My First Million - #77 with Greg Isenberg - WeWork's Head of Product is an Idea Machine

Episode Date: May 22, 2020

Today's episode is possible because of Superside! Head to www.superside.com/mfm to hire a dedicated team of designers for your project! Joined our private FB group yet? It's a page where people share each others million dollar ideas or what they're already working on: https://www.facebook.com/groups/ourfirstmillion. Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) talks to Greg Isenberg (@gregisenberg) who is the Head of Product at WeWork, the cofounder of a product studio called Late Checkout, and he’s an advisor for TikTok. Today's topic include: Greg talks about how YouProbablyNeedAHaircut.com came about (1:30), Greg talks about his background (4:50), Shaan and Greg talk about what drew them to Silicon Valley (11:00), Greg talks about selling his businesses to StumbleUpon and WeWork (19:00), Shaan and Greg talk business ideas (22:30), How to think about consumer internet products (26:00), Discussing how Evan Spiegel explained Snapchat (36:40) and How to invent the future and think about new products or ideas (45:45).  See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

This episode is brought to you by SuperSide. They're an always-on design company that delivers great design at scale, vast, affordably, and within 24 hours. Go to superside.com slash MFM, MFM as in my first million. So superside.com slash MFM to check them out. What's up, guys, Sean here? Sam is out today, but we got my friend Greg Eisenberg filling in. Greg is a great dude.

You guys will like him a lot. He's been a founder of a couple of companies, sold two of them, one to stumble upon, one to WeWork. He's at WeWork now. He's an investor in companies. He's a cool guy. You guys will like him a lot. He's got a real brain for designing products.

Anytime there's like a social or consumer product, he's one of the best thinkers around. And I think you guys will see that. We spend the first half of the conversation talking a little bit about his background. And then the second half is we go through a bunch of random ideas he has on his, you know, notes app on his phone just for fun. So I think you guys will like it. Tweet at me, Sean VP, tweet it to Greg.

Let us know what you think. about the episode. As always, enjoy. Hope everybody's doing great out there in the quarantine. Keep hustling, building stuff. Keep yourself busy with good things. All right, take care. Enjoy the episode.

Okay, so I should introduce you. So, Greg is on the podcast. Greg is a homie from, I don't know how long I've done you, a few years at least. We, you know, I guess the world probably now knows you for your haircut website. Right. That's true. Explain what that is. What is the URL?

Do you probably need a haircut? Is that it? You probably need a haircut.com. Yeah, we're the busiest virtual barbershop on the internet. Dude, so what happened? Okay, so people are in quarantine, they need haircuts, and how does this idea go from a little germ, a little sperm in your head, too, and a real idea out there?

I mean, you know me. I get sort of excited about stuff that goes viral, and I was talking about a buddy of mine. He's a stylist out of work. couldn't pay his rent. I was like, I need a haircut. I like to look good. You know, built the MVP.

And then just threw it on product hunt. And before I knew it, it went as on the Today Show, ABC. And basically the way it works is it's pretty simple. Like, for people who need haircuts, they book an appointment. They get connected to a virtual stylist. And they could either cut their own hair or they can have a friend and cut their hair for you. And so this is a dope idea. When it came out, I was like, who's behind this?

I feel like I know the person behind it. I didn't know it was you, but I was like, I feel like it's either you, it's Alex 2, or it's like, you know, one of you sort of viral memers of products. Yeah. I feel like, actually, in general, I've spent hours brainstorming with you before. I feel like for you to get excited about building something, it's got to start with some emotion. Like either you think of something that makes you laugh and then you're just giggling and

but you're serious about it once you start laughing. Or it's something like really sad story. And you're like, okay, this is an injustice in the world. I want to go solve. But is that a fair, is that a fair characterization of you? Yeah, I mean, I do like things that kind of go viral. And like, for me, you probably need a haircut. I mean, I was, I told my girlfriend, I was like, I'm 100% sure this is going to go viral.

And she's like, well, how do you know? How do you know? And I was like, well, like, the name and kind of, you know, where we're at. And it was the timing. You just seed it with a couple of journalists and, you know, throw it up on product hunt. And like, before you know it, like, I don't know, we probably had 150,000 Uniques in the first 24 hours. How many actual haircuts? Probably more, probably over a thousand at this point.

Yeah, yeah, definitely actually more than that. We have one silas who did 200. So, yeah, more thousand. Any public speaking thing where they're like, hey, can you send me like your bio? this absolutely needs to be the first thing. You know, I, you know, conducted over, I'm responsible for over 100,000 haircuts over the internet. And the crazy thing is that people, like, actually look good. Like, I've, I've, well, the crazy thing is you don't have a haircut right now.

You're growing it out. The crazy, try booking a haircut like this weekend. You can. The site is busy. Now I'm an entrepreneur. I'm out here. I got to make it happen for the people. I love it.

There's a reason I have this hat on because, you know, you boy. butchered himself with his own 2 a.m. haircut, with his own clippers, without using your website. And you can't see my hair. So that's why. All right. So let's give people background and then we're going to shoot the shit as we do. Greg, first, do you remember when you became a millionaire? Do you remember the day? Of course. You always remember the day. Tell me about the day. But I actually, like, you know, where I started actually, and I've never publicly said this, where I started, I think you might know this. Where I started to actually make a little bit of money was really as a teenager doing affiliate marketing.

Oh, affiliate. That's right. And like the underbelly of the internet. Yes. And, you know, not people, not a lot of people talk about, you know, there's a lot of actually great entrepreneurs who actually came from that area. I think Julian Smith, who, you know, is also in that era as well. but I actually remember 2008 it was my I think it was my 18th birthday and I was doing affiliate marketing basically I was doing deals with you know the e-harmonies the mash dot coms and zingas who were like they were willing to pay you three four five six bucks for every install you generated for them and back then there was this arbitrage I mean there's still arbitrage now but there was this arbitrage where if you could you know create a landing page and cost you $1 to get someone to it, to install that game, or get that lead to e-harmony,

they would pay you $5. So I would just figure out, like, kind of just some innovative ways to do it. You know, one thing I did, which I invented was the auto-playing video pop under ad, which ruined the internet. Were you desperately trying to find which tab is playing the sound? Well, we did it for a poker company and yeah, that's it. And basically, you know, we, I remember getting like one, two percent conversions on it. And this is a pop under ad to cost like a fraction of a penny.

But, you know, from that whole experience of like as a teenager kind of working in affiliate marketing, it really just taught me like, what do people want? Yes. Because, you know, I didn't grow up poor or anything. But like, my parents weren't giving me money to like go and a lot of money to like, and buy the things that I wanted. So I was like, okay, I'm going to have to go there and do it myself. And I ended up building, you know, I put it like, okay, $100 a month on this landing page,

a thousand. And it sort of grew. And you really pay attention if it's your own money. You really do pay attention. And, you know, if the difference between like a 1% conversion rate and 1.2% conversion rate is if you make $100 that day or lose $100 a day. or at bigger scales, lose $100,000 a day or gain $100,000 a day. And if you realize it's around just subtle details, like having a woman with red hair

or have the eyes look at you in the landing page or certain copy, all these little nuanced things add up to the, to getting people to do things on the internet. Totally. Me and I think you know Furkan, the CTO that had my startup, we used to literally look for hire for, can we find anyone who's done affiliate marketing? Because we were like, people who are on. understand those arbitrages, they actually understand how the internet works. You understand what makes people click, what drives them to actually take action, how the economics of the internet works,

how to move traffic around. And that's a probably, it's not a great long-term path, but it is like a great place to sharpen your sword so that then you can do damage with like products that actually matter or like more sustainable businesses versus these kind of like, you know, moment in time arbitrages. Yeah, I was, I tweeted the other day actually. I was like, the people I, I want to hire are, if I'm building a consumer internet thing, is like, X game developers or game product people are game marketers or X affiliate marketers. Like those are the people that understand game dynamics, mechanics, social mechanics, how to build, like, you know, game companies have very sophisticated marketing funnels and

understand the flow very well. And the same with affiliate marketers. Like those are the people that have been there, done that, um, that are probably undervalued in the market. Yeah. And then you went on, you did a bunch of other things. You did an agency that was kind of like building websites for big, bigger brands. Yes. Then you did it. By the way, we had James Altiture on the last one, and he said he did the same

thing, basically. That was because kind of his first hit was like making Americanexpress.com or like whatever, those websites. Well, yeah. After the affiliate marketing, I mean, no one's lower on the totem pole in terms of status and reputation than then domainers and affiliate marketers. So I was just like, how do I gain credibility? So got into the agency game and said I would only work with the top clients. Which is all status. All status.

Like 100% status. So did you have like status symbols? Do you have like dope car or anything like that? Did you do anything to play the status game? I mean, not not. I mean, I feel like for us like internet entrepreneurs, like that's not even like the status. Like the status isn't dope cars or dope like houses. I feel like it's, you know, it's more about.

Do you have a clubhouse invite or not? Yeah, exactly. Whatever is cool at the moment. So, yeah, I ended up doing this agency. It was called Stress Limit Design. We ended up doing high-profile projects, like the TechCrunch redesign, which was like in 2010, which was like a big deal, and that spawned a lot of business. And then, like, I think you had Andrew Wilkinson from Tiny on the show.

We had a similar model where we took a percentage of our revenue and we built. our own startups. And the startups is, was all, really all around this idea around building mostly community. So like we built like start a vertical. So we did like start cooking.com, which was like at the time the largest video cooking site on the internet, things in the finance space, a company called Wall Street Survivor, which became the most popular financial education and stock market simulator on the internet. And just like, how do you look at a vertical and build something that they really want?

and then wrap around community. Yeah. So did that. And then I realized I wanted to go do something. I wanted to do the whole San Francisco kind of like I was living in Montreal, Canada at the time. I'm like, I want to go do the whole like, this is like post social network right around then. Probably when it came out of 2012 maybe. And what did you think was hot shit back then?

Were you like reading certain blogs? Was it Twitter? Was it the social network, the movie? What was hot shit? Because I literally 2012 is when I moved to San Francisco too. And my journey was like I was starting like a restaurant. I was trying to start the Chipotle of sushi at the time, which ended up becoming this like Cloud Kitchen. And then someone, you know, Monumentor gave me the book, The Lean Startup.

And I was like, oh shit. Yes, we should test if there's demand before we pour everything into this and signed personal guarantees for this lease. And that led me to Paul Graham's essays. And I was like, oh, this guy, this Paul Graham guy, this is. the shit. I don't know why his website looks like this, but this is amazing. And so then I started to like, you know, drink the Kool-Aid of Silicon Valley. And I was just, I picked up and moved from Australia just off of the Kool-Aid. I changed my phone number. I was like, here's a San Francisco phone number. That means I'm in. I'm committed and then I moved. So what were you, what got you

hooked? I mean, I'm like a product designer. So like for me, it was really, and I love social apps. And so for me, it was really like the path, like path, you know, that was like so cool back then, you know? It was, yeah. So yeah, for those you don't remember, it was like kind of a, you know, it was based on this idea around Dunbar's number, which is like a person only really has 150 relationships. So like, what if you designed a social network around 150 people, like private? And it was just super well designed and beautiful. And they invent, they kind of were like way ahead of their time like Danny Trin and meant like reactions and stuff like that right um and I just like remember looking at a lot of like those people like the dig guys the stumble upon guys and just

being like I mean you needed to be there you needed to be there and and and you know even if you took quick trips it just didn't feel there was something special going on in that era so came down you're speaking past tense you still think that's that's true or that's not true anymore I mean, I think it's for me, I think like Bay Area is like very much. I mean, listen, it's a wonderful place, but I think for most people, it's very much like I look at it like a college experience. Like if you're not from there, it's like you go there four, six, eight, ten years, you do your stint. You learn as much as possible. You build your network and then you bring it to wherever you're from or whatever major city that you live near.

Are you still in a set? Where do you live now? No. I live in New York City now. Okay, nice. Yeah. Did you sell your place here or what? Yeah, it's gone.

Oh, man. Greg had this fat house here in San Francisco. It was awesome. It was a great, great little place. I mean, that was a crazy store. That was like a community, like it wasn't even, like it was my place, but like it was a community place. Like I, you know, we threw so many events there and it was, you came to some and, um,

it was like a co-working space. If instead of working, you just partied there. It was like a co-partied there. space. It was wonderful. It was awesome. I do miss it. So yeah, I think like, you know, that's what drew me to San Francisco and I started something called Five Buy, which basically took a look at all, you know, integrated with all the video popular, you know, apps like YouTube and Vimeo and all these sort of sources and we built like a beautiful curation layer on top of it so that when you press the funny button, you'd actually get videos that would make you laugh.

And we sold that to start. humble upon, which is Garrett Camp's company, which at the time was one of the largest social apps by referring traffic. So you ended up being within reach of being able to invest in Uber. Right? Because you knew Garrett. And then do you remember the first time you heard that he was doing this Uber thing? I mean, I don't remember exactly.

But I remember when I met him, you know, Uber was, you know, it was a thing. It wasn't obviously what it is today. But, you know, I definitely, I definitely wasn't like, hey, like, take my money. Right. You know, I think, but, you know, I guess you live in you learn. You live and you learn. I have a friend who, you know, Garrett pitched him. And he was in New York City.

This is, you know, one of the smartest guys I know. And Garrett pitched him on the seed round of Uber. And this is in, you know, in Manhattan. He was just like, Garrett, like, I don't know what you're thinking. thinking about, man. Like, people aren't going to, like, press a button, like, and, like, a car is going to come. It's just, you know, you raise your hand. Look at me.

He raises his hand. Right. Watch this. Watch this. Bam. You know, like, it's about creating 10x better product. This isn't 10x, quote, unquote. Yeah, that's true.

In New York, it actually wasn't, right? It wasn't a whole bunch of other places it was, right? It's like people with that with crypto. They're like, oh, watch this. Credit card. Boom, paid for coffee. I'm done. You know, look at this bank.

You know, don't need to worry about my money. It's like, well, yeah, but that's not the experience from most people in most of the world. And so maybe this doesn't solve your problem, but it's going to solve somebody's. Exactly. So we know we sold up. Are you a crypto guy? Am I a crypto guy? I have some crypto.

I have some crypto. I dabble. I mean, my whole thing is like everyone should have two to five percent of their net worth in crypto as a hedge. Right. I calculated the other day. I think I'm at 9%. Because I was like, am I going a little too crazy with this?

But then I was like, no, no, no, it's okay. It's at 9%. That's in the acceptable range. I'm at 7.5%. So it also grows, right? So as it grows, the thing is, are you going to sell off? No. So yeah, not going to sell off.

Yeah. We'll see if this age is one of this podcast. Yeah, exactly. The other thing is like pay to learn in a way, right? It's like, dude, okay, this is interesting. I need to get in the game. I need to get a little bit of skin in the game just to be, be, if not like, sort of driving things in that space,

but at least I'm in the passenger seat or the backseat or the trunk. Like, I'm involved in the journey of where that's going by putting a little bit of skin in the game. So I highly recommend that too, because that's been my approach with a lot of things now is just pay to learn. Right. Yeah, I think, like, for me, like, I learn best when I'm just, like, pushed into the ground, just, like, push me into the arena and, like, listen,

And like I've lost a lot of opportunity and I've learned a lot of things. And you just have to assume that you're in it for the long game and life is long, hopefully, and that you have enough at, it's all about at-bats. Like getting at-bat, trying different things, you know, build good relationships. In the end, you'll be fine if you learn and if you have a lot of at-bats. All right, this episode is brought to you by SuperSide. All right, so here's the deal. I'm incredibly impatient, like horribly, horribly, horribly,

patient. And if I get an idea at midnight, by 8 a.m. the next day, I want it done. You know, but that's really hard because if something needs to be designed, where am I going to find a designer at midnight to try to make this thing bring it to life? So, you know, I don't think I'm alone. Other startups, even huge companies need design help fast, and they just don't have the internal resources or expertise to get it done. So how do you get reliable design done without dealing with expensive agencies and lots of freelancers? You use SuperSide. That's our sponsor for this week. just go to superside.com slash MFM and tell them what you want. They have a team of designers that can get it done fast.

They are 20 times faster than hiring a designer and 50% more affordable than a traditional agency. So if you need high quality design done fast, try Superside. Lots of fast growing teams that are stretched are using them already. Check them out. SuperSide.com slash MFM. I've used them before. I love them. Check it out.

So we sold the business to stumble upon. Ran in as an independent unit and sort of helped us. some will upon as well. Grew that to like one of the fastest growing video discovery apps at the time. Left in 2015-ish and started islands, which was based on this thesis around group chat is the new social network and it was going to verticalize and that you'd have a place to talk with your workplace friends that became slack, a place to talk with your gamer friends that became places like Discord.

And we focused on just the college market. So raised a couple million bucks on the idea and away we went. And then what's your story on how that ended up? So the story is we sold the business to We Work in May 2019. And I would have loved to have continued building it out. It had amazing, it had a lot of really good metrics. Like the daily active users would send between 30 and 50 messages every single day. Weekly active users would open the app 47 times per week.

The average user would invite 2.1 people. It was a beautiful product. People loved it. So it had like engagement. And retention was 50% 45 day. So like that's too, you know, it's like pretty damn good for a social app above, above what you normally see. But like when I went out in the market to raise. money, I wanted to raise a lot of money. And the reason I wanted to raise it is because we were seeing 5 to 25% penetration on every school we launched at within a couple of weeks. And we had all these metrics. So it was just like, hey, give us money so we can scale this to every college in the United States. But at the time, this is around Facebook antitrust type stuff. Twitter wasn't really like, you know, innovating that much. Or they had a lot of like,

kind of like health of the health of the product that they were doing. Snapchat, the stock was at $5.90. Like social was kind of like, and house party was flat. You know, social was kind of like, no one wanted to look at it, you know? And I could have raised two, three, four million bucks to continue it. But like, I was kind of like, I'm very much, and you are too, like very much like a go big or go home. Yeah. And I just figured, yeah, let's find a good home.

You went home for it. You went home. I went home. Okay, gotcha. All right, so tell me what's it got in your interest now. So what are you doing day-to-day basis nowadays? So I am the head of product that we work, which is awesome, an interesting place to be. I'm a co-founder of a product studio called Late Checkout, which spun up the, you probably need a haircut idea, among other ideas, which is kind of a reincarnation.

which is kind of a reincarnation of what we had at stress limit. It's part agency, part product studio. I've been an advisor for the last year and a half or two years for TikTok, which has been amazing to see because they've obviously grown tremendously. And so I've been keeping busy. Yeah. Okay. Nice.

So people when they listen to this, what they like to hear about is they like to meet interesting people. So I think that's check. And then the second part is the people who are listening are either current entrepreneurs in the market doing something or they're people who have a job are thinking about making the shift or their college student thinking about making the leap. And, you know, one of the things that we do a lot of is we sort of, you know, guess and check or sort of pontificate on, you know, why doesn't somebody solve this problem? Or wouldn't it be cool if you did this? Or, hey, that thing's working. What if you applied it in this other way?

And so I'm curious, do you have, I don't know, do you have like in your phone, do you have like a notes app of like startup ideas, have big startup ideas? Yeah, I have probably, there's probably over 100 ideas here. I thought what might be fun because you mentioned that just before. You're like, oh, hey, like, do you have any ideas? I have a notes file. I could literally just like. Yeah, let's do it. We can play a game where I just go like this and just spin the wheel.

Spin the wheel. Yeah, let's do it. All right, pulling it up. Okay. Some of them are like you had a couple of glasses of wine. No, no, no. I understand. I understand.

All right. Metamusal for millennials. Okay. What about metamusal does what? It's rehydrating or it's like diarrhea or what is it? Fiber. Fiber. Okay.

So I think the genesis of this one was, you know, I think I love subscription-based businesses. I love businesses that are like repeatable. Right. People who take Meta Musil take it every day, mostly, to get their routine kind of in check. To be routine. Yeah. A lot of brands right now are just being kind of like rethought of with like obviously as D to C with like kind of a nice brand. Like I don't connect with Metamusel.

I'll tell you that much. Not at all. Yes. You know, maybe it's just so it's like that's like a no brainer. Yeah. I like that one. In fact, I did I did a podcast with the guy from so who created Soylent. And he was like, yeah, like, you know, part of the original thesis was kind of like the, you know, I forgot what the other shake is called insure. It's like insure for millennials.

And they don't market it that way, but they were thinking about it that way early on. And so, Mudamusel's another one. All right. I like it. I'll get that a solid 9 out of 10, actually. You came out hot with that one. All right. Spin again?

Yeah, spinning again. Secondopinion.com. When you need a second opinion on literally anything. Okay, these are experts giving you opinions or what? I don't know, man. Like, being an adult is hard, right? And we have to deal with it. And sometimes we need relationship advice.

Sometimes we need, I don't know how to fix something. Like, you know, what I've learned from, you probably need a haircut, actually, is that people are actually open to getting help and they'll pay for it. Right. And so it's like, imagine you're having, like, a big fight with your girlfriend and you want to tell someone, but you want an unbiased opinion. You need a second opinion based on the text that you're going to say. Right.

Secondopinion.com here to help. Great domain if you could get it. Okay, I like this. What vertical would be the best? That's kind of where this gets interesting to me because where would you start? And maybe you actually just end there because you specialize. But if nothing else, you start with one where people really want this or people really have this problem. So where could it be hot?

So a good framework for thinking about like how to think about consumer, like, internet products is like what is the thing that's going to get a lot of media attention because you want free customers and you also yeah you want free customers and also word of mouth is the best customer anyways um so like what's something like why don't you just reverse engineer what would be a good PR story like that's just one way to look at like MVP right it's like what's the minimal viable press release or somebody was doing this like for dating profiles, which especially as Tinder got hot, that was the time where somebody was like, oh my God, there's Tinder coaches.

They'll give you an objective opinion on your profile on how you're coming across and you pay for it. And that's like actually a thing. And that worked when there's like kind of the wave of internet, you know, Tinder itself was kind of newsworthy. And you could piggyback off that in the way that you guys sort of piggybacked off of, you know, all the sort of quarantine woes with the, you probably need a haircut. So you'd probably want to find.

something that is people are already talking about and then you sort of you offer the second opinion around that space exactly so you know maybe yeah so one idea is like maybe you start with like relationship like relationship advice because that's like evergreen that that's always and but then you launch like the viral piece of it should i get a divorce dot com or i was even thinking more on like you have to answer the why now and the why now is like a lot of like single people are like, should I go on a date with this person, like an in-person date, less than six feet, let's say? Or should I make out with Johnny? And then you press the button and it's like, no or something like that. So I think that's where it comes down to like, yeah, like building little

games, building little like nuanced things that like surprise people, the light people, people want to write about. Okay, I love it. Spin again. This is kind of like, I'm going to give That one is six and a half out of ten. Yeah, this is maybe even a three and a half out of ten, but like we're picking random ones here. Yeah. Text me a secret.com. And this is, I didn't do a full spin, so I guess it was related to second opinion.com. But like, we all have secrets.

And a lot of the time we want to like talk about those secrets. Get them off our chest. Get them off our chest. So this is a service that does that. Here's another one. I like that idea. So here's what I'm imagining. I get matched with someone and it tells me a little bit about them.

29 years old, male, San Francisco, rich. And then he basically, but I don't know more than that. And then they open up and you can open up or you can sort of roulette. We'll get to the next person. It's a secret network of telling secrets to each other. Yeah, man. And the business model is blackmail. It's genius.

We'll make millions. We'll make millions. I'm doing the money burns, you know, evil. he plans. Next idea, which is a bit more, the opposite of this idea, more nice for the world, is a wash and fold for low-income families. So I, a lot of people, especially in New York City, but everywhere in the world in cities, spend a lot of time in laundromats. And if you're a working mom or working dad, like, you know, sitting for two,

three hours at a laundromand is like take is a lot of unproductive time that you could either be spending with your children or you could be like doing a side hustle or whatever it is right so like how do you like do wash and fold and just take that out of the equation so that they can focus on what it is they want to be doing and so this is just philanthropic it's like uh it will be taken care for you we're going to give back hours of productivity to the people who people who need it yes absolutely Okay, all right. Here's another one. Spotify, but for work in progress, it's called Watercolors.

So the whole idea here is, okay, life is messy. And there's a reason why there's an eraser at the end of a pencil. But like when you go on Spotify, it's all these like highly curated, like I've produced this piece of content for the last six years. and this is, you know, here it is. Right. What if, what, what, what, what, what, what artists can put, like, just, like, little pieces of work that are, like, unfinished, um, and create almost like a SoundCloud type website or app?

Um, and, and it's called, uh, yeah, would I call it watercolors? I don't know why I call the watercolors, but I, that's the idea. So for the unfinished thing, would it be like a dribble where it's like a shot? It's like, it's like, 10 seconds. of the song. It's not the whole thing raw. It's a snippet that you like a riff. Yeah, it could be whatever whatever the artist decides.

So if the artist decides they want to do a like 10 second thing, great. This is like, here, check this riff. But I just think that there's a whole dimension of music that we're not exploring. And I also think that it's just kind of like, I want to see

more apps, I want to see more websites where it's fine to put unfinished work. I think that's a part of the creative process. And I think that it's a good message that we should be spreading. Yeah, and I think stories is an awesome format for unfinished things. Like just like stories got people to share little raw moments of their life because they're like, look, it gets, it's gone after 24 hours. I feel like if you can make it ephemeral, then more people. The question really is, why don't people share more unfinished work?

And then you wouldn't work backwards from that. Like, well, here's my objection. Here's my hesitation. Here's what I'm worried about. And then you can figure out product design. that will solve those problems. Well, yeah, I think, like, to talk to, to speak to that, I think, you know, artists, and I include myself as an artist, because I'm a product designer, is, like, we don't, we, we like to show our best

work, right? So, like, putting unfinished work is in, quote, unquote, our best work. So I think, like, a part of this is, like, you know, that's a big challenge with this one, but I think like educating the artist around like it's okay like you it's cool like and in fact like if you're like an artist hundreds of thousands of followers or even like if you just have like a thousand really engaged people like they want to interact like I I know this one artist he has 2,000 followers but like he posts on stories like little unfinished things and I'm like post more of this right yeah I'm with you I used to call it working in public and then somebody sent me this link I think Jessica Livingston or somebody would be

was calling it working with the garage door open. I don't know who I was reading, but they were saying like, imagine your startup, you know, you're starting in the garage, but what if you had the garage door rolled open? And like, what are the sort of serendipitous benefits you could have of putting your work out there in public? Another, you want one more? You want a couple more? Yes, yes.

We can literally do this for hours. This is just a concept. So, like, I just wrote, you know what are cool? ideas that take something free and then you charge for them. And then I put IG water. Like water bottles. If you think of water bottles,

like no one was charging for water until someone was like, hey, wouldn't be cool if like you can transport this water and like we would sell it? And then we can have like a luxury brand. Like you can have Evian and it's going to be from France. And then there's this whole new category. Like new categories.

The founder of Gumroad tweeted the other day, he was just like, if you want to make $10 an hour, Do you see that tweet? No, I didn't do. You want to make like $10 an hour, like go work for someone. You want to make $100 an hour, like charge companies or something like that. I'm butchering it here.

But if you want to make $1,000, like $1,000 an hour, the point is it was like you want to make $10,000 an hour, create a new category and be like the leader of the new category. And I think like I'm always interested in like new categories, like virtual, you know, barbershop, new category. Like, yeah, it may not work. but it might work. And if it works, it's going to work big. Uber. New category, like, it's really just like a new on-demand, like using technology to bring a car to you.

Like, new category. Like, boom. Yeah, for sure. So what's something that's free that could be charged for? So, for example, water is a good example. You know, when you first said that, my brain was like, oh, air. But actually, air is also charged for air purifiers, diffusers, things like that. humidifiers, there's ways that people have found a way to essentially charge for air in a way.

They're processing it, but they're doing it. What else is free that could be charged for? So content is a big one. Or put another way, like, what are the things that we take for granted as human beings that we can charge for? And that opens up like a whole other set of products and services. And those are hard because those are blind spots, right? You have to actually think hard because they are just embedded in the world. don't even realize that they're sticking out because they're you take them for granted by definition

absolutely and that's why like i had i was before we were chatting i actually someone called me and was like gregg where do you where do you see like the consumer internet going and i was like it's this stuff comes out of nowhere the stuff literally comes out of nowhere there's like you can look back in hindsight and be like oh yeah like we can connect the dots for these reasons but i think like the dots are actually pretty messy to connect if we actually look at it and i think like the best actually consumer businesses are kind of like somewhat random. They're somewhat random.

It's based on like an entrepreneur just like being obsessed with like I, Ben Rubin, for example, the founder of House Party. He's an architect. He thinks of, you know, House Party is these rooms sort of physical space, you know, digital representations of these physical spaces. The guy is like spent years being, you know, studying to be an architect and obsessing his like entire teenage years about like presence right and what that means so like it's not because that in like 2016 or whatever 2015 like live video is like important why you know it was like no

the guy's literally been like thinking about it forever and he's like the expert in the world on it have you ever seen there's this video of evan speakel from snapchat he's in a kitchen and he's explaining snapchat on like um you know like a notebook just like a note pack out of paper and he's got like you know he flips it three times and it's like those are his slides essentially have you seen this video i have it's actually everyone should watch that everyone should watch this video because it's he's taking when you go through that it's he like i've never met him but he's such a like you just realize that he's amazing because he's able to distill a really quote unquote complicated sort of like he just makes it so simple and i think the beauty of it

is like everyone on his team could look at that and like, oh, yeah, then they, they repeat it to other people. Yeah, what's Snapchat? Oh, it's so hard to use. No, actually, it's so simple. Right, exactly. Yeah, the video, the video is amazing. Even like, I just remember one detail in it on the product design. He's like, yeah, so he explains first, you know, why, you know, it opens up to the camera so you could take a photo and it's meant to be, he's like, basically photos today are thought of as memories. You take a photo and you're stashing it away for essentially your, your your keepsake. He's like, but we use photos for communication. We just think if you send somebody a photo, it's a great way to communicate, you know, what

you're doing, how you're feeling. If you take a photo of your face, it's, you know, it's better than typing in many ways. He's like, first, Snapchat is just using photos and videos for communication, not for memories. It's like, boom, insight one. Insight two. He's like, and then we created this thing called stories. And he's like, for stories, you know, what we wanted to do, he's like, every social network is reverse chronological. So you open up your feed and you're see sort of the latest thing first. He's like, but that's not how our brains are really wired. You know, we communicate through story, and that's what we remember.

And so, you know, when you click on a Snapchat story, it starts from beginning, then it goes middle and end. And it sounds like, obviously, duh, but that was counterintuitive. Twitter was reverse chronological. Instagram was reverse chronological. Facebook was reverse chronological. Your email was reverse chronological. And so that was the, you know, with stories, he's like, when we do it, beginning,

middle end, you can, you know, when somebody clicks your thing, they're going to experience it the way you are wanting to tell that story. And I was like, oh, okay, guy's a genius. Like, that's what that is. It's taking complicated things, making them simple, or taking things that seem simple on the surface and showing how much is actually below the surface, how much thought went into crafting that simple experience. Yeah, I think what I like about that is like, he starts with the key insight. Well, it's, you know, pictures worth a thousand words is one way of looking at it. So communicating through photos is a richer way of communicating than through text or calling somebody, right? And so, great.

And people do do this. And that's sort of like the immediate hater is, well, I can just, I can go to iMessage and I can upload a photo and then I can hit send. And I can send that to you. And then sort of, so the first insight is people use photos for memories. They should use it for, you know, it's a really effective way to communicate. that's the insight. And then he changed the how, which was like, well, what if we reduced the friction to zero?

So like, yeah, you could open up I message, click your friend's name, click the camera button, click the gallery button, find the photo, then hit send, and then they get it. And then they view it. Or you open up our app, the camera's already open,

you push, you know, you take the photo, and then you send it to as many friends as you want one to many. And like, boom, it was done. And so they changed the how, lowered the friction of getting people to do what they already wanted to do. Right. So I think it starts with the key insight. Next, it goes to, like, what is, who, who, what is the community that has a burning need for this? Like, instead of, like, a lot, you know, a mistake a lot of people make is they create software and then they find the community versus, like, finding the community and then building the software.

Right. So, like, you know, with this particular key insight, the way it relates to the community, I mean, Snapchat started off in high schools in Los Angeles. at like preppy, preppy, preppy, prepy, prepery, you know, $50,000 a year high schools. And these people were sending, you know, their kids. They're sending, like, naked pictures, they're sending pictures of drugs, they're sending things that their parents don't want them to see or just, like, making, or just basically things that their parents don't want to see. So, like, obviously.

We should change one thing. The unique insight wasn't just that the user for communication. It's that when photos stick around forever, people, you know, so hesitant to share. And so there's a whole bunch of things we want to share that we don't want to stick around forever. And so the ephemorality was sort of the key mechanic. So second piece, what is the burning need for the community? And then third, I think is like, okay, how? Like, what is the, okay, now you want to build software.

Now explain to me how that ladder is up to one and two and why this is the most beautiful and the fastest. and you know and then if you have those three like forget decks forget like business plans like just show me one two and three and if you show me one two and three

two and three like the market for you know when people looked at Uber initially people are like on demand black cars San Francisco come on right such a small market

what are you talking about and I know I know people who did that and it's like yeah like but sometimes small markets, you can't always pick a really big market. Sometimes those small markets actually expand to be new categories in really big markets. So I think you've got to play the field.

I think you've got to look at small. You've got to look at medium and look at large. And I don't think that if the market is small, you should be like, I can't do this. Right. And I guess if we're being honest with Snapchat, they didn't realize the high school was the community that would need this the most. Because I think what ended up happening was they had it, they built it while they school summer hit usage was pretty flat. They were thinking like, oh, college kids will want to do this, which ended up being true.

College kids did want to use it to send photos from parties and whatnot. Photos you don't want to stick around forever. And then somebody, you know, introduced it to their niece or something like that. And basically in the school, I think they were using it. Am I right on iPads to send sort of in classroom iPads to send, you know, messages to each other across classrooms or whatever? And the teachers couldn't catch it basically because the message destroyed burn after reading, essentially. Do I have history correct? Yeah, that's it. That's it. And then with Uber, same thing where I think they also probably thought it was a small market because neither Garrett

nor Travis ran the company initially, right? They hired a guy, hey, you know, guy off Twitter wants to run this thing. Sure, come on over. And he became a billionaire, you know? But like, I think if they knew what Uber becomes, they probably run it from day one themselves. I think they sort of observed over time, holy shit, there's a lot of pull here. And then this could go even further. And so, you know, it progressively stacked up from there. I agree. And I think like for for the people listening, I think it's important to like when you're thinking about what do you want to spend your time doing, think about like what have you spent your time doing? Like what have you spent your life doing? And why why do you have like this unique advantage or these, you know,

what are some key insights that you can have about the world that that you could. So what's the answer for you? I mean, I have a lot. I have. I think every person has had unique insights. Like, for example, like, or unique backgrounds. Like, my family used to own, like, stores in Quebec for, I don't know, 100 years. And I grew up. And because of that, like, every Saturday, my mom would drop me off at the mall where my dad's store was. And I spent a lot of time in a mall, frankly, because that's,

my mom was there, my dad was there, and my dad was working, so I kind of like walked around, I got to know them all really well, and I learned, I have a unique perspective on the world in terms of like commerce, in terms of like, what does the mall even represent as like a meeting point for people to like, you know, young people and old people and why are they there? And like, what are the types of restaurants there? Why is there a restaurant? Why is the food court here? Like, why are things, you know, how are things merchandise?

You know, I think one of the big reasons I became a product designer was because I saw that, you know, if you put like a product by like I remember like yeah basically like if you put products like near you know the lineup like people will buy them and I was like wow like the UIUX you know the interface user experience of the physical world is a real thing and that just led me to digital right yeah for sure so I like that basically there's one one school of thought and I think this is the Paul Graham school of thought. This is where I crypt this idea from. But he basically says, if you want to invent the future, just live in the future and then invent what's missing. And it's not sort of this crazy thing. It's like back to this, there's some quote where it's like, if you want to paint the

perfect painting, become perfect and then just paint. But the idea is like, if you already do something in your lifestyle that is unusual, that is sort of forward thinking in some way, maybe you're somebody who doesn't own your house, you rent and you rent your car and you rent everything, then the sharing economy is quite obvious to you, right? If you go and do couch surfing and you think that's normal, Airbnb is a normal idea for you, even though it's abnormal to others. But to you, you're like, no, I live in this future where this is true, right? I push button and my groceries appear. Not everybody does that today, but I live in that future where that exists and I'm going to sort of enable that for more people. Right. And so one way of looking at it is what are things

that are normal to you. It's normal to me to record something and have hundreds of thousands of people I've never met listen to me in their earballs every morning while they commute to work, and they feel like they know me. That's a normal thing for me, but not for most, but like maybe there's something that I could sort of make that, make my normal normal for others. So that's one way of thing about it. And what you said is sort of the counter to that or the compliment to that, which is, you know, don't try to get interested in sort of new things to try to create a company, look at what you're already interested in, the life you've already lived, and there's embedded insights and domain expertise and nuance that you understand because you live that way,

and then think, how do I, how do I start something that leverages those insights and that experience that I've already had? Yeah, and, and be, be mindful of the fact, like, oh, hey, like, why, why am I so, why do I love this, like, why do I love spending time at the mall? Or like, why do I love looking at, like, how things are merchandise and stuff like that? And being like, wow, like, I have an eye for that. And let your imagination go wild and be like, oh, you know, it would be cool if you could do this. You know, like, what if you could do that? And then that's when you start like, oh, yeah, wouldn't it be cool if you can, like, create that something?

And that's when a business is created to fill that void. And what are some of the most interesting either products or startups you've seen invested in, noticed existing things. What are some of the most interesting things that have caught your eye lately? So I'm just going to pull up my phone. There's an app. Have you, I was playing with it today. It's called It's Me.

Do you know it's me? No. Is this an Avatar app? Yes. Okay, I think I had it before, but I forgot what it is. Yeah. So it started, it recently started to kind of take off. But the way it works is you log in with Snapchat.

It pulls your bimogi, and you say your age, if you want to meet with, like, girls or guys or both. And it chat roulette style, like, you press a button, it connects you to someone. It says a bit about, like, where they're from, who they are. And you see the avatar talk. So, like, you're, like, you're talking, but you see yourself as an avatar. Yep. And I think what I find, you know, like, what is.

is the key insight there is that like man like being you know and for a lot of people like being in a physical form be it even on like a zoom or face time or you know literally physical is tough for people yeah and having that like wall is nice as like an icebreaker to eventually get you to meet in person etc i like that let me connect that to the last idea so uh when i first started working working in this kind of Twitch ecosystem, the live-frew me ecosystem. I saw this one guy, his name's Mani. I think his handles like the one Mani or something like that. And Mani, it streams on Twitch, but he's a dog.

He's not actually a dog. He's a guy, but his avatar is a dog. And so he's one of the few Twitch people who, their little webcam area, is not themselves. It's a dog that he uses this, you know, obscure app, or it got, I think it might have got bought by now, but it's called Face Rig at the time. So Face Rig was this obscure app. You have to have a Windows machine, go on Steam, download FaceRig, pay 20 bucks for FaceRig, then you get the dog, and the dog will mimic your head movements and your mouth movements

while you're streaming. And so for him, he was like, oh, yeah, this is way more comfortable for me than putting my own real face out there as the, like, kind of the show. And so I saw that, and then I tried it, and I was like, wow, that really does make me feel way less anxious about kind of like performing if I just have this little, you know, goofy-looking dog as me instead of me. And so that's another one where it's like, okay, today it took a lot of extra work. You had to go find this app, download it, pay money, blah, blah, blah, set it up on a PC.

But once you've experienced the magic at the end of that, you're like, okay, magic is here. Now can I make this way less friction? I've lived in the future. I saw what life was like, and now I'm going to bring that back to the present and make it accessible to more people. And it sounds like these guys and gals were building this app might have done that. They might have made it way simpler for somebody to have that same experience. Yeah, absolutely. And it's simple. It's fast and magical. And I think what I like about it, and I like about your story actually is that like that dude was like he was unique. And he was like, yeah, I'm going to do this. I don't care what people think. Like this is what I'm going to do. And he like pushed the envelope and did something weird. And it turns out like weird things are actually like head turners. And like head turners are actually create word of mouth. And word of mouth actually creates audience and creates buzz and creates all these things.

So like same with Snapchat, right? Like, and it's obvious now that like a message would disappear, a photo would disappear, a video would disappear. But at the time, like, no one that didn't exist. It's a new concept. So like people like, you know, listeners like tap into that like uniqueness about yourself. And don't be afraid to do it. because who knows you might be on the verge of a

Snapchat or something like that. And people will doubt it. There's a reason my Snapchat handle is still SVP test because I was like this app ain't going nowhere, right? Like I don't have to worry about making a real handle here. I'll just do this test account because I just want to try this silly fad and then, you know, this will be gone

in a month and of course famous last words. Yep, absolutely. Let me give you an idea that's sort of like that. Okay, so my friend, Damien, he's the founder of a company called Do Deal. Have you ever heard of this? I haven't. It's like a British-based company

Do-Dill as in due diligence. So basically they surface private company information in a way that's I think the EU has different laws of what you need to disclose. So he can provide like, you know, revenue information, employee information, so you can get a lot more information about companies there. So he built this

platform. It's like, FinTech guy doing fintech things. It's a super valuable company. I think it might be a billion dollar company. And so anyways, he did that. So the other day I see him on Facebook and he posts like, hey, you know, I've left and I was thinking about my next thing. So I come up with this new thing called Battelle. And I was like, oh, shit, what's Batel? Is this like some NeoBank?

Is this, you know, what is this new FinTech product? He's like, it's not FinTech. It's a remote sleep school for parents. And basically, he's like, I met this woman. And what she does is she teaches parents how to put their baby to sleep. and you know so they get a good night's sleep and the parents aren't up all night feeding every two hours and whatnot and she doesn't use what's called the cry it out method which is the the normal way you do this but it's like really hard on the parents to fight through and let their kid cry it out she's like

she doesn't use the cry it out method and she's a you know she's like the dog whisperer it's amazing i watched her work her magic on 200 families and i thought okay i'm going to help this woman scale her, her, you know, magic to, you know, as many families as I can. And so he created this remote sleep school. It's basically cost a thousand bucks, but you're going to teach, your kid's going to get a good sleeping program. So it's like, you know, what's that worth to you? And like, I don't, I don't know if you know this. I had a kid eight months ago. So now I'm in that position. And so I was like, oh, dude, I'll beta test this now because, you know, I'm going on three hours of sleep right now. And damn, I would love if I could, you know, do this. And so I think that there's these fringe,

sort of weird things where it's like, would people really pay $1,000 for this woman to Zoom call you and teach you how to put your kid to sleep? Like, you know, but I think that that's one of these products that is just weird enough, solves a real problem and, like, adds a lot of real value and is charging for something that normally this advice is just like a free mommy blog telling you, hey, try this. And instead, it's like, no, here's a super high-end version of that, but we're going to guarantee the result in a better way than an average blog would do. What do you think of that idea? I think it's I actually really like it. I think like I'm a big believer in you know come for the tool stay for the network but like the way I look at it is like come for the

tool stay for the vertical network where the vertical here would be parents. Yes. Like the fact that he's capturing such a high like you're just in your beginning stages my friend and like you're you're about to buy a whole lot of products and services for your child and maybe even more children if you have. So like the fact that like here's the thing, here's one thing I'll tell you. If if they help you with this problem, you're definitely going to be, wow, that was amazing. My trust in them will be like 1,000 points, you know. Right. So that's what it is. It's like when you're looking at like building a vertical, something in a vertical, it's all about like what is the trust quotient you can have with the vertical.

And I like that this particular task will give you a lot of, you know, a lot of, you know, a lot of cred for this business. And yeah, man, I think, like, that's the other thing is, like, it could, I could see it being like a million dollar a year of business, but I can also somehow see it being a billion dollar business. And so it's worth a shot. Yeah. And, you know, the math, I think, works where he has both options where it's like, you know,

thousand people paying you $1,000 a month, or $1,000 for the program, that's a million bucks, and can he find a thousand parents to do this? I'm very confident just through Facebook ads. I think he could bootstrap to a million dollars in revenue very quickly with sort of like 30, 40% margins on that and just pocket that.

So I think very low tech, easy to start, bootstrappable into the single-digit millions, let's call it between $1 and $9 million, or what you said, which is like, cool, if he thinks about this bigger, like, how do I, now that I have, trust with these parents and I've solved one problem for them, the problem they had during their first seven months of their baby, how do I help them with their next phase and the next

phase and the next phase and could go bigger from there? So I like having those options on the table where it starts with sort of those humble beginnings and it might just be a great cash flow business or goes for the sort of home run. Yeah, man. Tell them to keep going. I will. Well, I don't think he needs my encouragement to keep going. That's the best entrepreneurs don't need any advice or encouragement. I remember I invested in this, I invested in Lambda school and afterwards I was talking to my friend, we did it together.

And I was like, here's three reasons, you know, here's what I want out of this investment. Because I'm like, I don't know if this will make us money or not, but, you know, I want to learn about like this idea of this trade school thing for education. I want to hang out with the founder, you know, monthly and be helping them solve problems. I think it'll be really interesting.

And, you know, lastly, you know, I hope we get a return on this. And he replied, he was like, oh, all I care about is the return. Don't give a shit about the rest, but hey, to each of their own. And on my end, I was like, and ironically, the return is going to be there. But for the first two, like, Austin doesn't need my help, doesn't ask for my help. You know, if I text him something, I'm actually just taking up his time. And it reminds me of kind of what an investor told me, which is the best companies don't need us.

That's the reality of the value ad services is that the best companies rarely need your help. And the worst companies, you can't save anyways. And so, you know, there's some in the middle where you can help influence their trajectory, but this idea of investors really helping out or encouraging entrepreneurs or whatever else is sort of overblown. It's marketing. I totally agreed. I think actually last week there's this founder. He's just like literally he crushes it.

Like for years, he's done 10% year-over-year growth. Sorry, month-over-month growth. And I responded to his investor update, keep it up. And then he just responds right away. He's like, as if I wasn't going to keep it up. He came like, thanks, bro. Yeah, yeah, exactly. That's amazing.

I just took a picture of myself smiling and sent it back then. That's so good. That's great. All right, we should wrap up. We kind of went over time. But anything else? We do one last spin of the idea. Sure.

Let's do it. Let's get one more than we're out of here. We'll do a quick one. it notes boom um okay so this one is a quarantine-ish idea

but it could last beyond quarantine um it's an idea that basically um I called it chef's table um and it's this idea that like I don't know if you saw carbone the restaurant in New York City um is not doing

they're just doing one meal per night and then it sells out So it's kind of like a drop. Yep. Which builds a lot of buzz and demand and it sells out and every night. This idea is that like it's it's a drop for a restaurant, but you have a live stream with the chef telling you about like if it comes with wine or the meal. It's like this is how I did it. And it's more of an experience.

The live stream is after you order or it's before you order? So everyone, the way it would work is you would order it. Everyone, which is everyone would get the meal at the same time. I don't care if you want it at 7.30. How would you do that? This is an idea. This is an idea. Not enough time to talk about how we would do it.

But they all get the roughly around the same amount of time. And then chef comes and he's like, listen, like I, you know, pick these, these, you know, carrots myself in Hudson Valley. And here he's explaining it. And I think like that's what I miss most about sort of restaurant. I guess is like the stories behind and the experience behind it, which you don't really get if you're just like frying up some eggs in the morning. For sure. Okay.

So here's a twist on this idea. You're a high-end restaurant. Your business is gone right now. Like you're a Michelin Star restaurant? What are you doing? You can't do anything. And so here's your pivot. You go live on Instagram before the drop.

So you go live before and you're showing the prep. You know, you're in the chef's kitchen. They're talking about it. They're drinking one. and you're seeing it being prepared. And people, I think, like to see, as the show, Chef's Table has shown, people like to watch high-end food get made, real skill, you know, that sort of thing, as long as you have a personality with it.

And then basically by the end of the 20 minutes, the meal is ready for the drop. The drop goes live, and it's, you know, it uses the new Facebook shop thing that came out yesterday. You push the button, and it orders it basically. And it's like a $100 meal. and it's the stuff you don't find on Postmates or Grubhub or whatever, which are all kind of like the bottom of the barrel. So you come in at the very top end of those, and it's like the delivery experience is going to be,

you know, the packaging is going to be amazing and whatnot, but you're going to get what you just saw on the IG Live. And so you do these like $100 or $150 drops for high-end stuff through the delivery network. But you can go live before to build up that anticipation of QVC, but for high-end cooking. I like it. I think we kind of merge the ideas. That's why it's nice to have co-founders.

Okay, great. I'll incorporate it and we'll get this off the ground. Sweet. All right, Greg, where should people find you if they like your style? They want to hear more of you. If you want to hear more of me, check me out on Twitter. My name is at Greg Eisenberg, G-R-E-G-I-S-E-R-G. And just holler.

Cool. We'll put it in the show notes too. All right. All right, Greg, I got to run. But it's been good. Good catching up. Yeah, you too. Take care.

All right, man, see you. Bye.