Twitch, he was part, he was like the adult that they put into Twitch essentially. And now he knows you. And so he reached out at one point and was like,

hey, by the way, I love these emails. Like, I wish we had gotten to work together. And I was like, I didn't even know he's on this list. Does he work, not work there anymore? He runs, he's like VP of Amazon Prime. So he's at Amazon Prime now. And so, so anyways, he replied to my deck. I sent this out.

I said, hey, by the way, here's what my decade list was. And here's how I did. And so he was like, I got mine lying around here somewhere. So he sent his back to me. And he also said, what are yours for this next decade? So I don't know how much I should go into this. But is this interesting? Should I tell you this decade once and what he said?

Because I think he's pretty wise. And his feedback was pretty wise. So mine for this decade is total financial freedom. So that's $6 million in the bank that is working for me. So I think if $6 million is out there working at market rates, so like 7% a year on $400. $400,000 a year of just the interest. My life burn is not that high, so I will only be going up. You'll have a 10-year-old.

Yeah, I don't think it'll be that expensive. I live as extravagantly in a very expensive city right now, and we're not close to 400K a year. But, okay, so that's one. Number two is 70 million people, which is 1% of humanity, considers me, like, one of their favorite teachers through things like the podcast or books or anything else. The next one is, like, have a healthy lifestyle that's not using willpower. So like just find food I like that's also healthy. Find exercise I like.

That's also good for me. I don't have that today. I brought back the stand-up comedy set. So that's back on there. And then the last two. One is live in walking distance of five households that I love. Great one. That I think is the most important one.

That's the hardest one. And the hardest one. I completely agree with that. I can. So that's why I'm trying to go move next to Ramon and then I'll try to drag you there and I'll try to drag five of us together. I think that's a great idea. I remember when I was poor.

in Nashville. I lived in a predominantly black neighborhood in the projects. And it was the happiest I was ever beaten because I would go on my front porch and see my neighbors and we would chill and kick it. And I was way happier because I had that cold-as-sack. And walking is a key thing here because when it's walkable, you don't have to plan. You can spontaneously hang out. You can dip right back to your house. There's no obligations. That's why college is fun. That's why college is fun. Exactly. I think I'm just chasing college, really, in many ways of my life. So I, mine in 2011 was like earn a hundred grand a year. Okay.

Buy a Rolex, have a certain pair of jeans that I wanted a leather jacket. What was the jeans? I'm a gene and Willie jeans because I was really poor when I did this. Okay. And I achieved all of them, unfortunately. Which is like not. So at Twitch they have this goal setting thing because I'm always like, they ask for a goal and I'm like, well, do you want me to say that super aggressive thing?

You want like a seven out of ten, right? Or do I do what other people do and just sandbag it? Because then you look good because you hit your goals. And the seven out of ten rule is what they said to, which is like, If you're hitting seven out of ten, you're appropriately aggressive, but not unrealistic. Yeah, I agree with that. Can we talk about one idea I have? Yes, go for it.

I've been looking into membership programs. I'm very interested in those. So, like, group buying. So we've talked about it, where you pay a fee and you get access to discounts. Right. AARP is an example of one. Huge business. AAA is an example of one.

AARP, you said, has like three million members or something, I believe you said. No. I think 40 million. I mean, I think that like the majority of Americans who are 50 years and above have a membership. I bought a membership just to test it out. To AARP? Yeah, it's only $7 or $8 a year. The majority of the revenue comes from people who use their insurance premiums or insurance policy. Gotcha.

Huge business. Huge, huge, huge. It was kind of scummy, actually. And so I investigated Founders card. Yep. This thing called the Select Card. Have you seen it? I never heard that.

Not huge businesses. From what I gathered, this is all public. I think if I I guess that Founders card is 10 million in revenue. Select is 2 million in sales. But other than people, 100% profit because you don't have any costs. Right. And I talked to the founder of WeWork about this when he spoke at HustleCon and he told me that they had that as well for their members and no one used the perks. Yep.

Why do you think that is? Why do people not use it or why are these not bigger businesses? Why both? I'm shocked at how little they are. Now, the angle that you could do is if your founder's car, They claim to have 30,000 members. You have to clone or steal from Brex and launch your own lines of credit. Right.

I think the problem is you get these non-compelling discounts. So the people who are incentivized to give, to partner up with these are people who want users. So by definition, they don't have a lot of traction, which probably means they're not as attractive. I don't think that's true necessarily. You have Shopify discounts. If you use the discounts, they will make, like why wouldn't Zoom give you a discount? They just say that we're going to. spend this money to acquire a customer anyway.

We'll just give you the CPA. Right, but like is a 15% discount. New. As exciting to me for like signing up for this card for this membership, right? Like I don't know. I'm still trying to think about it. The thing I was telling you was if I went to your site and you just said, what do you use? And I use Mailchimp.

I use Shopify. And they say, boom, you'll save this much money. And it's like you're guaranteed to save this much money and therefore we'll offer you a membership at, you know, 15% less than that. So would you like free money? and you offer a variable membership rate depending on the products that you use, but you guarantee up front those savings, because you're making your money on the back end. You're making it from the companies anyways who want customers.

No. We don't make from them. Founders card makes 100% of their revenue from the membership fees. Why? I don't know. It's a weird business. I'm trying to understand it. If I was Founders Card, I would launch a bank.

So I would do at Brex. What's it called? The fee that credit card companies, the 4%, they probably go to Master. guard and they go give us 2%. Right. And you get the other two. And so that's what I would do.

You're interested in doing this for the hustle or you're dabbling. And so if you're out there and you, what types of products would you offer the discounts to? Things like Shopify, MailChimp. Software. And what do you curious about? Why don't you just do this? What's the risk? Likely will.

Likely will. And so if people are listening to this and they want that, how do they signal that to you? Tweet at me at the Sampar. At the Sampar. Just tweet the word yes. and he'll know what you're talking about. Yes. Okay.

I like that. All right. Do you want to talk about Casper? Yeah. You were researching Casper when I walked in to your office. The S-1 came out an hour ago. So everything I'm saying is kind of summary that may not be accurate, but the gist is close because I couldn't read all of it.

From what it appears, they've got $50 million in cash, a $50 million loan that is $25 million drawn out, and they lost $70 million last year in cash. Right. So they're going to run out of money in six or 12 months. the valuation is $1.2 billion. They're trying to go public right now. Typically, I think, I just did a quick search. I think these companies trade for 15 to 20 times earnings.

I don't see how on earth this is ever going to work. Right. When I walked in, you just kept saying, bad. Bad. Yeah. I was like, how is it? Bad. I don't.

This is like people, I hope people don't judge too much. I've only looked at it for 20 minutes. I don't understand how this will work. Right. Horrible. That's what I would say, horrible. And what, okay, if you were taking the other side of it, What do you think is the most promising part of the business?

What's my something you're right? They spend $1 in marketing and they make $3. They have well over a million customers. So this whole own-lisleep category, it could work. I think that could work. They should not be located in New York. They should not have raised all that money. They should be in...

How much did they raise? Two or three hundred, many hundreds. They should, all their customer service should be located in Hoboken, New Jersey. And the company headquarters should be there. and or like somewhere else and it should not be a run like it's being run. But what the fuck do I know? They built it. They probably know.

Yeah. No, I think it's interesting. It feels to me like this is something that they should have sold to one incumbent, like some old school mattress company that has a car. Target should have bought them. And doesn't know, it's like, you know, digital is the way of the world. And these guys have really pioneered the digital space for mattresses.

Let's buy this company versus going public. You really have to have a really compelling story. or financials in order to do well. And I'm almost positive that there's five founders and not one of them owns more than 5% of the business. Right. Which, so if they do it at a billion dollars, not one founder is going to get paid more than $50 million for creating billions of dollars worth of value.

You wanted to talk about Gumroad too. Gumroad. The thing about Gumroad is it's a cool service that lets you sell PDFs and other things like that, electronic files. Right. So if you make a little e-book, you can sell it for $10. bucks. Gumroad is a super easy way to do that. I've made thousands of dollars off of gum road.

Right. I love it. I think it's badass. I don't think that there's anything better. They raised $12 million. The guy who started it was the second or third employee at Pinterest. He probably would have made money if he stayed there. He raised $12 million, four or five years in, fired everyone, moved to Utah, and it's running

it way differently. Super lean now. Very lean. In their eighth year business, he releases all their numbers. They did seven. If you want to see these numbers, he's on Twitter. His at handle is just S-H-L. I don't know him, but I kind of like him from his Twitter persona.

They did $70 million in transactional volume, $5 million in net revenue because they take a fee of the sales, and only $250,000 in profit. $215.215.000. Horrible. It's a great product and a horrible business. It doesn't have to be maybe. He should be charging like a monthly subscription fee instead of a percentage. He should charge a, I actually don't know if they do this anymore, or if they do. He should charge a monthly fee of $20 a month for every creator and a percentage of sales.

Right. Yeah, I don't know what it is. He's blogged a lot about like this journey of like, well, I was at Pinterest and financially that would have been a good move. And then I raised money and I thought I was the shit. And then like, he raised $12 million to age 20. Right, exactly. So he was doing really well.

The product is really interesting. And then he kind of realized, look, this business is not going to live up to those expectations. I got to like, you know, I got to change this. So he radically changed it, which you got to give him credit for. I mean, to be eight years in and at that level, you know, on one hand, the impact of... We did that much revenue in our second year. Right. And I see this a lot.

I see great products that are fun and useful and helpful, but they're not great businesses. Reddit, Cora, Wikipedia, and Gumroad. Well, I think Reddit's going to be a great business. But for now... I don't see it, but I hope it is. Right. The revenue is growing like crazy. Is it?

Oh, thank God. Yeah. I just couldn't imagine advertising to that crowd. Right. Yeah, it's tough. But their revenue is doing really well and their growth, their user growth and they're engagement growth is like going through the roof because they finally built like mobile apps and they actually are working. That's awesome. I saw Steve Huffman at CES. I don't know him as a friend other than

a brief conversation. I love Reddit. I love Reddit. If it were a nonprofit, I would, I wouldn't mind. And I'm as capitalists as it gets. Right. Okay. So I have one which is training and compliance. So now that I work at a big company, they have so many like mandatory compliance things like anti-bribery training, gender training, sexual harassment training, whatever, mandatory things that you got to do. And the content is all really bad. And I've also seen this. My buddy works with a lot of schools. And schools have to do, like the teachers have to do professional development. And so the government gives schools a budget to do professional development. And so they go out and they buy whatever's the best training and professional development stuff for these teachers. And he showed me some of the

videos that they have to sit through. And it is God awful. And so if you're a company that goes into an unsexy space and you just committed to like we're going to make the training and compliance curriculum and content that doesn't suck. I think you do really well over time. So let me I might be able to blow your mind here. I don't know the numbers at the top of the head. I'm Googling it as we speak. So there's a company in Nashville that does this for nurses. It's called health stream. I just pulled up their numbers. Market cap 852 million P.E ratio 57. Wow. Yeah, wow. That's like half of it. I don't know what Facebook is. That's up there. What do you think their revenue is? Let's see.

Their revenue is. In fourth quarter, their revenue was $60 million. So not huge revenues, but not small, but they're doing exactly what you're describing for nurses. Right. And I think each industry has their own. Like, I'm sure pilots have a whole set of compliance and training and whatnot. And people don't realize how simple it is. I'm almost positive.

It's just a series of videos. It's just a series of videos. There's basically no technology involved. The hardest part is the sale. And, like, you know, there are established incumbents that have been selling year after year the same content to this company. So what category is interesting? So sexual harassment is like So the big one that's interesting to me is like all of the new social and moral things that like I don't even personally like fully understand.

So like at Twitch all of a sudden it's like we have a gender neutral restroom. People put when you sign in to come meet somebody you have to say what your pronouns are. He him, her, she, whatever, right? And I think for a lot of people like for me like this is like brand new. You don't know the etiquette. For everyone that's brand new. You don't know the etiquette. And they're sort of like you sort of feel dumb asking and you also don't want to like offend people.

by doing it wrong. And so I think that the sort of like social norm, like this new social etiquette is one that's there. But that's not as like, who's a provider for yours? I don't even know because it comes through Amazon. So Amazon might have their own in-house for like a lot of this stuff. But like, you know, every company is going to need this. Like a company, if you got 50 people, you need to have like training and compliance stuff for your for your employees. And so that's interesting. Yeah, my good friend used to work at Healthstream and they're a national everyone to school. And I think they only have like salespeople. Right. And it's like that, I mean, it's a sales organization.

There's a big business called LMS, which is learning management system. Yeah. Companies, you buy this like crappy SAP learning management system. And then the videos. SAP makes that? Yeah, they bought the big LMS system that was out there. I think SAP owns it now. That's crazy, man.

This is the benefits of working at a big company. You see so much opportunity that I have no idea exists. Correct. And what I have to do is just catch myself because it's always the annoying thing. And then I just have to reframe it. It's like, no, this is the opportunity thing, right? Like whenever there's something that's like a. real pain point that we have to do or it's really hard for us to do, but we have to check these boxes.

I'm like, oh, that's where we would buy a solution to this problem. And so, yeah, I think that's what budget do you have that you don't have to ask for a mission? Sales tools, honestly, which is why Salesforce, I think, does extremely well. And then anything around trust, safety, compliance. You have to ask? You don't have to ask. You just buy it. Well, like, you have to ask a certain number for everything, but, like, you're likely to get it when it comes to, you know, security, trust, safety. This is why I don't want to do e-com. It's because I hear about this and I'm like, why would I waste time when like this is like predictable? You have a company that makes $200 million in revenue and their value that way higher on revenue than. Casper is going to. So have you heard like this

zone of genius term? You find your flow in this particular category. Yes. So it's basically the intersection of like what you're really good at. And what you enjoy. What you enjoy and what the market wants and is willing to like pay you for. Right. And that's the zone of genius. The zone of excellence is just what you enjoy and what you're good at, but not necessarily what the market wants badly. And so that's kind of how I think of all opportunities now is like there's so many opportunities. Might as well pick the one that ticks all three of those boxes. Like, I'm really good at. I enjoy doing and the market really wants. And then let the, let the chips fall where they may. Good point. What else you got? Anything else? What we need to do is just make a list of all these big corporate

needs. I have such a list. Yeah, you told me. You never shared with me. I need to share that with you. I've never worked at a company. So I'm envious. The same list. simplest version of this that made me make this list is when I saw the like the iPad at the front. Everybody has this now. The iPad at the front. Huge company. Huge company with the simplest goddamn product in the world. It's a iPad, which they didn't make. It's a form, which is like the first thing you make when you learn how to like, if you make a website, you can make a form. And then all it does is just ping the employee and is like, hey, you're just to sign an NDA. And you sign an NDA. And they can print your name batch, right? So they added on a couple things, but like trivial, trivial,

You could have a team of 10 developers. Exactly. Less, even if you wanted to. Oh, sorry. I met like 10 devs with like multiple customers. Right. I was saying to start with, you could start this with zero. And it's something every business actually wants and will pay for.

So that's where I was like, oh my God, the needs of a big company, you just need to write them down. There's some that already exist. And then there's so many more that don't. You know, you had a guy on here named Keith, real estate. Yeah, Keith Wasserman. Yeah, I messaged him. And I was like, dude, can I just come and sit in your office for like four days? Right.

I won't say anything. I'm just going to sit there. I'll do whatever you want. I'll clean the floors. Yeah. But just let me sit. I think more people should do this. I actually reached out to several people to do this early on in my career, which was I did it to CEOs who I thought were badass.

I was like, hey, can I just come shadow you for two weeks? I just want to literally go room to room with you. And I will shut the fuck up and listen. And I'm just going to, I want to absorb you because they don't teach what you do in school. Right. So like, and they were like, yeah, sure. Well, that's exactly what I'm doing. So that's one.

And then the other one is to, I think kind of where you're going was, less like, hey, Keith, you're a badass. How do you lead? Yours is more like, what problems do you have in the real estate world that I know I could solve? But I didn't tell him that. Right. But that's your motive. I said, I'll sit there. I won't say a word. If you want my opinion, I'll give it. Right. And if you want, like, an errand run, I'll handle it. Yeah, I think this type of, like, rotation should be like a staple of what people do. I was like, I won't say, I won't say shit. And I'm not even remotely a big deal, but I certainly don't need to go work for someone. And I 100% would do that. Right.

Without a doubt. And I'm going to do it. I'm going to go down there. I'm sure he'd say yes. He said, yeah. I go, dude, I won't say a word. If you want me to say something, I will. But other than that, you just tell you want coffee, I'll get it for you.

And I have a feeling I'm going to learn more in those five days about multifamily real estate investing than I would reading for months. One last idea that's kind of like that. So I've been on a bigger learning kick because I got a little more time on my hands to learn things. And so I'm learning all these things that, like, You read a book, you watch some YouTube videos, whatever. But more and more, I'll frame it as a business opportunity, which is there are so many great books out there that should just be online courses that are more actionable.

They teach you the principal, to give you the worksheet to like do the thing yourself. Have you seen masterclasses, new business courses? No, what is this? Bob Iger, Howard Schultz are a masterclass. I'm buying them. Oh, nice. Yeah. So that was one of the ideas I had when I was thinking about business was masterclass for the enterprise,

which is kind of like what they're doing now, where they take CEOs and they make masterclass out of it. But I'm just thinking for the average person. So the book I was actually thinking about was the game. Did you read the game when you were like? Everyone read the game. Everyone read the game. Except for people who didn't read the game.

So the game is like a book about, it's like a guy who became a pickup artist. But we were like 15 when it came out. So of course all of us would have read it. Someone, my girlfriend gave it to me when I was 18 and I was like, oh, this is a sign. If my girlfriend gives me a book called The Game and says you need to read this.

No, even girls read it because it's entertaining. It is entertaining. Very entertaining. You should read it for the entertainment. You'll also learn some things about, human psychology and people that are applicable. But if you take the game and if you created the sort of pickup artist version of a course right now, I think that would do really well through Facebook.

I think that other things that are like, I'm learning one thing about like writing jokes right now, like the craft of writing jokes. Does a master class have that? I think they do actually. I took the one they have where it's like Steve Martin, did you just stand up comedy? No, I hated it because it's very surface level. And, you know, he just does like a three-minute video where he's like, you know,

the thing about comedy is you've got to be authentic. It's like, that doesn't help me. Like, what I need is like, my authentically self, it's not funny. Right. There's this great YouTube channel called Casually Explained. Have you ever seen this guy? Yeah, he's funny. He's just like a nerd, right?

He's just a very monotone voice and he does stick figure, like, stories about stuff. And it's like better than... So he has one that says how to be funny or like how to write a joke. And it's way better. If there was a course version of that, I think you could sell that at like a very low price to a lot of people. So there's just a few broad skills that people want to know. Like, a lot of guys want to know how to,

how to pick up, pick up women. A lot of people want to know how to be funnier. A lot of people want know how to write better. And nobody teaches those practically.

I'm not going to convince that a course business. The way most people think about it, I don't think they can be big, big, big, but I can tell you I've got my very best friend. He makes a wonderful living. Yes.

And then I've got two other friends that probably make eight figures. On courses. Yeah. But they have companies. Eight figures is more than I would expect for a course. I looked at like the top teachable courses and the top learners on audacity.

Those are just guys. Right. individuals. They make like, I know companies. Low millions, like one to two million. Like that guy, Grant Cardone, he probably makes $30 million a year selling education. Right. But he's got like a blended model where he's like, you know, Rameet, Rete, Rameet Sethi. Right. He's one of my investors. He's never told me his revenue. I have no idea what it is. If I had a guess, I would say it was north of $10 million. Okay. That's pretty good. Well, no, it has to be north of 10. Because I think at one point he had 60 employees. Oh, wow. And that's for her, and his business is free content, books, and

course? Yeah. And I don't know this for a fact. I never asked him, but like he has a blog post on the Tim Ferriss blog where it's called like a $5 million launch week. So this is not like a revolutionary idea. I just personally think it's under exploited and again, something that you can do if you're passionate about and you know about a niche topic or skill. And there's enough people who want to know about that, who want to develop that skill for themselves. And school doesn't teach you most of the skills that you want to know to have like a good, enjoyable life. Yeah, I buy courses all the time. I bought Rameet's course. Even though he's my friend and investor, that's a tip. By the way, if you have friends who have businesses, don't ask for discounts, buy their shit. I bought his

thing. Got so much value. I bought it. I just bought it two weeks ago. And I started going through it. So I've gone through about half of it. It's awesome. Yeah, it's pretty good. The thing is with his, what I like that he does is his thing is about and as you're doing the course, you know, you just see him doing it so well that you're like inspired. You're like, yeah, so engaging. Okay. believe that this works and I think that's awesome whenever you can sort of like embody the product while you're doing it's amazing I don't know what he charges for it now $1.00 dollars I got it in like a black Friday sale type of thing for like I want to say like bucks it's you know it's pretty pricey but like if you're doing a business you're going to make that money back one day and by the way

our company implement I buy courses I don't even think I don't care how much it is that's just the policy yeah that's how I'm with books I have an unlimited book budget I don't care the most expensive course has been five grand don't even think about it and I think of it and I think a lot of more people are like that than you think. Yeah, my uncle who, I'm going to bring him on because he's big in real estate. And I asked him, you know, how did you just owns the gyms? No, my uncle, he owns multifamily real estate. And so, he was at hustle.

He was at hustle con. He was like, yeah, the way I learned, I spent 180 grand from myself and four people who I wanted to be on my team to come to this real estate like workshop. It was like 30 grand per person. And he's like, four of those were basically flushing money down the drain. Like they didn't do anything with it. They walked away, and it's like the information left their head. And he's like, I learned a lesson there, which is like, if you're the type of person who will get the value from it, no price is too high. And he's like, I knew that I would like make something out of this course.

And I did. He's built like a, you know, $100 million plus real estate portfolio off of what he learned in that first course. And I think this is the difference between broke people and not broke people. I won't say broke because money isn't correlated to success a lot of times. people who achieve what they want and people who don't, which is they think, oh, that's way too expensive. It's like, no, no, no, no. That's not how you look at it.

What's the value that you derive from it? And is that an ROI positive thing? Right. Okay, cool. We should wrap up. Good stuff. So we're going to do this every week. Every Thursday.

All right, great. If you got ideas, send them to us. If you don't have trends, get trends. The best part of trends is the Facebook group, by the way. I've been meaning to tell you this. Everyone says that. The info is cool, and it's like good because the group has stuff to talk about. But you know you've built a badass Facebook group.

and that's what it is. For the record, and we said we were going to launch it on Facebook group. Everyone at the company, I wanted to do it. They were saying it's a horrible idea. I'm like, I don't think...

No, that is the best idea. Because I check Facebook every day and I would not go to trends.com and just go click your forum. I would not do that. Yeah. The Facebook group's awesome. But the ideas in that group

are so high quality, or just the conversation is so high quality. It's like this is a paid membership Facebook group that I do not regret buying. So hopefully when we get 30%, thousand people, it will also still be good. Yeah. How many people are in it today?

In the group? In the group, yeah. Maybe 4,000? It's doing well for like, like normally as things get bigger. Yeah, degrades. And by the way, there's no community manager. It's me. Right.

So there's no one, there's zero self-regulation other than the employees who work here, but no one's job. I think the filter is the price because the people who come in, they are like somewhat legit. And people who are legit, like, they behave well. And they like say smart and interesting things and like, or they say nothing. Well, thank you. And sign up, trends.com.

Yeah, cool. All right, see you. Boom.