My First Million - Sara's List Hostile Takeover and The App that Made $1M In Ten Days

Episode Date: October 27, 2022

Episode 379: Shaan Puri (@ShaanVP) and Sam Parr (@TheSamParr) talk about a hostile takeover of Sara's List and brainstorm how they're going to deal with it, the backstory of the #1 app - GAS, and much more. ----- Links: * Sara's List * Kristin Kent's Twitter (@kstankent) * The Muse * Packy McCormick * Gas * Nikita Bier Twitter (@nikitabier) * Do you love MFM and want to see Sam and Shaan's smiling faces? Subscribe to our Youtube channel. * Want more insights like MFM? Check out Shaan's newsletter. ------ Show Notes: (02:40) - Palmer Luckey recap (06:00) - The Sara's List Hostile Takeover (12:15) - Shaan makes an offer (25:20) - Nikita Bier & Gas ----- Past guests on My First Million include Rob Dyrdek, Hasan Minhaj, Balaji Srinivasan, Jake Paul, Dr. Andrew Huberman, Gary Vee, Lance Armstrong, Sophia Amoruso, Ariel Helwani, Ramit Sethi, Stanley Druckenmiller, Peter Diamandis, Dharmesh Shah, Brian Halligan, Marc Lore, Jason Calacanis, Andrew Wilkinson, Julian Shapiro, Kat Cole, Codie Sanchez, Nader Al-Naji, Steph Smith, Trung Phan, Nick Huber, Anthony Pompliano, Ben Askren, Ramon Van Meer, Brianne Kimmel, Andrew Gazdecki, Scott Belsky, Moiz Ali, Dan Held, Elaine Zelby, Michael Saylor, Ryan Begelman, Jack Butcher, Reed Duchscher, Tai Lopez, Harley Finkelstein, Alexa von Tobel, Noah Kagan, Nick Bare, Greg Isenberg, James Altucher, Randy Hetrick and more. ----- Additional episodes you might enjoy: • #224 Rob Dyrdek - How Tracking Every Second of His Life Took Rob Drydek from 0 to $405M in Exits • #209 Gary Vaynerchuk - Why NFTS Are the Future • #178 Balaji Srinivasan - Balaji on How to Fix the Media, Cloud Cities & Crypto * #169 - How One Man Started 5, Billion Dollar Companies, Dan Gilbert's Empire, & Talking With Warren Buffett • ​​​​#218 - Why You Should Take a Think Week Like Bill Gates • Dave Portnoy vs The World, Extreme Body Monitoring, The Future of Apparel Retail, "How Much is Anthony Pompliano Worth?", and More • How Mr Beast Got 100M Views in Less Than 4 Days, The $25M Chrome Extension, and More

And so Nikita said something in the group message, which he says, I think it'd be an interesting idea to ask myself or to figure out how can I build. You're making it too soft. I remember exactly how he said it. It was like, oh, so what are you doing? What are you up doing? What are you up to nowadays? Oh, Sam, you sold the hustle. What are you doing?

What are you doing? Nikita, you're sitting at Facebook. What are you doing? And he's basically, he just said it straight, straight up. He goes, I'm just thinking about how I can make $10 million in three months. And we're like, what? And he's like, yeah, I want to make an app that generates like $10 million in 90 days. What's going on?

We have a good episode. We talk about an app that's going viral, but this apparel is getting written about in a bunch of publications. We actually have the inside story because we kind of saw what was happening behind the scenes early, early on. And so we talk about this guy named Nikita, who launched this app that has made a million dollars in like two weeks or something crazy like that. And we tell you the inside story behind it. What else we got? And he called his shot, which you know we love here. we also talk about a ransom note that we got through email and why this ransom note was one of the best emails that we've ever got.

And me and Sam live brainstorm and live negotiate how we're going to deal with this ransom note. So if you want to see that, that's at the end of the episode. We also talk about the MailChimp CEO getting canceled and a little debrief of Palmer Lucky. So that's it. Enjoy this episode. All right. We live. Sam Parr, what's up?

Nothing. How's it going? You know, just the usual woke up, decided. okay, no small boy stuff today, got going, immediately started considering some small boy stuff, and then I remembered, there will be absolutely none of that today. What was it? I woke up, I was like, I'm a little sore,

wake up with a complaint, and waking up with a complaint on one of the greatest days I've ever had. Wow, this is not how I'm going to start my day. Wait, why was it one of your greatest days? That's just like a general, general attitude I have. Do you want to start off by recapping Palmer Lucky? Because after talking to him, I feel like he's kind of the greatest guy I've ever talked to. Kind of the man.

Yeah. Right. Is that how you feel? I thought he was awesome. Okay. Let me just say a word that describes Palmer Lucky. I would say like independent minded. I think I really respected that.

He is independently minded. I felt like all his opinions were his own. You know, people like, when they write that shit in their Twitter bio, like, opinions are mine, not my employer. You know, his opinions are really his. Also, when people write contrarian thinker, and it's kind of like if you have to say that you're contrarian thinker, you're maybe not like the most contrarian thinker. Do you know what I mean? Right. It's like the no offense.

I'm not racist, but. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's exactly what it is. So I, anyway, yeah, I thought that he was an independent thinker. I also thought that he was incredibly enthusiastic, which I liked. Yeah, very enthusiastic. Dead on the inside. Like, we have, we have said no to a bunch of guests just simply because they're like, you know,

their intelligence is like cranked up to level 10. Their success is cranked up to level 12. But they're like charisma and ability to convey any sort of enthusiasm about themselves, about the world, about their story is so low. And so they make for a terrible podcast guest. But for him, it felt not only like did he have charisma to tell stories about the past, he seemed really pumped about what he was doing and what the future looked like and why it mattered. And I just felt like this guy, you know, just like springs out of bed every day.

Me too. That's exactly how I felt. I felt like he was incredibly enthusiastic about life. And he, yes, that's a great way to explain it. but he, dude, he was so fascinating. He was one of those guys that I like because I don't like,

I can't think of a great word to explain, exe other than like prolific, but also almost like this, I don't think this is over explaining it or over grandizing it, but like almost like a Renaissance man, where he would say comments like, yeah, I bought this marina because there's going to be new laws about,

I don't even understand like what he was explaining about his marina, but he said like something about his marina, Marina and like seaport access and how it's changing. And then he made another comment about like, he's like, I was going to do this. Well, I mean, C-steading is is off the table for now. And I was just like, I don't even really know what C-steading is. Exactly. And you just said it like, well, we all know C-steading.

Now is not the time. I was like, what are you talking about? What the hell is C-steading? Yeah, he also, he also, like, he'll make another comment. He was like, yeah, I have this house we merged. We had like a, a workshop. In one weekend, I was building a jet engine. for the water. And we actually discovered that like we should make biodegradable food or what did he say

we should make oil based foods. It's kind of like building a Diet Coke for every food. And I was just like we could take this over lots of different paths. But it's just so interesting to me that you have that ability. Yeah, it was like a bunch of like candy being waved at us. He's just like, you know, I've one of the largest samurai sword collections in the world. And that just got me into thinking. And it's like, wait, what? He didn't say that by the way, but there's at least a 50% chance he has one of the top 10 samurai sword collections in the world. And 100%. The guy owns swords.

Like, yeah, he definitely owned swords. All right. So where do you want to go next? You can drive. All right. So check this out. I forwarded you an email. Did you see the email I sent from about Sarah's list?

Or maybe she sent this to you too. What was it? So a woman named Kristen sends an email. I'm just going to read it to you. We'll show it on the screen. you know, for those on YouTube because it's, it's kind of amazing looking. Oh my gosh. You open up the email and it says, I am holding sarah's list.com hostage.

And she goes, you don't know me, but I obviously know you. I purchased saraslist.com. I've turned it into a bomb-ass website. I am willing to sell it to you for $20,000. This is a steal as I purchased it for $30,000. I'm essentially giving you $10,000. You're welcome. If you'd ever, if you'd ever like to see saraslist.com again,

and then she turned the font small, or for the first time, you know, replied to this message, I'm looking forward to hearing from you, Kristen. And I was just like, this is amazing. Who are you? And who is she? Yeah, who is she? So she's, this is this woman, Kristen Kent.

So she sends me her story after that. She goes, I've been in tech for 12 years. You know, regrettably, I chose companies off Kristen's list, which was not as lucrative as if I had chose companies off Sarah. So for those who don't know, Sarah's list is this concept. We should explain. We did a full episode about it. Basically, Sam's wife, Sarah, is a self-made millionaire and did not do any of the heroic

entrepreneurial things you hear about in the media. She just did one really good thing. She just picked companies whose equity was going to like, whose valuation was going to go up four or five X in a four-year period. So she worked at Facebook. And not early at Facebook, not like she was like employee four at Facebook. Like she was like in the thousands of employees joined as like a middle middle manager type not again I say this not as disparagement because of how amazing it is like she didn't do the things that

you think you have to do to become like a self-made millionaire. She joined Airbnb again as employee I don't know something hundred what was it maybe like three four hundred no a thousand oh thousand okay great and Airbnb goes public at evaluation of this four five X and so you know if you're receiving a stock grant for let's call it $60,000 a year you know, on top of your, you get, you get some base comp, I'm just going to use fake numbers. Base compensation, let's say, is 150, and then they give you 50K of stock a year. For over four years, that's 200K of stock. But now the stock price, four or five X's, you made a million dollars during that time period.

And you were safe. You didn't have to, like, work 90-hour weeks. You got to work at a fun-growing company that was going to, like, win its category. And you didn't have to have this, like, amazing lightning in a bottle genius idea in order to do it. And so she had done that a few times. And so we, we said, oh, this was actually intentional. You and Sarah sat down and you guys, brazen. We like made lists. We like made lists. Like what's like a 500 person's company that has good maternity leave? You know, like these are all like the tell signs that it's like an interesting startup has, uh, you're in the, you know, top quartile of pay

just for off salary. You have, uh, interesting benefits, good health care. Like all this stuff that a lot of startups that are early don't have. Uh, but, companies do yet they can still five or 10x so yeah we made that list so we made that list and of the we put 12 companies on that list this was like a year a year and a half ago now 12 companies on that list and I think we did the recap I don't remember the exact numbers but I think the in the year year and a half since then the average company values up like two and a half X or something crazy like that and 11 out of the 12 companies raised a like significant upround since then so we were like very high hit rate and if you got in whatever you

your stock value would have been at that time, I think on average, it's something like two and a half X. Could be wrong. I don't remember the math. And so this lady sets a sight, by the way, and I'm looking at it. This is amazing. Her email is, so she DM'd me on Twitter. And so whenever people DM me on Twitter, I either ignore them or I just like click the heart emoji. Like, thank you. I recognize you, but I don't want to talk. And that's what I did with her. And I just replied and said, I'm an idiot. This is you're actually, you're different. Yeah. This is a really good one. So, okay, so then here's what I want to do. So you go to the website, it's just sarah's list.com.

It says 12 startups that can make you a millionaire. It's got a picture of Richie Rich, which is hilarious. And then it goes, who is Sarah? Who are we? And why do we have any business sharing a list like this? And then it tells the story about Sarah, about us, whatever. Selection criteria, it uses our criteria, which is that it's a company that's already valued over $250 million.

So it has a low risk profile. And it's likely not going to go to zero. A stable work environment, a high salary, great benefits. but still can make you a millionaire because the equity has potential to 5 to 10X. And then it has our list, which was like FlexPort and Uniswap and Anderil and Replet and Airtable and Figma. Like Figma got acquired for whatever,

$20 billion or something like that, or more than that, you know, after we mentioned it on this list, that's like a 10X, I think, from where we mentioned it. So anyways, then it says, find a friend of jobs. So you go to the job board and it goes, these are placeholder jobs.

You guys should consider syncing this up to one of these websites. But those cost money, which is why? And the last job post says, I'm not doing it. And the tagline, so the tagline at the bottom says, Sarah's list, get rich in five to 10 years, over 50% guaranteed. Yeah, exactly. So, hilarious. So then I started thinking, okay, so I said, let's brainstorm this live here on the podcast.

Should we do this deal? No. Okay, so your opinion is no, and give me why. No, here's why. It's just a website that would take me five minutes. minutes or no, it would take me, it's a website that takes me three hours to copy and a domain name. So for that reason, it's not that valuable. But what's more valuable is this lady Kristen who's making it.

Her emails are beautiful. Her copies, beautiful. I just looked at her Twitter. This woman, Kristen, is the exact type of people that I like to be around. She also works at Expa, which Expa is basically a company founded by the founder of Uber. Garrett, I think is it. Garrett Camp. And they basically are a startup studio that launches companies.

I don't actually know any of the companies that they've launched, but I imagine a lot of them are really successful. But she works there, which is also a really good indicator that she's like on to something. Do I think that we should buy this? Absolutely not. Do I think that I want this woman in my life and would love to work with her in some capacity?

100%. Agreed. The real value here is not the domain. It's not the website. It's Kristen Kent. Okay. So here's my proposal to Kristen Kent. Here's my counteroffer.

My public podcast counteroffer to you, Kristen. I'll give you the $20,000. I'll give it to you. In fact, I'll give you the $30,000 that you paid for this domain. If you really paid that much for this domain, I mean, that's kind of crazy. But it comes with this catch. We're going to work together on this project. You're going to do the work on the company side,

and I'm going to do the work on the promotional side, the distribution side. And here's what we're going to do with Sarah's list. We're going to turn Sarah's list into a half a million dollar a year, passive income stream. Passive-ish, I should say. Passive for me, that's a little active for you. By the way, by the way, Sean, when you say, we got to, let's remember this is Sarah's list of which I am 50% of Sarah's list. So whatever is. Sam is on the side right now.

Sam said no, no, no, no, no, no, no. I got him on the record saying no, no, a moment ago. And he's not a part of the counteroffer. Sarah herself will get a 1% royalty as we use her name. Not a chance. Here's what we got to do. What percentage of the of the dividends would you give or would you want Kristen to have? Kristen deserves 50%.

She deserves 50%. I agree. The other 50% split you and I. 9010, you got it, sir. So you can share the royalty with Sarah. So here's what we're going to do. Actually, I don't know if I even want to say this deal, now that we're having this intense negotiation,

I want to give out my great idea. Okay, I'll give up my great idea. So here's the great idea. Here's how we're going to make this work. So normally a job board, this is like monetized as a job board, right? It would be a list of companies that we are curating saying these companies are great. And let's say we might take it to 24, 25 companies rather than the 12 we have today. And normally on a job board, you pay like $500 a post.

for job posting, so we would need to go reach out to those companies, get them to post. And the other thing, you know, but, but hey, this is maybe premium. It's a curated job board. Maybe we could charge more, maybe $1,000, maybe $2,000 to be posting your jobs on here. So if we've got people to do that, you know, let's say $2,000 a month, 24 companies, let's say half, half of them actually do it. You know, that's like 24K a month, not bad. But I think we're going to be in this kind of constant sales outreach period.

So let me put out a different idea. here's a different idea. We're going to take these companies and we're going to host a demo day once a quarter. What's going to happen at the demo day? We're going to basically each week we're going to feature one of these companies. We're going to create an email list. We're going to spin off our current email list and we're going to say, we're going to feature one of these companies.

We're going to do a deep dive, but why this company is a good company to work for. And interested people, you know, high quality people in tech might want to read. Well, that needs to be an upsell. That needs to be an upsell where it's like for $25,000, like you get a deep dive. As a minority owner, I'm not sure you have a say here. So I can barely hear your voice. It was so faint like your equity ownership in this. So if we're in the same room, do you think I would have hit you already?

Or will that be coming in the next 10 minutes or would it have already have happened? So, you know, the way you promoted HustleCon where you used to write these kind of blog post once a week. I think you would, you would feature the speaker of HustleCon, and you would tell their story in this awesome infographic, and then you would say, do you like stories like this? You should come to HustleCon. We're going to have 25 badass entrepreneurs, including this person speaking there, and you should attend. And you did that for like 25 weeks, and you sold out like 500 tickets to this thing. So what we're going to do is we're going to do that once a week cadence about these companies. Do a little deep dive. That's an email. And then it's going to get people to

attend the hiring day. And hiring day is where the founder of those companies are going to come and they're going to give a little five-minute flash presentation on their company. And it's going to be a cure and applicants applied to join. And these you have to be good to join. That's why we got to keep the quality high on the company side and the applicant side. And then we're not charging for a job posting. We take the like the recruiter fee because when a recruiter places a candidate at one of these companies, they take $20,000 or $30,000 right away. And so if we can place like 25 candidates in a at $20,000 a pop, you're talking half a million dollars

of revenue, which is basically all we have to do is hire a writer. We're going to hire a ghost writer who's just going to write these company deep dives on the companies that we select. Have you heard of the daily? It was called the Daily Muse. Now it's called Themuse.com.

Have you ever heard of that company? The muse.com? No, I don't think so. Was that a women's hiring thing? Was that the news, I thought. Yeah. It's called the muse.com. It's been around now for 10 years.

And the woman who started, I've been actually DMing. I've wanted to come on here. She went to Duke, too. Oh, Catherine, I think her name is? Yeah. And so she went to YC. And so I actually originally thought that this was a great idea, but they screwed it up by raising a lot of money. And I think they've raised 20, 30, 40, 50, tens of millions. I don't know the exact number. But basically what they would do is they would do these deep dives on companies and charge the company some like fairly big fee to do a deep dive

on the company. And they somehow got tons of traffic. Now they're still getting 8 million people a month coming to their website or 6 million, something like that. And they had tons of people coming to their website from search, which is incredibly valuable. And I thought that they were just chugging along, but like not doing that great because I hadn't heard about them. I have a feeling they actually might be killing it because they've raised a lot of money and they actually are starting to buy other companies at this point. And they do these deep dives on companies. And another guy who does this is Pachy McCormick. And I have no idea what he charges for this anymore. But when the economy was crushing it, I think he was charging 25 to 50,

thousand dollars per deep dive. I think it was, I think it was a little more. I remember he was making $100,000 a month, if I recall, collectively, off his deep dive, and I think he might have been doing one or two a month. Wow, that's pretty amazing. And so I think you could do something like that here. We do the milk road, by the way. We do a deep dive thing.

And it's like, I don't know, I forgot what it would cost. I think it's like, it's like something between 25 and 40K, depending on, on the total, like, promotion. And who do you hire to do that? I wrote the first few because, like, we have one of our writers wrote it. Then I, like, kind of like, changed it big time. but now we are hiring a writer just to do the deep dives. How much would you pay a writer to do that?

A couple grand a month, like two grand a month. No way, really? That's it. Per deep dive. Like I'll pay $2,000 for like this one article. So the value is not in the writing. The value is in that we have a huge list and that if we promote something to this huge list, you're going to get a bunch of traction or you're going to get usage or you're

going to get candidates or whatever it is. So the writer is not bringing the value. The writer just needs to deliver value, but the list is what the list size is why you can charge that much. Yeah, it's pretty fascinating. I think this is an really interesting business. I've always said, I mean, I'm the one who even turned you on to job boards, aren't I? So like, you know, you're welcome. I don't even, I wouldn't have even met Sarah had you not married.

So actually, I think I should have one percent. I have introduced you to lists and Sarah. So. And before me, you weren't even. dot com. So like, you're welcome. So I think

kudos to Kristen. I think she's on to something. Well, I think we're on to something. But she also seems pretty special. Like I said, if you want, if you want a side hustle

that'll make, I don't know, 250K a year for you, it's there for the taking. I think that's understanding. All you got to do is all the work. That's all. Yeah,

but we'll promote it here. Well, this is an interesting thing. I don't think this is an venture-sized business, which is I guess why Expa isn't going after it. But it maybe could be. It may be. There was a business back in the day that went through YC called developer auction. Do you remember this?

No, but that sounds a little weird. That's not a great name. It's not a great way. So basically what they did was they were like, no, dude, that's not. Auctioning humans doesn't exactly have the best branding. That's why it was great. It's a head turner.

And, you know, when you're a small company, you need to be a head turner. And so these guys basically, they realize they were like, wait, the power dynamic is off. Why is it all about applying to jobs when actually, like, the developer is like the most valuable, like developer was like gold in Silicon Valley. And so they said, why don't we just curate like the top developers? So like who are these 10x engineers? And then let's just have them almost like a beauty pageant. They walk down the stage. and the companies are like raising their paddle,

I guess that's not what happened to a beauty pageant, but like an auction where the companies were raising the paddle, be like, I'll give them $300,000, I'll give him $400,000, I'll do his laundry. And then someone's like, you know, all suckles, boom. And it's like, you know, basically like the companies were like just falling over themselves, trying to get this talent.

And so they did one, and it was amazing. It was like, you know, 50 engineers or whatever. And all the engineers got this huge pay jump from these top companies. They're like, oh, shit, that's awesome. And then it built this little flywheel where they're like the next batch of really great developers like, yeah, you're going to do all the work for me to like get me my next job offers. Awesome. All I got to do was just go and explain how like, yeah, I helped scale Netflix's like video

infrastructure so that, you know, we got this latency and this, blah, blah, blah. So they would just go explain what they did and then the companies would bid. And it was kind of a great idea I thought they eventually, but the problem is it wasn't going to scale up. It was like two almost boutique. And so in order to scale up, they changed the model and then ended up pivoting into something else altogether. But like if you just kept it boutique, which again, you can't do this if you raise a bunch of venture money because then your expectation is to go huge. But if you're like,

if you like making, you know, a million dollars, you know, a year of like passive income, you could do that with a boutique model like this just by basically creating a demo day. But instead of startups pitching investors, you have, you have companies pitching to top talent. And so you could just, if you're good at curating, right, if you're a good curator, right? We did a good job curating on the company side, now you just got to do a good job curating on the talent side, you could actually create a pretty solid side hustle here. Do you enjoy working with your wife? No.

There are enjoyable things, but there are also some very unenjoyable things. But I tell you this on everything. If we have to like assemble some like IKEA furniture, I'm like, I hate doing projects with you. And like, we're both, we're both too stubborn. We both want our way. And I'm like, why don't you just listen? And she's like, why don't you just listen? I'm like, because I don't want to listen.

And she's like, well, neither do you want to. So I'm coming out. I'm going to do the ideation boot camp again. And I was trying to convince Sarah to like quit her job and like do this. And it ain't happening. We like did it. We did a few test trials. And yeah, it didn't work out.

Like it just like me talking to her like we're coworkers just just doesn't work. Yeah. That's exactly the problem. I talk to her like I would talk to somebody who's like, you know, somebody on my team at my startup. And she's just like, why are you speaking to me like this? And I'm like, well, but I'm not in husband mode right now. I mean like, yeah, it's modes. There's modes.

Yeah. It's like. I would be like, look, you're not stupid, but this is stupid. And she'd be like, why are you? talking to me like this. I'm like, what do you mean? I'm trying to encourage you and like, don't you want to like climb up this organization's ladder? Like, don't you want to be great and achieve great day? She's like, just wants to punch me in the stomach and knock the wind out of me. I'm like, yeah, I don't know if this is going to work. I wanted this to work, but I don't

think this can happen. So I don't know how the couples do it, but it wasn't working for us. There are many great examples like the founders of Eventbrite were that's a husband and wife couple. The founders of Bebo back in the day, Zoschi and Michael Burst, they're husband and wife couple. They work together just great. And, yeah, but I think it needs like that complimentary personalities where one. And also like, I don't have the best bedside manner. You know, shocker. Like, you know, pretty direct and pretty blunt about stuff.

And I, you know, I don't have. have that thing that some people have going for them. I think you have this where you could just be hella blunt. And it's like, it's just Sam being Sam. Like, you know, he's got to, he gets to play by his own rules because that's just the way he is. I have, like, I have too much finesse in my game. Like if you have, if you have no finesse, people are like, he's got no finesse. It's fine.

Like he's just being blunt. Don't take it seriously. But if you have any, then it's like, oh, he could have said that differently. But he chose to say it the wrong way. And you don't get that pass to just like, you know, say things, you know, the wrong way. Earlier in the episode we said you would describe Palmer Lucky in one word. And I think, you know, we both said different things. If I had to describe this last 60 minute episode in one word, I would say,

exhausting. This was an exhausting. I feel like I just went on like a journey with you. and I need to go rest my eyes. Is that how you feel? No, I'm just getting stronger by the minute. Dude, I believe that's called anti-fragile. You and I are not the same.

I'm about to peak. Yeah, you and I are absolutely not the same. Where do we go from here? Do we end it here? Do we keep going? I want to do two little things. One, I just want to have a moment of silence for the MailChimp CEO. What happened?

Wait, the MailChimp CEO or the founder? Ben. Ben, who was the CEO, I think, right? He was. I think he quit when they sold it. I don't know exactly. Ben Chessna, who I love. So, okay, so Milchimp was this like, darling.

They were bootstrapped. I think they were bootchap forever. Then they sold it into it for many billions of dollars. And they did it for like 20 years and they did it out of like Atlanta. So they were like this indie success story, right? Like, they're like, you know, like, there's like hundreds of indie hackers right now on indie hackers.com that like, you know. By the way, you said Atlanta in a very funny way. It's kind of like, I usually say Detroit.

You just said Atlanta. You put a hard AT on that. Atlanta, I like that. Atlanta. Oh, okay. Well, you know, it's like Detroit, Detroit, Detroit, Atlanta. So this guy, he had to step down. So he goes, so did you see what, what he did or what happened?

So he sent a, so he sent like an email or something like that. Where is it? Oh, I see it. Yeah, he basically just said, he's, he basically said, Chestnut said he identified a dangerous trend in his workforce. New hires introducing themselves using their preferred pronouns. This is completely unnecessary for a woman who is clearly a woman to tell us her pronouns as she, her and a man who is clearly a man to tell us that his pronouns are he, him.

he wrote in an email to a small group of employees. Instead, Chess said he understood the practice was ruining kindness, but added that in the long run, this approach does more harm than good, forcing people to behave in certain ways that are the opposite of inclusion. Okay, sounds not horrible, but that's a dangerous path to go down.

By the way, my recommendation to all of us is to just not comment on this. I think we should just read what happened, and then a moment of silence for this guy for getting fired, basically fired. Oh, I stepped down coincidentally right after this. But, you know, for, you know, whether you agree with them or disagree with them, I kind of feel like having to step down is a pretty like severe penalty.

Having to step down from your own company is a pretty severe penalty for like having a point of view on this stuff. But like maybe that's like maybe it's a lot more severe than I think. I don't know. Well, what's crazy. I think that when you look at, when you think about these things, words are aren't just words. You have to look at intentions. Right. And his intention, if you, we don't even have to read it, but his intention is not to say that, his intentions are good. His intentions

actually, I think, are rooted in like, I want to make everyone feel included and I want to be productive and I, you know, whatever. And I'm just reading this email a little bit like, here's live. And so it doesn't seem like a negative email. Here's the part where I think it got dicey for him. So he goes, in the email he goes, first, there is a tiny number of peeps at MailChimp. Strange to use peeps. Maybe that's like what they call themselves. Is that like a chip word? Yeah. So there's a very tiny number of peeps at MailChimp who consider themselves transgender, forcing either with orders or through guilt, the approximately 1,300 other peeps to adopt a new communication paradigm that humanity has never had to use in our 300,000 years of existence and under 150,000 years of spoken language.

in order to make things slightly more comfortable for an extremely small group of peeps is completely illogical. And he says that if you're forced to do something illogical, eventually you will believe and do anything, even if it's vicious. So, okay, that's like a little like, he says, nowadays, everything is incredibly politicized. I'm finding that peeps are no longer motivated by meaningful work. They're motivated to make political statements. They're using company time and company resources to win a game against their opponents in a game that is raging in their minds and on social media. Understanding and respecting that people can have different

views as part of being American, part of being mature adults. Peeps of all different political leanings are free to vote the way they want, blah, blah, blah, blah. But it's not for the workplace. So that's what he said. I'll leave it to anybody to agree or disagree. My personal opinion is, I understand what he's trying to say. I think he said it in a pretty stupid way.

Like it's a little too aggressive. And using the word peeps when you're talking about these things is also like if I I agree with the sentiment here. But I think that if it were a hot button issue, I wouldn't use slang. Yeah. You can't be like to the homies that had to use the pro. Yeah. I guess internally, maybe they must just always use that like, you know, like Facebook had like whatever like. Now has like metamates or whatever like.

Dude, it's kind of like a metamate to use a pronoun. unmetamate. There's two words that I hate using in a serious, like, argument or discussion. Like, if I'm talking to Sarah, my wife or, like, someone else about, like, look, like, you know, they said this in their tweets. Like, if it's ever, like, the word tweets in an argument, like, well, I tweeted. Did you see the tweet? Did you see their tweets? You know what I mean?

Like, I don't. Well, he tweeted it. Like, I don't want to use that word or text. That word. Text. Yeah. Like, when I'm having a serious conversation, I want to talk about something. and I got to use, well, he tweeted that. You see his tweets?

Yeah, because it's too much like I tuned at him. And it's like, yeah, it doesn't sound. I'm not a fan. But, yeah, I'm going to add peeps to that list. So, yeah, R-I-P, Ben. I like Ben. I don't know him. I'm acting like I do.

I've cold emailed him a ton of times and he's never replied to me. But so we kind of know each other. So, and. It seems like, so karma. Yeah. I guess he's just one of those peeps. Yeah.

He doesn't reply to my emails. You can take what happens to those peeps. Yeah. He's, him in a six billion can go off and be unhappy by themselves. But, you know, whatever. I like Ben Chesma. Chesna, I love MailChimp. I think it's a great company.

Yeah, me too. I think Mailchip is a cool, really cool success story. This data is wrong every freaking time. Have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform where everything is fully integrated. Whoa, I can see the client's whole history. Call, support tickets, emails. And here's a task from three days ago I totally missed.

Love spot, grow better. Do you want to talk about Nikita? Yeah, we kind of did, but it seemed like you wanted to do it more justice. I know, but we glossed it over, I think. So at the end of a podcast, a few days ago, the Sean Story one, we talked about this guy Nikita Beer, who you and I are both friends with. But we talked about it at the end of like an hour session. And I realized this is actually really amazing and deserves a significant.

more time. And so I'll kind of give, yeah, so Nikita Beer, he's our good friend. We're in a group text message with him. That's actually how I got to know him. And everything I'm going to explain, most everything is public information. So this is like through articles and his Twitter feed. So I'm not going to say anything that is confidential. But basically he started an app called TBH. So he went to school in Berkeley, California, started an app called TBH, which was basically some type of like viral high school app that like you could answer questions about your peers, something like that. It wasn't incredibly significant of an app, but it went viral and got millions of users very quickly after him spending over two years trying to create viral apps. And so we kind of felt like he kind of

honed in on what works and more importantly, what doesn't work. Facebook eventually buys the app for tens of millions of dollars. Originally, it was said to be like a hundred million. I think in a recent article, they're like, it was actually like 40 million, which is still a great outcome. And that was about five years ago. And so Nikita said something in the group message, which he said, does, I think it'd be an interesting idea to ask myself or to figure out how can I build. Not even that. You're making it too soft. I remember exactly how he said it. It's like, oh, so what are you doing? What are you up doing? What are you up to nowadays? Oh, Sam, you sold the hustle. What are you doing? Sean, you sold people. What are you doing? Nikito, you're sitting at Facebook.

What are you doing? And he's basically, he just said it straight, straight up. He goes, I'm just thinking about how I can make $10 million in three months. Like, I never were like, what? And he's like, yeah, I want to make an app that generate It's like $10 million in 90 days. And we talked about that. Like, that's just crazy. That's outlandish. We brought it up on this podcast,

but it was a really interesting, we just thought of it as an interesting thought exercise. Like, oh, that's actually a really, backwards from that dream. Okay, if that's, is that possible? Yeah, it is possible. I guess it is possible.

So then, all right, I'm a smart guy. Let me find out, find out a way I would do it. It is obviously very challenging. And so I guess he must have had, I actually don't know if this is true or not, But I imagine when you sell a company to Facebook, you have some type of non-compete. Well, typically non-competes are anywhere from two to five years. The other day, a few months ago, it was the end of the five-year period since selling TBH.

And so I imagine that was the period where he was like, great, I can do that. And so he launches this app about three months ago where basically you let you. It's the same app as TBH. So what was TBH? TBAH was a anonymous polling app or compliments app. So I don't know if you remember like in high school, they would always pass this thing around at the end of the year, the superlatives test.

And it would be like, who is most likely to become a famous, you know, famous in Hollywood. Oh, this person in our school. Who is most likely to, you know,

end up with 10 kids or whatever, right? You just come up with these like future looking things. Who's the best, who's got the best smile? This person wins best smile. And so TBH was that because it was playing on this thing, which is people are very interested in themselves and the people around them. And so you're like, all right, if I, I'll go through and I'll answer this quiz.

And it was using like, so that sounds very simple. Under the hood, it's got to be pretty smart, right? Because it's got to surface in your contacts. It's got to surface the right four or five names that you actually know. Who do you actually know so you could pick, you know, your friends? And then it would send them a text message and saying, hey, Sam, somebody. said that you have you have the best smile in your school download the app to find out who said it and you're like 100 percent you're going to go find out who said i have the best smile or who said

i'm most likely this who said they have the biggest crush on me and so you know that taps into like something pretty deep in a teenager and so that's what tbh was got acquired um and by the way that same idea had been done many many times our buddy sully who was the first episode of the podcast he had built that same superlatives idea as a facebook app when the facebook app when the facebook app platform launched back in like 2007 or something like that. And it also went viral. Also went crazy viral. Like this is just an idea that goes viral. And you could switch, he did it on the Facebook app platform. Nikita did it on the mobile platform where you would send SMS, you know, invites based off of this. And so it's the same, that was what he did then.

It got acquired. It pretty much immediately got shut down. There wasn't really much retention in it. And so it was like, oh, that's a cool idea. It gets people engaged. It goes viral for a short period of time, but there's no engagement. All right. So there's no long term retention. It gave him this like this persona of like I am a I'm a wonderkin like I know how to make things go viral because A, it is partially true and B, Nikita kind of has this like aura about him that who knows if it's on purpose or not on purpose where he like is mysterious and like somewhat silent and only make sarcastic jokes and everything comes easy to him. Like that's like his like cool kid demeanor. Yeah, yeah. He definitely definitely tries to be a cool kid. All right. So then it's a app you open up. It says, who do you have a crush on? Who's got the best smile? Who's most likely to be whatever? Who would you trust to bail you out of jail? And you answer and they're all supposed to be, you know, sort of like more positive-ish questions. It's not like mean. It's not supposed to be bullying. And again, starts to go viral. And so we sat there in this group chat as it was happening. So describe kind of how it played out from your perspective. He says things like, all right, now we're adding a thousand people an hour.

And I kind of brush that off because, like, I'm thinking maybe these are just bots. Like, this isn't actually serious. Well, there's one little difference. He launches it. And we're like, cool, man. How do we download the app? He's like, you have to, it's geo fence to these three high schools in Georgia. And we're like, and we're like, hey.

And then he would post like a, like, you know, he'd be like post his graph. It's like, it's going viral. But it's got like 200 people. We're like, oh, only 200. He's like, there's only like 2,000 people in the school. This is going to take a whole school, like right away. But he uses like academic. language. Like it has a K factor of blank, but we're seeing that user retention stagnates at this

thing. The turn happens at 3%. Like it was incredibly. The density coefficient is blah, blah, blah. We're like, whoa, okay. That's cool. And then, and then he goes, then he's supposed to chart and we're like, oh, sick. Like, I don't, like, how come I don't see it? When I go to my app store chart, like, you know, social free apps, he's like, we put it in the games category under puzzles. He's like, he's like, that way, we're going to like stay away from competition until we flip the switch. And we're like, whoa, like, damn, this guy is like, this is like, If you had a Game of Thrones and they're talking about, like, you know, how to invade King's Landing. It's like these guys standing at this giant table moving these chess pieces around, like talking about conquering.

That's him. But the chess pieces are like high schools. And he's moving. Yeah, it was like, it's like James Bond villain of high school, you know, quizzes, if that's such a thing. And by the way, there's one key twist to the whole thing. It's TBAH again, but he's like, this time. We're not trying to be the next Snapchat. We don't care about their attention.

We're just going to put an app purchase that says, pay to see who voted for you. And he's like, they're going to pay. And we're like, well, I get, well, will they pay? They're going to pay. And it's like, the thing is a freaking $699 weekly subscription. So this is basically $28 a month. This is double the price of Netflix to see who voted for you. And he's like, yep.

So if we're converting, you know, whatever, 4% of people and we take over this state, Georgia, Georgia has this many high schools. High school has this many students. And yeah, $1.8 million a month. Okay, good. Yeah, let's go. That's basically my reenactment of how they're thinking about this. And at this, with TBH, he had raised a little bit of money. He had raised money from Founders Fund and Greylock.

And like the, when you do that, it says, you know, I've got to build the next Snapchat. This way, with this new company, he just basically says, dude, I'm self-funded. I've got four engineers living in my LA house right now. We're just trying to like make it big, make it fast. And what do they say on South Park? Like scale up. No, start up, get big, cash out, bro down. You know, like that's exactly what you're trying to do.

He's trying to just get in, get the bag, get out, and just maybe rip. Tattoo idea for you. Yeah, not. And so anyway, about 10 days after, it launches. I'm just making these numbers up, but it's around a week, maybe two weeks. He starts saying like, oh, man, people are starting to spread these rumors that this app is being used for human trafficking. And we laughed that off and he goes, so I changed it to. No, he was like, he's like, yeah, it's like annoying as like as hell. Like we're getting a bunch of

deletia. Like, oh, it's going to die. And we were like, what? The thing that, like, you called your shot, you're like, I'm going to build an app that goes viral. It's going to make $10 million in like 90 days. And that's a ludicrous thing to say. You spend like two years plotting. He went through a bunch of different ideas to think about what it could be. Decides, you know what? It's TBH with a paywall. Launch it like spends, you know, has these like seven engineers living in his living room.

You know, the place smells like, you know, ramen and old spice. And he's like, all right, we build the app after a few months. We launched this thing in these pockets of Georgia. It goes viral. But then this hoax, you know, this hoax starts saying this is for, I don't even know what the sex trafficking, human sex trafficking, which I didn't even understand, but I didn't even understand, but he basically says, like,

YouTube's going to, like, deprioritize this algorithm, like, and we're out of the algorithm now, like, because I said that out loud. And he says that, he's like, well, it's actually, it's just like a couple of reviews, but I have a feeling that these couple of reviews are going to, like, spread. Someone already made a video on TikTok. This is just how things work. And so I'm like, it's whatever.

Like, I don't understand that entirely. That sounds like you're just being, like, neurotic, but sounds good. So he changes the name to crush, right? Yeah, so app starts getting deleted. It gets taken down in the app store. Apple takes it down or something like that. He's like, oh, we're going to petition, blah, blah. We're going to re-upload as Crush.

And he sends us, hey, guys, like new brand. And it looks exactly like, exactly like crush the soda. Like the grape flavor like soda. He sends it in the text. And I got so thirsty like the Pavlovian dog response. I saw that. And I was like, I need orange soda on my tongue right now. And I hadn't had orange soda in like a decade.

And I saw that thing and I was like, I need that. Relaunches again in like, you know, Alabama this time. He's like, okay, we're going south. And they attack Alabama with their four high school launch strategy. They do, they have this like thing set to a T. And by the way, like he had he had wrote a memo inside Facebook once about how TBH was launching high schools effectively. He's like, we created basically, his theory is basically for a social app, the most valuable thing you can have is, is a reliable way to test your app.

So can you get this into a small network, like a high school where most people know each other or know of each other of a thousand people quickly? Because if you could do that, you could test it in one high school, see what the data says, and then you could tweak the app, launch in another high school, do it again.

He's like, that reliable, like, Petri dish to test in is the most valuable thing. So they had come up with this strategy, which was, this memo got leaked when he was at Facebook, which was like, they would create instant,

Instagram accounts like, you know, crush, you know, archipelago high. You know, and it's like they take the high school name and they take the brand name of the thing and they would make the account private. And they would go follow every kid who had like, you know, class of whatever, 20, 22 in that high school. They would follow all of them. So then the kid would see, who followed me? It has my high school name in it. They click it.

It's private. To find, to see the profile, you've got to follow back. So they would request to follow. So a whole bunch of people requested to follow. He's like, but we would not accept anyone. And it's like, this is like the, you know, the dentist system on all of a study. He's like, you know, first we demonstrate value, then we take it away. And he's like, then at 4 p.m. on the day before launch, which, the day of the launch,

when everybody gets out of school, you know, we have a guy in a truck watching people leave the school as soon as they do. We accept requests. We accept everybody's request. Everybody gets a notification at the same time. And then they go to it. The bio basically says, download the app, see who likes you. You download the app.

And then he's like, we would instantly go viral in high school. So he had this like launch strategy, which was, I thought, pretty great, pretty tactical. So he's doing that again now with Crush. Crush going to go, it's going to launch like that. And it starts to work. And we're like, wow, dude, you did it again. Like the first one wasn't a fluke. You did it again.

All of a sudden, like, it totally attracted to a different demographic because of this like stupid orange soda logo and the name crush. And so he's like, oh, God, you know, cut. All right, let's move the scene around. Change the name again. And it comes back for Act 3. And this time, it's called Gas. And by the way, this whole, so he'd been working on this for many months, maybe more than a year, I don't know.

But this whole thing that we're describing takes place over two to three weeks. And it gets to the point where he starts making up phrases. Like, we are acquiring new users at this rate per hour. You know, a lot of times we talk about saying like ARR, annual recurring revenue. And what a lot of companies will do is they'll take their monthly run rate and multiply that by 12 to say, this is what they're doing. He was basically doing that at a per hour basis. So he's like, oh, we're, you know, we're acquiring a thousand users per hour, which means our, uh, our rate of like

new users is like 365 million, whatever. And yeah, he's like, he's like, if you look dawn day over day, it's like, dude, you're just measuring the period of like the sunrise day over day. What's your numbers are? That's insane. And so gas starts like taking off similar to, the original one, but this time, even more. And in a matter of like seven days, I believe, he starts tweeting out the results and letting us know. And basically, within like seven days, give or take, five days, I don't know exactly. It was doing a million daily, it had a million daily users, was adding 30,000 new users an hour. Users were answering 3.2 million polls per hour. In a brown like 10 days, I believe he's hit a million dollars in.

sales and are also around 10 days in, it was number one in the app store. And he had been telling us it's going to be number one in the next handful of days. It's going to be number one. And he totally called it. And we're talking number one like above TikTok, above Instagram, above Facebook. Yeah, totally. This is all true. And he says he tweets out. He goes, ladies and gentlemen, after a five-year hiatus, I'm no longer a one-hit wonder. Introducing guests, the number one app in the app store. And this is when it turns to a point where it's incredibly hard for us to compliment him and to root for him. Because clearly this guy has a chip on his shoulder.

Clearly, for the last five years, he was mad that he sold too soon or didn't become like huge or didn't become wealthier or didn't become whatever his target was. But he fell short, it felt like. And now he's proving that he is the man. Because here's what's what, here's what starts happening. And he gets hilariously cocky about it, which I love. I love. I love. It makes me like him even more, but I love.

And so like, here's an example. A really popular VC tweets out, his name's Josh Shelman. Momentum growth is a powerful feeling. And it could also go away really quickly. I have been surprised how many things with seemingly unstoppable momentum have slow crawl this past year. Zooming out, growth without deep duration. adoption and habits doesn't count. And Nikita replies, just at me.

And so basically, he just starts going around anyone online on Twitter, who's a big shot, who starts talking about high growth stuff, Nikita just pops out and it said, what are you talking about me? And it's hilarious. It is so funny. And so, around this time, though, the rumors start happening again about human trafficking. And he starts tweeting and sharing the craziest stuff. And this gets so big that Ashton Coucher is retweeting who Ashton Coucher, I didn't entirely know this, but like his whole like philanthropy thing is human trafficking.

And so these rumors of human trafficking start happening again. And Ashton Coucher retweets Nikita and says something like, Nikita says us a screenshot. It's Ashton Coocher DMing him. And he's like he's just screenshot against these like big shot people that are just DMing him like wink face. Instead of even saying hi, they're just like, it's like, is this how this guy. like slides into DMs. That's interesting. That wasn't Ashton Kutcher, but like, but Ashton also retweeted it.

I'd love to meet you. I'd love to help, you know, this thing is a hoax. Because basically what Nikita is saying is like, the thing is taking off like you wouldn't believe that, you know, it's going viral. The K factor is two. And when the K factors too, what that means is for every person who joins, you know, virally, they invite two more, right? So it's like, you know, you thought COVID spread fast.

Watch how fast the gas app is going to spread. It's got an incredibly high viral coefficient. That just basically means for free, it's going to take over whatever demographic it is until that coefficient starts to go down because either it's saturated or hits a new market where it's less viral. And so it's going viral. Ashtocher is like, I'll help you try to fight these hoax rumors because on TikTok, on Snapchat, you just see story after story of somebody saying, guys, delete this gas app. It's suss as hell. I downloaded it and a white van started following me around my neighborhood. And people are like, oh my God, oh my God, share to keep our school safe.

And it's like girls like girls do not download gas app. Like you ever seen the show you on Netflix? Say no more. And it's like people are just spreading this thing. And so it's like what the hell? Like where is this coming from? And he doesn't know. And he's like, it's got to be a competitor.

And we're like, okay. What like what kind of competitive? I mean, you've just launched like two weeks or how are they doing? this coordinated like social like sciops attack on you and your user base. And he's like, then he's like, we've located the source of the hoax or it originated in China. Well, here's what he says. Here's what he says. This is the most official tweet ever.

It's so funny. He goes, after an investigation, our team found several indications that the gas app, that the gas app human trafficking hoax was planted by an entity or person originating in China. Our data shows users connecting from China when the app first began growing and the fake review, the first fake review were posted that same day. And so basically he's accusing something or someone in China who starts spreading. He's accusing just the country. Yeah. And so this is just taken off from I want to make $10 million.

I want to get in and get out to China is trying to actively bring me down. He just tweeted out, dude. I am calling for a total and complete ban. of Chinese goods entering the United I'm just joking. But I told him, I was like, dude, you need to go lean in way more because what he's doing in his PR push.

He's like the hoax, a false hoax is being spread about gas app, human trafficking, blah, blah, blah. And I'm like, bro, you need to go full Trump. You need to be like China. The China virus is trying to take down this American success gas,

gas app, you know, TikTok is not only stealing your data, they're trying to take us down because we are the number one app for teens. China is doing this. This is anti-China. I was like, you should be leaning in way more to this. I was like, I don't know if this is true, not true, but like, this is your only hope is to get this. Like, you should stop saying your app's name with the words, you know, human trafficking. And you should start saying, you know, why is China trying to, you know, spread fake news about this? That is, that is my, my official recommendation to you. And it's totally working. And so this entire story that we just spent 30 minutes on, this entire story, we're talking like 20 days.

And this is the roller coaster that we've been in. And he would say the, he's on Fox News yesterday. Did you see that? Yes, but that's my point. He says these things in this group chat. And when it's on your phone, when it's just on this small thing, you think this is just limited to us six guys in this thing. This is just no big deal. But then you turn on Fox Business News and our Fox News business business.

and he's on there. You go to Wall Street Journal and he's on there. You go to Business Insider, Bloomberg, all these places. And it's real. I go to TikTok and I open up and there's a video about this app. And basically, as much as I don't like saying this because I like Nikita, but he is so smug. He has 100% called his shot and he hit it. He nailed it.

This is one of the most epic stories that I've seen behind the scenes in real time in a very long time. It's been quite amazing to watch this entire thing play out in just 20 days. Yeah, he's smug as hell, but I, you know, the same reason I find Connor McGregor very entertaining in the UFC, right? This cocky guy who tries to call his shots and then tries to pull it off. Like, I'm thoroughly entertained and I'm here for the entertainment. And like, you know, good for him.

Made it happen. This matters to him. He got really pumped about this and he made it happen. And it's like, I feel like, you know, you know, Bain, when he's like, like, you know, he sees other people, like, you know, I felt like Nikita for like four years would see other people try to build social apps and he would just like shit on them or he would be like, you know, or people building apps would be like, you know, if your app doesn't let you, you know, flirt with somebody, it's never going to work, you know, like, or it'd be like,

unless you built the number one app in the app store, like, you know, don't talk to me type of attitude. And, and I find it, you know, pretty awesome that like, you know, like, Bain when he's like, oh, you know, you know, whatever the line is where he's like, you know, you, you trained in the dark. I was born in the dark. Like that's him with these like teen viral apps. He's like, you know, oh, you're trying to make a social app. I was born to make social apps. And like, the fact that he just relaunched the same app is hilarious to be in so many ways.

He probably had just like a countdown timer to like when the non-compete ends. No, it wasn't even that because I talked to him in between and he was considering. all these like other ideas you consider this one real estate idea is considered this other idea and then it was just like like you know it's sort of like harry potter the wand chooses the wizard it's like it's just pulling me back in just what i think about i got to go do this af again like are you fuckers really going to let me just do this again he did it again yeah this is pretty amazing it also goes to show that it shows a few things it kind of breaks a lot of narratives which i actually like, which is a, like, you don't really need like a mission, you know, all the time.

Like, and, and I think that like with us, he's like, you don't need a noble mission. The mission can be a normal mission. You don't need a normal mission. 10 million dollars to three months. That's a great mission. And I do actually think that maybe there is something we're like, oh, it makes teens feel good or whatever. Maybe that's like there.

But like, I think what's there really above all else is get big fast because that's exciting and just like play the puzzle. It's just a puzzle. And I think that that's like kind of the dominating factor behind what's driving him. And I think that that's interesting. The funny thing, he goes on Fox News and he's like doing the interview. You know, they have the person talking and then the background. They're showing screenshots of the app.

And so he's saying, he's like, well, the thing we wanted to do was bring positivity to teens. You know, teens feel really bad from whatever like, you know, Instagram. We want positivity to our fake account. You know, it's anonymous, but there's no bullying. There's no, there's no like sort of negativity. And the screenshot is a poll question that says, want to steal them from their boyfriend? He's like, who'd be able to steal from the phone? He's like, you know, we just want to, he's like, I get messages every day from teens saying, you know, I was going to do something bad to myself.

But this app came out and now, you know, I'm running around in a field full of flowers. And it's like, it was just hilarious. The whole thing is like straight Silicon Valley HBO show. Like, it's so funny to me. It is so funny. And it's so exciting. Another thing is that basically when you're building these apps, like the really good folks are just, like maniacal about these little small numbers

and just tweaking them and just just being obsessed with these little small things when most people are carried about or worrying about design or branding or the logo or just these things that don't matter it's like dude all I care about is making this K factor like more than one and so and when it's not when it's 0.99

it's we're screwed we got to totally redo this and I just thought that it's a really interesting story. And this has been like a roller coaster and one of the coolest things that's happened in a long time. I just love following along this. Yeah, props to him. Great, great job. Thank you for the, thank you for the entertainment. All right, do you want to do any more or should we save it for the next? I thought you had one more. I do have one more, but we should save that one. It sounds too interesting. Okay, let's save it. Same for the next one. That's it. We're out of here.