3 Niche Business Ideas We Thought Would Fail… But Actually Crushed It

Shaan Puri

May 25, 2023. Subject line: "He said it was a bad business idea." I emailed out to his whole list. I think, "Hey folks, Alex here." Telling people you run a mouth taping business isn't all sunshine and rainbows.

Sam Parr

Is it any... does anyone think that that was sunshine and rainbows?

Shaan Puri

You know what they say.

Sam Parr

Running a mouth taping business ain't all sunshine. Everyone always asks me, "How awesome is this business?"

Shaan Puri

Alright, what's up everybody? Welcome back to the greatest podcast of all time, *My First Million*, where we talk about business ideas. We discuss businesses that are under the radar, crushing it, that you haven't heard of. Hopefully, when you listen to this podcast, you get a little inspiration and a little wind in your sails so that you can go out and kick a little more ass today. Sam, I have an ass-kicking story for you. You wanna hear it?

Sam Parr

I love **ass-kicking** stories.

Shaan Puri

In fact, this is two-way. It's stories of other people who are kicking ass, and it's a story of me getting my ass kicked as an investor. So, here are two investments that I passed on for two totally different reasons. I'm going to tell you the reason why I missed them and the really cool story of what these companies did. Alright, so this first one was about two or three years ago. I think it was two years ago, and it's this guy, David. He's pitching me a startup called Jenny. It was at peak AI time, so this is 2021. You know, GPT-3 was out, and everybody was excited about AI. This guy had yet another AI startup idea. I didn't really know what to make of it. It was small; it was only doing $2,000 a month in revenue. So he's like, "Hey, we've got great traction. I'm at $2K MRR." And I'm like, "That's cute, son. $2K MRR? Oh, you know, like the pool guys make $2K MRR. Come on, we gotta do better than that." But he was a really nice guy. We get on a call, and I don't remember what I said, but he told me afterwards, "Yeah, you were one of the nicer people in terms of giving us feedback and telling us what to do." At the time, they had a pretty undifferentiated product. So what they were doing was a product called Jenny AI. What Jenny was doing was it was a writing tool. It was just like Jasper, which was like, you just say, "Hey, I need a blog post," and it writes you a blog post. You need SEO content, you need blog content, you need email content; it was just like writing blogs for you. There were a bunch of startups doing this at the same time. Jasper was doing it, and they were taking off. So it was kind of a hot space, but I was like, "Dude, I think you're late to that party." And he's like, "No, no, no, we're gonna make it." I liked the guy. He told me that at age 16, he had basically started being an entrepreneur, trying to build companies. He tried to build a T-shirt company and failed, but you know, that's a rite of passage: to start your first terrible idea. He'd gotten that out of the way, and now he was on to this, which was cool. He's like, "I saw..." and here's your funny story. He goes, "We got on GPT-2 when it was just like developer access mode only, and we told it to, like, I don't know, tell us a joke or say something wise but funny." And GPT-2 goes, "What's the darkest place in the world?" And they go, "What?" And he goes, "A butthole." And they're like, "Oh..."

Sam Parr

My gosh.

Shaan Puri

This thing is crazy! What does this take? So they're like, "We gotta go all in on this." They start trying to come up with ideas for this.

Sam Parr

And how old are they when they start working on this?

Shaan Puri

So, they're about 24, I think.

Sam Parr

At the time.

Shaan Puri

Of doing this right, and he's like, "I got no money." He's living at his mom's house. He's literally saying, "I have to ask my mom, like, hey, can I get the credit card? I want to get Chipotle." And he's like, you know, she didn't make me feel bad, which I respect. I know she probably felt bad because, you know, Asian parents, all their kids and all their friends' kids are at Stanford and getting promotions. And he's still in the bedroom. He's... I don't know.

Sam Parr

Know, 24 is the threshold where it's like cute from concern.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, con... exactly, exactly. Endearing to concern. He was making that transition and she's like, "I don't know, he just keeps saying thanks for hopping on the call, but nothing seems to happen after that." You know, he's pitching people all day in his bedroom and it's not working. But he makes a pivot, and he makes a pivot that made a lot of sense. He did what I call a "niche down" or "zoom in" pivot. A zoom in pivot is when you basically say, "I have this thing today that's kind of meh for everybody, but maybe for one set of people, it's awesome." This is the same way that actually Twitch started. Twitch was born from Justin.tv, which was about broadcasting anything. It was this grand vision: broadcast anything, broadcast your life, broadcast your backyard, broadcast this sports game, broadcast this video game. Only 2% of it was people broadcasting video games. Twitch was a zoom in. Justin.tv was failing, and they said, "What if we just did the video games thing?" It sounds counterintuitive. It's like, "Well, then we'll be too small. It's only just that little bit; it's only 2% of our current traffic." But it actually had the potential to be quite big once you specialized the product in that way. These guys did the same thing. They focused on college students who need help writing essays specifically—not like, "Oh dude, it's like one minute before the deadline, just give me a full essay. I just want to hand it in to my teacher and trick them that it's AI." It's like, "No, no, no, it's actually like a writing assistant." So, you're basically writing your essay, and you don't just say, "Give me an essay about the Industrial Revolution." You start writing your essay, and then it kind of... like, I know it autocorrects. It'll kind of fill in the rest of the sentence. So if you're writing and you stop, it'll suggest what the next couple of sentences could be.

Sam Parr

It'll help you cite stuff as well, so there.

Shaan Puri

Cite sources exactly like you need for.

Sam Parr

Example online is really well, it's really great. So, it's the effect of the ketogenic diet on human longevity. It looks like he's talking about something and it's like, "Hey, by the way, do you want to cite this paper that's already mentioned this or that?"

Shaan Puri

Automatically, the well-formatted citation at the end will run a plagiarism check for you. It'll be like, "Hey, let's just make sure that this is not copying what's already out there," because, you know, your teacher's not gonna like that. So, it has a couple of specific tools. It's not like ChatGPT where it's just a chat interface. You kind of click buttons and select how you want this to help you, and then it helps you.

Sam Parr

You know how Microsoft used to have Clippy, who would catch you making errors? They just need like a little picture of Bill Ackman that says, "Uh-uh, that's plagiarism." Exactly, exactly, we're going to have Billy.

Shaan Puri

He told me that, basically, at the end of the essay, less than 30% has been written by AI. So, 70% is written by the student, and 30% ends up getting filled in by the AI. Okay, so he gets this idea, but even still, how do you know if this is going to be successful? Now, he pitched me two years ago at $2,000 in MRR (Monthly Recurring Revenue). It's currently doing $300,000 in MRR, so that's $3,600,000 a year. In fact, last year he had an offer to sell the company for $3,000,000. He thought about it and was like, "Oh my God, I could be a millionaire! I could have $3,000,000! I'm young, I'm in my early twenties." He turned it down, and now this company is probably worth $10 million to $16 million today. So, in 6 to 12 months, you basically tripled the value of the company. That's great!

Sam Parr

Alright everyone, a quick break to tell you about HubSpot. This one's really easy for me to talk about because I'm going to show you a real-life example. I’ve got this company called Hampton (joinhampton.com). It's a community for founders doing between $2,000,000 all the way up to $250,000,000 a year in revenue. One of the ways that we've grown is by creating these cool surveys. We have a lot of founders who have high net worth, and we ask them all types of questions that people typically are embarrassed to ask but that provide a lot of value. So, things like how much the founders pay themselves each month, how much money they're spending each month, what their payroll looks like, and if they're optimistic about the next year in their business. All these questions that people are afraid to ask, but we ask them anyway, and they tell us in this anonymous survey. What we did was create a landing page using HubSpot's landing page tool. It basically has a landing page that says, "Here are all the questions we asked. Give us your email if you want to access it." I shared this page on Twitter, and we were able to get thousands of people who gave us their email and told us they wanted this survey. I could see where they came from—social media, Twitter, LinkedIn, basically everywhere else that they could possibly come from. I'm able to track all of that. Then, I can see over the next handful of weeks how many of those people actually signed up and became members of Hampton. In other words, I can see how much revenue came from this survey and how much revenue came from each traffic source, things like that. But the best part is I can see how much revenue came from it. A lot of times, it takes a ton of work to make that happen, but HubSpot made that super, super easy. If you're interested in doing this, you could check it out at hubspot.com. The link's in the description, and I'll also put the link to the survey that I did so you can actually see the landing page and how it works and everything like that. I'm just going to do that call to action then, and it's free! Check it out in the description. Alright, now back to MFM.

Shaan Puri

So, I talked to him and I was like, "Dude, David, what's the story here? What happened?" He's like, "Well, you know, we talked to you. We did a bunch of things. So here's kind of the story of how they figured it out." So, do you want to know the kind of like the startup survival part of it, or do you want to know the strategy of how they made it big?

Sam Parr

Well, the strategy... I mean, the startup survival mode of it. Like, he was just probably floundering, but he didn't have any expenses. So, like, he was kind of default dead. Just not even in startup mode, but default dead. Just his life, I mean.

Shaan Puri

He's not even there, but then actually, Jason Calacanis' incubator launched and gave him $100,000 just like that, over email. So then they moved to Malaysia, thinking, "Cool, this will last forever here." He's like, "How do we make this $100,000 last as long as we need to survive?" Because they didn't know if there was ever going to be another investor. They did end up raising more money later, about $800,000, but how did they make this big? I wanted to share a couple of things. First, he's like, "You know, we do the obvious things. We post about it, but it's not really going anywhere." Then there are three interesting inflections for this business. Inflection 1 is that he does the stuff that doesn't scale. He goes and fights for that first 100 customers with hand-to-hand combat. The overall strategy that worked here is that he called it "influence the influencers." He starts joining Facebook groups and wrote a long Twitter post about this, which you can check out. He joins a group of, let's say, 10,000 people. He explains that you can't just join the group and immediately post about your stuff; it just gets taken down or flagged as promotion. So he's like, "I basically did a strategy where I warmed up these groups. If I ever want to post, how would it be well received?" He worked backwards from that situation. He figured it would be well received if the moderators and admins liked him, were rooting for him, and actually liked his product. They had already used his product, and he was a familiar face in the community. They had seen him around adding value. Even when he posted, he was really posting just for feedback and not for "buy my stuff." So he thought, "Let me work backwards from that." He joins the group and starts posting very helpful content. In a Facebook group, the bar is pretty low, right? Because nobody's like professionally trying in a Facebook group; people are just very casual. Most people don't do anything at all.

Sam Parr

This is like a Facebook group for researchers.

Shaan Puri

It'd be for college students, like grad students. He had a hypothesis about it, so he's like, "Oh, I think it should work really well for grad students."

Sam Parr

Got it.

Shaan Puri

So, he joins some school's grad student group, which has like 6,000 people or whatever. Then he would get in, and what he would do is first start making helpful posts. He was just very visible and very helpful. People started to see him as like a regular. He's a regular at the bar. Okay, then he hits up the admin, and the admin's like, "Oh, you're one of the regulars? Yeah, sure, what's up?" He's like, "Hey man, I wanted to get your feedback on something. Would you be down to do like a 15-minute call? I know you talked about this in a previous post, and I think I actually have something that could help you with that." Then the guy would be like, "Alright, sure, I'll do it." So, he gets on the call with him, shows him the product, and then he's like, "I'm not gonna promote this until I see the eyes light up." He's like, "Basically, if they don't like it, then I'm dead on arrival. If the core power users don't like it, the casual guys aren't gonna like it." So, he's like, "I'm gonna keep iterating on my product until those guys are like, 'Yeah, this is actually awesome,' and I see that they're using it after the call. They keep using it." So, he does that. He asks them questions. He was like, "I read the Mom Test, like you guys said. These guys are fans of the pod, so we learned how to do these customer calls." Then I'm doing the calls, and I'm finding other pain points. Then I try to build a product that solves them, and then I'm seeing, do they use it on their own organically afterwards? Once they did, he's like, "I got them." So, then I would let them use it for a couple of weeks. And then he's like, "Oh, and by the way, I'm also gonna circle back." So, I would do the call, and then he's like, a week later, "Hey, I took all your feedback and I made the product better." That's like a key part of winning users over: making them feel like they're heard and that you actually acted on what they said. Finally, he'd be like, "Hey, do you think I could post it in the group? Do you think other people would like this?" I'm like, "Yeah, for sure! Actually, I'll post it for you." And they would go post it. So now you get the kind of like co-sign from the group admin or moderator that everybody knows the leader saying, "Hey, this is awesome! I've been using it. The founder's in the group. If you have any questions, check this out." So, we start getting a bunch of traction. So, you got the first 100 customers through this very manual process, which was really not as much about getting customers as it was about getting the product right by winning over the customers. This is very similar to you doing the first 100 calls with Hampton members, right? Like, you showed me your calendar, and I called it the zebra calendar. It just stripes... just 20-minute calls all day. Just like your whole calendar was striped.

Sam Parr

And, well, I did this with Reddit too, by the way. I did that when "The Hustle" first got popular because I posted on Reddit. I did the same thing; I wasn't as eloquent as he was, but I basically just said, "10% self-promotion, 90% add value." So, people start getting a reputation. Did you see that there's a movie about the guy? What's his name? Some Roaring Kitty who did the GameStop stuff? Okay, so Roaring Kitty, the real person, is like a really good-looking guy who is charismatic. He looks like he could be an actor. When you see him talk, I remember watching that movie and thinking, "Dude, the real Roaring Kitty is cooler looking than this actor."

Shaan Puri

Right.

Sam Parr

I'm looking at David Park doing this video, and I'm seeing how he dresses. I'm also looking at some of the home videos that he's taken of himself. I'm like, "This guy looks like an actor playing him." Do you know what I mean? This guy's got the *it* factor. I can't even hear him talk, but I can just tell it by his body language and how he dresses. This guy's *charisma* is undeniable.

Shaan Puri

Kinda like the Gen Z haircut, yeah.

Sam Parr

This guy's dressed up. He looks like the actor playing him.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, he's like one of those people where if they wear clothes that don't fit, it looks good. But if you wear clothes that don't fit, you look like a fucking idiot. He's one of those people who can actually wear clothes that don't fit. Now, let me tell you, okay? So then here comes phase 2: **Get Lucky**. And "Get Lucky" is... you know, we've done that thing before about the 4 levels of luck. The first one is just dumb luck—lightning strikes you. The second one, which is "fortune favors the bold," is when he's taken a bunch of action and puts himself in a position to get lucky. So, there are two lucky breaks that happen. The first is this guy, Zane, who runs an AI newsletter. I think it's called **Superhuman**... or something like that. He does this Twitter thread, and it's called "10 websites so useful it feels almost illegal to use them" or something like that.

Sam Parr

That's something... so funny! That's so funny.

Shaan Puri

Classic, like, you know, clickbait-y thing. And this thread goes so viral. Dude, guess how many likes this thread has?

Sam Parr

I don't know 10,000.

Shaan Puri

365,000. Dude, I could post a sex tape and not get 365,000. In fact, I probably wouldn't get any likes.

Sam Parr

But yeah, if you could ask...

Shaan Puri

You could post a sex tape and not get 365,000 likes.

Sam Parr

What was the joke that you had? You're like, "I can't believe one of your friends is on a porn site and it isn't popular. That's the worst job ever!" That's like, you release a sex tape and no one wants it. I was...

Shaan Puri

Still talking about that later, your friend who you said has a porn site is not that popular. I was like, "Wow, the worst-case scenario."

Sam Parr

How many downloads did he get from that phone? How many users did he get?

Shaan Puri

So, he's like, "Dude, every minute, I'd get 10 customers." It was just insane. He gets this huge boost; I don't know exactly how much, but it's like 10x or more. He was at $2,000 before that, and now he's in the tens of thousands of monthly recurring revenue (MRR). The first thing I described is how he got to the first $2,000 in MRR. Then he gets the viral Twitter thing, and now he's in the tens of thousands of monthly recurring revenue. So, what happens after that? Jennifer Lopez does a commercial about AI with Virgin Air or something like that. In the commercial, she's like, "Oh, I'm not Jennifer; this is Jen AI." That gets a bunch of searches, and he's the number one search for "Jenny AI." He's like, "I got a bunch of free traffic from that." It helped again. He's like, "So, I'm getting lucky, but I still don't know what to do to really blow the top off this thing." Then they start posting TikToks. Now, this is what I want to ask you, Sam. You did a great job early on with The Hustle. I'm going to put you on the spot; this is going to be hard. At The Hustle, you did some really cool ads. Instead of just saying, "Here's my newsletter; please read it. It's very good, I promise," you were like, "My boss thinks I'm so smart, but what he doesn't know is I just read The Hustle every day." It was value-based, right? It kind of had that hook. What is the happy ending for this customer? It's not that your newsletter's great; it's that your boss thinks you're smart, and everyone thinks you're so smart.

Sam Parr

My boss thinks I'm smart. I'm not. My secret weapon is the hustle, which I get every morning. That was the ad, right?

Shaan Puri

And you stole that from somebody, and now a hundred people have tried to copy that.

Sam Parr

I wouldn't say I stole it, but you could say that. I don't think I would say that. I would say I was heavily influenced by a random ad that I saw from The Skimm. I changed it, and now everyone else has since stolen it.

Shaan Puri

A jury of our peers would say that. So, yeah, this guy... now I want you to tell me, if you had to do an ad, right? You're making a little short video, a TikTok, and you need to promote Jenny AI. Let's brainstorm real quick, right? Let's do this live, as Bill O'Reilly used to say. Alright, tell me what you would think of. I know this is a very hard prompt, but if you come through, just imagine how smart everyone’s going to think you are at this podcast. What would you do? How would you design this TikTok ad?

Sam Parr

Well, okay. I actually think that I would steal that same premise, which is like, "My teachers think I'm brilliant." I'm not. I'm really just using Jenny AI. Video is harder. So, all of my ads were text and a photo on Facebook. To do this on video, that's like what young people are great at, and I'm really bad at. What would you do for the video? I would do that same premise, but I don't know how I would struggle to display that.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, watch this. This TikTok has 4,000,000 views. So the ad is basically... it takes a different format instead of saying, "My boss thinks I'm so smart" or "My teacher thinks I'm so smart." I call it the relatable struggle. Let's just break this ad down. It features a girl, and it doesn't look like an ad. That's the first thing you've even noticed.

Sam Parr

Looks like Starbucks.

Shaan Puri

If you want ads to work, don't make them look like ads. That's the biggest thing. As soon as I see an ad, I'm instantly swiping away. So, this needs to be relatable. For example, it could look like a college girl at a Starbucks, and it says, "Doing an essay last minute. My goal is to submit before 12 AM." It's done two things: it's relatable and it establishes some stakes. Will this person make it, or won't they? Alright, that's the thing. It's a door-closing mission impossible; you've got to slide under the door.

Sam Parr

Here, I gotta tell you the second thing from my experience with about $15,000,000 in ad spend. I'm going to say something right now that might make me sound horrible, but I'm just going to speak the truth. Here's what I found with my numbers: women get higher clicks among women. Women also get higher clicks among men. So, women do better in terms of getting clicks from both men and women. I've always had a higher click-through rate with women. Now, here's the thing about women: they have to look approachable. I can have a conversation with them, but they need to be aspirational. If they are too good-looking or too fancy, it doesn't work. It has to be an approachable young woman, and I found that this demographic gets the most clicks across all groups. They did that wonderfully here. Did I say that right?

Shaan Puri

Say that with an appropriate level of nervousness in your voice as you're trying to say this without getting canceled. You're like, "You're a fine, approachable young woman. You're a striving lad, young lad." Like this...

Sam Parr

Is we used to have... it was like a... if...

Shaan Puri

You use like 1940s language. You're like, "If you're a young lass who's splendid and fine," then you're... It's like, dude, you can't just avoid cancellation by using old language.

Sam Parr

I'm gonna call it "next door hot." Whether you're a next door guy or a next door girl, "next door hot" always outperforms "beautiful" or "model" or whatever.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, runway hot. So that's frame one: relatable struggle. Okay, now, two is... oh, and then by the way, it says current time 10:20. So it's, "Here's 10:20, gotta submit this by midnight." Last minute research. Then it says... this is the key one: 10:50, mental breakdown. She's crying basically. Like, now you're like, "Alright, you kinda don't know, is this gonna be funny? Is this gonna be... like, it's obviously kind of planned, but it still doesn't look like an ad for any product." We're 10 seconds in, no hint that this is an ad for a product. Then it says, "Coffee and TikTok break." Relatable. It says, "Back to it," and then it basically is like... shit gets serious. It's her, like, clipping up her hair again. Another relatable, humorous moment: "Oh, that's so me! I get it. I'm guilty of this," right? We're now 30 seconds in, and there's been no mention of the product. So this does two things: 1. The TikTok algorithm loves that you're watching full-length videos rather than swiping away because it's like, "Oh, this is some ad." 2. The second thing is, you're kind of invested. You have sunk cost; you need to see the ending. Even once you realize... one of the top comments is, "For a second when you showed Jenny AI, I was like, I got bamboozled by an ad!" [in all caps] Because you didn't realize it was an ad until you're basically, what, 35 seconds in? And then even then, it's not some polished demo of the product. It's a phone recording a laptop of someone typing in "Jenny AI" into, like, their Google search. Finally, it tells you what the product does for you, which is, "It'll help you write two times faster." And the happy ending is, she submits it on time. Okay, so the formula is this...

Sam Parr

How... like my doctor, lawyer, and accountant are... or they're just like at Starbucks at 11:50 PM trying to plagiarize a paper that's due at midnight. Well, that's how they were 8 years ago. Shit.

Shaan Puri

Dude, you know that you went to college with people who are now doctors? You're like, "That guy? I know that guy. I know the real version of that guy." Right? Like, "That guy only drinks Jägermeister... this guy should *not* be a doctor!"

Sam Parr

And so right now, these guys... that ad was great. So, David Park, you're amazing! They're at **$350,000** a month.

Shaan Puri

$300,000 a month, so $3,600,000 a year and doing really well. So congrats to the Jenny guys, did great. By the way, he gets cancer then, and he says this in that Starter Story video. He goes, "I felt like my dreams and nightmares were both to be true at the same time." What's that?

Sam Parr

And he got... that's a footnote to his story. He got cancer.

Shaan Puri

He got cancer during that last year or whatever. Then he had surgery, and he got out. He's good now. It's a crazy story, dude. It's a really crazy story. So, congrats!

Sam Parr

By the way, I don't think... I wouldn't say this is going to be a smart investment yet. So, no, I...

Shaan Puri

I don't think it's going to be a good investment, but I think it's going to be great for them. You make $6 to $8 million; that's fantastic! But below 30? That's amazing! You're set.

Sam Parr

I like... so if I was David, this is a company I would love to own. This is not a company that I would love to invest in, but it's going to make him very, very rich. I think at a very young age, and it's going to make him mildly famous amongst our little startup.

Shaan Puri

Dude, this is a business I would love to sell. If I could sell this thing for anything above **$18,000,000**, you won't see me. Bye! See you later! They'll be like, "Wait, the paperwork's not even signed." I don't care. Bye! It's over. I'm out of here. I mean, AI moves too fast. I'm not trying to be in the middle of the hurricane of AI and hope that I'm not made obsolete by, you know, one-click ChatGPT or some big company adding this. I think this is actually fairly protected. I don't think it's so niche that too many people are going to go for it, but I just wouldn't want to mess with this. I also think that college student essay writing isn't like the biggest total addressable market (TAM) either. So, you know, I would want to sell on the way up, get out, and go do something else.

Sam Parr

Yeah, and also, Sam Altman raised the equivalent of America's GDP, like $5 trillion. Whenever I see these numbers, I'm like, that just means nothing to me. I hope I'm dead by the time this becomes a reality because... is there?

Shaan Puri

Any Sam Altman story? You wouldn't believe.

Sam Parr

No, I believe I would not believe at all.

Shaan Puri

If I told you the OpenAI headquarters is underwater, would you be like, "That's bullshit," or would you just be like, "Where?"

Sam Parr

I would believe anything about it. Yeah, I'd be like, "So, should we scoop up and go visit them, or what do we do?" Yeah, I believe it all. Alright, I've got a big one and a short one. I'm going to give you the short one first, and then I want to hear this thing about flow. But do you remember? I want to give an update, and I want to say, with preference, with this update: last time I gave an update on this guy, he took that update, clipped our YouTube video, and turned it into an ad. I got super fucking pissed. So, I just want to tell you, **do not turn this into an ad. You do not have permission.** That's dumb. It looked like I endorsed this product, and I don't. A few years ago, I think it was three years ago, this guy started DMing me, telling me he has this idea for hostage tape. Do you remember I told you about this? It's basically tape that you put over your mouth because mouth breathing at night makes you a bad sleeper, I guess is the premise.

Shaan Puri

It's just gross.

Sam Parr

I don't know what it is, but there are some health benefits. He just got in right when the Hubermans and the Brian Johnsons of the world were emerging, so he timed it perfectly. He told me he was launching this, and I was like, "Oh, this is really dumb. This is the stupidest thing I've seen in a long time." He kept DMing me and sending me updates. I think in year one, he did $2,000,000 in revenue. Now, he just told me he ended 2023 with $14,000,000 in revenue. Then he's saying that this year, in 2024, he's like, "I think I can get $40,000,000 in revenue." He's saying, "We're buying all these ads on Joe Rogan. We're going to be sponsoring the UFC." He's saying all this crazy stuff, and I'm going to file this under the "I cannot believe this worked." I still can't believe it's worked, and he's totally proven me wrong so far. Has this guy been sending you updates?

Shaan Puri

Not an update. I've talked to him a couple of times about one specific deal he was going through. I just tried to help him out. By the way, on May 25, 2023, the subject line said he thought it was a bad business idea. He emailed out to his whole list, "Hey folks, Alex here, telling you that telling people you run a mouth taping business isn't all sunshine and rainbows."

Sam Parr

Is it any... does anyone think that that was sunshine and rainbows?

Shaan Puri

You know what they say: "Running a mouth."

Sam Parr

Taping business is saying, "All sunshine." Everyone always asks me, "How awesome is this business?" I just didn't know anyone ever said that.

Shaan Puri

I recently got called out on a very popular business podcast called *My First Million*. Maybe you listened to it? Anyways, I reached out to one of the hosts, Sam, to tell him my idea. He said it was a bad idea. All bold. That was over a year ago. Now, with 1,400 reviews and 100 success stories later, I couldn't help but message him again. Well, he didn't go, and so he says...

Sam Parr

I don't know.

Shaan Puri

What I don't know is what the thing is. Oh, he goes, "I thought it'd be really funny if the hostage tape army... if you're a customer of this and you're in the hostage tape army." I mean...

Sam Parr

None of these words should be going together, by the way. What's that? The hostage? None of these words should be lumped in the same sentence: "the hostage tape army." You know what I mean?

Shaan Puri

If that's on your bio, like you're out. But he said, "Show up in the comments and say, 'Hey Sam, hashtag shut your mouth.'" I like that part. That part's pretty good. Hostage tape, "Shut your mouth." I think that's... yeah.

Sam Parr

Yeah, that one's good.

Shaan Puri

He goes, "I don't wanna start a war, but these guys appreciate a good prank." We do, we really do. So, I don't know if he did that. I'm gonna click this link.

Sam Parr

And by the way, he's getting the last laugh. If his tape is untaped, he is getting the last laugh. This guy, this guy's winning. He's making a lot of money. People actually want his product. I'm wrong here; he's right. I still think it's stupid though. I'm looking at the comments, by the way.

Shaan Puri

I don't see one hashtag. Shut your mouth, Sam. So, I don't think Hostess Tape Army showed up. The cavalry did not appear for this one. But I think it's funny that he's doing this, and I think it's great that he's winning.

Sam Parr

God bless him. I got so angry when I saw my face on these ads. I started getting these ads, and it said, "I..." and I was like, "Oh, what the fuck?" I was making fun of you, and you just totally jujitsu'd me. Now I'm promoting you.

Shaan Puri

Alright, you shared an anecdote. I'll tell you about an experience I had. It's 2020, and I'm having dinner with a friend. We're only about 40 minutes into the dinner when he says, "I gotta go." I'm thinking, "Was it me? Was it something I said? Am I chewing too much? What's going on? Why do you have to leave?" He reassures me, "No, no, no. I hate to leave, but I have to go meet with this founder from Belarus."

Sam Parr

It was just you two at the dinner.

Shaan Puri

It was just the two of us at dinner, and he just bounces. I'm like, "Belarus? I don't know where Belarus is," but I was like, "Alright." I don't know if this is some elaborate excuse or what, but he leaves. So, I finish up dinner and go home. I see an email from my friend. He says, "Sorry I had to jet so early, but this company is really interesting." He tells me about a company called Flow, and he's investing in this company. He's like, "If you want in, I could get you in." I remember this because today, or yesterday, I'm scrolling on Twitter and I see Flow is one of the biggest success stories in consumer startups today. They have $192,000,000 in ARR with 60,000,000 active users, and it's been the fastest growing health app for, you know, four years. I'm like, "$192,000,000 in ARR? Why does this app sound familiar?" I go back and look at my email, and I see that I could've invested in this thing years ago had I just replied to this email from my friend.

Sam Parr

What valuation? I don't know what it was back then because I...

Shaan Puri

Didn't even reply to ask, but whatever it was, I should've done it. Because, you know, obviously the thing has been growing so fast that it has clearly become a $1,000,000,000 company, and it's done really, really well. But this company is really interesting. Last pod, you talked about... I forgot, ammo or whatever it is, like some Eastern European app builder factory.

Sam Parr

Yeah, they make a variety of apps. One's for muscle building for men, and another one is for working out for women while the men and women are on their own programs.

Shaan Puri

Well, I see your Eastern European women's app, and I raise you because that's what Flow started by these guys out in like Belarus or Lithuania, something like that. Two twin brothers, by the way. So, the twin brothers were raised by a single mother who was a librarian. They were like, "Yo, we gotta make money." They were 15 years old. One of them said, "I was going to school, and then I would work a full-time job after school. So, I would go to school for 8 hours, then I would work for 8 hours. That's what I did every day as a teenager." He had this deep feeling that they had to figure something out. So, he did two things. He taught himself how to code using textbooks. Then, he started actually writing books to make some money. He said, "Whatever I learned, I would then package up into a book and write it." He mentioned that he had written a bunch of books and then became a book publisher. He said, "I've published 1,000 books now." So, I'm like, "Okay, random." He continued, "The other thing that happened is in 2008, the iPhone App Store comes out. I think this is gonna be big. I think this is gonna be like, you know, the internet was big. There were a bunch of winners. I think there's gonna be some here." So, he said, "Forget the book publishing; let's start making apps." They started a health app, which kind of failed, then a second app, which also kind of failed. People asked them, "What did you learn? Was Flow your first app? How'd you do it?" He replied, "No, no. I started two things before that in a similar space, but they just didn't fully hit. I believe that success is the sum of your attempts." He said, "Those first two attempts that I did for a couple of years—that is the success of Flow." I just love that quote: "Success is the sum of your attempts." I think that's an amazing quote. So, he goes, "We start Flow," and they're like, "So, you're a dude building a women's..."

Shaan Puri

Tracking app... the number one tracking app in the world. How does that happen? How does a dude in Belarus do that?

Sam Parr

I love this quote: "It's not my job to build the product; it's my job to build the company of people that are able to build the product."

Shaan Puri

Exactly! They're like, "How do you have the product intuition of building this?" And that's exactly what he said. He goes, "This is one thing I learned in those first two products: as a job as a CEO, as a founder, my job is not to build the product. It's to build the company that will build these products." And that's what they did. They actually built two things. They created this holding company, and the holding company owns like four apps that are all super successful. They own Flow, which itself does about $200,000,000 a year in revenue. So, what does Flow help with? It basically started off as just a simple tracking app. It's like a monthly tracker, but then from that, they expanded into other things. They created what they call a "women's health super app." This was the pitch that I saw at the time when my friend went and had dinner with them. They were like, "Look, we built the number one tracking app, and that's great." At the time, they had like 30,000,000 users using this app. They said that in the U.S., 10% of adult women were using their tracker. So, they built the best tracker, but a tracker is not going to be the most monetizable thing. They were like, "Well, why do people track?" Often, they track for health reasons. They track because they're trying to get pregnant, or maybe they're entering menopause. There are all these other things that maybe they need health coaching for, and there are a bunch of maybes from there. It turned out they were right. They said, "We're going to make more money than any of these other health apps." So, they're bigger than Calm or these other meditation apps that are in the health and wellness space. This is a bigger app than all of those, and it's run by these guys in Eastern Europe who have basically dominated the world in this one category. They're the number one in this category. But they also own a couple of other companies. They own another app called XYNG, and they own another app called Prisma, which is like a photo editor. Do you remember when Prisma went viral a little while back? It had those cool-looking filters.

Sam Parr

Yes.

Shaan Puri

The Holdco has raised a $100,000,000 Series B.

Sam Parr

And that's called **palta**.

Shaan Puri

Palta, yeah.

Sam Parr

Are they in America?

Shaan Puri

No, they're in Lithuania.

Sam Parr

Really? And they...

Shaan Puri

They have hundreds of employees, and this is like in the pitch deck. It was like, "Yeah, we can hire like 10 super talented European coders for the cost of 1, you know, mediocre engineer in San Francisco." They didn't say it like that, but I added the mediocre part. But that's the implication. It is basically, we have this talent advantage. We're the big fish in the small pond, but the small pond is highly talented with really good programmers. We're super, super cost-efficient. So they were able to be very, very efficient as they've grown.

Sam Parr

You could have invested in this.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, so this one.

Sam Parr

That one sucks.

Shaan Puri

So, I would say the first one was not really a miss in that, even now, I don't think it would have been a great investment. It was a great business to own, but not a great business to invest in. This one would have been a great business to invest in, but it just didn't hit any of my patterns. It's like you have an Eastern European company versus a Silicon Valley company. It's in the tracking space. I don't know how big that space could be. I underestimated, I'm sure many people underestimated, how big that app could be. In fact, that's why they said they were like, "I love that these guys didn't bullshit." They didn't do the thing that all Silicon Valley startups do where they make up their origin story. For example, Jack Dorsey with Square said, "I was trying to buy this vase that was being made by a glassblower, and I wanted to buy it, but he couldn't take a credit card. I thought, wow, the small businesses of America are underserved. I should really change this." In fact, I think part of that story is true; the co-founder did do that as a hobby. But I think most startups make up their origin story. For instance, with Native Deodorant, the founder said, "My sister was pregnant, and I just did not want her to be having aluminum in her armpits, so I created a pregnancy-safe product."

Sam Parr

Dude, the shipping cost of deodorant was just a lot cheaper than mattresses. And you just... exactly like that's why you did it.

Shaan Puri

Unit economics is not as good as a store. I went to Etsy and was hunting for the most highly sold product.

Sam Parr

Didn't have competition. That was...

Shaan Puri

Under £1 to ship and had 80% gross margins. It's like, that's not as good of a PR story. So these guys, they didn't do that. They were like, "Why'd you do this?" He's like, "Well, we just wanted to find the most underserved market." He's like, "We just knew that no talented builders were building in this space. We thought, well, half the world's population has this problem. They're completely underserved, and we could build a simple product that might have legs to grow from there." That's what they did.

Sam Parr

This guy's amazing! We gotta get him on the podcast. So, it's one of the founders. I guess it's, you said, two brothers. His name is Yuri Gursky. I guess he's from Belarus, but I think they kind of live in Poland and Cyprus. They're all over the place. But he's really successful. So, you kind of acted like he was just a young kid, blogging and packaging his blogs into books.

Shaan Puri

No, no, these guys are gangsters.

Sam Parr

Yeah, like these guys are ballers. He's had multiple companies that he sold. One he sold to Facebook, and one to... I actually don't know how to pronounce this, what's Mail.ru? It's the Russian guy.

Shaan Puri

What's Mueller?

Sam Parr

Yes, yes, yes! He sold one to Google. These guys are hardcore. These guys are awesome!

Shaan Puri

Yeah, these guys are kicking ass. So, you know, he's basically like... they're like, "What do you think contributed to the success of this?" He's like, "Well, the biggest thing is we picked the right market." I love that he said this because I think this is where he even mentioned it. He said, "Most people... you need three things: the right target market, the right timing, and then the right people to execute on it." He's like, "Most people don't get the first two right, but that's your rising tide. If you could pick the right market and the right timing..." He's like, "We picked basically this underserved women's health market, and we started in 2008, right when the App Store came out. That's where we started making apps. So we were early, and we went to the underserved market that had demand. From there, all we had to do was just hire good people, and it would work out." I think that most people, when you talk to entrepreneurs or the way their brain works, if you had to make a pie chart, it would be like number one is, you know, "How cool is my idea?" So it's not market-focused, but it's more product-focused. They focus on the product, then they focus on the people, and then last, they kind of think about what market they're in. What they try to do, which I think is a bad strategy... one mistake I made many times is like building the best product in a... whatever market, in a meh market. But you'd rather go into an amazing market and build a good enough product. That's where a lot more success comes from.

Sam Parr

And the best example of that, I believe, is Coinbase. They were like, "Our website early on sucked; it went down all of the time." But they picked a market that people were banking on and that they were willing to put up with a really crappy product. Another example is Michael Acton Smith from Calm. He gave me this great sound bite one time. We were just talking, and he said, "I don't launch these other things, and I kind of had to push the rock up the hill in order to make it work. But I knew that I picked the right market—being Calm in meditation." He described it as if he was surfing and just happened to catch this massive tidal wave. His job was not to push the rock up the hill; it was just to hang on to the surfboard and hope he didn't crash because it was pushing him and doing all of the work. That's the difference between something really working and something not working. He said, "I had all these amazing things, and I'm a really good entrepreneur, but I kind of brute-forced it into reality. It was really, really hard." I learned that when you pick the right market and catch the right tidal wave, it makes life a thousand times easier.

Shaan Puri

And the hard part is what you people get wrong. Okay, I want to pick the right market, so they just go to the biggest, flashiest market. Right now, AI is the trend, so they go into a super competitive market. It is a hot market; there are going to be huge winners there. But the trick, like Peter Thiel once mentioned at a meetup, is that he drew two circles like a Venn diagram. He labeled one "bad idea" and the other "good idea." He said, "The problem is most people just do things that sound like a good idea." The issue is that everybody else is also doing things that sound like good ideas. You're just facing tons of competition, and you might be too late by the time it seems like a good idea. He said, "So the secret is, can you find something that today seems like a bad idea but is actually a good idea?" For example, Coinbase started back when Bitcoin was not considered trendy. Crypto wasn't the wave back then; it was actually an underserved market. It turned out to be a great market, but it wasn't seen as such at the time. Now, with AI, everybody agrees it's an incredible market, so they are all going to fight this battle over there. If you're going to have something, you really have to niche down and find some section of that that's underserved. Or, go somewhere that's not seen as valuable today. Forget AI; find the thing that will be AI three years from now.

Sam Parr

This seems like the hostage tape guy giving his TED Talk. You know, he's gotta be standing there like this, talking about the Venn diagram of bad ideas and good ideas, and that his idea is just gonna be in the circle of the bad ideas. Yeah.

Shaan Puri

You gotta be the middle.

Sam Parr

I'm sorry, hostage tape guy. You're right, I'm wrong. You're the one winning. This is amazing! These guys are amazing. I would love to get this guy on the podcast. Is he speaking? I imagine he's an English speaker, right? Or partially?

Shaan Puri

Dude, he probably speaks better English than us.

Sam Parr

Yeah, is there anything this guy can't do? Like, would...

Shaan Puri

You, yeah.

Sam Parr

if if

Shaan Puri

If one guy had to save my life and then they're like, "How about this guy?" I'd be like, "Yeah, sure. I'm sure he could do it."

Sam Parr

Yeah, yeah. And if you Google this guy, his name's Yuri Gursky. Sorry, I'm probably pronouncing it a little bit incorrectly. He's got the perfect balance. He's got that "next door" hot look, you know what I'm saying? It looks like you could chill with him a little bit, but he also looks like he could really mess you up physically. He does a good job of having that "next door" appeal.

Shaan Puri

Want him to mess you up physically a little bit? Yeah.

Sam Parr

Dude, I get so many messages or comments from people making fun of me. They either think I'm gay or they're just like, "Dude, why are you commenting about people's calves all the time?" I'm totally just giving into this.

Shaan Puri

By the

Sam Parr

Do you have something to promote today, or what? Now it's time.

Shaan Puri

Right now, we're talking about some of the best execution we've seen and some of the most talented people we've encountered. Are they sitting in America?

Sam Parr

No, they're overseas. Actually, everyone has been overseas.

Shaan Puri

Everybody we've talked about has been overseas, and that's because the world has changed. There's talent everywhere. For you as an entrepreneur, one of the things you should be doing is leveraging that global talent. The way to do that is to go to Shepherd and just tell them what you need. All you do is go there and say, "Hey, I think we need a developer, an engineer, a designer, or somebody who could do all of our influencer marketing." Whatever you don't have time for—that's the bottleneck of your business. Go to Shepherd, tell them what you need, and they will find you somebody. In a couple of weeks, you will have talent in place, usually for five times less than you'd hire for in America. This is a not-so-secret secret anymore. For my e-commerce company, I think 40% of our staff is international. We get tremendous cost savings and we find some of the best talent by just looking overseas—looking where other people aren't looking. If you're hiring in the same place that everybody else is hiring, you're not going to make it. They're doing developers now, yes, because they do LATAM. One of the things I've been using is all their LATAM talent in Latin America, where you get a lot more of two things: one is a ton of MBAs. I needed an operations person, and my COO is just like, "I feel like every COO is overworked." I don't know if you've ever had this, but the entrepreneur always just gives the COO everything they don't want to do, which is like 85% of all the work in any business. It just gets dumped on the COO. It's like, "Yeah, it's operational; you should figure that out." So I was like, "Dude, my COO needs a COO." We started hiring operations people from South America because they have people who are MBAs. They're trained that way, they've been doing consulting for years, and they make, let's call it, $3,000 a month. Compare that to America, where you'd probably be paying $12,000 to $15,000 a month for that same talent. So we have four to five times more. We found some awesome developers and operations people in LATAM—that's what I go for. Then, for customer service, design, or anything that's like data marketing or marketing assistant, that's all the Philippines for me.

Sam Parr

Wow, alright. Well, what's the URL?

Shaan Puri

Support Shepherd.com. Go to Support Shepherd.com, and then when you're there, tell them I sent you. They'll take care of you.

Sam Parr

Do we want to round up or round out with the three random things you have here?

Shaan Puri

Yeah, I got some random things. I don't know which one we want to do. Did you watch the Super Bowl at all?

Sam Parr

Yeah, I'm not really a sports guy, but I watched it just because it was a big deal. You have Jason... how do you say the guy's last name? Kelsey? Kelsey. Jason Kelsey over Travis Kelsey. That Travis guy seemed pretty likable in his post-game interview. He seemed like a big goofy idiot in the best possible way.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, he kind of is. Although it was really bad for him, I don't know if you saw during the game, he like...

Sam Parr

He looked like shit.

Shaan Puri

He got super angry at his coach and almost knocked him over while yelling at him.

Sam Parr

The reason it wasn't cool was because his coach is old enough that you're like, "Oh, that ain't... that's like you kinda pushed an old guy," you know what I mean?

Shaan Puri

He kind of lost his balance. He almost pushed him down, and it was like, "Yeah, yeah."

Sam Parr

That's what I'm saying.

Shaan Puri

Everyone felt bad for their own dad in that moment.

Sam Parr

That's what I mean. I was like, "Oh, he's a little bit too old," but they hugged it out and it seemed like they were fine afterwards.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, I think they're fine. But definitely, all of the Taylor Swift fans were like, "Red flag! We need an emergency meeting." All the Swifties said, "I'm worried about Taylor. I don't like what I saw out there."

Sam Parr

But did you see the brother? I did see the brother. So he has another brother in the NFL, Jason. His brother dressed up like Zach Galifianakis from *The Hangover*, where he wore the outfit from Alan. He looked hilarious!

Shaan Puri

Yeah, I basically want to do a TED Talk. Actually, I want to prepare slides and be like, "Here's why you should be Jason Kelce and not Travis Kelce." Because on paper, you want to be Travis Kelce. He's the receiver, you know? Jason Kelce is a center, like the most unglamorous position that there is. So it's like, you know, you have Travis Kelce. He's a tight end, he's always catching passes. He's better looking, more handsome, and more stylish. He can dance. The other guy's kind of awkward. You know, Travis Kelce is dating Taylor Swift. Oh, that's amazing, right? But Jason Kelce's wife is a badass. She's a great-looking former athlete, super fun. She joins this podcast all the time and has a great personality. She just seems super down to earth. She shows up to the box because they know they're going to show Taylor Swift like a hundred times during the game, right? And it's Taylor Swift that she's there with, like that actress... what's her name? Blake... whatever.

Sam Parr

Blake Lively, yeah.

Shaan Puri

Blake Lively, yeah, and it's like they know every time something happens, they're doing the YouTube thumbnail face. They're so exaggerated with their emotions because they know we're performing here. Whereas, like, Jason Kelsey's wife is there in the background. She's wearing her college hoodie, like her alma mater hoodie, no makeup, and she's just super comfortable. She's having a great time, eating food and drinking. She's just chilling out, not trying to get attention all the time. So it's like... and then, you know, Jason showed...

Sam Parr

I've thought about this a lot.

Shaan Puri

I did because last week, or two weeks ago, they played in Buffalo. The game... I don't know if you saw it, but it was like a crazy snow day. Jason Kelsey was watching the game, watching his brother play, and he went and said, "Dude, I don't wanna sit in this luxury suite. I wanna be out there with the fans. This is awesome! This is like what you grow up loving about football. It's a snow game; this is crazy playoff football." So, he takes his shirt off, jumps into the crowd, and starts chugging beers with the Buffalo fans. He's just having a great time with them. He said, "That's the experience I want." His wife was like, "Don't do this! Taylor Swift's here; people are gonna see you doing this." But he replied, "I don't care what people say. I wanna have a great time. This is what I grew up admiring." You could tell this guy's having a great time. He's not in it for the show; he's got the real relationship goals you should have, not the Taylor Swift high school cheerleader dating the quarterback type of stuff. Then he shows up to the Super Bowl dressed like Alan from "The Hangover." I love Jason Kelsey! I am all about Jason Kelsey. Jason Kelsey over Travis Kelsey—that's my case.

Sam Parr

I'm looking at the... I just googled "Jason Kelsey's shirtless," and you do see him in the box wearing gray sweatpants, taking his shirt off. He's in the "drunk guy" mode where he's yelling. What's hilarious about this guy is you see his face and some of the things he says. He sounds just like a goofy dummy, like he's just joking with his fat friend. But they show him shirtless, and you see a can of beer in his hand, and it is so small! This guy is a giant. This guy will kill you with a 5-hour energy drink. Yes, this Bud Light looks like a 5-hour energy in his hand. This guy is a freak! How... like, they're both, I guess, huge. This guy does not look huge when you just see him from the neck up on the podcast. And you know he's got gray hair, right? So he doesn't look like an athlete. But when you see him shirtless, this guy looks like a freak. That's the...

Shaan Puri

Amazing! Yes, exactly. I just think there's some life lesson, some wisdom in this whole thing. In fact, another version of this... By the way, did you see when the Grammys were on and the Tracy Chapman song was going super viral? Did you see this? They did "Fast Car" - her and...

Sam Parr

She looked awesome too.

Shaan Puri

So, do you know the backstory of Tracy Chapman and that song?

Sam Parr

Yeah, she basically was just a normal person. She was just your average lady, and she, I think, got discovered by like a friend of a friend. So the friend being the writer of *Billions*, his dad... Yeah, his dad worked in the music industry, and Brian went up to Tracy. He was like, "Look..."

Shaan Puri

Well, they went to the same college. So, they were in college. She's just playing on campus, and he's like, "You're amazing." He calls his dad and he's like, "Dad..."

Sam Parr

Well, he goes, "What he said was..." He goes, "Look, this is like, lame usually, and I never like ask my daddy for a favor. That's kinda douchey, right? But you've got... Would you care if I make an introduction to my father? I actually think he might help you. I'm not just like blowing smoke up your ass... You actually... this actually could do something." And I think it... it became something. It did. And so she... she kinda gets a contract, but she's... she's like...

Shaan Puri

The anti-artist, right? She's the anti-pop artist. So she's not like... she's just going to make the music she wants, and she's not going to just do what the record label wants. They were like, "Oh, tell us about your relationship." She's like, "No, I prefer to keep that private." Yeah.

Sam Parr

Yeah, yeah.

Shaan Puri

But just tell us, she's like on Access Hollywood. They're like, "But this song has to be about someone." She's like, "Well, it is about someone, but like, you know, I'd prefer not to share it. I don't want them to feel bad about it or anything like that, so I'm not gonna share." And they're like, "Well, it's hard to promote this album if you're not gonna say anything." And she's like, "I just want my music to speak for itself." To me, I watched a couple of interviews; I went down a rabbit hole after this and I watched her. I was like, she is the beacon of authenticity. Her and Jason Kelce are like, you actually want to be them. You don't want to be the pop answer. There's something to just being totally authentic and not performing for everybody. She makes all the little TikTok influencers look like little TikTok influencers. I don't know if you've seen the subreddit "I Am the Main Character." Yeah, I hate it. It's full of people who think they're the main character of life. They put their camera somewhere on a flight, stand up, and do a TikTok dance while everyone else is like, "Dude, can I get to my seat? What are you doing? What is this?"

Sam Parr

And it's.

Shaan Puri

Just like these annoying people who are trying to do stuff for attention.

Sam Parr

Do you know how old Tracy Chapman is?

Shaan Puri

She's probably in her fifties. I don't know what she...

Sam Parr

She’s 60. She looks 60. She looks awesome and she’s...

Shaan Puri

Like, yeah, she just goes gray. She's got no makeup on or whatever. They're like, "How do you promote your music?" She's like, "I don't know. I don't have social media." "You don't have social media?" She's like, "No. I mean, I just hang out with my friends. Why would I need that?" And they're like, "But because..." It sounds like an idiot trying to explain why you need social media. She's like, "I don't know. I just make my music and I go outside and hang out with my friends. Like, why would I need that?" Then they're like, "Okay, but what do you do on your phone?" And she's like, "I don't have a smartphone either." Well, have...

Sam Parr

Haven't you heard the story of the Mexican fisherman and the banker? It's like that where it's...

Shaan Puri

Yeah.

Sam Parr

You know, a banker—a rich banker—is on vacation in Mexico, and he's loving it. He meets a fisherman who brings him fresh fish every day. The fisherman basically brings the fish in the morning to the banker, then spends the rest of the day chilling. The banker goes to the fisherman and says, "Hey, why don't you just go and hire more fishermen? Your fish is the best! I'll help you. Let's build this into a thing, and we're going to make so much money." The Mexican guy is like, "Alright, but then what?" The banker replies, "Well, then we're going to grow revenue to like $15 million, and then we're going to sell it." The guy asks, "Then what?" The banker says, "Well, then you're going to be rich, and you can do anything you want." The Mexican guy is curious, "What would I do?" The banker responds, "Well, then you could just fish all day and hang out." The Mexican guy replies, "I do that now." And that's like the whole parable of, you know, I actually don't know what it's trying to say other than your great life is a lot simpler.

Shaan Puri

Long until the end.

Sam Parr

And all this nonsense, whatever. Actually, I'm not sure what it's all about. Why does it be? Yeah, because what's up? Be the banker. Let's go on vacation. Oh, this should be a fish.

Shaan Puri

should we go home

Sam Parr

like yeah

Shaan Puri

I think you missed the ending of that one. I think it's about knowing what you want and also knowing how to have it. There is such a thing as enough. Tracy Chapman has enough; Tracy Kelsey has enough. By the way, a couple of other cool things about her story that I really like: 1. You know, be prepared to take the chance when luck presents itself. So, do you know how she got her big break? What kind of catapulted her to become a star? Because obviously, she's not doing the normal stuff you do to promote yourself as a pop star. She doesn't look like a pop star, doesn't talk like a pop star, doesn't have social media, and doesn't have a smartphone. So how does she initiate her break? Have you heard this story? No? So, there was like a giant televised music event that was for Nelson Mandela's 70th birthday.

Sam Parr

yeah yeah yeah

Shaan Puri

And she's on the prelims, the undercard of the undercard, before the TV stuff even turns on. So she goes and plays 2 or 3 songs early in the day. Later in the day, it was supposed to be the headline acts, and Stevie Wonder was supposed to go on and perform. But Stevie Wonder got lost. No, I'm just kidding—Stevie Wonder! They messed up his backing tracks, and so he's like, "I can't go on. My backing... this is not gonna work. I need the audio to work." They were like, "Shit, the audio is messed up. We need somebody to fill like, you know, 6 minutes of time here before the next act and give us some time to fix this. Who can go on and play with no backing tracks and just go on acoustic and kill it?" And they were like, "Tracy, will you go on there and play a song?" She's like, "Okay." And they're like, "But it's just you and your guitar, nothing else." She's like, "Okay." So she goes out there and plays "Fast Car." You can see this video on YouTube. Her voice is quaking at the beginning, and she has no autotune, no vocals, no backtrack. You can hear every imperfection in it. But then she kind of comes into her own, sings the song, and people love it. They go nuts for it. That's how she kind of got her break into stardom—by being prepared, willing to go out there, take a risk, and having obviously the talent to back it up. Her first album sells 10 million copies, which is insane. Then they're like, "Amazing! Huge hit 'Fast Car' still is considered one of the top 100 songs ever written." They're like, "What are you gonna do for your second album?" The record executives come to her with some ideas. They have a pitch meeting, and they're like, "You know, presentation." They pull the curtain off the easel and say, "Tracy Chapman singing these pop songs." She's like, "No, I don't think I wanna do that." They're like, "But Tracy, you did 10 million your first time. You could do 20 this time, right?" Like the banker to the fisherman. And she's like, "No, I don't really wanna do that." They're like, "Well, what..."

Sam Parr

do you wanna do she's like

Shaan Puri

I'm not sure yet. I'm going to experiment and figure it out. They're like, "Experiment? What do you mean? You have to go to the studio and record." She's like, "No, no, I'm not going to record. What I'm going to do is..." So normally, what a musician does is they write their songs, go to a studio, and hire a studio musician to come and play the piano, trumpet, or whatever with them. They have no chemistry with them, they record, and then later they go on tour and perform. She did it in reverse. She's like, "What if I did the opposite? What if I hired a set of musicians that I really like? I took the risk of hiring them, and what if we tour for a year writing songs as we go? Through the tour, we're going to see what music is resonating with people, and at the end, we'll just record the stuff that they like." It's almost like a comedian going to small clubs and working out their material. She did that for music, and that's how she did her second album. She was like, "I'm so proud of how it turned out." I have no idea what the sales were, but I like that approach. Again, I'm on an authenticity kick right now, and to me, I love that.

Sam Parr

Last year, I said, "Sean, I'm going to be having a baby. Could you tell me what are some of the highlights of having a kid?" This was in private, and you were like, "It's just great. You know, my son and my daughter, I just get so much joy out of seeing that they admire all these little things. They just love staring at the fan." It made me happier to realize that, "Oh, the fan actually is cool." I like that I am interested in it now because they're interested in it. I love seeing them grow. That's how I feel right now. A few years ago, I asked you about really simple things that I thought you would understand, like Dolly Parton, and you were like, "Dolly who?" Now you're teaching me about Tracy Chapman. Next, for all I know, you're going to tell me who the Beatles are, and you're going to do this wonderful breakdown. I just think that you have grown so much. You are now like Tracy Chapman. I didn't know everything about her, but I could tell you a lot of her songs. Now you've just discovered her, and I love that you are bringing a new perspective to this. You're actually teaching me about an artist that I love. Next, what would we talk about? You know, Paul McCartney or Clapton? Let's talk about all this stuff. Tell me who Mick Jagger is. I like...

Shaan Puri

Sam, I used to stop believing, but now I realize I shouldn't stop believing. It's a great song.

Sam Parr

I'm getting so much joy, and I'm learning now that you are doing... because you probably didn't know much about her before this, did you?

Shaan Puri

no I I mean I just heard the song

Sam Parr

in fact I didn't

Shaan Puri

even understand what the song is

Sam Parr

never heard that song

Shaan Puri

no I heard I love the song but I

Sam Parr

don't know

Shaan Puri

Are you... so there's two types of people. I think there are people who listen to songs for the words, and there are people who listen to songs for the meaning. Which one are you? Like, I can hear a song a thousand times and not tell you what it's about. I have no clue what the song is about. I've never even thought about the lyrics. I might know some of the words, but I couldn't tell you what the song is about, even though I...

Sam Parr

don't know how to

Shaan Puri

tell you

Sam Parr

I care about the meeting, particularly about rock and roll, which was influenced by a lot of Black people in the seventies and eighties. It's like civil rights stuff. I enjoy learning the story about it. Yeah, I don't actually know what "Fast Car" is about, though.

Shaan Puri

You should go listen to it. Go listen and, like, actually listen to the lyrics. It's an amazing story that she's telling in that song. I kind of got into it for that reason. I also watched an interview with her, and I think both of us appreciate **poise** as a trait. I think poise is something nobody ever talks about, but we all notice it when we see it. Those are things that I like to pick up on. What are things that nobody says they are into or practice? Nobody ever says, "I'm practicing poise," but when we see it, we all think it's badass and we appreciate it. Well, Tom Brady, he's so poised, or that leader, he just has this way he carries himself. It's poise under pressure, right? So, she did this Charlie Rose interview, and Charlie Rose, again, she's kind of the worst interviewer ever because she doesn't say anything.

Sam Parr

but she doesn't play the game yeah she doesn't play the game

Shaan Puri

And so he's like, "You know, tell me, when you were a young kid, when did you first start playing music?" She's like, "Oh, you know, I got a guitar and I started playing music when I was like 5." He said, "By 8, I was writing songs." And he's like, "And that's when you knew you wanted to be a musician?" She goes, "That's when I knew I was a musician."

Sam Parr

yeah

Shaan Puri

That's totally fine. I just realized she wasn't trying to say it to Onan, but what a statement too! I think there's a poised way of saying something, and she's just saying it as it is. That's how it was. I realized I was a musician, and that's me. That's a part of me. That's how I am. It wasn't, "I'm gonna try to do anything." Trying is like the least poised thing you could do. I am a musician. I think she's a badass, and I really respect her.

Sam Parr

And I think she lives in Ohio, which is, you know, sort of like Dave Chappelle. You know, these guys that could have it all; they could be in the middle and the thick of it all, but they're in a fucking Ohio, just Chappelle's.

Shaan Puri

Another one on the authenticity of Mount Rushmore, right? Like, he walked away from $50,000,000 because they were trying to control the show. And he's like, "Then they maybe called me crazy and said I was doing crack in Africa." He's like, "No, I'm not doing crack in Africa. What the hell are you talking about?" He's like, "I'm in Ohio. I'm not gonna stop my image. I'm just gonna go live my life and be happy."

Sam Parr

I didn't know that that I I actually up until recently thought he was in africa

Shaan Puri

he was

Sam Parr

like because

Shaan Puri

That was the narrative. It was Dave Schell. He kind of went crazy; he was doing crack, and then he went to Africa. He lost his mind, and he came out years later saying, "No, they were offering me a bullshit contract. I said no, and then I just went home and did other things with my life." Yeah, he's like, "I didn't..." and then they started saying this crazy shit. But whatever, okay, whatever.

Sam Parr

Yeah, he was like, "I was in Ohio. That's where my father's from." There, I was just...

Shaan Puri

Hanging out with family, right? It's like, you know, the poise thing. Like when Mandela got locked up for whatever, he was locked up for 30 years or something like that. Then he came out and, you know, whatever, solved the apartheid. I don't know. I don't know.

Sam Parr

know what he's doing

Shaan Puri

he did something good for that you know black man

Sam Parr

he might think what he he picked up mexico and he fished yeah he was fishing with a bunch of mexican fish

Shaan Puri

Did, but the thing that he said was badass. He was like, they were like, "You know, aren't you angry or resentful at the people that put you in jail for 20, 30 years, whatever?" And he was like, "No, I was preparing because I was preparing for this." I was like, that's awesome! That's a cool way of saying it.

Sam Parr

sean coming through big time this is the sean purry episode that was a good good one from sartan

Shaan Puri

cultured now I think I'm cultured

Sam Parr

I think the second you give props to **Tracy Chapman** and **Nelson Mandela**, you are officially... you've crossed the chasm, my friend.

Shaan Puri

You know, when you leave milk out for a while, it becomes yogurt cultured. That's what happened to me. I just sat out for a while and it happened.

Sam Parr

It only took you a couple dozen, a few dozen years, but you've officially crossed the threshold. Congratulations! Good job, good pod. If you're a fan of this, you gotta subscribe if you want more Tracy Chapman stuff. But also, the occasional joke about Mexican fishermen that we totally skipped over and don't understand the meaning of the story. You gotta subscribe. That's the pod. Thanks!