The Pomp Podcast - #664 How To Make An Extra $1k This Weekend w/ Sam Parr

Episode Date: September 17, 2021

Sam Parr is the Founder and CEO of The Hustle, a new age media company that uses email to deliver information to young people. He is also the co-host of a great podcast, My First Million.    In this conversation, we discuss bitcoin, asset allocation, portfolio construction, companies to go work at, how to make an extra $1k this weekend, and the best internet businesses.  ======================= AppSumo is the leading digital marketplace for entrepreneurs, and a great way to get your product in front of 1M+ entrepreneurs, founders, and small businesses. AppSumo is giving away their entire $1 million Black Friday marketing budget to creators. If you have an ebook, online course, template, or any other digital product — this is for you. List your product on AppSumo between September 15th - November 17th and the first 400 offers to go live will receive $1,000, the next 2,000 to list a product and go live get $250. And everyone who lists gets entered to be one of 10 lucky winners of $10k! Go to AppSumo.com/pomp to list your product today and cash in on this amazing deal.  ======================= With 10M+ users, Crypto.com is the easiest place to buy, and sell 100+ cryptocurrencies. The Crypto.com Visa Card gives you up to 8% back instantly, and 100% back on Spotify and Netflix. Also, Crypto.com lets you earn up to 8.5% p.a. on BTC, and 14% p.a. on stablecoins. Get $25 when you download the Crypto.com App with code "pomp". Download the App now: http://www.crypto.com  ======================= Polymarket is the world’s leading information markets platform where you can trade on the most pressing global questions and see unbiased, real-time data on what the market thinks will happen – all on the blockchain. For a limited time, sign up with referral code “Pomp” to get your first trade reimbursed up to $100. Click on the link to get started: polymarket.co/pomppod

What's up, everyone? This is Anthony Pompliano. Most of you know me as Pomp. You're listening to the Pomp Podcast, simply the best podcast out there. Now let's kick this thing off. Sam Parr is the founder and CEO of The Hustle, a new age media company that uses email to deliver information to young people. He's also the co-host of a great podcast, My First Million. Highly suggest you go listen to it. In this conversation, we discuss Bitcoin, asset allocation, portfolio construction, companies to go work at, how to make an extra thousand dollars this weekend and the best internet businesses. My brothers and I really enjoyed this conversation with Sam and we hope you do as well. Before we get into this episode

though, we want to quickly talk about our sponsors. First up is AppSumo. AppSumo is the leading digital marketplace for entrepreneurs and a great way to get your product in front of one plus million entrepreneurs, founders, and small businesses. AppSumo is giving away their entire one million dollar Black Friday marketing budget to creators. If you have an ebook, an online course, a template, or any other digital product, this is for you. You can list your product on AppSumo between September 15th and November 17th, and the first 400 offers to go live will receive $1,000. The next 2,000 to list a product and go live get $250, and everyone who lists gets entered to be one of 10 lucky winners of 10K. Go to AppSumo.com to list your product today and cash in on this

amazing deal. Again, AppSumo.com. You can click on the link in the description as well. app sumo.com slash pomp if you are a creator or an entrepreneur if you get an ebook an online course a template or any other digital product app sumos for you go check it out and let me know what you think next up is crypto.com they're helping to mainstream the crypto industry signing major global partnerships with multiple sports including siri a the italian football league you the ufc the united fighting championship or the ultimate fighting championship excuse me And my personal favorite, Formula One. With over 10 million users around the world, Crypto.com offers an easy way to buy and sell more than 100 cryptocurrencies.

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Again, $25 when you download the Crypto.com app today and use code POMP. Last but not least is Polymarket, one of the cool new companies I'm really excited about. PolyMarket is the world's leading information markets platform where you can trade on the most pressing global questions, all on the blockchain. You can choose from a variety of markets. What will the cheapest crypto punk trade for? Will the US have more than 200,000 daily COVID cases before 2022? Will Britney be free from her conservatorship? With over $140 million traded on the platform, PolyMarket is where you can settle the biggest debates of the day. Do you think you know more than the market? Trade on your beliefs and earn a return if you're right.

do you want tomorrow's news today use polymarket to see real-time data on what the market thinks will happen no fake news no pundits without skin in the game so head over to polymarket.com and make an account today for a limited time sign up with the referral code pomp to get your first trade reimbursed up to 100 bucks go to the description and click on the link for more info polymarket.co slash pomp pod again polymarket.co slash pomp pod go check them out let me know what you think all right let's get this episode with sam i hope you guys enjoy this one anthony pompliano runs pomp investments all views of him and the guests on his podcast are solely their opinions and do not reflect the opinions of pomp investments you should not treat any opinion

expressed by pomp or his guests as a specific inducement to make a particular investment or follow a particular strategy but only as an expression of his personal opinion this podcast is for informational purposes only all right let's start let maybe let's start with uh bitcoin first What are your current thoughts on Bitcoin and cryptocurrencies? What are you doing? So I told you my Ross Albright story, right? You did. He went to a party and Ross was there. Yeah. So I met Ross years and years ago and he was my neighbor. He lived near me. And when he got arrested, I told my friend and my friend, his name was Billy Draper and Billy's dad is

Tim Draper. And Billy was like, yeah, like Bitcoin, it seems really cool. My dad says it's going to be great. And I was like, oh, well, if your dad says it's going to be great, he seems like a smart guy. So I bought some back then. And so that was my only Bitcoin purchase back then. And then I own, for me, a fairly large stake in Ethereum and I don't do anything. I just let it sit. Yeah. So you have Bitcoin and Ether and pretty much that's it. That's it. Okay. And then I don't even log in. And then I know this, so I'm giving you a softball, but how do you think about investing in crypto versus investing in other assets? Yeah. So I consider it to be highly volatile. So I put a relative like single digit percentage of my net worth in there. And then

most everything else I put into an ETF and I don't look at it and I don't touch it and I don't do anything. I'm such a boring investor. So I allocate some high risk money to it, to crypto. And then the rest I put in the most boring index funds ever, which crypto nerds, they like laugh at me. And I'm like, I don't know, man, I don't, I don't stress. It makes me good money. I'm happy. That's a, that's the whole point of life, man. All right. Let's talk first. Maybe, um, I know that you've got a whole list of companies that you think are kind of like rocket ship companies that could have really high upside for people to go join. Maybe walk us through first, when you think about these types of companies, what is the framework I use to evaluate whether it's something

that would go on the list or not go on the list? All right. So listen, so my wife, about five years ago, when she wanted a job, we thought, where can she work that has a very high salary, high perks, not cushy, but like not like a 30 person or a 10 person startup where you're grinding your butt off and you have zero resources. We thought, what company can she work at then that is very competitive and also has the possibility to maybe 10 X in equity. And so we made a list and then we went and I helped her apply and, and she ended up getting a job at Airbnb. And I don't remember what their valuation was five years ago, but I think it was like 20 billion. Now it's, uh, uh, what's it? 90, 90 billion. Yeah. It's much higher. And so if you do the math, let's say that you're

given $250,000 in stock or $400,000 in stock, something like that, and you divide that up by four years, you can make millions of dollars that way. And so this is like the strategy that we've kind of like, or I've helped her kind of live by. And so I made a list of companies that I think you can work at now that are pretty safe. You're not going to grind. You're going to get great health benefits, great other types of perks and benefits. You can make a lot of money in salary, you know, like a Facebook style, Google style salary. And also if you own some of their stock, that could potentially make you millions. And so we call it Sarah's list. And so I've got, I've got, I've got a few of them. All right. What's the first one?

And I bet you've got a few of them too, by the way. All right. The first one. All right. We'll start with something easy. The first one, Zapier, you know, Zapier. Yep. Do you like automation type stuff? Yeah. I'm, I'm so bullish on Zapier. So Zapier is a 350 person company. They're are completely remote. They've been remote. They raised only $1.3 million. And with that $1.3 million, they got close to $80 million in ARR, which is pretty phenomenal. The founder, his name is Wade Foster. I've met him. He's amazing. What they do is basically the simplest way, the way that you describe them is kind of complicated, but they connect API. So a very simple format is I had a scale that was a smart scale. I stepped on it. I weighed myself. That

smart scale was connected through Zapier. Zapier then put it in a Google Sheet where I could track my weight. And then also it emailed out all my friends, all my weight was. So it shamed me into being skinny. So that's like the simplified version. Now imagine that I'm, uh, your business using that on steroids. So like pop, every time you get an email about that, use the word, um, use a sub certain word. It's categorizes that email into Google sheets in a certain way. And you can, but you can do that with thousands of different, uh, software. So it's pretty amazing. And when you think about a company like that, if you were to say, okay, Hey, this might be one that I want to go work out. How do you think about cash versus equity compensation? Is it something

where you want all cash or is it something where you want all equity or some balance? I, so I would want it, I would want a competitive salary and I would want a lot of equity. And I think you could push for both at a lot of these companies. I mean, look, I think you can get, I think a lot of these companies you can get like for a 28, 29, you know, so you're five years out of, out of school, five years, six year experience. I think this is a place where you can make 200, $250,000 a year and also get 150, $200,000 a year in stock. So that's a total comp package of $500,000.

I think that's very possible. And then my bet personally is what I'd be trying to do is if I'm getting $200,000 of stock, I sit there for four years, that's at 800,000. I'd want my 800,000 to turn into two, three, 4 million. Got it. What's the next one? All right. Next one. All right. This one's a little controversial because the founder is a little different. All right. Have you heard of Andro? Andro. Yeah. Palmer Luckey and what, Trace Stevens, I think, right? Yeah. So Palmer Luckey, he started Oculus when he was like 18 or something, sold it when he was 21 to Facebook for over a billion dollars.

He's controversial, not really that big of a deal, but he's a big Trump supporter and he claims he got fired from Facebook for being a Trump supporter. So most of Silicon Valley is left to center. So for that reason, it's a little controversial, which in my opinion, actually makes it better because there's probably less applicants. So your chances of getting to work there are actually higher. And so what they do is basically when the have you ever seen the movie War Dogs? Yes. Great. So it's awesome. Right. So when the government needs something, they put out a bid and people bid and then they make whatever it is. They get the bid and then they make it make whatever it is that they put the bid on.

Andrel uses data and a bunch of other stuff to kind of guess what they think the government will need. And they just go ahead and build it. And then the government hopefully buys it from them. That's kind of their business model. The first thing they did was they made they use drones to create a wall between the Mexico and America border. And they're doing a bunch of other weird stuff like that. So they have like towers that they can make that can help track people. So kind of like not for everyone, but they raised money at a four point six billion dollar valuation. I think this company could easily be worth 50 billion dollars or more. Oh, I completely agree. This to me is one of those companies where there's definitely a bunch of people in the tech industry who they don't like the defense department. They don't like the government. They feel like they shouldn't work with it. They don't want to take government contracts, whatever. But then their government needs help. Right. And I actually think that having technologists and people who are competent and experienced building this technology is probably better than letting the legacy defense contractors do it. Um, and so this company in 50 billion, I think is, uh, you know, I don't want to say a layup,

but, uh, but probably conservative. If this, that's my point. Yeah. If this company ends up being successful, it'll probably be worth hundreds of billions of dollars over time, just because they'll start, it's kind of like SpaceX, right? They literally start to almost get a stranglehold on government contracting in a specific sector. Whereas now like who competes with SpaceX for, uh, some of these, uh, contracts, it's really not that many people. Yeah. Maybe like a blue origin pops up every now and then, or maybe a virgin or something. Uh, there's a couple of other companies who kind of sort of, uh, try to compete, but it's the beauty of government contracting is if you do something really, really well, and it's a big market, then you're the only

one who does it. Like they got to work with you. Yeah. So I'm bullish on this company and they've raised money at $4.6 billion. That sounds like a lot. That's a fucking steal. This is going to be worth way more than that. I think that if you've got a million dollars of equity broken down over four years at this company. So 250 a year or 200 a year, I think that definitely can be worth 10 times that can be worth up to $10 million. Yeah. I think this is a great company to work at, but it's not for everyone. I, uh, I like this one way better than the Zapier one, only because I think that this has like such significant upside. So I completely agree with you on this one. All right. What's the next one? Do you know what Adobe is? Of course you do. Yeah. So Adobe, do you realize

that adobe is like the 30th largest company in the world no and that's crazy right 315 billion dollar market cap massive massive company well you probably know what these guys are have you heard of figma everyone probably has heard yeah like the design software okay so this one's a little bit weird but all right so figma is basically photoshop online it's basically photoshop plus google docs uh they've raised a lot of money 10 billion dollars um and so it's very simple to explain. It's just Photoshop online and collaborative. So you can like see people's cursor moving. They raise money at a $10 billion valuation, but Adobe freaking huge. It's so big. They make so much money from Photoshop and from the creative suite. I think Figma absolutely can

10X. I know that sounds crazy is that a $10 billion company can be a hundred billion dollar company. That's a little nuts, but Adobe is so, so big. The market for this is so large. I'm pretty bullish on Figma. How much of what Figma is doing is just, Hey, we have the same functionality in like a slicker interface versus there's like true technology improvement. I don't know. I'm like, I'm like a Neanderthal. So when I use it, like I could do some drag and drop. I mean, I use PowerPoint for Photoshop stuff. So, but I do think that it's quite good. Um, I, I would say in my opinion, it seems like it's a similar thing as Photoshop, but online. Got it. Okay. Next one. All right. Let's do another one. All right. This one's kind of a boring one, but still pretty safe. I think this one could be worth 10x what it is now. Have you heard of Rippling?

Rippling. Yeah. This is, what is it, Parker Conrad. And he's doing like the small business software. Yeah. So this guy named Parker Conrad, he started this company, Zenefits. At the time when Zenefits came out, it was the fastest growing startup ever, I believe. The fastest growing by revenue. and he got in trouble because basically two things were happening. He created this bro culture and people were like having sex in the stairwells and like they got a lot of flack for that. And the second thing he did is if you want to sell, so basically his company was called Zenefits and it was an HR software and it allowed people to get benefits. So if you're a small business, if you're Pomp's show and you have five or 10 employees, you put them on this platform and it helps them pick their benefits and they can sort through which benefits and they categorize

it whatever well this guy in order to sell that and sell insurance you need your employees to become licensed insurance brokers and he basically created a program like a macro where they could just like click a bunch of buttons on the screen and it auto approved them as a as a broker because they like watch some presentations so we got fired for that i love that i love when people get fired for doing dumb stuff and they make up for it and so his new company is called rippling and so basically it's very boring but here's the thing everyone freaking needs this everyone every small business needs exactly what rippling's selling it does a few things that are amazing basically if you want health insurance you sign up and your employees can pick their health insurance they do

your payroll and they do like a little bit other uh small things like for example when you have a company with 30 people and everyone has a different laptop it tracks who has a laptop and you could turn it off when say quit or once you fire them just little simple shit valued at 1.3 billion dollars uh do you know what workday is workday is like the big dog in this space what's it 25 uh what are they valued at yeah uh let me see i think higher uh probably 50 uh let's see workday 66 billion wow and there's yeah and then there's paychecks they're a big payrolls provider i think they're at 50 so rippling at 1.3 it's way better than workday and i've used a lot of these things it's way better i think that this is a steal super boring so this would be perfect for a

salesperson. Do you think that, um, when you look at like evaluating a job opportunity or where you should go work, one of the frameworks, uh, that I heard somebody tell me once is, um, evaluate it like an investor would evaluate it because you're going to go make the biggest investment, which is your time. And so where do you, where would you put your dollars? Right. Cause you're about to go put your time there. So it's even bigger investment. Do you do the same thing in terms of, uh, thinking of like valuation and market cap and like what the future prospects of the business are or do you look for something else well i look for financial and emotional stuff so uh i i like look at who the leader is so zapier i met wade i think that they're he's badass and i

trust that he uh i like basically culture comes from the top down so the way the ceo or the founder acts is the way often how the rest of the company is going to act so i look at what the leader is like and so that andrew company um parker seems kind of like a brilliant shithead who's kind of funny and controversial and likes to poke at stuff. And so I imagine the culture is going to be like that. And frankly, I like that. I think that's fun. That's fun for me. Rippling is started by Parker Conrad. That's why I said I like someone who's made a mistake and is willing to make up for it. That shows that they have grit. So I'm super into that. So yeah, I look at what the founder's like. Somebody in the comments said that you're a

pink sheet sleeper. You got all the tips of the illiquid private companies that people should be looking at that's a great nickname pink sheet sleeper i mean that is an all-time nickname i'm sure a lot of different ways i'm sure that there's somebody on wall street who calls themselves the pink sheet sleeper and uh they're probably trying to sell uh pics online uh rather than actually be good at investing what's a what's pump angle soily what someone called me wait what is that the dude people are calling me all types of stuff uh that's awesome your audience is kind of crazy yeah uh just a little bit it's all right um all right let's talk about ideas to make a thousand bucks this weekend uh we what did we do i think we did it before at um uh we did it a

couple of weeks ago and i asked joe and i think it was only five hundred dollars and his first response was to go and be a caddy at the local golf uh course and you could easily pick up five hundred bucks if you caddied like Saturday, Sunday, if we would try to get to a thousand dollars, what ideas do you have? I, uh, this is such a hard question to ask. When you texted me this last night, I felt so much pressure. It's I felt pressure because I don't think it's that hard. Like you can do anything. So I used to own a hotdog stand and there'd be days where I would sell a thousand dollars of bottled water. It was, it was so easy. It was, you know, how much bottle water costs to wholesale, it's about 14 cents. And I would sell it for $3 and you can

crush it. So I used to sell a bottle of water. You used to take bottles that you bought of water for 14 cents and sell them for $3 and you make a thousand bucks in a day. When I had, I mean, I had a hot dog stand, so I was selling other stuff, but yeah. And describe the hot dog stand in terms of how you put it in business. I know you told me before, but tell us the story again about how you got the hot dog stand up and running and, and, uh, pulling in thousands a day. so I just I wanted to um I wanted to start a business and I didn't have a lot of money I had about five hundred dollars I was at a bar or somehow through a friend of a friend I met someone and they randomly said well I've got a hot dog stand like in storage and I was like bro let me

rent it from you I can't pay you up front but I can pay you at the end of the month if you're cool with that you kind of know me like look I don't have anything but so he goes yeah that's fine. And so then I went and, uh, you can get these licenses, uh, through the state of, uh, while I was in Tennessee through Nashville, I got these licenses. It's called an encroachment license. It says I'm allowed to be in sell stuff on the sidewalk. And there's all types of rules. Like you gotta be like five feet from the nearest restaurant door. You gotta be five feet from the curb. And I found this amazing spot. And I basically used his, um, use his cart, which I got for free. I got this encroachment license for $35. I had $500. I went to restaurant Depot the

day before i was supposed to sell stuff and i did test them some different like ingredients the day before or a few weeks before and i went to restaurant depot bought five hundred dollars with the stuff including bottled water vienna sausages and just like shitty buns because shitty buns taste the best and i just showed up and i had a a sign that says uh wieners as big as a baby's arm and and i worked from 11 a.m to 3 p.m and then i went to class from like four to like eight. And then at night I just wheeled it out by the bars and I just started collecting money. I mean, it was like so easy. Wieners as big as a baby's arm is an all time marketing slogan. How much did that play into selling thousands of dollars a day?

Yeah, it was badass. It was awesome. I mean, just think of that. Just think of that baby's arm. All right. So what would you do now for a thousand bucks this weekend? Let's say that you're a younger kid, you don't have a lot of money. What are some of the things that you would immediately think about to, to go do? So I, uh, like what's your best idea? All right. No brainer lay up thousand bucks this weekend. Here we go. Oh my God, Tom, is this what you do to people? Yeah, let's go. Hey, listen, there's a, listen, you just came on our show and said, Wiener's as big as a baby's arm. And people are now in the comments being like, man, I love this guy. So now you got to follow it up with some good ideas so they can go get money.

All right. Here's a great idea that most people aren't going to do because they're going to be afraid to do it, but I think you can kill it. All right. And I think you can build a much bigger business on top of this. I would do a couple of different things, but basically it's all centered around lead gen. So I would use Yelp and I would find a service that has a lot of liquidity so basically uh relatively low reviews and but lots of reviews and so that would be like well that's a service that a lot of people have um and that maybe people aren't exactly satisfied with it so in my head that would be like all right so there's a lot of like pent-up demand and angry people i could deal with that and i would go door to door and let's say it's um let's say it's house

painting or let's say this one this one's even better in austin where i i live most of the time there was a storm and everyone's plants got destroyed like all of our cactuses got destroyed I would knock door to door and I would try to, and I would spend all day doing it. How many doors do you think I could do in a day? Like, let's see, five minutes a door. I don't do public math, right? No, you probably, let's say it's 10. Let's say that you can knock on 10 doors per hour.

All right. 10 doors an hour. So then a hundred doors. I think I can get the leads, lead information. So I think I can get 20 people of a hundred. it. I think I can get, no, I didn't get 10 people who say, yes, I need my plants replaced. Yep. Yeah. I need them to be fixed. And I would track all their information, how many plants they have. And I would say, and I would be like the kindest person ever. I'd be like, oh, thank you. I'm going

to, I'm going to handle this. And then I would immediately go to Yelp in order to call the top 10 providers. And I would sell those people's information and their lead information to each person for $10 a piece. I think I can make a thousand dollars in one day doing that. And I know a guy who did this and eventually turned into a much larger company. It's very simple. It's called lead gen. Look, you're either selling your own shit or you're selling someone else's stuff. That's how the world works. And I just think I could sell other people's shit for a good amount of money and make $1,000 in a day. What do you think? I think it's absolutely possible. And I love the idea of basically getting the leads, not actually doing the work, because you're going to outsource it to somebody who's an expert who probably is going to do a better job than you are. And my guess is that once you have those leads, you can call them up for other services as well. And you almost become their like concierge for all kinds of things they need at their house. Right. So it's plants today, but all of a sudden they need their grass cut. And if you did a good job in terms of the plants, I'm assuming that you could slowly creep into other areas, but you already have the lead and you basically could just resell the lead to, uh, multiple times.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Of course you can sell the same lead multiple times. So I think that's what I would do. And I think I could do it. And I think I would crush it. Matter of fact, I might go do it now. Um, do you ever see what, uh, Gary Vee does with that garage sale flip? Dude, I do that sometimes you 100% could still do that.

by the way you just go to goodwill and you bring the ebay app and you scan shit and it tells you how much it recently sold for it that's like the it's so fun i've done that a ton of times that's great um and you can sell it on facebook marketplace and you don't have to put it on ebay facebook facebook marketplace is highly underrated john here uh put a motorcycle up for sale on facebook marketplace i'm gonna make him tell the story because it's all time but he ended up, I think, selling it on Facebook Marketplace, right? Yeah. Yeah. All right. Tell us the story of what happened first and then tell us how you sold it. Yeah, I was in New York City. I put a motorcycle up for sale. Someone responded with, hey, are you willing to trade? And I said, trade

for what? And he responded with just an absolutely terrible car, a lot of miles, all this stuff. So I said, my bike was listed for like thirty five hundred dollars. I said, yes, I have a motorcycle. It was a KTM Duke 390. So it was, uh, I said, yes, I will accept that trade. If you also throw in $3,500 of cash and he proceeded to call me a smart Alec and tell me my bike better not get stole. So the guy who wanted to trade them, he said, sure, I'll take your car. That isn't so great. Plus you got to give me 3,500 bucks. All right. But how did you end up selling it? You somebody else on yeah listed on facebook marketplace sold it uh facebook marketplace is super underrated yeah it's so underrated and if you have a pickup truck uh it's very underrated

uh because you can do like these arbitrages so if you live i lived in san francisco and i would buy stuff in napa uh which is like an hour away and i had a suv and you could buy a lot of big shit and just do an arbitrage where you bring it to san francisco and resell it i think you'd kill it also by the way if you wanted to make a thousand dollars just own a pickup truck and just move stuff for people i i we i've had to pay people so much money in austin just to move shit the other day i paid a guy five hundred dollars and he was just a kid with a power washer that he bought on amazon for two hundred dollars to power wash my driveway um and it was on uh what what's the app called uh task rabbit so i think if you i'm convinced power washing is one of those

like super you got to get the equipment obviously but you can even rent it you don't even have to buy it uh and it just takes time and nobody wants to do it but uh it's such a uh huge like inflection point for the way that the driveway looks or the house looks or whatever that people will get it done and you can charge really high rates and then you use their water it's basically just labor and then the cost of renting the equipment yes and then eventually you hire cheap labor and you build them out for 25 an hour or for 50 an hour and you give them 20 an hour yeah i was gonna say we used to do it with the uh snow shoveling when we were kids yeah we were did the snow shoveling but the problem is you can only do so many in a day so you eventually have

to get other help and outsource it to other people what we used to do is when it would snow we'd basically run outside and uh we would go to all the neighbors and be like hey hey can we can we uh you know shovel your driveway but the two keys were one we'd be like all right well we'll come back and do it in a little bit because we would have to go to like another one so we'd basically beat everybody there get them to agree and then like we didn't do it right then we would to come back later but the second thing was huge huge controversy in snow shoveling driveways do you have to do the whole driveway or do you just do the tracks because because if you do just the well that costs more money if you do the whole drive yeah if you just do the tire tracks you

can get it done really quickly and they'll pay you like 80 of what they would pay you to do the whole driveway but when you're like 12 14 years old like the whole driveway is like that's a that's a tall task the tracks like we could like run through that in like an hour and so we used to try to convince them be like hey can we shovel your driveway and as soon as they said yes we wouldn't bring up the tracks versus the full driveway we would just tell them a price and it was for the tracks and then every once in a while you get a guy come and say hey i thought you guys were going to shovel the driveway not two lines down the driveway yeah we're kids man we're kids i think dude i think in order to make some money like a lot of people because we're on youtube

right now and everyone's watching online they immediately go to like what shit can i make online i would not default to that at all if i wanted to make like 150 200 000 a year on my own and i wasn't very good at online stuff which most people aren't i think um i would totally just um do all this manual labor shit and by the way you want to hear a crazy story i've got a mother my mother-in-law is from haiti okay and she came from haiti when she was 18 she knew how to sew a little bit and she one day about two years ago she took me to the airport and it's about two hours from new york city and she goes hey can i drive to the airport and i was like why she goes i just want to ask you a question about internet stuff and so i she goes fine i go fine she drives me and she goes

hey explain how do you sell stuff on the internet and i was like oh this is just another time that like someone's gonna ask stuff and they're never gonna follow through so i taught her about like conversion rate and i tell her about like how to buy ads somewhere so about two weeks later she sends me her etsy page and it's called smithy home couture and it's these fancy pillows that she's making for like $150. Okay. And I was like, wow, this is amazing. And she goes, yeah, that's me. I did that. And this year she'll probably do 250 to $300,000 in revenue this year. And she doesn't, she, she doesn't have a website. It's all it is, is an Etsy page. And she has a, at first she was just sewing pillows out of her house. And now she's got a small office and a part-time

employee. It's pretty nuts. And so building stuff, just to sell on top of like a lot of really popular platforms like an etsy um an ebay and like amazon you could crush that you don't even need a website i've got a uh a brother um who well we have a brother i guess not he's not my brother he's all of our brothers uh who really uh enjoys building things with wood and he'll like make like crazy crazy stuff like uh one time he gave me a cutting board but it looks like a chess board and it's literally different colors of wood all like uh put together and i said to him i was like dude you could sell this for 250 300 bucks easy and he's got a real job so he can't sit there all day long and make it but my guess is that he could crank them out at a pretty fast rate and uh

and he just he's not interested in it but when you have that skill and you enjoy doing it you might as well make money at the same time yeah i agree i agree what if i was doing a cutting board thing i would make cutting boards i my whenever i think of these like those cool things i always think i want to make it localized so i want to make us i want to make it all about states you ever like notice on buzzfeed dude check this out so there you know how on buzzfeed um if you say like wait where are you guys from pump you guys are from you guys are from north con what city raleigh so it'd be like 18 reasons why you know you're from raleigh and like the likelihood that raleigh person clicks at is like crazy high right and so there's this idea that you basically people

who are from somewhere they always want to see uh uh they always want to see their name or their friends names or their city's names on paper it just you know it makes you feel good and so there's this old guy who had this newspaper and he and he was the best-selling newspaper when all newspaper local newspapers were declining and he goes i'm going to tell you three words why my newspaper's crushing names names names all i do is i list as many names as i can because people love seeing their name or their friends names and so that's just like the psychological principle and so buzzfeed used to launch these articles and so this guy who worked at buzzfeed created this thing called homesick candles so if you google homesick candles you'll find it and so they made candles

for each state and they made it smell like that state so washington was like wintergreen uh i don't know what new york was but like you know they yeah like can you have like a trash like yeah that's exactly what it is there's uh go ahead and so they this principle i think you could apply to so many different things uh just have a missouri that's where i'm from a missouri shaped cutting board you're in business bro it's over uh lily chang uh from the chat who actually is one of the winners that we talked to uh on zoom she said that when she was in college a girl scout would go around to the Greek houses on Thursday night to sell cookies

and the little girl and her mom would sell a couple hundred boxes a night. Like going to the college campuses and selling, like, you know, you were talking about the bars with hot dogs, but selling anything to college kids around food at night, I feel like is a grand slam, right? Dude, I used to sell during the day for $3.

It was, no, it was $4 for a sausage during the day. And at nighttime, the same thing was $8. Price gouge. Yeah. So you just double the price. Yeah. But, but I mean, that is exactly how, uh, how it works. Right. And you also are looking for, uh, college kids at the opportune moment, obviously if you're outside of a bar and you've got food, they're likely to wanting to buy it, but you can, you don't have to necessarily go sit outside the bar either. If somebody's selling the, uh, the cookies on a Thursday night outside of the Greek houses, that works as well. Right.

Yeah. And that's what I used to do. And I, I used to kill it. I mean, but here's the thing though, So it was fucking hard work. It was so hard. Like I was like physically exhausted at the end of every day. And then I discovered the internet and I started making money in the internet. And I was like, oh my God, this is so good. This is the best thing ever. And I remember making like my PayPal going off of my phone in finance class. And then I eventually left school because I was like, dude, I just made more than you teacher. Like I'm not listening to this finance class. But it's so hard working with your hands and your body. It is definitely exhausting. so uh zach said that girl scout set up cookie stands outside the marijuana dispensaries in chicago the fact he used the word marijuana means he's a cop so it's a weed dispensary but uh very smart obviously if you're gonna set out a setup outside there and then um what did somebody say oh when you're drunk eight dollars for a hot dog's nothing someone said you don't even look at food prices when you're drunk dude there'd be days where i uh so i was a national at the time that's where i lived and you know how like cities have uh these like free concerts

where uh you know during the summertime where they like shut down the block and like you know tens of thousands of people show up so i used to work those and i would come home with three grand four grand in cash uh and i would work like an 18 hour day but i would i killed it i we used to call it being hood rich i would just have a lot of ones and fives and there's so much money i mean $3,000 when you're eight, when you're 20, it's like game over. You win. Yeah. I'm the richest guy ever. All right. If you had to pick one internet idea for this weekend, what, is there anything that you think you could get set up by the end of the weekend and book a thousand dollars? All right. I'll tell you something. So I have this thing on gum road. So years ago, I used to own a

roommate matching business. It was a very bad business. But what I learned is if you're in a major city, New York, LA, San Francisco, and you post that you live in a three-bedroom and one of your roommates just moved out and so you have a spare bedroom, because there's so many young people moving there who can't afford their own one-bedroom, they want to move with roommates. And if you posted an ad on Craigslist, you would get like 50 to 100 applicants, meaning most applicants aren't going to get it, right? And so I wrote a guide on how to land an apartment because i knew how to do cold email and i created this guide on gumroad let me see if i can find it here it is this guy to this day makes me thousands of dollars a month there it is

you wrote a guide on how to respond to open roommate inquiries and like be the one accepted in the apartment yeah the miracle craigslist template bro there's a name for it the miracle craigslist email template and i saw a great name it's a great name i sold a ton of these and it was a very very simple problem and the way that i got customers at first and but and i'm getting to the point but the way i got customers is i posted fake ads for an empty apartment on craigslist and then i had an auto reply that emailed them back and said i'm sorry there's there's no apartment, but I made this thing. If you want to use it, here it is. And that's how I got my initial customers. And it made over $1,000 in the first month. And the way that I hosted this

was on Gumroad. And for anyone who's listening who doesn't know what Gumroad is, Gumroad is a godsend. Gumroad is the greatest thing. To dumb it down, they probably don't like this, but basically it's the easiest way to sell a PDF. And what I would do is I would troll Twitter or troll LinkedIn and find a variety of different like problems that I think that like one per like one very specific group has. And I would create like a guide on it. I would go and read a book or I would read something where I would just summarize something and I would put it into a PDF and I would DM them on Twitter and try to sell it to them. I buy, you ever buy, do you ever buy anything from gumroad i think i have once or twice i actually don't remember what it was but uh it's

a really easy experience it's like one click two clicks and then you're done dude it's so easy and so i i i i buy shit from gumroad all the time like if i have a very very specific problem like i want um uh like i want uh a summary of a book or uh what what else are there uh i want well like a people will summarize like 50 books and i'll like scroll through all the books i'm like oh that's great and they just sell it on gumroad so i read it um another one is uh that's a great idea that's a great idea yeah it's easy it's easy stuff or i don't know i mean there's like a thousand different use cases of gumroad but it's really great for selling incredibly specific use cases and so that's if you want to make money online i think and you're just starting out that's what you have

to do is you you don't really want to go if you don't like if you're not if you don't have millions of dollars to raise in funding, just do a very, very specific thing. So the Miracle Craigslist email template, the most specific thing that you could possibly have. And that makes me thousands of dollars a month. And so if you want to make money online, I think, and you don't have a lot to blow and you're kind of a noob, do a very specific thing. For example, I could summarize or do you transcribe the podcast? Sometimes, not always. Great. Perfect example. I would go to Rev.com and I would get your top like 50 episodes. I would go to the Pomp on iTunes. You go to podcast, you sort by popularity and I would, or you go to

YouTube and you sort your videos by most viewed. I would transcribe them and I would write my analysis of them. And then I would list all the links that you talked about. And I think I could sell that on Gumroad. Yeah, you probably could. Somebody said, Mr. Hood Rich's baby arm hot hotdogs trade market that's pretty good we also uh somebody who works with us who probably doesn't want to be named said that uh if he was broke right now he would create a product hunt product review show because there's too many products to get posted on there for to try all of them so basically he would go he would try them all in the big all right listen i know that this thing there's all this voting bullshit but like everyone's gaming it like here's really the two

products today that you need to pay attention to i would do one better here's what i would do is i would do, make it an email, a daily email where you just say, here's the top three things that launched from product hunt the day before. Uh, so I would do like the day after. And so the day before I sent that email, I would email the people who have the business. And I would say, give me an affiliate link because here's why a lot of software businesses, they give you an affiliate that's 20% of revenue per month. So if the software product is a hundred dollars per month, they'll give you $20 a month if someone buys it through your link. And so I would do it. And so Product Hunt, they never have had affiliate links.

And I've always thought that was the stupidest thing ever and that they should, they would make so much money. And so I would just look at Product Hunt and I would look at like the top things that were huge. I would DM them on Product Hunt or on Twitter and say, hey, I'm gonna promote you. Can I get an affiliate link that gives me 10 or 20% of the revenue that I send to you?

And I would send that email out and I would do that every day. All right, my first million podcasts. I'm not letting you out of here before we talk about it. uh, explain to everyone what the podcast is and then walk us through like the process for how you guys come up with, cause you guys do some crazy stuff in terms of different ideas, uh, on each episode. How do you guys come up with it? You see that NFT thing we did? Yeah, pretty good. Tell us about the podcast first. Then we'll talk NFT. All right. So, uh, I owned this company

called the hustle. We just sold it to HubSpot in February and it was basically like a daily email that went out to like 2 million people about business and news and information, stuff like that. We also own this podcast. This podcast originally was started by my good friend named Sean and I'm his co-host. And one day someone didn't show up. He originally would interview people and someone didn't show up. And he goes, Sam, no one showed up to the podcast to be interviewed. Do you want to just come and shoot the shit? And so we went on and we just ripped and we just went through ideas. And so basically twice to sometimes three a week, but most of the time it's twice a week. It's called My First Million. We go on and we just talk about different

ideas and opportunities that were seen in the market and how we would pounce on them occasionally we'll have a founder of a huge company come on who sees loads of different problems in their industry and they'll be like you know if i wasn't doing this this is what i would launch um but basically if you ever want to start a company or you just want to uh uh hear us riff about different opportunities kind of like what we're doing now it's called my first million uh it's quite popular now it's very it's growing and it's becoming quite popular my goal pomp is to surpass you i think we're at 800 000 downloads a month now but you're you've got us beat for now listen good luck i'm just gonna bring you on my show and then we'll get everyone to listen to this

one that's right all right tell explain the nft thing so uh we we don't have ads anymore as part of getting acquired we don't have to sell ads anymore which is pretty awesome uh but sean uh My co-host is huge in NFTs, huge into crypto. You know him, Sean Pomp. He's a big fan of yours. And he basically, on a whim, I think he used OpenSea, which is on one of our, that's on our list of companies you should join, by the way. And he created an NFT that was, it's basically called the Five Minutes of Fame.

And so whoever bought it, they can come onto the podcast or they can hold on to it or they can resell it and they can come onto our podcast. So we've got a pretty large audience and they can say mostly whatever they want, you know, so long as it's within reason and not hateful or anything like that. They can talk about whatever they want. And we tweeted it out two days ago. And I think someone's already bid 20 grand for it. I don't know how many ETH that is, but 20 grand already. I think we might get up to 50,000 for it. And it was kind of on a whim. I'm pretty amazed at how well it's working. Do you know who bid that high? No, I'm kind of illiterate when it comes to this stuff. It's just a username, right?

I mean, how can I find out everything empty is their username? OK, and then the way that this works is let's say that I go in and I bid twenty five thousand and I win. I get five minutes on the podcast and I can either expend or that now or yeah, or you can wait and then wait. And as the podcast gets bigger and then eventually, let's say that you become, you know, Joe Rogan's scale. I could basically then say, OK, now I want to come on. And so it's almost a little bit of a gamification in terms of what's the cost I'm going to pay now, how much is that five minutes worth, and then is – or am I betting on a show that's going to be much, much bigger in the future? Yeah, or they could sell it. And we're going to – well, basically what we're doing is – so this $20K that we have so far, we're just going to use that to do some weird stunt.

What stunt should we use? How would you like – how would you blow – how would you guys blow $20,000 in order to get more views? Oh, I mean very, very simply. I think the one thing that everyone loves is, uh, give them things, obviously, um, yeah, $20,000. You, you probably gotta get a little bit higher to get like a good enough car where people would be super excited about it. But one of the things that, uh, I think you could definitely do is you could fly somebody to you all, you could give them the car and then you could drive back home with them, with you guys in the car. So they get the time with you to spend having

the conversation. Would that get views? Oh, dude, if you, if you, people had to tune in to be able to, uh, uh, to win, of course, because I think one of the things for you, for you all, right, is, um, most of your audience, from what I understand, they basically, they want your time. They want the ideas, right? They like, like the high quality conversation is the most valuable thing that you could offer to them and them entering into your network would be super valuable. And so it's essentially uh you give away like one spot in the sam and sean friendship circle right like like basically like we're gonna know who you are we're gonna have to spend hours with you in a car we're gonna have talked about whatever you want to talk about and by the way you get to keep the

car when we get there like that's so much work what if they live like across the country well don't pick them. Yeah. That's so much work. I mean, what are your other ideas right now? I don't know, dude. It's like, I watched what Mr. Beast does. I'm like, I don't want to sit in Igloo for 24 hours. I don't want to be successful that bad. I mean, like the other thing that you guys could do is, uh, you could easily, easily, easily take the $20,000 and basically give it to uh kind of like city managers right so take a thousand bucks and find um somebody in 20 cities around the u.s or around the country or around the world give them a thousand dollar budget and say like just throw the absolute banger my first million party you guys don't even

have to go but they've got a thousand dollar budget they can rent out a place they can get food they can do whatever and the whole idea is to bring the listeners and their friends and so you just end up building more and more kind of excitement all right i could deal with that let other people do the work we um yeah i think there's a bunch of interesting ideas we uh i gotta figure it out like when i see what mr beast does i love watching it i just that's so much he's crazy it's so much work that guy like he's he's getting after it and uh i don't want to like keep my hand on a ferrari for a week or whatever he does you know what i'm saying we'll see the other thing that I'll say is when we were talking earlier about how to make a thousand dollars, uh, before the

end of the weekend, I don't remember who said it, but somebody said, just put a thousand dollars on the giants tonight. It's pretty, uh, pretty good. How about this? Let me give me your guys take on this. You guys ever use Fiverr? Yeah, I know what it is. Yeah. Fiverr is amazing. I love Fiverr. And so on Fiverr they have, uh, like you can get anything done on Fiverr. You can get like an animation like the like the uh you guys have these like um pop i think your face is like you have like an avatar of your face on your show somewhere you can get these like logos done for five bucks or some people price their stuff at like a thousand or two thousand dollars i think what we should do is buy one service that everyone needs and we buy the five dollar one we buy the

five hundred dollar one and we buy the five thousand dollar one and we'll compare the the difference if it actually makes any difference between if you spend you know give someone like a ton of money to build something versus a little bit of money. Ah, I like that. I like that a lot. I'm workshopping here. All right.

The only other thing that I would say is my last question for you. If you had to pick one social media platform for the rest of your life to use, you can't use the rest of them and your sole goal, what you're optimizing for is to make money. What platform do you pick?

Well, so we made tens of millions of dollars off email, but that's not considered social media is it you can't use the i agree email probably would be the answer so don't use that one youtube easy youtube youtube behind even behind email youtube is the most important right it's that's the easiest question i've ever been asked youtube right am i wrong i mean i tend to think that it's a pretty good answer like a million subscribers across all platforms youtube is definitely the best because uh you like like the in media the equation for revenue and enterprise value is basically like time spent multiplied by the quality of the person's like the buying power of the person times the quantity right and youtube is the best way to

optimize that because if you get someone for 10 minutes or those shows like three hours i mean if like you're really getting a ton of airtime and you could you could i mean it's basically like when people meet me on the podcast like man i listen to you for like three hours a week i feel like i know you right so anything that you you recommend i'll buy it's the most intimate experience you're literally whispering in somebody's ear while they're working out or walking or or uh traveling somewhere or whatever yeah so youtube easy i mean and i pay for youtube premium and like i don't even go to the podcast app anymore i only listen to podcasts on youtube so it's the best both worlds so youtube easy without a question but it is the hardest dude

it's so hard i don't want to like dude they just bought me husband just bought me this thing like i'm gonna look like casey neistat with this fancy camera it's like i gotta like walk around like holding this camera like what's up world and so i gotta figure out how i'm gonna do that um and i'm a little like intimidated i think it's one of the most intimidating platforms to get going on. You're going to be perfectly fine. Joe, John, what do you got for Sam? So Sam, since that was the easiest question you've ever been asked, I'll try to make this one a little more difficult, but you, you've done everything from hotdog stands to roommate matching services, to building the hustle and whatnot. We have a lot of younger people who

watch this show who are just starting investing, just out of school, whatever it might be. If you had to go back to that time and that age, early 20s, leaving school, doing whatever, starting your career, how would you approach it from a career perspective and knowing what you know now into building wealth and putting yourself on the right path? Where would you start with from a job-wise? Where would you start with from an investing standpoint? How would you go about building your career? When I was younger, I did a really good job of cold emailing people, but I didn't really, and I would get like, you know, I got a job at a bunch of amazing, I got interviews at a bunch of amazing companies like Airbnb, Uber, because I would email the founders. And I knew, so I knew

early on that getting in with like big shots was smart. But what I didn't realize it as much as I do now is that when you're 18, 19, 20, 21, and you show that you're relatively smart and that you're working really, really hard and that you're persistent, a lot of big shots like billionaires will 100% give you the time of day if you approach it in a respectful and right way. And so knowing what I know now, if I was a sophomore or junior in college, I would make a list of 100 people who I wanted to work for, and I would pester them in a very particular way. so it wouldn't feel like pestering, but I would cold email them like crazy and I would work for them for free. And the way that I would do it is I would explain like what I think I wouldn't ask

them to tell me what they need done. I would say, I think you need this, this, and this. The way that I would approach it is by doing blank, blank, and blank, say the word and I'll fly out there and I'll get at my own place and I'll be at work on Monday and I'll get it done. And I think that doing that would change your life. What I learned early on was that attaching myself to the right people who are older than me and more successful than me, uh, could change the 100% change the, the, the trajectory of your life. And I would work really hard at not focusing on really making money in the short term, but, um, um, um, kind of attaching myself to someone like that and just like dedicating three to six months of my life to making their, their life a little bit better.

John. Yeah, that's great advice, Sam. Uh, I'm curious about kind of content, right? So where do you consume content what do you look at like newsletters books um like how do you go about that i read a biography a week probably on audible right now i'm reading the biography of teddy roosevelt before that i read all about the comanche indians before that i read about the wright brothers so i'm a big biography guy i use audible i try to walk like 15 to 20 000 subs a day and i listen to audible while i'm walking um i use youtube instead of tv so i only get video content from youtube um and i like uh reading the hustle i like reading that's a newsletter i like reading uh axios uh and i like business insider even though it's kind of like smut and like

mostly bullshit for some reason their headlines they get me every time so i like reading business insider and i read the wall street journal awesome i mean you're kind of right i know what you mean yeah i mean they know what they're doing they know what they're doing dude here's the thing about media basically is that i'm currently in vintat so the offices of like all the bd companies in the world or like 80 of them are basically all right here and all the employees work at the each company like they jump around from company to company and company and so it always bothers me like about media is that i already know what the angle is going to be because it's the same circle jerk of people and they all like hang out on the weekends and they're all going to go the

the same angle i'm like oh fuck i already know you're gonna say it like i already know so i try to look for media that like is not part of this new york manhattan circle jerk uh that's a little bit outside of the sorry sorry so far you can say whatever you want yeah say whatever you want yeah one time so far it was a sponsor and we said so far more like so fucked and because we were talking about some shit they had going on so sorry about that so far uh and uh yeah they they didn't work with us again and um anyway uh the the new york uh the the new york media scene like which is like we're like so like a lot of and a lot of people don't realize it's like dude news corp fox news is on 57th street it's like right in the heart of manhattan right and then like down

the street from that it's time warner that's where cnn is these fuckers they all work in the same area we already know like how they feel about the same topics and so for media i always look for things that are a little bit outside of like the scene um and that's hard for me you know washy journal is not exactly in that business insider is definitely not a part of that so i like a lot of sub stackers pop i get a lot of news from you joe i follow you like crazy i love all your um your uh sports uh data and your your tweets so i follow you i know your work quite well so i get a lot of my news from uh twitter and i like the sub stackers i try to find people that are outside of the circle chair sam i love you to death when you just said that i just got

17 text messages from people that i don't even know who some of these people are that are messaging me right now saying oh god sam and you know what i just responded with i love it no censorship i like is the for which comment exactly look i didn't say anything wrong i like like like who cares if you're part of a circle jerk pomp you're you're the you're the lead of a circle right like you got two hands full i'm not saying it's wrong right like we all have our biases i just made it better i just want to i I just, I just want to identify what those are and explore a variety of circles. Listen, I literally just got another message, all caps, no cease and desist.

I didn't say anything wrong. I didn't say anything wrong. There's nothing wrong that was said. I, I, I, I, I could assume all these things and I liked them and they all serve a purpose. I just, I work really hard to, uh, have a, uh, uh, a full perspective. I appreciate that. uh where can people find you on twitter first um the sampar uh all right i'm i'm reading these comments uh all right second this is amazing this guy is awesome yeah all right second second thing

where can people go listen to my first million podcast uh you can go on youtube you can look it up on where we film them and put them on youtube or uh my first million on spotify and on itunes and click the subscribe button or what do you keep saying smash the subscribe button or what do you say like if we get to 2 000 likes you get a free bitcoin yeah we'll do that too no no no that's not what we're giving away oh sam it says it right there it says i see 2 000 likes and you get a free bitcoin smash the like button not a free where's a bitcoin oh all right we gotta go because i got an actual an important meeting at one o'clock and hopefully they just weren't watching this and they're like hey pop so about the circle jerk

it's a metaphor bro i appreciate you i appreciate you everyone go follow sam on twitter and if you enjoy this conversation my first million podcast they pretty much talk about this whole time so uh go listen and we'll do it again soon my friend all right thank you see you guys