My First Million - #44 - New e-mail clients, Sharing the craigslist office & How to keep your star players

Episode Date: February 10, 2020

Sam (@thesamparr) and Shaan (@shaanvp) are back talking news, trends, interesting products and businesses. Dear all loyal listeners: 1) Please, please, please give us a review on Apple Podcasts!, 2) Screenshot your review and tweet it to Shaan and Sam, 3) They'll give you a present!. Also, if you're looking to promote your own podcast, visit castro.fm/promote - they push your podcast out to thousands of people. And last promo for the day... the way to make a million is by surrounding yourself around other people who want it. Join our Facebook group where we share ideas and help each other out: www.facebook.com/groups/ourfirstmillion. Alright the topics for today: The first Hustle office was also Craiglist's office (01:43), Taking craiglist sections and turning them into unicorn startups + Sam's first startup (05:34), New email clients like Superhuman, Hey.com and Front (12:06), Pay to get a reply from influential people like Earn.com (21:23), Getting paid by the minute instead of bi-weekly (23:26), Donation business models (25:52), Taking on Wikipedia (29:39), Menstruation apps (32:01), Life schools (36:29), Prenups (38:49) and Negotiation tactics / How to keep your star players (43:12).  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

Sweet gold shoes, dude. Thank you. They are, they're women's. I got them from women's foot locker. Thank you. They're women's. I think they're size 14. Did you have to like convince them to like give them to you?

Well, they're like, you know those are women's. I was like, yeah, I don't care. Right. Who cares? It's like when we were buying these chairs, we were like, give us the reddest, brightest chair you've got. And they're like, well, you sure you don't want this good looking chair? We're like, no, no.

We want the brightest reddest chair in the store. We want two of them and we want them. and we want them now. Yeah, that's what happened with these shoes. Okay, so we're going to try, we're doing this. This is a reminder, we're doing this to get 100,000 listens per episode. We're doing good. The last 30 days have been the most listened ever.

So here's what I want to do. If you like this podcast or if you don't like it, just do this anyway, please go to iTunes and give us a five-star review. Take a screenshot of you doing that and DM one of us and we'll give you a prize. I'll take a four star even. I'll take a four. Yeah, a four will be fine. Give us an honest review. That's all I care about. We have 250 or 300 reviews. Let's say we can get to a thousand. So leave us a review and we tweet it at us and we will do something. We got to figure out something cool. And follow the hustle and Sean and me on socials and

we're taking all these videos and turning them to clips and we'll be sharing them and all that shit. And all the links for this are going to be in the notes of the podcast. So you don't have to remember our handles or whatever. All right. So leave us a review. Send us a screenshot and we will mail you back a special surprise. So let's give the people what they want. Let's give them some good stuff. All right. I see up here, Craigslist story. Yeah. So we ended this yesterday and I thought that this would be a cool story to start things off. So when we started our company, when I started this company, the first office that I had, did you ever go to that one? I've been to it. Well, is it the Craigslist? Craigslist. Yes, I've been there. The first office I had,

we didn't have a lot of money. And I moved, I started me and Cieva, my friend, we, we, We co-leased an office in the inner sunset, which is a non-popular neighborhood in San Francisco, but it's lovely. And it just looked like an apartment. It was a house that was zoned mixed use. And when we went to visit it, there was a sign that said Craigslist, 1996 to 2000, whenever we moved in, 15 or 16 or 17, I forget. My portion of the rent was $500, which was a lot of money at the time. And because we had just started the business, we only were making $30 grand a month. And we move in and there was a desk still in one of the rooms.

And this was like a, it wasn't a shitty apartment, but it kind of was a shitty apartment. Yeah. It was a three-bedroom apartment, less than a thousand square feet. And I move in and Craig from Craigslist, Craig Newark, he actually left his desk there. And his desk was a kitchen table. That was his desk. But it was too heavy to move. And so he just kept it there.

So that's what I use. And the landlord, I came in. His name was Emmanuel, I believe. he came in and I was like, hey, so Craig's was here? He was like, yeah, Craig started the, he lived down the street in Cold Valley. He started the company here from 96 up until recently.

I go, oh, what was that like? He's like, yeah, they were kind of like little celebrities in the neighborhood. Everyone knew about them. And at the time, when they moved out, they were making something like $5 or $600 million a year in revenue. And this, a whole apartment, my half of the rent was $500.

Siava's was like $2,000. So we paid $2,500. and it could only see at most 12 people probably. Yeah, this place is tiny. That was the Craigslist team. And I go, well, what were they like? And he's like, well, they were cool. Craig told everyone if he introduced, like, if I talked to me and I'd be like,

Craig, what's your job here? He wouldn't say he owns it or that he's the founder. He would say, I do customer service for Craigslist. Nice. And they were so, he said they were so cheap and frugal that in the lease, it said something like Emmanuel had to give them toilet paper each month. and every once in a while he would forget or not bring it on time

and they wouldn't pay the rent until they got the toilet paper. Yeah, if you just close your eyes and imagine the Craigslist website and then start to imagine an apartment or a house, it looked like that. It looked like the UI of the site. Yeah, and if you Google Craigslist office,

you'll see photos of it. They had a big sign on it. It was great. And did you ever meet him? Yeah, so I called email them, Craig, and we talked back and forth. We talked to the phone a little bit. And I was like, hey, can you come

and take a picture with me at the office? and he never made it over, but we did talk. And we correspond every once in a while. It was awesome. And a lot of people don't know how Craigslist makes money. They make money only from jobs, jobs, apartments, and cars, all in certain markets. Yeah. And they make everything else free.

They make like $5 or $600 million a year that way. And they've never bought a company. They only employ at this point probably 30 people. So it must be one of the most profitable companies in the world. Right. And if you've never seen this, There's a diagram floating around. If you just Google like Craigslist unbundling.

Yeah. There's a diagram that basically takes the homepage of Craigslist when you're in one of the cities. And there's like all the different categories. And it just draws a line from like, let's say, shared housing. And it'll draw a line to like Airbnb. And it'll be like temporary shared housing, couch surfing. And it basically goes through every category. And apartment rentals.

It goes Zillow and truly a home for sale. And so you can just see how many different businesses just, realize that, hey, if there was demand for it on Craigslist, maybe we could build a specialized version of just that one feature. We could build a whole site of just that one service that it's offering. And there are like hundreds that are in this. And this has actually happened to give dollars in enterprise value. Yeah, exactly. So huge, huge number of successful companies that literally did that. And companies like Airbnb bootstrapped off of Craigslist. So I don't know if when I started my first company, me and John, because you were as we were doing

a roommate thing? A roommate thing. We would get thousands of users. So what did you do? Break it down. How did you leverage? So John and I, John started it. And then I joined it. The premise was in major cities like San Francisco and New York, there's a lot of young people who are moving there who don't know anyone. And getting a one bedroom or two bedroom apartment is prohibitively expensive. And so what we would do is we would holler at people, apartments and landlords who had two, three, four, five bedroom apartments. And we would throw massive parties for people who were interested in it. And what we would do is we would take the five bedroom apartment.

that was five grand and post it on room shares for a $1,000 per bedroom. And yeah. And then we'd throw these parties with 50 people who all had similar interests and we'd pair them up in groups of twos, threes, and four. And they would move into a place. Okay. Cool idea, but it didn't work well. And then what happened with Craigslist?

How did you guys sort of leverage Craigslist? So what we would do is we would create, John was good at Photoshop. And at the time, Craigslist stopped doing this because so many people like us did this. Yeah. And we would, the ad was just. just an HTML file and it looked like this big image and it said click here at this big button to sign up and you would click there and go straight to our website. I'm saying we would get thousands of people a day. And then what we did was once they banned that, we would just post it

without the image and people would email the Craigslist address and we had an auto responder that said, great, apply here. Right. Yeah, there's a story about the Airbnb guys how they got started, right? Because every marketplace, you have this chicken and egg problem. You have no supply because you don't have supply, you don't get demand. And they just sort of, it's a chicken and egg problem. And so one thing that came out that Airbnb did, they're not very public about this. They've actually, I think, denied in some cases this. But you can go out there and you can find this.

I found the whole description of it in one black hat forum, black hat marketing forum. But basically they did two things. So what people know about is that they scraped Craigslist listing. So they said, okay, if you listed your apartment for rent on Craigslist, they would scrape Craigslist every day. they would take all those listings, make a listing for it on Airbnb with those same photos. So they basically say it's like they would just share the supply, right? And then if somebody came to Airbnb and tried to book that, it would email the person via Craigslist and say, hey, you got an inquiry.

Come check it out on Airbnb. And so that's like how they started. That part is generally seen as like, okay, the part that they got a little bit of heat for was they went one step further. They started creating fake personas, Linda or Cindy or whoever it was. and they would go and they would email every listing that was up for rent on Craigslist. And they would say, hey, I'm super interested in this. And they're like, oh, great.

You know, here's the details. And they would say, oh, do you guys have an Airbnb? I really only want to rent through Airbnb. It's much more trustworthy than this. And then they'd be like, no, what's Airbnb? They're just like, here's the link. It's pretty awesome. I'd really be interested if you guys would do this via Airbnb.

Otherwise, I'm not interested. And they would just send this to thousands of people every single day. And so all these people were like, shit. It seems like if I use this Airbnb thing, this customer would have bought from me. And that's how they grew all out of their awareness. I love that. I'm totally in favor of that. A few other services have done similar things, and they got sued and put out of business.

Airbnb pulled it off. Yeah, they escaped. When I was out that office, the police would show up a couple times a month because they would get subpoenaed. Like someone would be murdered or a stolen car was sold on Craigslist. And the police would come to our office, like a sheriff. Thinking you're the Craigslist office still. Yeah. I was like, you know, they're not here anymore.

And we would get mailed cease and desist letters or we would get mailed subpoenas. We would get mailed letters from people who bought who were email messaging Craig. It was cool. It was wild. And so sorry they're not here anymore, but do you guys like news? Do you guys like email? Yeah. We got a newsletter usually.

It was awesome. And on the sign it said Zappos was started there as well on the second floor. It was a two-story. There was one apartment up top and one apartment at bottom now, nugs.net, which is a, the trading marketplace for mixtapes, for Grateful Dead Mix tapes. No way. Yeah, that's real famous too for people who are into that shit. That's hilarious.

All right, what else we got? So your buddy has an interesting company. So Andrew Wilkinson, who you've talked about a couple times on the podcast, owns a bunch of different companies, dribble, meta-lab, blah, blah, one of the companies he has now is podcast-related. Actually, he has two podcasts-related ones. One is Castro. You use Castro, right?

Yeah, big fan of Castro. I've been using it to listen to. like true crime podcast. I use it for that. And I like, they have this feature that allows you to clip or trim some of the clips

and share that on your social feed and with friends. And so you were using what before Castro to listen to podcasts? Just a podcast app, which is horrible for searching. Right.

And so with Castro from what I understand, they have two things that are good. One is, you know, when you have the podcast app and you're like, oh, I'm interested in this show. And just by being like,

I'm interested, I subscribe. It downloads like every episode of theirs whether you're listening to it or not and then like your phone's out of space the next time you go to, take a photo. So what Cashra does is like the podcast you listen to a lot of, they download. They have them right there at your fingertips. And the ones you're just kind of dabbling in, picking and choosing, they don't clutter up your whole phone with all the episodes from those podcasts.

Yeah, I actually, I had to help with my mom the other day. Everyone has to do this when they go home for Christmas. She was going to go buy a $1,000 new phone. And I was like, let me see your phone. And I looked at it and she had eight, it was a 16 gig phone. She had eight gigs of podcasts. Right. And then they have this other thing, which we're going to use now, which is, is they have this like promote program. So promoted podcasts. So we're trying to go to this podcast. As we said,

as we said many times, the podcast has already grown, you know, six months. We got to a million downloads, but we're looking to, you know, five, 10x that even more. And so what they have is they have a bunch of people who use their app.

So as a podcaster, we can submit it to be promoted. And if you pay, you can actually get your podcast in front of a bunch of the right audience. And so we're going to try this out, see if this helps us grow. If you want to promote your podcast,

go to castro. F.m. slash promote. That's Castro. com slash promote. Let's go with the... Okay, so something

that interests me, two years ago, I would have thought this would have been a horrible idea, totally bought into it now. New email clients. Okay, so they're superhuman.

Superhuman is their base here in San Francisco. The guy who started it, his name's Rahul. Is that his name? Yep. He previously started report of,

which is now table stakes, but at the time was ground. breaking. Right. I remember the first time I used that shit, I was like, this is magic. Yeah, it is magic. What it does is you can type in anyone's email and it could tell you if it's the right email and it can tell you all their social links. Yeah, like in the sidebar of your Gmail, it like took over the web page and then the sidebar pop up a photo of the person's face, their Twitter, their last few tweets, their job on LinkedIn. It was like, it was like having a

great memory or like being a great sort of networker without having to do anything. I just call it my stock and talk method. It would help me to stock them. Then I would like, And if you needed to guess somebody's email, you would just type it in. And if report have had nothing, it's not their email. You try a different variation of like... Well, you could put 100 emails in there and then highlight each one. Right. It was great.

Well, got bought by LinkedIn or something. For 15 million bucks, I think. Great outcome for him. I'm friends of them on Facebook, so he bought himself fancy Lamborghinis and shit. Okay, so email apps. He launched this thing called Superhuman. I think they have about 20,000 paying subscribers at $300. $30 a month.

$30 a month. I bought it. It's cool. Yeah, I use it as well now. There's a new one coming out. Hey.com. Right. So two quick things on superhuman. So if you don't know, if you already know, just skip for 30 seconds. If you don't know what it's good at, it's trying to make you really fast at email. So the idea is most business people spend a lot of freaking time in email. And so they just made it really fast. Lots of hot keys, little smart little details. It's hard to use at first. You have to literally learn it. So they will not let you use the product. You cannot sign up for it. You cannot give them money unless you go through their onboarding where they call you,

they video call you and they teach you step by step for 30 or 40 minutes all the different tricks, all the different little tips that make it faster for you. And then every day, the founder emails you one more tip of a thing that makes it slightly better than normal email. And I would say it is better than normal email, but I'm not a big email guy, so I'm not really getting the value out of it. But, you know, do you know how many? It's like having a Louis Vuitton bag in Silicon Valley is to have a, superhuman email account. The numbers work out to where there are more email addresses per person in America.

So everyone has roughly two emails. Yeah. So that's just in America, let alone everywhere else. It seems very plausible that you can get a million people to pay $30 a month. Right. A million pro-pro users of email. So that's superhuman. On the other side, you have Hay.

So yesterday, Jason Freed, who's the founder of 37 Signals, that's a company based in Chicago, They make stuff like Basecamp. What are some other big products? So they have Campfire. Campfire, they shut it down. They kind of double down on Basecamp, really. But they've built stuff. They've been around for a long time.

Base Camp's only okay, I think. They've been around for 15 years. They actually kind of punch above their weight because they're very, very smart. So first, they released a bunch of books on the way they work. Rework is a phenomenal book. I fucking love that book. And so Rework is one of their books that they launched. And that's made a lot of money and grown awareness of their brand.

And they also just love to pick fights with Silicon Valley. Which I don't agree with all the time. It's a brilliant marketing tactic. Even if you don't agree with their opinion, it's like such a smart thing to do for them. So they're like, oh, Silicon Valley will say you got to work 80, 90 hours a week. That's crazy. 40 hours more than enough. And I think they do four day work weeks in the summertime.

They do four day work weeks during the summertime. They don't have ambitions to take over the world. They're like, we're not interested in conquering, disrupting. we just want to build a good business for our customers, make our customers happy. And they just really try to be the anti-Silican Valley. They're a tech company, but they're an anti-Silican Valley tech company. And because of that, they get a lot of flack, but really just get a lot of attention. So it's brilliant marketing.

And they may believe exactly what they're saying. So yesterday, Jason. Yeah, so he announced this new project. Hey, hey.com, like a baller domain. I bet that domain, if they had, they probably already owned it. They probably owned it for a while. That could probably cost a quarter of a million to half a million. Easily. Yeah. So they came out and they basically said, hey, just go to the website. They kind of explain in a letter what they're trying to do. It's a little bit vague because their product's not out yet. But basically, they're trying to make email. They're like, look, email is great. It's awesome when you get email from a friend. It's awesome when you get a newsletter that you really wanted to get. But that's like 1%, 2% of all the email most people get. Most people just get a slew of automated shit. And it's just made email really unpleasant experience. We're going to try to make it pleasant again.

the old 37 signals way. I'm interested. What do you think? Very interested. So I signed up for the beta. We'll find out if I got it. Very interested. I think that there's a lot of cool stuff

going in the email space. Another one is a front app? Is it called front? Front. The woman who started it released a lot of their details, like their deck and you can kind of reverse it. Yeah, you can see their Series A fundraising deck.

Just search Front Series A and you can read the whole thing. It's great. Yeah. And what other email apps? And what Front does a little different, Front's like for teams. So let's say we for this podcast want to have an email address where listeners can email us. Front says, okay, you don't need to like make one account and share all the credentials. And then everyone's logging in from different devices and you don't know who's read what.

So Front is email designed for a team. So it's good for customer service. It's good for marketing. It's good for any like shared inbox that five people in your company all need to use. Pretty smart because that's actually a common thing. Yeah. And then they're, this actually was shut down recently or a few years ago, actually. Actually, this guy named Gentry Underwood started this thing called Mailbox.

Yep. They were trying to reinvent email. It was acquired before they even launched. $100 million. $100 million. Good deal. For very nice UI. So they were kind of the first ones to do it.

I think that this is a massive, massive, massive opportunity. I think that there is not even close to enough competitors in the space. There's room for everyone to win. Right. Or a lot of people to win. And the key, the reason it works is email is interoperable. The protocol is not owned by anybody. So you can make a new client.

And unlike a messaging app, if I make a new good messaging app, I have to convince you to switch off of IMessage or Facebook Messenger to come message me over here. But email doesn't work that way. I can use superhuman. You can use Gmail. He can use Hotmail. And all of our email works. We don't need to convince each other to move.

Yeah. That's why email clients can work as a business. So can I tell you what I think is the biggest opportunity here? Go for it. Okay. So I would actually make it a free email client. But what I would do is make it so you can purchase products inside the email. So the way email works now, let's say you send an email to,

to 100,000 people. You've got to click out. If you're lucky, you'll get a 30% open rate. So you have 30,000 people. Of those 30,000 people, then maybe 5%. So what's 5% of 30,000? Henry. What is that? 6,000?

Is that 6,000? So is that right? No, less 600. 600? The 600? I think it's 600. Yeah. So you'll get 600 clicks on 100,000 cents.

That's just the way the math works. Yeah. If you can make it to where you can purchase products quickly in email, that would be great. The reason why you can't now is the way Gmail is set up, like JavaScript and things like it. It doesn't work. I'm not technical, but our team explains this as it's just, it physically is impossible. So the only way that you can make email like this work is through building it from scratch. Do you think somebody would want to,

oh, I'm going to use this new email clients so that I can buy things through email? Like that makes sense if you're the sender. No, but I think that that's an interesting way to monetize though. Right. I think it's an interesting way. So this is not like a weekend project. This is a massive project. Right. But I think that like if I was superhuman, I'd be like, man, I wonder instead of like charging, could I somehow take a cut of merchants?

Right. And get mass adoption. I think it's incredibly interesting. Another thing with email is I've been hacking with this in my brain and we've thought about doing it here is it's a few interesting things you can do with email. The first thing is you can't put movies in sounds in email. Right. But you can put jiffs, which are basically movies without sound. And another thing that you can do is if you tell us, if you can put a jiff in there and you say, hey, refresh this.

And you can refresh it and you could upload a new image on the back end show it shows like part two. So I've been hacking around with this. I think it'd be cool if you could have actual movies and audio that are long in email. Right. It's quite interesting. I think the what's the, I think the size limit for? for email is, man, I'm going to sound like an idiot. It's an 150 megap, I forget what it is.

Pixels. Megabytes. I know. I think it's smaller than that because Gmail makes you zip stuff when it's over 25. Or is it 15? Sorry, is it 15? I don't even want to sound, I mean, I don't know what I'm talking about here. I know that there's a limit, though, and our tech team knows what it is.

Anyway, very interesting stuff with email. Right. Yeah, I like a lot. Huge project. Huge project and very hard, but very valuable. if you can crack it because everybody everybody uses it. So I'm pretty

into that. I'll give you another idea that I really like that didn't work, which is probably a stupid thing to talk about on the podcast, but idea I think is dope that got tested that didn't work.

It was this company that got sold, it was called Earn. It sold to Coinbase. It sold basically because the main guy is like very high profile. Yeah. Bologi. We should get him on.

He apparently, Mark Andreessen calls Bologis, the most, the highest idea. per minute that he's ever seen and anybody he's ever met. He said, this guy has the highest velocity of ideas. Is this like a good-looking Indian dude? Not a good-looking, but he's an Indian dude.

He looks like a celebrity? I wouldn't say so, but maybe to you. Oh, I know he's on Twitter. He's got like an image. Yes. Like a... He's got an image. Cartoon. Yes, exactly.

So this guy, he's really interesting guy, big time into crypto. So he tried this crypto project, which was pretty cool concept. It was, look, we all get too much email. And a lot of businesses are always trying to send people email. but the incentives are not aligned because email's free to send. So it's free for me to bother you but you don't want to get bothered

and you don't get any value when you respond. So he set up a different premise, which was, what if you could just set a price where he said, if you pay $10, I guarantee I'll reply to your thing. Yeah, so there's another one. There's a few of those. And the reason I know this is when we send a million emails, we have a reply address.

I look at it all time and it says, you've got to pay a dollar to reach this person. Interesting. What do they, you know what they're using? It starts with the D. I can't remember off the top of my head. like Discord or discourse or is a word similar to that. I don't remember I'll wrap the top of my head.

Facebook Messenger tested this as well where if you wanted to cold message someone, you'd have to pay a dollar. I used to do it all the time. And would they receive the dollar or Facebook gets the dollar? Facebook. Right. So this is different where this says I will get five. I will get, if it's $10, I get nine, the service gets one.

And the person gets a guaranteed reply. And I think that's pretty cool for, you know, high profile people or important people, you know, recruiters who want to reach people. is pay per reply. I think that's interesting. It didn't work, but maybe there's a V2 that will work eventually because the premise makes a lot of sense to me. I'm into it.

Cool. What else we got? Let's do the, what's the streaming thing? Streaming payroll. Okay, so this is an idea by buddy Furcon gave me. So he was basically like, hey, there's an interesting crypto project. And I was like, what is it? And I forgot the name of it now, but he basically was describing it.

He's like, you know, we get payroll. Like we get paid every two weeks or one, you know, whatever, biweekly. why don't you just get paid per minute that you work? Why aren't you just like we stream video and it just, you know, bit by bit just comes to us instead of having to download a full thing and then watch.

You know, the way video turned into streaming, money should become streaming. And I should just get paid all, every hour I'm working, not once every two weeks. And so the crypto project trying to do this. I think this would be awesome if the world could make it work.

Why does it have to be crypto, crypto to make this work? It doesn't have to be crypto. I'm like, I don't want to do It doesn't have to be crypto to make it work, but you're building basically on new financial rails to do this. So there's a reason we don't do this in the traditional financial system. But in this case, you know, there's another company that's very successful that doesn't

use crypto for something very similar. It's called Ehrn In. So what Earnin does, Earnin's a company, they've raised now $190 million. And what Earning does, you'll see their ads on TikTok. This is how you know they're doing something interesting. So they basically say if you're a retail worker, most people, three-fourths of Americans, are paycheck to paycheck. So if there was a two-day delay in getting their paycheck,

they would have problems making rent, paying their bills, etc, et cetera. And so what Earning does says, that's a shame. You work at this job. You've worked there for two years. We know you're going to get paid. Why don't we front you the paycheck? So this has existed like payday loans,

which were really predatory before, but what Earning does is pretty cool. So you just connect your bank account. It scans your bank account and it'll just see, oh, every two weeks it gets a deposit from the same company every two weeks. Okay, we understand. understand that's your paycheck. And what they do is they say, hey, if you want to access your paycheck now,

you just click this button. And it's actually free to do that. So they're not taking some aggressive payday loan. The way they do it is once you get your thing, you can tip. So it's whatever you, however happy you were with the service, you tip. So it's all pay it forward. And your tip becomes the front for somebody else's paycheck, payday loan, basically. Oh, I hate that. And so it's doing really, really well. That shocks me. It's doing really well. It's doing really well. based off of... I'll tell you another story about donations. Are you sure this is good?

It's doing really well. Just pay for it. Why don't you just pay $5 for that? So you do, you do pay $5 for it, but you just do it voluntarily. I hate that. You can hate it. It works. And so I have another example of this.

That's crazy to me. When I was in the restaurant industry, there was a restaurant, I can't remember which one. I think it was Panera Bread. Panera Bread ran an experiment somewhere, I think Missouri maybe actually. Oh, you know why? That's where I'm from. That's because it started. We call it St. Louis Breadco.

Right. Exactly. So they went and they did a thing there. They were like, look, there's a low-income area. We want to make this restaurant. It's pay what you want. And they did a pay-what-you-want experiment. And I was talking to the guy who ran the experiment.

And he said, we've done it over a year now. He's like, and the data is crazy. He goes, I don't know if it's just because it's a novelty thing, but we've gone a year now. And what they found was that if the average checkout at the time, I think, was like $9 at Panera at the pay-what-you-you-you-want thing, it was $12. And they were making more money per customer on the paycheck. Because he said, majority of people will do the recommended.

And some people are generous. And some people are sort of freeloaders. But on average, they were making more money per customer in this. Now, that might have been a novelty thing. I don't know because maybe the people who go there sort of self-select. Everlane. They do what?

You know Everlane? Yeah, yeah. Cool t-shirts and shit like that. It's all tipping? No. When they have, instead of putting, So they for sure have it. I think it's instead of sales,

but they have a selection of items that are pay what you want. And what they do is there's a baseline, like $40. And you could easily figure that out just by lowering the thing. But it's like, what do you want to pay? Just pay it. And if it's below that threshold,

they don't accept it. And so what I do is I just lower it. I just find out where that baseline is and that's what I pay. Right. But yeah, I hear what you're saying. Another example. I think it's really stupid.

Another example for you. So I'm at Twitch right now. Twitch has two ways to pay, two main ways. One is you subscribe, you pay five bucks to Twitch. Twitch gives a cut, you know, half to the streamer roughly. And you get these benefits in the chat. You get to use these special emojis, blah, blah, blah. The other thing is you can just donate straight to the streamer.

You get no perks, but 100% of the money goes to the streamer. Stream Labs, which is a company that runs that tipping service, they put out a quarterly report every every quarter and it's public, so you can go read this. But there are hundreds of millions of dollars flowing through the tipping service where you get no benefit. It's crazy to you, but I'm telling you,

there's something to this. I have enough data points to believe. PBS, you know, PBS, they've been doing this. NPR has been doing this. And I don't know what their numbers are. I'm sure they're public. Right.

But shocking to me. Shocking to me. I don't understand. It may not be optimal, but it is above. the bar of not working, right? I would not want to run my business that way. Sure.

That's fair. So maybe there are, what's the phrase, a rule? Exceptions to the rule. Exceptions to the rule. Maybe I think these are the exceptions. Could totally be the case. That's mind-boggling to me. I would not want to be in that position where I have to ask for donations.

We talked about Ted Turner yesterday. That's what they did when they first started, though. They would do... How much is Wikipedia raised when they do their donations-based thing? Do you know? Can you Google how much does Wikipedia raised in their donations, I'm curious, because they're probably the biggest example of a donation-based global service.

Web Archive, I think, does it too. Right. But Wikipedia is one of those popular websites on Earth, right? So that one's going to do. How much you think Wikipedia costs to run? $20 or $30 million a year? I have no idea. I mean, it's a lot of bandwidth, right?

Yeah, but the static pages. What's that? You think they get them for free? Maybe. Maybe they get donations there, too. Okay. You want to talk about Wikipedia real quick? Yeah.

Is it gold.com? Is it gold.com or golden? Golden. Golden.com. Some of our friends invested in it. They're trying to compete with Wikipedia. Andresen Horowitz invested in it. Rumor has it.

There's another big round that will be discussed soon. Right. I think a pretty large round. So golden.com, what they're trying to do, it's very hard for me to actually figure out what they're trying to do. I've been watching them for a while. I don't get it. It's very confusing.

I like the guy behind it. Jude, I like him a lot. I think he's really smart. But golden is almost two. smart for me. So it's basically like Wikipedia, but they'll explain topics that sometimes Wikipedia doesn't do a great job of explaining. So like science topics or things about companies, stuff that Wikipedia doesn't do a great job of. It seems like a long, slow, hard road to build something like that. Yeah, I don't quite understand what they're doing. I mean,

I know what they're trying to do, but I don't get the angle. Another person who's trying to do the same thing is Machbood from, he's... Rap genius. I think he's a crazy person. I've hung out with him little bit. I think he's nuts. He started Rap Genius, which was like Wikipedia for rap lyrics. Now he has this thing and he's been doing it for a while called every is it everypedia or Everpedia yeah. I think it's stupid. Yeah, I think it's stupid too. Then again, I thought rap genius was pretty stupid initially. But it's not a good business. And then I switch because when they said this stat which was that 2% of all Google searches were for lyrics. Yeah. Like AZ lyrics. It's just insane. And then they grew that thing and then it sort of like crashed because

the founders are crazy and it wasn't a great business. Yeah, it's hard to monetize that stuff. But they went the media route. I don't think that was the right route. Did they sell to Spotify yet? It seems like they're just trying to sell to Spotify. They look like Spotify. Yeah, but I think they raised it like a billion dollar valuation.

Like it's like 100. Oh, that ship's sailed now. Yeah, I think there's no recovering from that. I think it was north of $100 million. I mean, it was a lot of money. Right. Yeah, I don't get that. Wait, what about Wikipedia?

What's the answer? They said? They raised, according to Business Insider, in 2016. raised $82 million. $82 million in one year? Wow. Yeah. See,

and that's the biggest website in the world. Pretty good. I don't think it's great. I'm not a fan. What's this period? So more money than that gets donated to Twitch streamers every year, which is something wrong in the world. Wikipedia is great. Let's do period apps and then number eight and nine you have here.

Okay. Period. So I don't have a ton to share here. This is very surface level. But I saw. I've been tracking this for a while. So there's two types of apps that didn't work very well early on when the app store first came out that now there's a bunch of successes for. And so the lesson here for an entrepreneur is just because it didn't work then, something might have changed now.

And I think people just got more used to using apps to run their life. Is this period like time or period like a menstruation? Yeah. So basically there's two types of apps. So, you know, we just had a baby. there's these apps that are about I think one's called What to Expect and these apps do phenomenally well

Oh my God like the the downloads The usage the monetization It's all on point And that one's a little bit tough Because when you get out of the You know after nine months You sort of churn because you've moved on That's okay but during that nine months

You'll buy anything during that nine months You A have to buy a lot of shit So like their sponsorships are crazy Like Dove is going all out And so as Huggies and all these other guys Crazy sponsorships The forums are crazy So what they do is they bat you.

They say, September mommies, you know, October 2019 mommies, whatever. And so they batch you by birth month. And the forums and this thing are like, I've never seen this level of engagement because the moms want to know what's going on. They want to share ideas. They want to ask questions. And this is like the safe place to do it. So that's what to expect.

Then there's the ones that are about generally tracking, you know, menstruation cycles, fertility and that sort of thing. These companies are crushing it. So I saw some numbers for a company. They're one of the companies as a tracking app going to do 30 million this year annually. First year they turned on monetization. What's how to make money? It's insane.

Subscription. And in the subscription, you get, I think, probably either access to either more information. So there's some like mini courses inside or it's like sort of just unlocking more data about yourself. So better tracking around certain things. So between fertility, administration tracking, you know, the birth cycle process. These apps, I literally remember when the app store first came out, people tried to do these things, and they got no traction. I remember them in college. Me and my girlfriend would do it.

And so now these have become like very mainstream. And the same way that calm sort of took many, many years. And now, boom, meditation apps are making, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars now. The same thing has happened with these niche apps. If I wanted to make money right off the bat with this, I would make it a newsletter where I would say, tell us where you are in your pregnancy or like, are you just, you just got pregnant? Are you, how, you know, whatever. Are you a week, you just gave your birth a week ago? Where are you at?

And then you can send daily or weekly emails on what to expect. I think that's a very smart approach. And you're going to make that shit one time. And I think it would work better than the app. Because I think an app has a whole different problem of like people remembering to check it. Whereas email just goes to their inbox. And so if somebody's doing this or you're interested in doing this, talk to me because I want to partner with you on the, on the specifically around. babies either pre pre birth or after birth are very interested in that space yeah i think i would do it

in email you know what the cool thing about email is you can make this stuff one time and you'd have to write a lot but you could do it as you go it's like a lesson plan you do it as you go but then you could right continually reuse it and you make it a drip sequence so you can download the convert kit yep mailchimp yeah whatever love it you sign up it's week one of pregnancy here's what you need to know This is exactly how what to expect. That's how it works. You start with that basis as you're in week one. Here's everything.

Week two, it changes, that sort of thing. And then you can have a basic-ass Facebook group where it's $30 a month to be part of. And it says here's the top posts from this week of related to people who are in your category. Right. And I have a half-baked idea around this. So last night we went to a class because our baby's five months old. And that's when you start introducing solid foods. And so my wife was like, oh, we need to go to this.

class, they teach us how to do this. Like, we don't know how to prepare the foods. We don't know how many times to do it. We don't know how to blah, blah, blah. So it's like, okay, so we went to our class. Nice lady teaches us and there's just like a bunch of families there. All of us with our crying babies crying during the class. And I was just sitting there thinking, I was like, man, information like this is actually super critical. Like, I've never paid attention in a class more than I was for like figuring how to feed my baby. And why, and like, why isn't this like just an online thing? Why isn't it their life school that just teaches you real? life shit that you need to know.

I want to start that. I want to start real life school. Our engineer West goes to one for buying a home. So he bought a home and he went to a, I think it was a couple weeks where it was a maintenance class. Right. And he learned how to fix a freezer, an air conditioner, all this crap. Fixing shit, learning.

I have friends that just came into a little bit of money and they're like, hey, I know I'm supposed to be investing, but like I got no clue. And everywhere I look, I just feel like they're just trying to rip me off. So I'm just like, I left it in my checking account for four years. And this is like life school. here's how that works here's how a mortgage works life school here's how going through the divorce here's what divorce looks like

you know like fuck yeah people just need people just need information that's not selling you the service when I got married we were thinking we're looking at the annulment stuff or not the annulment pre-up stuff right I had no idea where I was I had knew nothing about that and that was hard to figure out but so how did you end up figuring it out

I paid a lawyer yeah but I didn't know I just went to Yelp. But I was overwhelmed. So you did a pre-nup? We didn't end up doing it. It didn't end up doing it. Why not? Because we both were coming to the table with equal things. With some things, yeah. Yeah. And who was trying to do it? Were you trying to do it? Were you trying to do it? Because I've always thought, like, man, that's an awkward conversation to have. It was not awkward at all. And why was that? Because we're both, we have the same values.

Who brought it up? You brought it up? I brought it up. Because me and Sarah, my wife is a very successful. comes from a very successful family. And we were just like, we have the same values when we got married was, so it starts with love. We'd love each other. But also the second thing was like, this is like, it sounds weird. It's almost like an arrangement. Like it's a team.

Like we are, we're joining forces and it is about love, but also like a partnership. Here's the rules that we're going to agree. You know what I was. It was like, all right. Do you want to raise your kids like this? Because if that doesn't fit how I, my values and this. partnership doesn't work. It was very much a partnership. It was like, all right, so what, which can we expect for the next five or ten years? Right. The operating agreement.

We had an operating, basically what it was. We sat down and we said, this is how I feel. Do you agree or not? Meaning to hash this out, otherwise we're not going to get married. And so let me ask you a different question. If one of you, let's say you or her, let's just say, for a hypothetical, let's say she wasn't coming to the table with, let's say, equal financial means at the time. Would you have still brought it up and do you think it still would have worked? So the logical side of me says yes you have to do it the emotional side of me there's a funny quote from rie gold uh an entourage and they say like Ari's telling all his actor friends to get uh pre-redups and they go what about you he goes i'd kill my wife before we got divorced yeah that's not

i'm like look if i'm gonna commit like i'm in this forever and and and you know we both said that we're like you know if we hate each other like because we're both catholic and like this is this is this is we're committing you're fucking Indian. It's like, the Indians are like that too. Yeah, Indians don't get divorced. But for different reasons, it's like, what will society say if we got divorced? That's how I felt like, if I commit, I'm committing forever.

Right. And no matter how bad I fuck up, unless it's like physical abuse, like it's forever. That's how I felt. Why did you even explore the pre-up if you feel so strongly? Because every smart person, like all the lawyers that I have have. They got in your head a little bit. Yeah, they're like

you should do that. And who the fuck knows? It might come up. invite me in the ass. Right. We had a handshake agreement. I think there's also some laws around California that whatever you come into it is already separate. I think there should be the thing you were talking about, the operating agreement.

I think there should be like a little questionnaire quiz that couples take before they get married. I think there should be an online service that says, how do you feel about this? How do you feel about this? And then it compares your answers. And it tells you here's where you guys are super overlapped. And here's where you guys are most different. And maybe you guys don't have a conversation.

And here's some tools that might help you guys succeed. So there is this thing. Is it in New York Times? This guy, like, came up with this list of 23 questions, and they're like, how to, like, get to know someone, how to fall in love with someone in five minutes. Have you heard of this thing? No, but in college, we made up a similar thing called the Get to Know You Game. And they're like, if you ask these five questions, and this is, like, when I was single, I was like, shit, I'm going to do this in the first day. So what are some examples of the questions?

I don't fucking remember. It was something like if your parents were dying, like, what would you tell them? Like, just like, it starts off as, like, high level, like, simple shit. Yeah, beach or mountains. Look at Henry, look this up. Look up 23 love questions or some bullshit like that. Like, yeah, look up that. And it's like, New York Times, 23 love questions.

Yeah, New York Times covered it. 36 questions. 36, what is it? What's it called? The 36 questions that lead to love. 36 questions that lead to love. Can you give me some examples of questions? It starts easy and gets harder.

So we did that early on. Nice. And yeah, we were like, an operating agreement would be great. You didn't do this? I think everybody does it in some informal way. and ad hoc way and incomplete way. No, we sat down and hashed out. Ours was incomplete, I feel.

Sarah, I'm lucky. You know Sarah. She's very, she's pretty business-minded. Very rational. And that's why I love her. And one of the reasons. And when we got married, we had to go to the church. And you got to talk to the priest.

And I was raised Catholic, but I don't do any of that shit anymore. And he was like, so why don't want to get married? And we're like, well, we have similar values. We want the same things in life. We're both really driven. We're both a business. And we said all this shit like that. And he goes, what about love?

And we're like, oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, that too. And while we were beating this priest, I remember he was like, so you guys are Catholic. And I was like, yeah, Catholic is shit, super Catholic. And I remember I was so nervous because I didn't want him to turn us down, which were not really Catholic. I remember my phone rang and I go, oh, fuck. And I go, I was like, oh, shit, sorry, didn't me to cuss. Like I was trying to like not get banned. Right.

So hard. But anyway, we went to the whole process. What are some questions? When did you last sing to yourself or someone else? So when did you last sing to yourself? That's an easy question. But then one of the questions like 30 and 25. When did you last cry in front of another person?

Wouldn't you last cry? Of all the people in your family, whose death would you find most disturbing? Yeah, these are good questions. Yeah. So if you're single, I think these are good things to ask in the first couple of dates. Yeah, I think it's great. It's ice breakers and you can get intimate fast. I love it.

Good stuff. Okay, cool. What else we got? You want to wrap up with no. number eight or number nine. Okay, yeah, let's do. I don't know what either of those are. I'm going to do number nine.

So this is just something I'd noticed. All right. So this one that I have up here, it's called three reasons versus one reason. So I noticed this because in the last 24 hours, I did three different like deals or negotiations. And they are. One, I definitely cannot say.

One was at work. All business. Business related. One was at work where a guy on my team wanted to leave and go do this other team. And he's like, one of our star guys. And we were like, I was like, no, you can't leave. Why do you want to leave? And he was giving me his reasons. And I was trying to convince him, essentially, don't leave. We, you know, we need you. You're great. It's great. Whatever's wrong, we can fix it. And another was a business transaction where I was buying something and negotiating a price.

And in all cases, I noticed this thing, which is there's two types of, there's, I'll start at a high level. There's two types of disagreements. There's a disagreement you can actually fix. and disagreement you can't because you're fundamentally misaligned. So let's focus on the ones where how do you figure out which one you're in? So anytime somebody puts up resistance, there's the stated reason and the real reason. And I think because I played poker a lot growing up, I just now assume that the stated reason is never the real reason. It sometimes is, but I just always assume it's not. And I've noticed in a lot of people that I hire, I have to teach them this, which is whatever they told you, that's the stated reason.

And they're not necessarily lying to your face. it's just what they feel is polite or it's what they think is true, but they haven't really assessed it themselves. But there's a stated reason. There's the real reason. And if you find the real reason, you want to figure out, is it three reasons or is it one? When it's three reasons or it's a bunch of different things and you start to ask why and they're like, well, there's this and then this and this, what you're getting is an emotional reaction. They are just emotionally hurt and they want to, they want change. if you get one reason, that's an actual reason that if you just solved it, they'll change their mind.

And so I found this where I'm talking to somebody. I'm trying to convince them of something or we're trying to find some common ground. And when they give me three reasons and I start to use logic to address those reasons, it never works. They'll just pop up a fourth reason and a fifth reason and a sixth reason. It's because it wasn't a logical problem to begin with. It was an emotional problem. They weren't feeling the love. And I just got to show them the love.

And then we'll see what happens. And when it's one reason, if I start to show them, show them the love, it doesn't do anything because I got to actually problem solve the one reason. It's actually a rational decision that they're making. So it's just an observation. If you're talking to somebody and they give you resistance, first figure out this is the stated reason. What's the real reason? You do that by probing, asking questions.

And then when they give you the real reason, is it one or three? If it's one, you could probably solve it. If it's three, it's an emotional problem and you need to show them the love. That's cool. And that book, High Output Management, it discusses something similar. which is there's when you meet with people, employees, there's really only one or two or three or, actually three or four reasons why meetings exist. The first one is just to exchange information. The second one is they say they have a problem and you solve it. And the third one is you just got to listen. Someone just wants to complain and don't like, you know, a lot of complaining you don't want to put up with. But everyone's in a while people just have, they just want to vet. Right. It's got to just kind of talk about shit. And you just got to sit there and listen and you don't try to solve the problem. You just got to listen to it.

And that's usually the hardest. And that's the hardest. But you can overcome that shit. It's just, I think men in particular, you see her, they go, I got a problem. You go, okay, we're going to solve by doing this. We're going to do this. A lot of times they'll be like, well, no, look, you're not hearing me. It's not actually a problem.

I'm just trying to get off my chest. Even worse, you'll say, that's not a big deal. Look, let's just do this and this. So not only have you minimized the problem, you basically told them they're stupid for thinking it's a problem and you tried to fix it when they didn't want either of those two things. Yeah, no, I've had to learn this. You have an executive coach. I had one that basically taught me a phrase that she said,

are you listening to learn or are you listening to fix? Are you listening to learn? Or are you listening to fix? Two different modes. Yeah, that's exactly what we're doing. Typically will actually just want you to listen to learn. You're actually listening to understand how they feel and what's wrong. Well, not listening to fix.

We share the same executive coach company torch. We got to talk about them next week. They just sign up to sponsor with us. Yeah, I was going to say, there's free sponsorship for them that they're getting. Yeah. No, we, and they just signed a, we just signed a deal with them. So we'll actually have, maybe they'll actually be like a proper advertiser, but we'll talk about them regardless, maybe next week.

Cool. Because it's kind of cool. I really dig that. They're good. Like it. Okay, that's all I had today. All right. Please comment and give us a rating on this.

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