Should You Start Creating Content? Business Advice, Tips, & Ideas | My First Million 05/25/2020

Shaan Puri

What's up guys sean here sam is driving for some memorial day weekend thing so it's just me flying solo today but got some good stuff to talk about first it's been almost exactly a year since I had this idea for the podcast so I'm looking at my messages right now to sam so 5/13/2019 so this is may 13th a year ago I messaged him yo I got a proposition for you he says yes I said I'm starting a podcast it's like how I built this good quality good guests and I sent him a list of guests that I had in mind I said I want the hustle to be the publisher I'll do all the work you include it in the email in this new episode and if we start monetizing let's share the economics sam says okay deal I said cool I'll send you the first episode to preview at the end of this week and then we go back and forth a little bit and then and then we started you know I you know the first thing I did was I went and found somebody who could edit a podcast by going on twitter and writing podcast editor in the search and then looking for people who wrote that in their bio and then I found ishan who was an editor for other people's podcasts we made a cover art we made we figured out a name it was funny I'm looking at the messages here the original name that I was thinking was because I was basing it off of how I built this so the name was how I got rich which I decided was way too you know I don't know crude or something it could have been a good name it's at least sort of I don't know gets your attention but I knew I'd have trouble getting guests on with that name and in fact my first million also had trouble getting guests on because a lot of people who are successful don't wanna come talk about money and they don't wanna seem like a rich asshole but it worked out anyways my first millions got off the ground we shifted off of interviews and started doing more casual brainstorm type episodes and that's what people resonated with they liked listening to something where it gets the wheels turning in your head it gets you to learn about a new space or a new business model or a new product that you hadn't heard of and people like to hear 2 people scheming and thinking up new ideas and dreaming about what could be because there's not very many podcasts to do that and so that's what I learned along the way I'm looking at our stats now we have reached over 2,000,000 downloads we did about a 1000000 downloads in the 1st 6 months and a little more than that in the second half and dude I could have never imagined that we would hit 2,000,000 downloads in year 1 that's kind of amazing I'm like in shock even right now just sort of looking at it because I don't really check you know I don't really pay too much attention to it because because I'm not doing this really for the listeners in fact when I started this I told sam I said he asked me why are you doing this and I said well our company is getting acquired we're it's we're in the due diligence phase right now and it's a lot of either lawyers or security people looking at our code things like that I was like it's really boring I want to do something I can't start a company but I can start a podcast during this time and so I need I had the itch to start something and this was my something and I'd always wanted to do a podcast because I like to talk and I figured this would just be a great little networking hack you know when I actually started the podcast I didn't think anybody would listen to it my plan was there's all these interesting people here in san francisco I want to meet them instead of just saying hey my name is sean I'm a founder of this company you want to get some coffee which is annoying I hate when people ask me hey can I have some of your time do you want to get a coffee do you want to do a call would love to chat I'm like well what's in it for me this is this is awful I don't wanna I don't even drink coffee so fuck that but if somebody invites me on a podcast or invites me to speak at a conference I'm like okay cool tell me more and I usually say yes and it's weird because it doesn't even matter how many people are listening to the podcast or it could be an event that has a 100 people but still it feels good to to sort of be on stage and I knew that other people liked that too so my my goal was this is a great way to meet interesting people and have an excuse to connect with them and I thought nobody will listen to this except for my mom but I'll build a cool network of people through the podcast that was my my evil plan and then I got greedy once it started growing and now I kicked off all the guests and now it's just me and sam talking but yeah my perspective changed I think that's a good lesson too in general so I had one decisive reason to do it which was this will be a great way to meet other cool people I got that out of it and I did 30 episodes with different guests who had built awesome companies and then I discovered a different opportunity as I was doing it which was hey a lot of people are actually listening to this instead of making this about meeting the guests what if I made this about giving the audience content that they like and being you know being somebody that they listen to on a regular basis and I've you know sort of pivoted pivoted from there but anyways it's been amazing 1 year since having the idea and that's pretty bizarre I think I'll probably be podcasting for like 10 years that's my guess because I like this a lot and it's been cool there's all these different things that have come from it and I think you know if you're somebody out there who doesn't create content today it is where I would start if I was somebody who wants to have a nontraditional career if you don't wanna just have a job or hell even if you want a job but you just want a better job this is what I would do right off the bat I would start creating content about a topic I like either interviewing guests and networking that way or talking about a subject researching and talking about a subject that you're interested in learning more about and just publishing and just publishing regularly because you'd be surprised who listens pretty badass people listen to this podcast and then they reach out and then opportunities come my way or investments come my way or whatever it builds trust in people and the beauty of it is that it's low effort right I record once for 1 hour but each episode gets listened to for 1,000 and thousands of hours by other people so you know my 1 hour yields tens of thousands hundreds of thousands of listened hours and that's amazing leverage right I'm getting a multiplier of let's call it a 100000 to 1 on my effort and time which is kind of amazing that's why I would produce content and I would and it also forces you to think about content as a product right so you gotta make content that people want you gotta figure out how to distribute it to them you gotta figure out how to monetize it so it's a great little mini business in and of itself without any cost really you just gotta you know buy a microphone that's that's kind of the the extent of it it's not much more beyond that anyways I wanted to because I'm flying solo today I wanted to actually look back and look at some of the different ideas that we've brainstormed and I wanna give you my top 10 half baked business ideas that we've talked about on the podcast so as we've been riffing and brainstorming and just kinda shooting the shit these are my 10 favorite ideas that we've talked about on the podcast I don't know if they're the best 10 ideas they're my favorites which means I find them interesting either because I think they would work or I think there's a nugget of something interesting there and if somebody really kind of remixed it or riffed on it or sort of built it up fleshed it out they could build a great business around it so I'll give you my top 10 and this will be kind of a recap episode we'll keep it short all right so number 1 or I'll actually start with number 10 number 10 1st dibs okay what's 1st dibs okay so this is when we were looking at auction houses we were breaking down I think heritage auctions which did $850,000,000 last year in auctions which just shocked me right people selling collectible coins movie posters comic books I had no idea collectibles and auctions are as popular as they were I knew they were a thing but I didn't realize how much money was really flowing through that system and so anytime I observe something that surprises me I want to know more and I see that as an opportunity I used to see something odd and be like that's weird move in the other direction and now when I see something that I'm like that's weird tell me everything there is to know about this and I'll give you an example I remember when I was in college this guy who lived on our hall tofiq probably the strangest guy I've ever met I walked into his room his dorm room and he was looking at his computer and he was looked like he's playing a video game and I was like oh what are you playing and he turned and he looked at me and the game kept going like his character kept moving and I was like wait you're not even touching the mouse how is this happening he's like oh I'm not playing I'm watching I was like you're watching a video game this is you know back in 2,000 and what 2006 2007 something like that and he's like yeah yeah this is a replay of a starcraft you know tournament that happened yesterday I was like what I was like you watch other people play video games and he's like yeah it's great I'm like and it wasn't even live it was a recording of a korean match that some guy had commentated over recorded and posted on the internet and he was catching up first first thing in the morning he woke up and he was watching this and I was like this is so weird you're so weird dude I moved on with my life now fast forward you know 10 15 years later I sell my company to twitch which is the largest live game streaming you know place to go watch other people make video games you know who knew but he knew and he knew it was awesome and if at that time I had been like woah this is interesting why do you do this I could have learned a lot more I could have started twitch had I really sniffed out that opportunity and instead you know now I work at twitch and you know they've they've created a multibillion dollar company out of it so that's kind of a learning for me anyways back to first dibs so as I was looking at these auction auction houses you know of course you have ebay which is the auction site for everything but then I saw all these niche ones there's goat for sneakers you know for sneakerheads bring a trailer is an auction site for vintage cars and it seems like you know on the surface that there's every every niche is covered there's an auction site for everything so what do you do when there's no inventory left there's nothing else there's no niche left you gotta make a new niche you gotta make some you make new inventory that doesn't even exist yet so the idea for 1st dibs is it's an auction house for things that don't exist yet now what does that mean you would partner with musicians artists movie studios athletes and you would auction off their first whatever you know these are the first hundred of this <\n> Of lebron sneakers that are coming out so it's the same sneaker that's gonna go for sale but auctioning off the first 100 to be made the first 100 tesla model threes the first 100 t shirts the first 100 of copies of this album from your favorite musician I think people would pay a premium maybe even a super premium for getting first dibs from the creators that they love musicians athletes artists movie studios etcetera and it's like a cool kid's version of kickstarter right if you're a famous musician you're not going to do a kickstarter it's sort of beneath you but this is like a cool version of doing the same thing you're just going to say hey we're going to make an album if you want to have one of the first 100 copies or you want to be the first 1000 people to listen to the single you could pay me right now you know $500 a piece to to get that and you would end up raising you know potentially half a $1,000,000 upfront to fund your project just through selling first dibs to your superfans alright that's that idea number 9 drone light shows so fireworks big industry but there's all kinds of problems sound pollution air pollution danger so this is a new way of doing fireworks you do it with a fleet of drones that are all synchronized and all have lights on top of them so you've probably seen this you know intel is doing a bunch of these demos for new year some people do this but I think there's an opportunity to do this at a franchise level on on a local in local markets so fireworks you know pretty big business $2,200,000,000 a year you know last year I think you can do that with drones I think you can basically say hey you know pay $1,000 you're gonna have a drone light show at your corporate retreat at your birthday party at your city's you know festival or whatever it is and so it's a business in a box and if somebody was to create a drone light show franchise I bet you could have franchisees in you know a 100 cities in the next 2 years if you if you've made it easy for them to push a button and have their own drone light show business alright number where are we at 8 just talking alright this is one of my favorite ideas I was talking to my uncle who was divorced he's you know 60 years old and he's lonely you know like I think he's not lonely in a depressed way but like this is the reality of the situation how would you feel if you were 60 years old and you were divorced and your kids have grown up and they moved out of the house and a lot of people tell them you know you should get out there you should go and do do online dating but you know that's normal for millennials but for somebody like my uncle that's kind of intimidating he doesn't necessarily want to go put himself out there and he doesn't even necessarily wanna you know start dating and remarry somebody that's not his goal and so I think you can create something that is just talking it's a way for people to connect it's a way for sort of single people to connect but not for dating and so it gives you know the baby boomer generation a way to go online and just chat in a safe place sort of like you know you've seen all these netflix shows love is blind or the circle and and you know I think they're tapping into something which is that you could form a pretty strong bond with somebody just by talking and I think you could build a subscription business around giving seniors and baby boomers a place where they can go push a button and have somebody to talk to alright this episode is brought to you by superside alright so here's the deal I'm incredibly impatient like horribly horribly impatient and if I get an idea at midnight by 8 am the next day I want it done you know but that's really hard because if something needs to be designed where am I gonna find a designer at midnight to try to make this thing to bring it to life so you know I don't think I'm alone other start ups even huge companies need design help fast and they just don't have the internal resources or expertise to get it done so how do you get reliable design done without dealing with expensive agencies and lots of freelancers you use superside that's our sponsor for this week just go to superside.com/mfm and tell them what you want they have a team of designers that can get it done fast you know they are 20 times faster than hiring a designer and 50% more affordable than a traditional agency so if you need high quality design done fast try superside lots of fast growing teams that are stretched are using them already check them out superside.com/mfm I've used them before I love them check it out alright number 7 is yc for content okay so first you gotta know what yc is yc is y combinator it's the sort of best startup accelerator that's ever been built they incubated or not incubated really but they accelerated companies like airbnb dropbox etcetera etcetera a bunch of $1,000,000,000 companies so they were super successful what they did was they said hey we can take 2 people with an idea and we can in 3 months give them a clear focus which says hey at the end of these 3 months you're going to be on stage in front of a group of investors who want to invest in you and you got to have a great product and you gotta have traction you gotta have something to show for yourself something you've done in these 3 months that will give them the confidence to invest in your your company and through office hours and whatnot they they made that happen and so they helped create a whole bunch more start ups that otherwise wouldn't have been created they helped get them funded so I believe we're in the biggest boom ever for content content is king in a way that it hasn't been before you have netflix you have disney + hulu hbo apple tv + quibi you have all these companies that are spending 1,000,000,000 that's a capital b 1,000,000,000 into original content these are platforms that are hungry for content they're walking into a benihanas they're looking for sizzling content on the grill so I think you can create y combinator for content it's an accelerator where you take talented people who are either directors showrunners producers whatever and they create a pitch for the show and at the end you have a demo day where they're gonna invest in funding your pilot and so you can create a sizzle reel which is like a 2 minute trailer essentially for your show that's what you create during the 3 months and you come in and you say hey here's the concept it's a group of friends that get lost on this island but then they discover you know mysteries that start when they dig up this hole and it's like oh yeah wait is that lost yeah it's kind of like lost but it's a new age lost so anyways you get the idea y combinator for content I think somebody should go to la start this now if you're willing to do this I would love to be involved okay I'm gonna zip through a few more quickly so boy scouts without the religion and sexual harassment so this happened when me and sam brainstormed about boy scouts big business 2,000,000 members $200,000,000 + in revenue but they recently announced they're claiming bankruptcy due to all the lawsuits they've been slapped with so I think that the fundamental need here is still gonna get solved people want to have a sort of rite of passage style program where you learn life and nature skills and parents want a place to put their kids you know sort of a glorified daycare where okay I don't have to watch my kid and they're gonna learn something they're gonna come back you know sort of enriched in some way and so I think you could go direct to consumer through facebook you could do targeted ads to parents who basically they want their kids to stop playing fortnite and go do something outdoors and so I think you can create a new brand like a boy scouts that's just not rooted in necessarily religion and doesn't have the sort of problems that boy scouts has had with sexual harassment and other other things that got them a bunch of lawsuits okay great number 5 org charts okay this idea came from daniel gross who was a special guest on the podcast daniel was great I should get him on again he was like you know 10 ideas a minute type of guy so he brought up that every something that I've noticed now that I'm at a bigger company right I'm at a company now of 2,000 people and every company has an internal org structure right there's the ceo here's their direct reports this person's the head of marketing here's their direct reports this person does content marketing here's their reports and so there should be a really easy org chart builder that can be used inside companies so you so I can find hey who who do I talk to if I'm trying to who runs our social media I could find that person and then secondly that should be made public so you should be able to look at other companies hey I'm looking at stripe who's the head of their developer platform and you could crowdsource all the content by pinging employees with automated emails that basically says hey we think you're the head of this is that the right thing and you can get people to fill it in sort of wikipedia style and so I think you could use this and this could either be a free service that you know eventually pivots into more of a linkedin type of thing or it could be a saas tool for for companies so that they could have this there's actually a startup that came out of stealth that that is doing this after we we talked about it clearly stole our idea it's called the org they raised $8,000,000 from sequoia and founders fund and they're it looks like they're doing exactly this alright number 4 hemingway for email okay I believe that now more than ever as companies are going remote writing is an incredibly important skill you need to be able to communicate through email through slack writing memos in Google docs so that other people can understand your thinking and your plans the the problem is most people suck at writing and a lot of people are self conscious about it which is why a company like grammarly can be at $100,000,000 in revenue just doing spell check grammar check type of things hemingway is a cool little app that you know I discovered many years ago which is it analyzes your writing and it helps you make it more punchy it tells you hey this paragraph is too wordy or hey why are you using this complicated word there's a simpler one you could use and so I think somebody could build a hemingway like tool for business and help you write better business emails I'm very very interested in this I talked to the hemingway guys and said hey I'd like to buy your business because I wanna do something like this so if somebody wants to build this I'd love to help make that happen alright number 3 trt subscription alright so sam has been taking trt or testosterone replacement therapy for a while you know so so the average testosterone in a male decreases by 40% over the last century that's the sort of I don't know how they're measuring that because I don't think in a 100 years they were measuring testosterone but whatever that's a stat it's decreased over time and then when you have less testosterone you feel more depressed you feel weaker you have increased chances of heart attack blood pressure problems etcetera etcetera you know in normal sports you can't take testosterone because it sort of gives you an unfair advantage but in real life you know there's no commission that's drug testing you to say hey are you taking testosterone which helps you you know maintain your muscularity and feel you know sort of greater levels of energy and whatnot I know joe rogan sort of popularized this he takes testosterone and then some other things and so here's the idea six letters d to c trt you can make a $100,000,000 off those 6 letters and yeah so you a direct consumer testosterone replacement therapy solution it's a repeat you know recurring business every month I think it's very high margin high retention and potentially a big market so I like that idea a lot I think that could be very lucrative number 2 this one's clap kitchens so this came from stu stu was a guest on the podcast and he said look food delivery is booming grubhub postmates uber eats they have you know millions of users who open the app every day and they're trying to figure out what to eat and so now the restaurants that are on there are just right now your local restaurants but what they should be is you know there should be more diversity there should be more special restaurants that really get you to click when you open up postmates or uber eats so cloud kitchens are on the rise which is basically it's a central kitchen there is no storefront there is no in house dining these are kitchens designed to produce food that gets delivered through these apps so uber's founder travis kalanick he's raised I don't know 100 of 1,000,000 of dollars to fund his company cloud kitchens where he's buying real estate in cities turning them into cloud kitchens so this one it's klout spelled with a t at the end klout kitchens because it's going after influencers so you go and you get big names in the same way that like gordon ramsay bobby flay wolfgang puck jimmy buffett they've opened up their own branded restaurant chains you could do the same thing but on delivery only restaurants so robert downey's brownies you know asap rocky road the kardashian salad company you know the possibilities are endless so you have influencers they partner with a cloud kitchen to produce one type of cuisine and then you deliver it on the top of all these different networks okay I'll pick one more one more good one here okay so this one's hooked for romance novels so I didn't know this but my friend taught me about this my friend ramon he basically educated me that romance is one of the best selling book genres there is I believe it is the best book selling genre romance fiction really appeals to older females and 1 third of all mass market fiction books are romance and 1 third of all romance readers are 45 + you know the average reader who reads romance novels reads 5 times more books than the next genre book reader so they're they're just voracious readers of romance if you like that genre you like these books in fact I know because my mom used to love reading danielle steele she's got this mansion here in san francisco on billionaire's row that mansion was built because people loved to read romance you know one of the most best selling books of all time fifty shades of grey romance fiction so you get the idea but most you know entrepreneurs don't do this they don't read this so they don't see this opportunity but there's a multibillion dollar industry of romance novels and there's a group of devoted readers and they have time and money to spare so I think you could deliver that same content in a new way so what the new way would be is like hooked so hooked is this app that's short form stories that you read on your phone and they did it for you know young adult fiction and they raised $15,000,000 they have over 50,000,000 readers I think you could replicate that model you could do hooked for romance novels and you could build a cash cow you can build an absolute cash cow you can get people to pay you $7 a month to subscribe for this content to have unlimited all you can eat great romance stories delivered to you on your phone so I think there's a big opportunity here you could pay a bunch of writers to write writers are out of work writers need you know who needs who needs a paycheck more than a you know a struggling author so you could get a bunch of authors who are capable and you could say hey I'll pay you whatever $100 per story or per page or whatever I don't know the rates but basically you could get stories written for fairly cheap and then they become your content library that you are that you're amassing and so I think there's a big opportunity here but anyways 10 ideas for you from the podcast as you can see we are idea machines if you're listening to this it's because you can become an idea machine too my goal is for more people to see the world as you know full of possibility when you see something that's interesting you go and wanna learn more and you try to think about how you can get involved and you can make it bigger or when you see a problem and you say wait why isn't there an x that solves that problem and you can come up with ideas to solve it you're not gonna go and do all of these but it's really great to train your brain to see the world in this way most people see the world as just the way it is it's like this fixed thing and I see it as this completely fluid thing full of little holes where I can hook into and I can build new things I encourage you to do that don't look at the world as this fixed thing and be surprised every time someone invents something new just see the world as full of needing inventions and maybe you or somebody you know could be the one who fills it all right I'm out of here thank you for listening sam will be back I think for the next episode enjoy