Marketing Lessons from Jingles, Candy Crush, and Betting Sites
Jingles, Polymarket, Whale Hunting, & Corporate Slang - July 17, 2024 (9 months ago) • 44:00
Transcript:
| Start Time | Speaker | Text |
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Sam Parr |
Alright, I've got a thing I want to fill you in on. This is something I've been thinking about lately, and I think that you're actually going to bring more application to this topic than I am. So it's my theory, but I want to hear how you would apply this idea that I have.
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Shaan Puri | Alright, hit me.
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Sam Parr | So, did you see that blonde-haired woman? She had that song that was like "Looking for a Man in Finance 64" or whatever. Yeah, what was it? What was it? Come on.
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Shaan Puri | **Blasphemy 65, bro.**
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Sam Parr | 65. It was a finance trust fund. 65. Yeah, blue eyes or whatever.
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Shaan Puri | Dude, have I seen that? Has there been 10 minutes in my house where either me or my daughter is not singing that song? My fourth.
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Sam Parr | and daughter.
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Shaan Puri | By the way, it's very different when your daughter says it. My dad, hormones kicked in, and I was like, "You ain't looking for what? Are you looking for your Barbie, your toys? You're looking for Legos, is what you're looking for."
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Sam Parr |
There were really funny follow-ups where people were like, "Let's do the math on that." By the way, how many men are 6'5"? It's like 0.1%. How many people live in New York City? How many have a trust fund? And it was like... you know, and they're single. It was...
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Shaan Puri | There were seven. | |
Sam Parr |
Guys left? Yeah, yeah, it's pretty funny. But that got me thinking, and before I tell you exactly what it is, I have to ask you a question: Do you know your mother's or father's cell phone number by heart?
I do not. For the life of me, I couldn't tell you my wife's phone number. I could tell you the area code, but I couldn't tell you her number, which is like a big deal. However... how many commercials from the '90s do you remember?
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Shaan Puri | I want my baby back, baby back, baby back. I want my baby back.
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Sam Parr | Yeah, or Hot Pocket. Like, do you remember some of these songs?
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Shaan Puri | $5. We know what comes up to after that. I don't even have to have known you, right? You could be a complete stranger, but if I'm like, "$5, $5," the guy's gonna say "footlong" at the end of that.
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Sam Parr | So, I got really interested in jingles because I don't remember my wife's phone number. I don't remember my parents' phone numbers, but I can cite all these jingles. In fact, I follow Instagram accounts where it's like commercials from the nineties. The nineties were when we were kids, and for a lot of listeners, that was the heyday of these jingles and commercials.
In my opinion, we need to bring that back. I want to give you a little bit of a short history of jingles. In the nineties, something like 15% of commercials had jingles; now it's closer to 1%.
In the twenties, this company called General Mills came out with something called Wheaties cereal. It wasn't that big of a hit early on, so they thought, "Let's write a song about it," and they created a commercial on the radio for Wheaties. This was the first time there was ever a dedicated commercial for a product. Wheaties wasn't really doing that well for the first 3 or 4 years, but then that song came out, and in year 5 or so, it took off. Now Wheaties is a huge brand that we all know.
I think we need to do more of that. In the nineties, it kind of kicked ass because when we were kids, there were what, like 50 or 60 channels? There were fewer channels, and the key to a jingle sticking, and something I remember, is that you need to hear it tons and tons of times.
When the Wheaties commercial came out, they ended up playing this song something like 300 times a day on a variety of radio stations. Back then, there weren't actually that many radio stations, so repetition was important.
However, once YouTube, Facebook, and whatever else came about, we have so many different channels. When you run Facebook ads, you can increase the repetition, the frequency, I think they call it. You can see, "Am I hitting the same person 20, 30, 50 times?" A lot of times with ads, it's just a photo. It's usually a photo, and there are little silly trends. For a long time, it was pointing an arrow at something or zooming in on someone's face. There are little silly trends that one successful brand does, and everyone copies them.
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Shaan Puri | Yeah, one we had was we would write the ad in the Notes app on iPhone. Then, we would take a screenshot of that so it looked like someone was sharing a screenshot from Notes, but it was actually just an ad.
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Sam Parr | Yes, and I remember reading or seeing this short video. It was launched at Sundance, actually. It was like a featurette in 2016. Maybe you saw this, but it was about people who have Alzheimer's. They were really bad, you know? They're elderly, they have Alzheimer's, and they were just out of it all the time.
So, these doctors played music that the people would have listened to when they were in their twenties and thirties. All of a sudden, it clicks, and they start singing the song. They're like, "Oh, I remember this song! I was in the army doing this," or whatever. And that's when I met my wife. Then they have the next 3, 4, 5 minutes of speaking normally.
It kind of made me realize music is really important for that reason, but particularly for advertising brands and products. I've been trying to think about what makes a jingle work. I have it down to a few things, and this is a little bit for the modern-day jingle—what it needs.
The first thing that I think it needs is a little bit of cringiness. I think with ads, we think, "This needs to be cool," but it needs to be a little bit overly cringe. The second thing that you have to have is it has to be incredibly repetitive. For example, do you remember that song, "Don't you wanna Fanta, Fanta?" Yeah, "Don't you wanna?" You need to say the brand many, many, many times. | |
Shaan Puri | **Like Chiquita Banana.**
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Sam Parr | Yeah, so the Chiquita Banana ad is actually interesting. In that ad, it featured a sexy banana dressed up as a Cuban lady dancer. She was singing and dancing, and it was all about when you know a banana is ready to eat.
She sang about how you should "peel me back when you see a little bit of brown." It was kind of sexualized and awesome. That ad would play 100 times a day. I love when people sexualize stuff, by the way.
My friend Neville had an ad for why you should buy this set of fonts from him. He said, "When I whisper Geranda, does it make you weak in the knees? If so, this is for you." I love when they do that.
And then the last thing you need is a call to action. Do you remember the song where it's like, "Call J.G. Wentworth, 877-CASH-NOW"? Do you remember that song?
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Shaan Puri |
Yeah, you can remember full phone numbers when it comes to a jingle, right? Whereas you can't... You started this by saying you can't remember your wife's or your mom's number, but we can remember some company's phone number—1-800-whatever—if they put it in a jingle.
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Sam Parr | And so this whole kind of rant is, I think we need to bring them back. Now, the problem is that I don't exactly have a consumer brand to do this on. You do, and you work a little bit more with consumer stuff. | |
Shaan Puri | Why can't you do this for Hampton, by the way?
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Sam Parr | I could, and I should. So that was a bullshit excuse.
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Shaan Puri | Thank you.
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Sam Parr | Do you see this working with your stuff in consumer?
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Shaan Puri | Well, I would say in theory, I'm all there with you. As in, jingles work; it's a non-debatable statement. Would jingles work for my brand? Well, why not? Jingles work.
So, we're back to square one: do jingles still work? Yeah, I'm pretty sure they still work. I think you might have to tweak the form factor, maybe make it a little shorter or whatever. You know, like McDonald's—what they do now is they have their whole commercial, and then it's "I'm loving it," right? They just hit that at the end as a little 5-second hook, which is shorter than maybe how jingles used to be, where it was much more of the whole commercial.
So, I think there are maybe some tweaks that people are doing to them, but they for sure still work. So, I'm with you, and I'm also with you that I'm surprised they've declined because the brain has not changed. In fact, there's a thing I think people call the phonetic loop or something like that. I forgot how they call it, but it's like the people who study the brain and the ear. There are neurologists, and there's even somebody called a musicologist. They're basically trying to figure out why it is that when we teach kids, they learn easier through nursery rhymes.
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Sam Parr | Yeah, there's like a nursery rhyme to learn your home address. Have you ever seen those?
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Shaan Puri | Dude, I could tell you Caracas, Venezuela; Lima, Peru. Right? I could tell you the capitals of South America that I haven't thought about in 30 years. But when I was 6 years old, some teacher taught us a song.
I could teach my daughter the states much faster than I could teach her numbers because I could turn it into a song. There's something in this, right? I think they call it "earworms." It's basically what they call it when a small, repetitive snippet of a song, slogan, or jingle just gets stuck in your ear.
That's called an earworm. Using this to improve recall, improve memory, and even make your brand associated with something that's kind of fun, upbeat, or positive definitely has value.
Now, the question is: why don't I, or you, or any of us modern marketers use this? I think really most people would say, "Well, it doesn't work anymore. The form factor changed. People got over it. Blah, blah, blah." I don't think any of that's true. I think it's just like fashion. I think it's marketing fashion trends. I think it's out of vogue right now, and as soon as somebody brings it back in, it will become a thing again. | |
Sam Parr | Remember Dat Piff? That was where mixtapes were, like rappers. So, this was... I think Lil Wayne would put out like a rap a day on Dat Piff, and he would just churn these suckers out.
I think you need a certain creative type of person to be able to do this, but we can definitely churn these out in a relatively fast way and see what works, which is different than a commercial.
One of the reasons why I think it went away is that the things you and I liked when we were 9 or 8 years old, by the time we were 15 to 25, that's like... that's lame. That's no longer cool. But then we get in our thirties, and we're like, "Oh, I remember that! That was awesome!" You know, that was so cool.
It's kind of like the feeling that you get when you see a Surge drink, like a soda. You're like, "Oh, I remember that! That was so awesome! I remember that as a kid," and you get this nostalgia.
So, I think what we can do is look at all of the past things that worked well with the brands that we liked when we were younger. I really think you can replicate them within the law and actually not copy.
The reason I think that is because the $5 Footlong song and McDonald's songs are coming back. They're reusing a lot of these songs now because once your customer base is a bit older, you can reuse the same stuff, and it becomes cool again because it's nostalgic.
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Shaan Puri | I'm subscribed to my first million on YouTube. There we go, cool!
We can workshop that if you want. If your ad is to be memorable, which we all want, then using one of the most sticky things, like a jingle, is key. It compresses several elements together, right? A feeling, a positioning.
For example, "$5 footlong, nationwide is on your side." It overcompresses a position and a feeling into 4 seconds, 5 seconds, or 7 seconds, all in a package that is now easily transmissible. You can sing it, you can tell it to another person, and it sticks with you. So, of course, that's a good thing if you can do it.
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Sam Parr | Alright guys, really quick. Back when I was running The Hustle, we had this premium newsletter called **Trends**. The way it worked was we hired a ton of analysts and created a sort of playbook for researching different companies, ideas, and emerging trends to help you make money and build businesses.
Well, HubSpot did something kind of cool. They took this playbook that we developed and gave to our analysts, and they turned it into an actionable guide and a resource that anyone can download. It breaks down all the different methods that we use for spotting upcoming trends and identifying different companies that are going to explode and grow really quickly.
So, if you want to stay ahead of the game and find cool business ideas or different niches that most people have no idea exist, this is the ultimate guide. If you want to check it out, you can see the link down below in the description.
Now, back to the show.
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Shaan Puri | I got something that's kind of interesting. It's a totally different angle, but I think you'll like it. Are you familiar with PolyMarket?
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Sam Parr | Is it gambling for crypto?
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Shaan Puri | Well, that's one way of looking at it. It's a prediction market, which is... yeah.
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Sam Parr | Yeah, sort of an... | |
Shaan Puri | **Aioli, mayonnaise, situation with gambling...** You know, reframing gambling, but it actually is a way to bet on a prediction that you believe will happen.
So, if I go to PolyMarket right now, I will see the top bet: **$2,237,000,000** has been bet on who will be the winner of the 2024 presidential race. Right now, Trump is at **61%**, Joe Biden is at **19%**, Kamala is at **10%**, etc. You can see that for any idea you have, there could be a betting market for it.
For example, you can go to sports, and right now, I think the Euro Soccer Cup is happening. Spain is the top favorite bet with **34%**. You can also bet on Wimbledon right now.
But you can also bet on scientific things. For instance, there's a bet right now on what the June 2024 temperature increase will be. It's like, "more than **1.09**" or "less than **1.09**." You can also bet on whether this hurricane will hit the United States: yes or no.
Right now, that bet has played out where you could see that when it started, it only had an **18%** chance of "yes." Right now, it's at a **99%** chance, which means it's about to hit or almost certainly will hit. So that bet is playing out right now.
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Sam Parr | And you could see the top bettors. There's a guy named "Revenge Tour 1984" who has bet $2,300,000 this week. | |
Shaan Puri | His... if you go to his profile, he's the top bettor on the platform right now. He's got 1,690,000, or 1,600,000, in bets placed. Basically, these are his positions that are out there. He's got a P&L, where his profit and loss is, and he's up about $1,000,000 so far on Polymarket.
He's traded $169,000,000 worth of bets. For example, right now, he's got a bet out on "Will JD Vance win the 2024 Republican VP nomination?" He bet on it when it was at 6 cents, and it's currently at 31 cents. He could just sell that position today and bank the profit, even though it hasn't happened yet.
So, you can win even if your thing doesn't win, as long as the odds go up. A couple of years ago, I got on Polymarket and I got really addicted to this thing. Every day, I was going on, and I basically had a $10,000 fund that I was just betting on Polymarket, and I think I ended up...
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Sam Parr | Making the same. | |
Shaan Puri |
5 or 6 grand, and then I cashed out because now you can't do it in the United States. They basically ruled against it. So all of this volume... they're doing about $50 million a month in volume, which is huge. Probably the most popular crypto app right now is Polymarket, and they've done $400 million this year in betting volume. So they're on pace for almost a billion dollars of betting volume this year.
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Sam Parr | What did you bet on?
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Shaan Puri |
I used to bet on all kinds of things. I would bet on tech stuff, for example. You could bet like, "Will Tesla stock be above this price on July 31st?" It's easier than buying the stock; you could just go and bet. Do you think it'll be here, or will they announce this at this time?
I was betting on sports stuff too. I would bet on just a game. There's a game on a Tuesday night, and I could just bet... It was easier than betting at a sports book because the way this thing worked was:
1. You would just sign in with your MetaMask wallet
2. You didn't have to do KYC [Know Your Customer]
3. You didn't have to do a bunch of other things
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Sam Parr | Who makes the odds?
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Shaan Puri | There's no odds maker, so this is like what's called an **automated market maker**. Basically, the bet gets created and then it's based on the betting volume.
If more people start betting "no," then the odds of "no" go down because that's a more popular bet. If everybody thinks "yes," then buying "yes" will have less upside for you.
Most of these don't work like an order book. There's not a buyer and seller. It's the same way that a lot of the DEXs work or the NFT platforms work, where it's an **AMM** (automated market maker).
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Sam Parr |
A lot of the bets are weird. For example:
- Will Taylor Swift be pregnant in 2024? Yeah, 30%... 30% chance, right? Or something like that. 21% chance.
- Will Andrew Tate be found guilty of human trafficking in 2024?
But then there's weird things like:
- Will Trump say the word "mog" in 2024?
I don't know what that word is... M-O-G. But can't he just say that then and win the bet?
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Shaan Puri | So, that's one of the controversies of betting markets. The easy example is, "Oh wow, if I'm Trump, I could theoretically go place a big bet and then just say the word."
But there are a couple of problems with that.
1. The more I... let's say something like that, it probably has very thin volume.
So, for example...
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Sam Parr | Right now, $4,000. Yeah, $24,000.
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Shaan Puri |
So if he went and tried to bet $100,000, he would swing the odds himself to "yes" to the point where it wouldn't really be worth it. There's not much action on the other side. Basically, the "yes" bets win the money from the "no" bets, and the "no" bets win the money from the "yes" bets, depending on how the bet plays out. Right? There's no third party that's involved. So you would have to do it in one of these [markets] that has really big volume.
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Sam Parr | If you wanted to make a lot of money, it says, "Will Travis Kelce go for ring number 4 and get engaged this year?" | |
Shaan Puri | Yeah, exactly. There's, you know, Elon tweets: how many tweets will we have this month? Will TikTok get banned in the U.S. in 2024? Right now, there's only an 8% chance.
So, if you thought that TikTok was going to get banned, if you're Pelosi, you could go and start betting. Yes, but that bet only has $29,000 of volume, so you can't bet too much. You can't make too much of a profit on something like that.
The controversy, the thing that people have always said about prediction markets, is that prediction markets become assassination markets. Meaning, if there was a bet that, like, "Will this person win?" or "Will this person live?" and let's say there was $100 of $1,000,000 on the line, you've inadvertently created a giant bounty to go and assassinate somebody.
This is one of the controversies around prediction markets: that it could become, you know, problematic in that way. But these are not new. Crypto is a new way of doing it, but these have been around for a long time. Historically, people felt that prediction markets were more accurate than polls.
So, let's say you wanted to say, you know, "Who's going to win the election?" They would go to a poll. You have a very small sample size. People might say one thing, then do another, which is like what happened when Trump won in 2016. He was polling far less than what actually happened when people went to the ballot booth because they didn't want to admit where they stood.
Whereas prediction markets, because you're putting money on the line, it's just more predictive. It's more accurate versus just general polling. This used to be a really popular thing. In fact, even on the stock market, you could go and bet this way. Wall Street was like a hub for prediction bets.
But then, after World War II, there was kind of a social stigma around it. Newspapers stopped quoting it, and they shifted to polls. But I think it's swinging back. We're going to go away from polls and back to prediction markets.
So, my prediction of this whole thing is that PolyMarket is going to be massive. In this presidential election, it's going to have just like a huge run-up this year because already you can see that whenever anybody is writing about the odds of something, about, let's say, the election, they're referencing PolyMarket and embedding PolyMarket in their articles. | |
Sam Parr | They're doing that now, or do you think that it's...? | |
Shaan Puri | It's already happening. That's why it has this huge surge. I think a couple of months ago, they had over $100,000,000 in embedding volume.
It's made for TV; it's made to be embedded in articles. In fact, I think they should take this further and make their little betting widget much easier to share and embed inside of articles and news outlets. They're going to need to quote what the predictions are around interest rates and presidential matters. It's just going to continue to grow that way.
So, I think Polymarket is actually sort of a media company—a decentralized media company—where it has really interesting data that every other media company is going to want to reference. That's going to drive this surge.
They've also had some really viral bets. Right now, one of the viral bets is obviously the presidential election. But remember when the idiots went down to the Titanic in the submersible? Yes, that was one of the most viral bets. I think they had like $60,000,000 bet on that one thing about what was going to happen with the submersible.
So, you know, they can go viral. Just yesterday, it had $5,000,000 in volume. Business is booming for Polymarket.
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Sam Parr | Who started it, and when did it start?
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Shaan Puri | This guy, Shane Copeland, I think is his name. He started in 2020, so this is not a very old business. It's been around for about 3 to 4 years now. I believe this is his first venture. His LinkedIn, when I was on it earlier, mentioned that he was an intern at Rap Genius and at some other place. Then he created Polymarket, and he's been doing that for 4 years now. | |
Sam Parr | Did they raise money?
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Shaan Puri | Yeah, they just raised a big round. It was pretty under the radar and actually seemed sort of sketchy before. When I was betting on it, people were telling me, "What are you doing, dude? You put real money onto this thing!" I was like, "Yeah, it's awesome."
They asked, "Who runs this? Is this legal?" And I was like, "I don't really know. I'm not sure." It just looked like a very thin app at the time.
But they just raised $75,000,000 from Founders Fund, Joe Gebbia, Vitalik, and a whole bunch of other heavy hitters. So it's obviously become a lot more credible.
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Sam Parr | I hate talking about gambling because I don't want to sound like "my farts don't smell" type of guy or like I'm better than others. But I am, because I hate gambling. I don't like it, and I don't particularly love products that make it more popular.
It's weird because I have vices; I love nicotine and stuff like that. So, I would be bummed if no one made those products. But I feel weird about making gambling more popular. Do you know what I mean?
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Shaan Puri | I understand. I don't know. Obviously, I enjoy betting. I bet on many things. I have a bit of a betting problem, I would say. It's the honest truth. It's like...
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Sam Parr | Like porn, we consume it, but we're like, "You know, that's disgusting that you would do this for a living."
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Shaan Puri | That's disgusting. Yeah, it's like... alright, so, I think there is actually a lot of value in this.
I think that the **wisdom of the crowds** has always been a phenomenon I've been interested in. I believe it's just a more pure form of information. It's very easy for the news to tell you one thing or for random polls to be quoted and claimed.
I like things that are more **ground truth**. I don't know, like, more ground truth is an actual betting market on something. That is what people actually believe.
The wisdom of the crowd... it is very hard to beat the wisdom of the crowds when it comes to betting.
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Sam Parr |
I don't know if I buy that yet, mostly because I'm ignorant to these predictive markets. In 2016, what did whatever existed before Polymarket say about the election?
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Shaan Puri | It wasn't as popular back then. There have been platforms like Augur and a couple of other crypto prediction markets, but they were never mature enough. They didn't have enough volume, and the people that consumed the world were only crypto degenerates. So, only crypto degenerates skewed one way. It's almost more like a poll in that case.
I'm not sure what they said then. All I know is that all of the polls were wrong. FiveThirtyEight was wrong. All of this sort of data science around polling was so wrong during that time.
I also know that one of the things that helped FTX take off back then was that Sam Bankman-Fried was one of the first to put political bets on his platform, I think in 2020. It was a big accelerant for FTX, allowing people to bet on election information back then. People around the world wanted to bet, and it was a way to attract a lot of liquidity to FTX at the time. | |
Sam Parr | What was his philosophy? SBS's philosophy, it was like... what was it called? Altruism?
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Shaan Puri | **Effective altruism.**
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Sam Parr | But doesn't him having betting on his website go against that?
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Shaan Puri | No, not at all. **Effective altruism** doesn't mean "no sin, no vice."
Effective altruism basically means to make as much money as you can. The highest impact way to give and contribute to the world is to first do something that's going to accumulate a huge amount of capital, so you can reallocate it to your cause.
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Sam Parr | Like addicted to things that they spend all their money on.
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Shaan Puri | Bank freed, right? You're more... you have two choices. You could go work for a nonprofit or go volunteer in a soup kitchen and pour soup every day. But that's a pretty low-leverage way to give and contribute.
Versus if you become a billionaire and give away $1,000,000,000, you have done more good that way. So, effective altruism is basically working for the purpose of accumulating as much capital to give away as possible.
Now, in his case, he turned out to be, you know, a liar and a fraud on many accounts, right? So, it's not... I think he sort of tanked the brand of effective altruism, which probably is a little unfair. He also tanked the brand of crypto, which is a little unfair. People are like, "Oh, crypto is a scam." It's like, no, this dude scammed crypto.
He tricked and lied to the crypto community. Basically, he was taking money and not letting you know. Somebody would go try to buy Bitcoin on his platform, and instead of buying Bitcoin, he would just tell them that he bought Bitcoin, take the money, and do something else with it altogether. He was deceitful. It's very different than saying crypto is deceitful. | |
Sam Parr | The New York Times had this podcast the other day about a woman who got addicted to DraftKings or FanDuel. I think they're the same thing.
She told a story about how she was a $150,000-a-year earner and got addicted to it. One of the reasons she got addicted was, a) she is an addict, and b) they assigned an account manager to her, just like you do when you want to upsell software.
They're like, "Hey, I see you're spending on this. We've got this new game called this, this, and this. I'm willing to give you a $500 credit in order to get your feet wet and try this out."
As she was telling the story, I was listening and thinking, "Hey, that's the same tactics we used to get people to buy ads." You know, you say, "Hey, you're a new customer, we'll hook you up this time, and hopefully, you get addicted to us and want to give us more money."
But they were doing that with this woman. Eventually, she got into $350,000 of debt. She got divorced; it was a whole issue. She mentioned that they're still sending her emails trying to get her to try these new games, and she wants to try them so bad because they sound so awesome.
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Shaan Puri | Oh my god.
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Sam Parr | And so, this whole online gambling thing kind of left a bad taste in my mouth. Particularly because now, you watch UFC, which is the only sport.
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Shaan Puri | The same thing happens in a bunch of different fields, but also in the entire mobile gaming market. Things that look very harmless, like Candy Crush, all these mobile gaming companies work the same way. They're all hunting for whales. The whole business model is to try to acquire 100,000 users and look for the few users that are going to spend $100,000 inside your app. | |
Sam Parr | And are people doing that with games where they spend $100, of course?
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Shaan Puri |
Yeah, this... I mean, Candy Crush and the entire casual mobile gaming thing, these seemingly silly, innocuous "free-to-play" games, they're based on a specific model. There are women in the Midwest who are going to dump tens of thousands of dollars into each game they get hooked on. That's what these companies work for - they're trying to find **whales**. Whales are obviously the most profitable customers.
And in that [mobile gaming] world, you can't even win anything, right? It's not even like gambling where there's a chance of winning money. There's no money to be made in it, it's just money to be spent.
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Sam Parr | You had friends in the gaming industry, or at least you know better than my friends who work in the gaming industry. How many times did they say they had a customer that would spend $50,000 or $100,000 on a game?
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Shaan Puri | Would be how many times? That's like, I guess.
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Sam Parr | How big is the scale of people willing to spend that much?
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Shaan Puri | It's very large, dude. This is, I mean, this is how they make these games—make like $1,000,000,000 in revenue, right? So they're...
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Sam Parr | All I thought it was like everyone buying a $20 a month thing. No, no, no, no.
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Shaan Puri | It's most players who spend nothing, right? The vast majority of players will spend nothing. Then there's a segment of people that are going to spend a small amount, and there's a very small segment of people that are going to spend a huge amount.
The total thing blends together where you're like, "Oh, our ARPU (average revenue per user) is $7 or $10." But it's not that every customer spends $7 to $10. Most spend $0, a few will spend $23 on average, and then a few will spend $23,000.
That's more of how it looks when you look at the distribution of these things. | |
Sam Parr | That's insane.
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Shaan Puri | Ben used to work at FanDuel, and he was like, "Yeah dude, part of the program I had..." I think he was like employee 30 or 40 at FanDuel. He's like, "You know, I basically oversaw this program," or he was associated with some program that was like the whale VIP white glove service.
It's like, "Oh, if you're betting and losing this much money or winning, or even winning, you know you'll eventually lose it." So if you're betting a certain volume, guess what? It's the Super Bowl! We want to fly you out. You're going to come visit. "Hey, we're in New York! We want to invite you to this private dinner."
There's a whole VIP program, a white glove program where, "Hey, we got you tickets to this game," and they're going to make you feel like a rock star.
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Sam Parr | Is it just one of the mother degenerates sitting around the dinner table like, "Hey, what do you want to bet that the meal's going to be chicken?"
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Shaan Puri | Yeah, and these are willing participants. These are adults. Now, I would say, obviously, some people ruin themselves. They get addicted to gambling, just like people get addicted to everything: social media, drugs, vaping... you know, there's a ton of things that people get addicted to, and it's not good for them. I definitely agree with that. That is for sure a thing, and you will always see news about that because, A, it's happening, and B, it makes for good news.
"Big company ruined this person's life," right? That's always going to be a thing. Guess what? Robinhood is designed the same way. Robinhood is literally designed like a mobile game to get you addicted to trading, to get you to try to trade as much as you can. They make money every time you make a trade. They don't make money by you buying a low-cost index fund and holding it for 20 years. They make money by getting you to buy Robinhood Gold, to trade options, and to day trade.
So, Robinhood, which is this name of like, "We're going to steal from the rich and give to the poor," is doing the exact opposite. It's basically "steal from the dumb and give to themselves." And that's what Robinhood is.
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Sam Parr | So, I'm gonna place a bet on this. I'm gonna... that's what I'm saying. I'm gonna bet that Justin Bieber is gonna be having a baby boy.
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Shaan Puri | You can't. You're in the U.S. You're not going to be able to make a bet.
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Sam Parr | How do they track that? | |
Shaan Puri | I think it's just like your IP address. Right now, I don't know what else they do.
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Sam Parr | God, this is horrible and awesome. I like this one. I can't believe this exists. That's pretty wild. | |
Shaan Puri | Alright, let's take a quick break. I want to tell you about **Wander**.
It's summer planning time, and if you're going to try to get away, one of the best ways to do so is through Wander. They have amazing luxury homes that you can stay in. It's sort of like staying in a 5-star hotel, but it's a home. You get the best of the home vibe along with the luxury amenities and turnkey experience of a hotel, all in one.
So check out Wander. They have so many cool locations! I'm taking a trip with Wander in about a month to Tahoe. They have a really cool property there.
Go to **wander.com/mfm** and just browse. You can see some really amazing places to stay that make for great family trips or even corporate off-sites. These locations are so impressive!
Also, if you go to **wander.com/mfm**, you can enter to win a free trip giveaway. They're giving away a trip to one listener! Plus, if you download the app, you get $300 of free travel credit, which is pretty awesome.
So check it out: **wander.com/mfm**. Alright!
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Sam Parr | What do you want to do? One more thing, what do you got?
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Shaan Puri | Okay, I want to do one thing. You said something earlier about jingles and catchy things. I was sitting in a meeting, and there was somebody who was prolific. If Kendrick Lamar wore a suit and sold B2B software, that was this guy. This guy had lyrics; he was lyrical with his corporate slang.
It got me thinking about epic corporate slang and some of my favorite greatest hits of corporate slang. I just started thinking, you know, we need some more. So, I wanted to play a little game with you.
I texted you this: I want you to think of corporate slang that doesn't exist but should. Because we're innovators here on the podcast, I want to come up with some slang. I think it would be a fun claim to fame if we could just make something stick with corporate slang.
So, I say we go back and forth like a rap battle with this: corporate slang that doesn't exist but should.
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Sam Parr | Alright, you have more than me. I came with about 4 or 5. You have a bunch of them. This is right in your wheelhouse, so let's see what we can do though.
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Shaan Puri | Alright, let me get my phone.
So, the first one is: "One man's Thanksgiving is another man's Thursday."
This applies to any situation where someone is really excited about something that, to you, is just normal or even lame. But hey, it's their Thanksgiving! It might just be Thursday to you, but it's their Thanksgiving.
So, it's kind of a way to throw shade in a corporate setting when someone is overly excited about something that's actually just normal or average. You can just say, "Hey man, one man's Thanksgiving is another man's Thursday." You plant that seed and leave it with them. They'll realize later that they just had shade thrown at them.
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Sam Parr | And that's a phrase that you need to use. When someone is like, "Wait, what?" and you're like, "Wait, you don't know what that means?" | |
Shaan Puri | You know what I'm saying?
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Sam Parr | Yeah, like... | |
Shaan Puri | It's just one of those things they say.
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Sam Parr |
Yeah, like when I was a kid, I thought it was "go out there and break an egg," not "go out there and break a leg," you know what I mean? So we'll make that a phrase. Or instead of "cat-like reflexes," I thought it was "Cadillac reflexes."
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Shaan Puri | This is not even corporate. These are just like stutters that you had.
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Sam Parr |
Yeah, yeah. So I say for years, "You know, go out there, have fun, break an egg." That's how you need to use this phrase.
Alright, I've got one. We're gonna call it "bubble wrap." As in, when someone... Do you have any employees that are overly sensitive, and when you bring news to them, you have to be like, "How are we gonna phrase this?"
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Shaan Puri | So it's like a word of, "We gotta bubble wrap this."
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Sam Parr | Yeah, like, alright, we have to tell this guy about this thing. But we gotta bubble wrap his ass, and we gotta bubble wrap this phrasing. We gotta figure out how we can deliver this so it doesn't totally crush him. Instead of just saying, "Hey, we're not doing that anymore. Your idea sucked," we gotta bubble wrap it. So we gotta bubble wrap it.
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Shaan Puri | Okay, so it's actually like... I like what you're saying. You're right, but we're going to need to bubble wrap that before it goes out.
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Sam Parr |
Yeah, so you have to say it in a more sensitive way not to freak a particular person out. Because that person, when you talk to them, you gotta bubble wrap them before you talk to them. So we're gonna call it "bubble wrap."
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Shaan Puri | I like that one. That's strong. Alright, I got another one: **Alohomora**.
Making email introductions sucks. I hate doing it. It's like, "Oh, can you introduce this person?" I gotta say, "Hey Bob, meet Sean. He's this guy, he's this guy." I'm just shortening it to one word. We're using a Harry Potter word, **Alohomora**, for the spell that just unlocks doors.
So that's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna go to an email thread and just say, "Sam, Bob, Alohomora!"
*Boy voice*: "Alohomora, fellas! I've unlocked the doors. Here, go on through."
And that's it. I'm shortening it to one thing.
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Sam Parr | What... but what's that word from?
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Shaan Puri | Harry Potter... it's the spell he uses to unlock any door.
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Sam Parr | Oh my God! Alright, that one's extra nerdy.
Alright, I've got another one. So, you know how on Google Calendar, the default is typically 30 minutes?
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Shaan Puri | mhmm | |
Sam Parr |
I hate that. So we're gonna call this... we're gonna say... we're gonna use this word when it's like, "Hey, put something on my calendar and let's sync storm it." We're just gonna *sync storm* it.
So it's, by default, a 5-minute meeting. Let's just sync storm and, you know, people say like, "Let's sync up," and it's always either default 30 or 60 minutes. No, fuck that. We're gonna sync storm this. We're gonna get it done in just about 4 or 5 minutes.
So, "Hey, just put something on my calendar. Put a little sync storm on my calendar and we're gonna bang this out."
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Shaan Puri | I love it because the other person is going to have no idea what you mean by that, but it sounds like they're supposed to know.
So, yeah, no problem. I love singing "Stormin." It's one of my favorite things to do. And they're going to walk away and be like, "What the hell am I supposed to do here?"
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Sam Parr | We gotta sing "Stormin' to Some of the Bitch" don't.
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Shaan Puri | It's also nice because it's a way... they're like, it's the equivalent of dating. A first date, and being like, "Hey, let's grab dinner," and you're like, "Let's do drinks."
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Sam Parr | Yeah, yeah, yeah. | |
Shaan Puri | It's actually that.
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Sam Parr | Yeah, you got a sing store, man. Alright, what do you have? Alright.
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Shaan Puri | We gotta crash the boards here.
So, this is a sports analogy that's going to be used in a corporate setting. It's when you're emailing people but you're not following up hard enough.
You're emailing a prospect, trying to make a sale, and you notice there's just no follow-up. There's no follow-up email.
So, either you could use it like, you know, when you're following up, you could say, "Hey, I'm just crashing the boards here." Or you could tell your sales team, "Hey, we really gotta crash the boards here, fellas." They know that means we gotta really follow up strong.
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Sam Parr | I used to use the word **blitzkrieg** when referring to that. Then I realized that referencing World War I and World War II, Germany, and their military tactics probably wasn't the best thing. It's a crash course.
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Shaan Puri | **Blonde hair, blue-eyed.** To be using that one, yeah.
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Sam Parr | Yeah, we had a bubble. We had the bubble wrap blitzkrieg and we were crashing the boards. That's pretty good. | |
Shaan Puri | You got another one.
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Sam Parr | Yeah, so let's do this.
You know how when you have a meeting, and oftentimes, even if it's a good idea, it still turns into a vote? A lot of times, it's like, "Look, not everyone thinks that's a good idea, so we're not going to go with it." Even though, many times, the non-popular choice is the good one.
So what you do is try to be political and get people on your side before the meeting. That way, they vote for your idea or whatever. We're going to call that "sliding."
Look, we're going to have a meeting, but we gotta landslide this in advance. We need to get everyone to vote for our side. This idea needs to get landslided, so we're going to call it "landslide."
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Shaan Puri | That's powerful. I like that.
Alright, this is when you have an employee who it's sink or swim. You have somebody new, and you need to really figure out what they're made of.
It's, "Are we boiling eggs or potatoes here?" It's a way to ask about somebody and what they're really made of.
Because when you think about it, a potato starts out really hard, but if you boil it, it gets soft. An egg, on the other hand, starts out soft, but if you apply some heat, it gets hard.
You want eggs; you don't want potatoes in your company. So that's where you put that out there.
It's when times are getting tough and people are wilting, they're folding under the pressure, under the heat. You just gotta ask, "Are we boiling eggs or potatoes here?"
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Sam Parr | That's a good one. I think that's an old phrase from the South. Haven't I heard my grandpa say that? Have you ever heard that?
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Shaan Puri | I have not, but maybe I got... I've been told I have an old soul, so maybe that's what they got.
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Sam Parr |
Good one! Alright, this is the last one that I have. We're gonna call... Alright, so you know you were just in a meeting where a guy was saying a lot of jargon. Or oftentimes you'll be in a meeting and people are lying. They'll be like, "Well, we're doing great," and it's like, well, we're not really doing that great.
For that, we're gonna use the phrase "**bullshit bingo**." It's like, "Hey, are we having a meeting about what we're gonna do, or are we just playing bullshit bingo and winning right now?"
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Shaan Puri | We're.
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Sam Parr | This meeting is just a game of **bullshit bingo**, and we're killing it.
So, yeah, it's like, "Sean, look, you're telling me all this nonsense." I think your board is full for **bullshit bingo**. This is just nonsense.
And so we call it **bullshit bingo**. I like that one.
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Shaan Puri | It's a way to call someone out, but because it's an alliteration, it just bubble wraps it enough. **Bubble wrap is the real winner here.**
Alright, I got one last one. This is similar to a situation where somebody is trying really hard, but we're working on the wrong things. It feels like we're just "massaging elbows" here.
It's when you're working on a problem and you're working really hard, but you're focusing on something that doesn't really matter. There's not enough meat on the bone there, and so you're just massaging elbows. It's the wrong place to be applying the effort.
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Sam Parr | I like that one. I like that one, but you have one more that I think you should finalize with—the one about a tree.
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Shaan Puri | So, this one came from Diego because I was very sorry with him. He goes, "It's when you have an employee."
Okay, so the phrase is: "I think we're trying to teach a fish how to climb a tree." It's when you have an employee and you put them in a position that's not really their core strength. They're great as a fish, but they need to be in water.
You put them in a position—maybe it's a technical person—and you got them on sales calls. It's like we're trying to teach a fish how to climb a tree here.
You'd just be better off putting them in their natural environment and letting them succeed there than really just working against, you know, the laws of nature.
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Sam Parr | Have you used any of these phrases yet?
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Shaan Puri | I'll start this. This was a brain... this was a sync storm, and now I'm ready to start.
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Sam Parr | Nice! There is this TikTok I saw where it was this teacher, and he goes, "My new favorite thing is to talk to my Gen Z students and say phrases, then gaslight them into thinking they don't know what they are."
He's like, "I just make up phrases." I think one of them was "pebbles." He was like, "Pebbles is like the opposite of a mountain or the opposite of a boulder."
So it's like, "Hey, why are you crying over this problem? This is a small problem. It's pebbles, baby! You don't have to freak out about this." And he would just throw these phrases at them.
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Shaan Puri | Sick, actually. Pebbles is... | |
Sam Parr | A good one. I think another one was, he was parked. So, it was when the day is going really slow or something's not moving. For example, "Man, it's only lunchtime now. This day is so parked and it's going so slow."
In this TikTok, he's like, "I use these phrases," and I just... they look at me and they're like, "What does that mean?" And I'm like, "You don't know what that means? Like, nerd!"
You know, that's what we have to do with bubble wrap or teach them how to climb a tree. We're like, "How do you not know what that means?" We just have to act like it's normal.
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Shaan Puri | We have had potential. Like, I first of all think parked and pebbles are elite. I don't know, I think bubble wrap is pretty elite too, to be honest.
But in the YouTube comments, let us know which one you're actually going to adopt. Which one was ready to go?
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Sam Parr | We have to have some like, buttoned-up billionaire guest or something on. Just like, oh...
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Shaan Puri | We just started using them.
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Sam Parr |
We just start using them and we'll use them so many times. For example, do you remember that movie "Super Troopers" where they're cops and they're like, "Hey, you wanna play the meow game?" And so instead of saying "now" they use "meow" like, "Give me your license right meow." They're like, "Let's see if we can play... let's see who can say meow."
That's what we have to do with our next guest. It's like, "So, Dharmesh, did you have... were you able to give it to him blunt or did you have to bubble wrap it?" You know what I mean?
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Shaan Puri | I just see, do they react or do they try to roll with it? Yeah.
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Sam Parr | Are we going to wrap up here? Is that it? Are we going to... was this podcast a sixth storm?
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Shaan Puri | Yeah, I think we gotta end it there.
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Sam Parr | Alright, that's the pod, dude.
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Shaan Puri | I got a shoehorn. You've reused a shoehorn.
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Sam Parr | Is that to put your shoes on?
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Shaan Puri |
I bought... not just a shoehorn, but like the most intense... Just for scale, this thing's bigger than my torso. So good, so critical! Such an amazing... I've never done one thing in my career as important as inventing the shoehorn. That's when you go...
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Sam Parr | I thought you were like a Crocs type of guy. What type of shoes are you wearing?
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Shaan Puri | When I try to put shoes on, it seems so difficult because I've just been in flip flops all day, right?
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Sam Parr | Have you been following Dye Workwear on Twitter?
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Shaan Puri | I do watch it. Why, what did he say about shoes?
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Sam Parr | He just is inspiring me to dress better. His content is so interesting, and I think he's inspiring a lot of people to dress better. He's just awesome.
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Shaan Puri | Is that why you have this green T-shirt from Hanes?
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Sam Parr | No, it's a little bit challenging when we do the pod because you only see like the upper part.
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Shaan Puri |
"Nips up!" So, we need our own Twitter account: "Fashion for Podcasters." I know! "Best 12 Garments You Can Buy: Nips Up."
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Sam Parr | Yeah, it's hard to... it just nips up. It's hard to, like, kind of be flamboyant like some of his stuff.
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