How Successful Startups Got Their First 1000 Customers (Uber, Product Hunt & More) (#362)

Shaan Puri

What he was doing was, every day, he would wake up at like 5 or 6 in the morning. He would go to Phil's Coffee and sit down with his laptop. First, he'd tweet out that he was at Phil's every single day. Then, he would start literally emailing and tweeting at people, encouraging them to post their product on Product Hunt. He would say things like, "Hey, I posted it for you. Would love to hear your comment," or "Hey, I noticed this product that's a lot like yours. I wonder if you know about it, or like, that's in your industry. You should check this out." All he was doing was manually being the human notification system for Product Hunt. He was the human invite system, the notification system, the retention system—he was all of it.

Sam Parr

I have a feeling you're coming with fire or something you seem fiery today

Shaan Puri

I got some good stuff. Also, do you ever watch Barstool's interviews with people?

Sam Parr

do you watch are you talking about the caleb presley one

Shaan Puri

I don't know who that is maybe that's his name it's the one with they yeah interviewed aaron rodgers

Sam Parr

I watched it today, dude. His name's Caleb. Have you... so it's called... is it called Sunday? What's...?

Shaan Puri

it called sunday conversations but it's like sunday like ice cream

Sam Parr

Yeah, it's like this chubby guy named Glenny Balls who's sitting in the background. Then there's Caleb, who's like a bro, but he's actually really funny. He's hilarious and quite smart. He interviews these people and asks the best questions. He's so good at it.

Hubspot

have you

Sam Parr

seen the past ones

Shaan Puri

I've seen a few of them. This one is the first one I've watched in its entirety, and God, he's good, man! That is amazing. So, I watched that, and sometimes that's all it takes. You just see someone being great at their thing, and you're like, "I'm gonna be great today." That's it! I'm gonna be great today. I saw greatness, and now I need to be great.

Sam Parr

He makes me self-conscious. Caleb Presley is very, very good at these funny, awesome interviews. He's great on the spot; he's very good.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, he delivers. Alright, so let's do this. Can I tell you something? This is kind of amazing. Alright, this is going to be a little hard to share on here, but I put this into the document. So you can click the links, Ben, if you can. Let's screen share some of this stuff that I'm going to tell you. I saw this ad on Instagram, and this is the most amazing marketing funnel I've ever seen—maybe ever, but definitely for a musician. So check this out.

Keralanka

Stop scrolling! You have 24 hours. We're Kira Lonca, an independent hip hop group. Last year, we had the honor of being placed on Brockhampton's official community playlist, and we were also shouted out by Kenny Beats.

Shaan Puri

shiro lago go off I bet you can do it

Keralanka

This year, we're trying to grow our fan base. So, for the first 15 people who DM us on Instagram in the next 24 hours, we're going to send you a special gift. Swipe up and DM us now!

Shaan Puri

So, the beginning of the audio didn't play, but he goes, "Do you recognize these people?" and it's like Biggie, Pac, and a bunch of other famous rappers. He says, "Stop scrolling," and then he basically does this little thing. So, Ben Levy sent this to me, and I was like, "What is this amazingness? Let me swipe up; I must know what this free gift is." So, I do it. What does that lead you to? It opens up Facebook Messenger with a direct message already ready for their team. It just says, "Send me the free gift." Okay, so that happens, and then they respond, "Yo, what's good?" immediately. You're like, "Okay, I don't know what's happening here, but I'm intrigued." The next thing that happens—I have screenshots of this stuff below some of your research—they go, "Yo, Sean, what's good?" They use my name in the message; they pull it from Facebook Messenger. Then it says, "Give us a little bit; we'll get back to you ASAP with your gift and some more details. Thanks for your patience." Okay, cool. One day later, I get a message. It's an audio note from the guys who are the rap group, and it's basically like introducing themselves. Again, this is kind of mass-produced, but it works. They go, "Yo, Sean," and then it's the audio, which is like, "Yo, here's our story. We're these guys, blah blah blah. Here's what we're doing." Then they said, "For your gift, we wrote you your own custom song. We personalized the lyrics just for you, and let me know what you think." It links to their SoundCloud, and it says, "Sean, King of the First Million," that's the name of the song.

Hubspot

oh

Keralanka

Yeah, the homie Sean, he runs it up. Ain't no underhand. Got his Dodge with him. Yeah, that's the gang. Hope you understand. I saw the homie on Twitter. Now he done messaged us, "Invest your funds with a fiat at ET. Get it done." But I can't afford it, to keep it real.

Hubspot

so they

Shaan Puri

Send the song, and I'm like, "Okay, well, I don't know what's happening right now, but this has never happened before." You go from an Instagram ad about a band that you've never heard of, then you swipe up. They send you an audio note and a personal message. The following day, they send you a song that has your name in it. Then they follow it up again, saying, "Yo, I don't know if you're in New York, but I'm going to pretend you are. We're doing a show. Here's the link to the show, and here are the tickets." Then they send this automated graphic using Canva. You can see it there; it's like me crowd surfing. I don't know what is going on, but this band is kind of genius in the way that they're promoting themselves. They're still small; they're called Karalanka. When I saw this, I thought, "I don't know, they may or may not be the best musicians, but they probably have the highest overlap of marketing genius for a young band." They play music, right? There's a lot of marketing genius out there, but they don't make music. There's a lot of musicians, but they don't know anything about marketing. These guys know enough about both to be very dangerous. I just thought this was amazing.

Sam Parr

Is this effective, you think? I don't understand. So they're basically doing all this to get you to buy tickets to their New York show, is that right?

Shaan Puri

Well, it's not just that. It's not just about buying tickets to a specific show. Basically, the way I think about it is that every business needs to find a way to get like their first 100 or first 1,000 customers who love them. That's a really specific thing. I just need 1,000 customers who love us. Whether it was for this podcast, we needed 1,000 people to listen who actually really love the show. Every business has this challenge. So the question is: how do you actually do that? At Y Combinator (YC), they have this saying: "Do things that don't scale." They talked about the early Airbnb guys, how they used to go and personally call all the hosts of their New York Airbnbs. They would go to their houses and take professional-looking photos so that the listings looked better. People were always laughing, saying, "You know, that's not gonna scale." But they responded, "Well, first of all, it doesn't even matter if it scales because right now, I don't need scale. I just need something that's gonna get 1,000 people to really love us." That's what these guys were doing. I thought this was an amazing example of actually betting on that strategy: you need a small group of people to really love you and go to bat for you, not a bunch of people who just kind of sort of like you. For example, "Oh yeah, we got 10,000 views on this thing." It's like, okay, but do those views matter? What are those views worth compared to someone who has a story to tell, like I'm doing right now, or someone who's really impressed by you, feels interested in you, or is invested in your story? That person actually goes and clicks, learns more about you, and goes deeper down your funnel. I think this is amazing because they're brute-forcing that 1,000 fans who really care about them.

Sam Parr

Dude, I always hated this thing of, "Well, it doesn't scale," or "You gotta build to scale." I've always hated that conversation for a few reasons. Number one, most people aren't going to make it to the point where they ever have to worry about that. Number two, you can brute force it and just manually and by hand do things to a pretty large number. I think the largest number that I've seen... let's see, I think Mr. Beast's whole operation is worth $100 million. That's a pretty brute force operation. I don't know what it looks like, but just talking to him, it seems like a fairly unsophisticated operation. When I talked to NerdWallet, you know NerdWallet? It was a blog that, at the time, was making like $30 million in revenue and I think around $15 million in profit. Incredibly, I saw a little bit behind the scenes, and it was super unsophisticated. What are some other things? It was basically just them blogging. What are some other examples of things that you've seen that look like a tech or internet-based company on the outside, but behind the scenes are pretty rudimentary? They haven't even thought, "Oh, we need to automate or scale," or whatever.

Shaan Puri

so our buddy ryan hoover built product hunt and he he listens to pod so he he he came on the pod as well and and told the story but I was there kinda like front row when he was building that thing meaning like I think I'm user number 17 in product hunt's history or something like that like very very early first dozen people or so that were on the platform and so and for some of us he was sending like updates on like literally what he was doing to build it and what he was doing was every day he would wake up at like whatever 5 or 6 in the morning and he would go to phil's coffee and he would sit down on his laptop first he'd tweet out that he was at phil's every single day and then he would start just literally emailing and tweeting at people that they should be posting their product on product hunt or hey I posted it for you would love to hear your comment or hey I noticed this product that's a lot like yours I wonder if you know or like that's in your industry you should check this out and all he was doing was like manually being the human notification system for product hunt he was the he was the human invite system the notification system the retention system he was all of it and at the at the time I was like this guy is literally like sending out like hundreds of personal welcome emails a day maybe a 100 personalized tweets per day and then he would like you know sure enough by 6 or 7 pm he'd close-up his laptop he'd go to the gym he's a very like structured guy and he would like go home he hits the bed early he's not like you know he's not like going out and socializing or doing anything like that he would wake up again the next day and he would do the same thing and sure enough that community that we were part of I think that first group he sent it to was like maybe 25 people and it didn't even have his own website he was using this thing called linkydink at the time it was like some third party tool to go use and every day he would send out the email digest in the morning of the cool stuff people posted and then he would tag each person with an individualized thing oh sean I know you guys had once looked at building a product like this what do you think about this and he'd get you to share your thoughts because he was asking in such a nice personalized way that okay I'll go ahead and reply but that generated all of the activity for that early community and why did product hunt work why did it sell for $20,000,000 well because at the beginning he got the right people from silicon valley to actually participate in the thing and the way he did that was like it's like when you watch somebody build a fire it's like first they're just like you know they're just hitting the flint or they're rubbing the 2 sticks together just to get the spark and then when it's there they're sort of covering it they're just blowing on it gently and then they're adding just the next little few pieces of sticks and they know it could go out at any moment and that's how it feels to build a community I saw you do the same thing with trends basically right like for trends when you wanted to launch that it was by no means gonna be a slam dunk and I think most of us who are in trends would say the research reports you guys sent out which was the product they were cool but the real reason anybody liked trends I think was the facebook group and all it was was a facebook group there was nothing you know you didn't build that you just literally went down there and typed typed typed a you know a title in and hit enter and then but what made the facebook group good was you picked you handpicked who could get in and then every day I felt like you were sharing like some super high quality stuff to get a conversation started in the group chat was that intentional when you do that 100%

Sam Parr

That was intentional. So, when I did two or three interesting things, trends right now are making many, many millions of dollars in subscription revenue. It's pretty simple, and I think there are only five people who work on it, so it's a pretty profitable thing. We added these people to this Facebook group, and I would do a few things. The first thing I would do is, even for people who didn't pay but I thought were impressive, like you or some of our other friends, I'd say, "Hey, I'm adding you to this group." I would manually add them and say, "Oh, look who just joined! You know, it's Sean. Sean has done all these impressive things. Funny seeing you here! How cool! If you have any questions for Sean, just ask him right here in the comments." I would do that all the time, adding these people who did the activity.

Shaan Puri

Worked, by the way, because I was like, "Oh shit, this group has cool people." In reality, you added 300 paid members that I've never heard of, and then you added one interesting person. But you made that intro post *baller*. You're like, "You ever seen a plane fly? Yeah, that's because of this guy." You know, it's like it was always the most *baller* intro. You're like, "Did you know they didn't have $100 bills till this guy came around?" It's like, wow, I get it.

Sam Parr

That all the time. The other thing I would do is write out all these long posts about interesting things I was thinking about. Then, I would tag certain people who either accomplished something like that and would talk about it, or I would write comments for smart people and message them, saying, "Hey, will you do...?"

Shaan Puri

me a favor

Sam Parr

Post this on there, or I would write posts for other people and make them comment. One time, when HubSpot was looking to buy us, I saw that Brian Halligan, the then founder and CEO of the company, joined. I messaged like 80 people and said, "Hey, reply to Brian. Here's the message to say to him." So many people commented, and then he checked in like 8 hours later. He was like, "Oh my god, I've been overwhelmed with replies and notifications. I can't believe how thriving this community is." I remember thinking, "Got them! I got them!" That interaction is how you make all... that's the feeling you want all community members to feel. We used to do that all the time. But yeah, Ryan Hoover is a good example of people who have grown without really caring about scaling. We should have a segment another time where we actually think about the most thrown-together, duct-tape stuff that we've seen that has gotten quite large. But I'm going to give...

Shaan Puri

You have another angle towards this. So there's one approach which is the brute force method: do things that don't scale. They almost do them even longer than that. They do it even past the point where you shouldn't be able to keep this up. Like, Airbnb still does that photographer thing. By the way, they turned that unscalable task of going to people's apartments, taking photos for them, and saying, "Hey, we'll improve your listing for you," into a scalable process. Now, they just have a fleet of photographers around the country that will come and do this for your listing. It's like they actually turned it into a scalable thing.

Sam Parr

And that's another thing. When people talk about, "Well, that's not scalable," it's like, "Yeah, it is." They'll talk about an ad agency and say, "That's not scalable." It's like, "What do you mean? Of course it's scalable! You just hire 5,000 employees." That’s scalable. Maybe that's not what you want to do, but virtually everything is scalable. You just have to add a ton of people, probably.

Shaan Puri

Most things can scale past what most people think. This also happens in engineering all the time. You work with engineers and they're like, "Well, we're gonna need to build it right before we launch," or "We're gonna need to build it right because this won't work in production." And so, this won't work when it scales. It's like, did you hear these stories? It's like, you know, Facebook was written in PHP. Why? I don't know, that's just the language he knew at the time, and that's what he did. And yeah, actually, it still runs. You know, years later, it was still running in that way, past where it was supposed to. And dude...

Sam Parr

I have friends that were early at Uber and friends that are still at Uber. A lot of people don't know this, but they might consider him a founder. The first or second employee was this Mexican guy. He lived in America for a little while, but at the time, he was living in Mexico. So, the early versions of Uber were written with a ton of Spanish in the code. My friends who were early there told me, "Yeah, I forget this guy's name. Do you know who I'm talking about?"

Shaan Puri

I've I I remember reading about him but I don't know his name top of his name

Sam Parr

Yeah, he was Mexican. His friends in Mexico were like, "Yeah, well, I know a good agency. We're gonna have him do it." They said it was kind of thrown together and kind of janky. I've got friends now that still work there, and they say every once in a while, we'll find Spanish in the early code base. That is, you know, what these guys were writing. We'll find like Spanish notes and things like that. That was the early version of Uber.

Shaan Puri

and think about how many rules of uber got violated of how many rules of startups that uber violated so for example the uber founders travis and garrett they didn't work on it full time uber was not a project they were willing to do they just literally tweeted out hey we need a general manager and random guy named ryan graves was like I'm a hustler I'll do it and they're like alright cool it's like they literally like delegated the ceo job then did they have a super strong technical team technical cofounder who could write the code and do this in house nope used the 3rd party dev shop to build the the first version of the app they outsourced the coding yeah most of the investors who invested in uber would tell you if you're a a product guy and you go in and you say yeah I'm gonna just use an agency to write the code for the app they'd be like yeah this is not yeah no go okay then what's the next thing then they literally broke actual laws it was like running and they got a cease and desist from san francisco saying hey for every day you're operational you owe us $5,000 per day and they just kept going then the next you know they just violated rule another one at the time I remember at the time when uber first came out airbnb was popular at the time and I talked to our investor and I was like should we be doing a product like this he's like no bits not atoms that was like a common phrase in silicon valley which is you wanna do startups that are software based because they can they're the ones that can scale and have profit margins all these things with real world cars and homes and t shirts and stuff like that like that stuff super hard to scale ends up being super super low margin and yeah okay you know some people will say oh they're right you know uber's not that profitable but the reality is that the founders and investors in uber did fantastically well scaling this thing up and it was kinda a narrative violation there was all these narrative violations all these these general rules that were broken that like today if you said yeah I'm the I'm the founder of this thing no I'm not working on it full time I found a guy on twitter to be the ceo and then we're using this agency in mexico to build the app yeah we're the next big thing that doesn't fly and guess what it worked

Sam Parr

Dude, we gotta go on a quick story tangent. That's kind of what this whole first half is gonna be, I guess. But there's this guy named **Scott Belsky**. I'm friends with him, or I used to be a little friends with him. I haven't talked to him in a while, but do you know Scott?

Shaan Puri

yeah I I like him a lot I like to think of fred's though the reality is I've talked to him twice

Sam Parr

Yeah, I'm friendly with him. He invested in my company, and I've hung out with him once or twice. He doesn't know this, but he's kind of like my secret admirer. He's this good-looking, handsome dude who dresses nicely and seems really wealthy. If I see him, I'm like, "Dude, you are the best!" And I've talked to him.

Shaan Puri

if you have $10,000,000 and a jawline jess

Hubspot

is all in sam is all in

Sam Parr

Yeah, definitely all in. I love this guy; he's great. So, basically, I gotta tell you a quick Scott Belsky story. Right now, he's an executive at Adobe, but not just any executive—I'm pretty sure he's in line to be CEO. A lot of people don't realize that Adobe is one of the 30 largest companies in the world. I think their market cap is around $300 to $400 billion. Scott Belsky is pretty young; he's in his early forties. I cold emailed him to invest in The Hustle, and that's how I became friends with him. I met with him one time, and he said, "Yeah, so when I was 26 years old, I was starting my company called Behance." Behance and Dribbble are basically the two companies where designers can host their portfolios and connect with one another. He mentioned that when he was just starting this company, he knew I worked at Goldman Sachs and that he came from a wealthy Jewish family. I think his grandfather started Kaplan, you know, Kaplan University.

Shaan Puri

no way

Sam Parr

yeah and so I was like stereotyping him as oh you guys just you had everything handed to you to him and like he told me a few stories where I was like oh you actually like it's not exactly how it seems from the outside and he said I left goldman and I was making $90 a year there and then when I left I had like 50 or $60,000 saved I started behance it didn't go very well and we bootstrapped it and I noticed that with behance we were getting a lot of traffic from 2 different websites the first was called stumbleupon and people and designers would post cool designs and we would get traffic from stumbleupon and the second was a small company called pinterest and I emailed both these guys and this was I forget what year 2011 2010 he goes I emailed these guys I go hey you guys are sending us like hundreds of people a day which for us at the time was a lot of people what what are these websites and this guy ben told me about this website called pinterest and then this guy named garrett told me about stumbleupon and ben was like hey I'm gonna raise a little bit of money do you wanna invest it's a $3,000,000 valuation and Scott was like dude I only have like $50 and but I don't wanna like look like a noob to this guy whatever I'll invest $15,000 and that's a big deal to me and then garrett was like hey my friend and I are starting this other thing none of us are gonna work there because I'm too busy running some upon but it's basically like a car service and Scott was like I don't wanna invest in a limo company like there's no way a limo company is gonna take off but like I don't wanna look like an idiot this guy's been sending me some traffic and I I kinda wanna like appear a little bit like a big shot and so he gave him $15,000 think at a $3,500,000 valuation and he did both of these in the span I think of about 2 weeks so he's like I basically had like 50 or 60 grand in my checking account at the time my startup that I was bootstrapping was only doing okay it wasn't making much profit and I was doing consulting on the side to pay the bills but I did my wife was like angry at me but I gave them each $15,000 fast forward however many years they both went public around the same ish time and I remember sending him something to his house and he sent me his address and I remember the address being this like really fancy townhome and I because I looked it up and I was like doing the math and I'm pretty sure each of these $15,000 checks turned into around 50 to a $100,000,000 each inside a span of like you'll have to look up when they went public but they almost went public right around the same time and he gave them money each at the same time and another thing a lot of people don't know is behance his company sold I think for a $175,000,000 and I think he owned he told me around 70% of it he owned the majority of it and so this guy has just knocked it out the park over and over and over again and a lot of it came because of uber and pinterest early on and he was like I don't think these are that good of ideas but I just I don't wanna look silly

Shaan Puri

That's an amazing story! I love that story. It reminds me... I just got a DM from this guy. By the way, this is nowhere near related. I am not trying to compare apples to apples here; it's very hard to have a story that compares to Uber and Pinterest. But there's a guy who, I don't know, maybe 6 months ago or 9 months ago, something like that, I was getting kind of interested in the AI stuff about, you know, this basically artificial intelligence that can create art and things like that. I said something offhand on the pod, so somebody reached out and they were like, "Hey, you know, I heard your interest in this. I'm trying to make apps that will do this. We just released our first one. I want to see what you think about it, and you know, we're raising a little bit of money. We'd love to see if you want to invest." I never replied. Then I get another DM, or no, I see somebody mention this app. I go and click on the founder, and I click the DM. Oh, this guy DM'd me a while back saying I should see how it's going. So I go, "Hey, how's the biz going? I'll share a screen chat with you guys." He goes, "Good man, good! Yeah, that app I really ended up releasing it. It's been downloaded 120 million times. And then I released another one, and it's also been downloaded like 100 million times." And yes, really, it's going really well, man. How are you? Oh my god, I'm currently walking off a cliff because I never responded to that initial DM!

Sam Parr

your body's like well I recently switched from trader joe's to whole foods I've been to agree with that

Shaan Puri

yeah I just did my 401 k match yeah that would be fascinating

Sam Parr

you sure buy not much you that's crazy

Shaan Puri

Share one other story that's kind of related to the idea of doing things that don't scale. This is something I actually learned from those guys, Dylan and Henry. I'm a big fan of this idea that you have to find a way to learn from three groups of people: 1. **People who have done it before** - These are individuals who have experience and have succeeded multiple times. People normally try to learn from them, like mentor-type figures. 2. **People who are in the game** - These are your peers, those who are alongside you. That's kind of how we got to know each other; we were in a peer group, a mastermind group. We haven't made it yet, but we're all trying to succeed at the same time, and we can learn a lot from each other. 3. **People who are just starting out** - These individuals are fresh and don’t know any better. There is a certain tactic to spending time with each of these three groups. You need to be humble enough to know how to ask the right questions so that you can actually get advice from all three groups. If you ask the same question to all three, you're not going to get valid information. You're not going to get the right answers from all three. The questions you would ask someone who has been through it before and the topics you should discuss with them are different from those you would ask your buddy who is going through it right now, or the 19-year-old who just graduated from college. You can't ask the same question. I'll tell you something about the 19- or 21-year-old, or whatever. I don't know how old they were at the time, maybe 21 or 22. Dylan and Henry were fans of the podcast, and they offered to come help us with our video setups at the time.

Sam Parr

Well, previously they were fans of the pod. They would chop up clips for us and share them on social media. A lot of their videos were beautiful and awesome. They just brute-forced their way to having a relationship with us.

Shaan Puri

They exactly... and that became a full-on agency that does pretty well. They did it for us, then they did it for the All In podcast, and they did it for a bunch of others. So, people kind of know them now, but at the time, nobody really knew who they were. They were just guys who had just graduated from college. They had their own podcast, which was kind of like ours, but, you know, you can go look at the views—nobody watches the thing. That's okay; most podcasts, especially those by guys who just graduated from college, don't get many listeners. They flew out to our house and were installing the studio setup in my garage at the time. I went out there and asked, "You guys need some water? Are you alright? Are you eating anything?" I was kind of like parenting them. I was like, "What are you guys doing here?" So, I started shooting the breeze with them. I asked, "So, what's your guys' strategy? If I was your friend, I'd want to know. You have a podcast—that's pretty cool! Most people your age don't have a podcast. What are you trying to do? Why are you trying to do it?" They explained, "Well, you know, we kind of like podcasting; it's fun, so that's why we do it. The second thing is, we just think that making content is important. We don't have money to go advertise, and we don't have connections to just knock on a door and get distribution somewhere. So, content is our only chance. We just wanted to get good at content, and the best way to get good is just by doing a bunch."

Hubspot

I was

Shaan Puri

Alright, that's another smart thing. I go, but nobody's watching your stuff, right? So, is it even working? It's kind of like what you're saying about this band thing. Does this even work? Like, this is cool, it's interesting, but is this valuable? Is this actually going to work?

Sam Parr

yeah

Shaan Puri

and he goes oh I'm just he goes nobody watches it today he goes but someday if we start to get people to watch there is now a library he goes we call it our binge bank it's a place where you can go and you could binge dylan and henry and I was like what and he's like yeah well basically we just wanna have a rabbit hole for you to go go down because if anybody ever gets in like today nobody's interested but if people ever get interested I wanna have this bank of content that they can go binge and sure enough after like you know 45 minutes down this rabbit hole you're gonna walk out being like I think I love these guys I feel like I know these guys and I wanna hang out or work with these guys and I heard that and I was like that's really fucking smart I was like that's the way to think about content because most content doesn't just like immediately hit and blow up but you wanna have this and I thought about it because I was like there are several people who I've gone down that rabbit hole with and I've come out with that same exact conclusion after a 45 minute dig you do this all the time like you discover somebody you go read everything there is about them you go read their old blog you watch their old talks and you come out you'd be like this guy is awesome this this girl is amazing and they had to create that like library of themselves that personal library to go and let you binge and I thought about it because you know the band like the the guy macklemore the like the famous rapper guy I remember maybe 10 years ago now me and my buddy trevor we started like we like found his one of his songs and we were like oh this guy's cool who is this guy and he had a binge bank he had these vlogs he was doing on youtube of him like trying to make it as a rapper it'd be like we're going to doing this show at this small college in wichita oh we like we're every day right now we're waking up at this time we're trying to record in the studio because we suck at the creative process so we're just trying to train ourselves right they were just like just kinda sharing along the way and we watched this stuff and we were like I remember these videos had less than a 1000 views there were like 700 views on youtube at the time like I just went back and looked at it now those have each like millions or like close to a 1000000 views each on those videos at the time less than a1000 and we became super fans of this guy why because it's fun to be early we liked what they were all about and we felt like the quality of content was like higher than the views and so that made it for like an exciting it's like we found a a treasure

Sam Parr

dude people say that in our comments on youtube

Shaan Puri

like oh the I'm like I'm I'm surprised this isn't bigger or like I'm happy to be here before

Sam Parr

Yeah, they're like, "I'm happy we're catching it." That definitely gives me encouragement and makes me happy. But yeah, people say that, and little do they know that our podcast has like 10 times more downloads. They're like, "Oh, this little shitty podcast only has 10,000 views on this thing." And I'm like, "Yeah, we suck."

Hubspot

share please share please

Shaan Puri

Yeah, but I'm a big fan of this **binge bank** concept. Once I said that, it clicked with me. I started thinking about our stuff that way. I also started remembering that there are actually a bunch of people I've gone down their rabbit hole with. There could be a product like this. I know YouTube is kind of structured this way, but I wish there was a thing that showcased your **greatest hits**. It's like, "Yo, if you're kind of interested in me, this is the curated rabbit hole." This is my tweet that went viral, this video, this was the first thing I ever made, and this was a blog post I wrote back in the day. It's kind of stupid, but it captured how I was thinking at the time.

Sam Parr

I have two tools that I use regularly, and I'm a paying subscriber of the first. Do you read a lot of biographies? No, none. So, I read a ton of biographies.

Shaan Puri

over the world

Sam Parr

Yeah, I read a ton of biographies. Any biography that talks about a person who is a little bit pre-internet era is interesting to me. I'm a subscriber of Newspapers.com, which has aggregated like every newspaper ever. For example, I was reading a biography about Dan Gilbert, the founder of Rocket Mortgage. I think it's called that. The guy who owns the Cleveland Cavaliers... oh, I forget, he owns everything! His company was originally called Rock Financial. It got popular in the nineties. So, I just Googled "Rock Financial Dan Gilbert" and set Newspapers.com to 1985, since that's when he started, to 1990 when he went public in '92. I was like, "I'm going to find everything!" I read all of these articles about him before he was really well-known. It was fascinating to see him in the making. That's one of my favorite tools, Newspapers.com. The second one for anything internet-related is the Wayback Machine (Web Archive). Whenever I talk to anyone who's popular on the internet, I go and look back at when they started. I like to look at their old websites. You can see the trends and the trajectory, and that teaches me a little bit about patterns. It also makes me feel like, "Alright, it's okay to be not great even at this size." It's okay to be only okay around this size, you know what I mean?

Shaan Puri

Totally, totally! Yeah, you should go look at early startup landing pages. I have a blog post about this, actually: "10 Throwback Landing Pages." It's like, go look at the first version of Airbnb, Uber, Snapchat, and all these things. Then you'll be like, "Oh, why are we trying to perfect this before launch?" If you could start there and end up where these guys did, then I can start wherever the hell I am now, launch, and then make it better over time.

Sam Parr

Do you want to go to a... can I let me bring up one? So, yeah, this guy DM'd me and I found his YouTube video. It was really amazing. So basically, in 2014, this guy graduated from Stanford and he got five job offers. He did this video where he goes, "Here are the offers that I got in 2014, and here's what happened, and here's how this story played out." In the video, it's really great. So actually, it looks like someone's highlighting the video. What's his name? How do people find this? His name is Rahul, so if you Google "Rahul Tech," you'll find it.

Shaan Puri

pan pandey p a n d e y

Sam Parr

yeah so you Google that or just like rahul and then like tech tech jobs and I bet you it will come up so basically I'm gonna summarize it but here the video is great but here's basically the offers that he got so the offers that he got from twitter with with a combination of stock and salary was a 190,000 with a combination of stock and cash his facebook offer was $200,000 a year his Microsoft one was around also $200,000 a year his square one around a $160,000 a year and this is both a combination of stock equity and sign up bonus and his Google one was $250,000 a year now fast forward 8 years what would that stock + cash be worth so basically the stock the cash is mostly stagnant I think he added like an 8% annual growth the stock he looks at what each what it grew since then so his twitter comp fast forward it would almost be the same because their stock hasn't grown his facebook stock it actually would have gone a lot higher but right now facebook stock is down a ton and so his facebook's 1st year comp went from 200 to 220 his Microsoft comp it started at 200 if you fast forward today it would be worth around $300,000 a year now here's where things get interesting his square stuff and and he was only 22 when he graduated or something like that and he his 1st year salary and comp back then would be $160,000 fast forward the stock is now worth a $580,000 and his Google stuff was worth $250,000 a year now worth almost $700,000 a year and keep in mind so here's a few takeaways from this the first takeaway he said this funny thing in the video he goes square offered me something that I didn't think was any good because the recruiter said you know if square one day becomes a $7,000,000,000 company the stock that we're offering you now it's only worth $100,000 over 4 years it could be worth $400,000 but he goes I'm really doubtful that square will ever be a $7,000,000,000 company now it's worth 50,000,000,000 and it's down right now I think at its peak it was 70,000,000,000 so the thing that is really hard to understand is that everything at the time most things seem expensive and the reason why things seem expensive is because exponential growth is incredibly challenging to understand so if I tell you that something is gonna grow at 7% a year every single year that's actually kind of hard to understand but that what that means it's gonna double every 10 years if it's gonna grow if it's gonna grow at 30% a year which a lot of these tech companies are that means it's gonna double I think every 2 or 3 years and like exponential growth is really hard to understand the the another thing that is really interesting is leveraging offers and negotiating is very possible even if you're a 22 23 24 year old and so you always do better when you have another offer in hand and you play them off one another and finally the most important thing for people listening employees at tech companies 100% can get meaningfully rich and people don't talk about that enough because it's a fairly safe way if you are good enough it's a high bar if you are good enough to get but it's still like a 1,000,000 + jobs if you add together faang or around there and they hire tens of 1,000 or 100 of 1,000 a year so it's not like that coveted but if you can get a job at one of these tech companies and I'm talking about a tech company that's growing quickly and has at least a 1000 employees relatively safe it is such a good way to build wealth in a low risk way and the final most important thing on top of that is now's the time so we're you're talking about square being worth like you know what it might be worth $7,000,000,000 I I have a very small lens here but I see what the private company valuations are they have reset and even better the public companies have reset so we have square facebook twilio maybe robinhood I think like a company like hubspot or something like that a coinbase all these valuations are pretty low if you ask me and I think now's the time where you can get some of these offers where you're getting paid a 100 200 $300,000 a year in equity and that could be worth potentially 8 figures in 10 years

Shaan Puri

That's really interesting and a great ad for HubSpot. Very well done, very native. I enjoyed that one.

Hubspot

This data is wrong every freaking time. Have you heard of HubSpot? HubSpot is a CRM platform where everything is fully integrated. Woah! I can see the client's whole history: calls, support tickets, emails, and here's a task from 3 days ago that I totally missed. HubSpot: grow better.

Shaan Puri

The time when we were selling Bebo, we had a bunch of conversations. Then, you know, you sort of compare offers. You're like, "Alright, we had..." I think at the end, we ended up with three offers. We had a Facebook offer, we had the Twitch offer, and we had a not-papered offer from Discord, but only because we turned it down early. I did an exercise recently where I looked back and asked myself, "What was I thinking then?" I wrote it all down and reflected on how it actually played out. I'll be damned if I wasn't wrong on every single thing I believed.

Sam Parr

yeah let's walk through this yeah let's go through each one

Shaan Puri

So, for example, we'll start with the one that's relevant to what you're talking about, which is the stock. Basically, Discord was like, "Look, we like you guys. We think this is cool, but there's no way we would come up with cash like you're talking about." So, it would need to be just a tiny bit of cash and then mostly stock. But, like, we think our stock...

Sam Parr

Is great. So, what would, let's say, that you walked away with $1,000,000 of Discord stock back then? And back then, it wasn't that long ago; that was 4 years ago.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, less than 4 years... 3 years ago, 3 or 4 years ago, something like that. At the time, I went and talked to one of Discord's investors. I asked, "What do you think about this?" They replied, "Well, it's real simple. Today, let's say Discord is valued at around $1.5 to $2 billion. So, let's say $2 billion. Or no, I think at the time, Discord was valued at $1 billion. It was $1 billion then." He continued, "You're basically just betting that Discord can be worth $5 billion. If it gets to $5 billion, then this is the best offer. If it's not going to get to $5 billion, then this is the worst offer. You just have to make an educated decision about that." In my head, I was thinking, "Well, I do like... I was a big admirer of Discord. I think Discord is kind of amazing. The CEO at Discord, Jason, he's kind of amazing. Of all the meetings that we took, I thought he was the most impressive in there. He cut straight to the chase and was like, 'Yep, I'll do this.' No, you know, the cash is going to be small, maybe $1, $2, or $3 million, and then the rest will be stock. So, you guys have to... is that interesting to you?" At the time, I was like, "No, because that sounds really speculative and illiquid. I can't go buy anything cool, and the total number as valued today sounds way lower."

Sam Parr

yeah

Hubspot

and

Shaan Puri

In my head, I was just like, "I can't do this." Fast forward, Discord I think is worth about $15,000,000,000 now, so it would have been by far the best deal. We had a $1,000,000 deal.

Sam Parr

If they gave you $1,000,000 of stock in private valuations, that would be worth $15,000,000 now in 4 years, right? Correct?

Shaan Puri

and we were getting more than $1,000,000 of stock if we had done that deal

Sam Parr

okay

Shaan Puri

So, that would have been the worst deal. There was one caveat, which is that it was going to be vested. I would also have to spend, you know, 3 or 4 years earning that stock, which I didn't.

Sam Parr

yeah you probably would have been fired way before that

Hubspot

yeah so so you know what are

Shaan Puri

The odds I was going to capture all that, I don't know. But it just shows how our brain is not real. The idea of Discord becoming worth $15 billion didn't seem very likely. However, in actuality, the odds were probably in its favor. It seemed like a very low probability thing because it just sounded big. It sounded like a big jump. It's like, am I betting that Discord is going to become 15 times bigger than it is today? And actually, yeah, it did. The user base grew by 2 or 3 times, the monetization grew, and the overall market grew. There are all these different ways that you just multiply these things together, and you arrive at this private market valuation now. Also, whatever private markets have corrected, maybe it's not worth as much now, but it's hard to say. It's illiquid. Then the next one was the Facebook offer. It's like, alright, well, Facebook's offer is higher in cash and higher in stock. But we don't know exactly which stock is going to perform better: Facebook or Amazon. They both seem like great stocks. So then it came down to intangible factors, and we ended up ruling out Facebook for some intangible factors, which were, in retrospect, somewhat silly reasons to decide. The first was that Twitch is the leader in game streaming, and Facebook had nobody watching game streaming at the time. I thought, man, this is just going to be like another startup. They are called Facebook, but in this niche, they're at 0, and they're hoping that we can help them win. If we're going to be pushing a boulder up a hill, I just want to go join the Warriors and play on the winning team.

Sam Parr

facebook just hadn't decided they were gonna win yet

Shaan Puri

Yeah, exactly. My mentor was like, "That's such a stupid way to think about this." You're going to walk into Facebook, and they're going to be like, "Cool, game streaming's over here." And you're going to be like, "Actually, I'm going to wander around to this area over here. I'm going to go play in virtual reality. I'm going to go to AI. I'm going to go to, you know, news." He's like, "You could just walk into any other department you want and just go do that thing." He said, "They'll forget you even exist after they hire you." You're worried about what your day-to-day life is going to be like there, and you have no idea what your day-to-day life is going to be like there. He was absolutely right.

Sam Parr

By the way, have you ever been to the Facebook campus? Yeah, it's basically just like a better college. The way that I describe it is like a mall where everything's free. So they have like a food court, and they don't have just one pizza place, they've got many pizza places. It's... one... my wife worked there and I would go and I'm like, "Oh this is the best thing ever." They have restaurants like a sushi restaurant, everything's free. They've got: - An ice cream place (everything's free) - A woodworking shop (everything's free) - A laundry place - A barber - A dentist

Shaan Puri

The barber... that's the biggest one. I was like, "Food, I expected," but when I just saw you could walk over to this guy and get a haircut, I was like, "Damn, that was a big draw for me." I was like, "I don't have to go anywhere. It's just free. I just walk in and get a haircut." That's kind of amazing.

Sam Parr

yeah they're like it's free all you have to give us is your life

Shaan Puri

Yes, I know. Did you say there are two pizza shop owners?

Sam Parr

so how much would the facebook so a a 1,000,000 in facebook back 4 years ago would be worth what

Shaan Puri

A million in Facebook stock would have been... it's gone. I think it's up 30% since then, so it's like, you know, a million would have been $1.3 million, right? So that's where the stock landed. At its peak, it was about double. So at its peak, it would have been double, right? In that one, we made the mistake of basically optimizing for really intangible things. One thing that seemed really tangible was that they weren't going to take our whole team. I was like, "Oh, I don't want to toast at the celebration party of this acquisition and be like, 'But not you four. They didn't hire you guys.' So, you know, it's been awesome. The rest of us, we're going to go, and you guys, you won't believe the recommendation letter I'm going to write you."

Hubspot

right like that would have been you said

Sam Parr

cab money thanks for last night yeah

Shaan Puri

Exactly. So that wasn't going to feel good. Of course, as soon as we rejected them, they were like, "Why?" I was like, "Well, the team thing." They're like, "Dude, we would not just hire them a few months later. We just didn't have the headcount yet." He's like, "That's why." And I was like, "Yeah, and the commute was really far down there." He's like, "Dude, we have an SF office. We could've got you in." I was like...

Sam Parr

oh yeah

Shaan Puri

I guess I

Sam Parr

Should the commute? They have a bus that basically has a restaurant, café, toilet, internet, and TV on the bus. It's not even a real commute anymore.

Shaan Puri

yeah people on the bus complained they're like oh my god like the the line for the pedicure on

Hubspot

the bus was so long this morning it's like alright you know I don't know

Shaan Puri

What you're complaining about anyway? So, we made a decision. It was a really hard decision, and whatever, it ended up fine. But I guess my concern is that it's really hard to forecast and predict these things. It's especially hard to forecast and predict what a stock is going to be worth down the road.

Sam Parr

that's awesome right

Shaan Puri

so so I have another topic that I wanna go to

Sam Parr

alright

Shaan Puri

quick I 2 quick ideas 1 is around what I just talked about predictions so there's this company that brandon sent me that's called pressy taste I I don't even know what this is it's a horrible name pressy taste you go to pressy taste at prcitaste.com and it's some kind of like basically it's a prediction engine I don't even honestly know exactly how this works but basically what it's doing is it's using data like cameras like historical trends whatever and what it's trying to do is tell the person in the back like how many burgers to put on the stove like how how many how many fries to take out of the freezer because it's basically like how can we help you predict demand and so this idea aside I actually think that there's like a lot of different ways where this is really valuable so for example we own a ecommerce store and we're always trying to predict like how much inventory should we order we're ordering you know 6 to 9 months in advance sometimes and it's so hard to forecast what's the world gonna be like 6 months from now it's like oh yeah turns out there was a pandemic a war a war like in you know stimmy checks that like caused everything to go up and then like everything that could go down and then shipping broke and like it was impossible to predict but every like every better prediction saves us a lot of money and so I actually think that there's like a whole bunch of business problems that entrepreneurs could go after that basically just help you predict how much demand there will be there's a couple different ways you could go about this so for example for our ecom store it'd be nice to know how other ecom stores are trending are we all trending up trending down by how much% year over year in our category because that would kind of tell us like where the overall market demand is another prediction might be you know if I'm a if I'm a restaurant what is the foot traffic or the sort of drive through traffic like this time of year right september or in this weather pattern how much traffic should I expect today that might tell me what I need for staffing and for you know food today versus any other day and if you just think about like if you can be smarter and cut waste by 10 to 15% in in these types of businesses in these types of industries that's probably gonna add up into like the tens of 1,000,000,000 or 100 of 1,000,000,000 of dollars per year of money saved and so I think these businesses are very interesting this whole like demand prediction industry is very interesting to me

Sam Parr

Dude, I have done a ton of research in predicting business trends. Obviously, like we have this thing called "Trends," and before launching that, I was like, "What do we do?" I think I told you about this years ago, but everything I'm about to say is from years of research, and I'm doing it mostly off memory. So I'm gonna be a little bit off, but not totally off. But have you heard of this company called WGSN? I think I told you about them.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, they're the ones who say, "The color of the year is lavender," and "The smell of the year is, you know, blue lily," or whatever.

Sam Parr

But listen to this. They’re publicly traded, so these numbers are actually facts. The 2021 revenue was £91,000,000. It’s a British company, so £91,000,000. I don’t know what that would be in other currencies.

Shaan Puri

a $100

Hubspot

yeah something like that

Sam Parr

Yeah, like I don't know the conversion of Monopoly money to real money, but no, £91,000,000. Listen to their adjusted EBITDA, which was £41,000,000. So basically, for every dollar they made, 45 cents was like net income profit. What they do is they tell you which colors are going to be popular. I'm pretty sure the product only has 65 to 100 customers, so they're paying like $25 a year or something like that. I think the product is basically a quarterly PDF that tells you what colors they think might be popular. I'm almost positive the way they get this information is by putting tablets at fashion schools and asking students what they're feeling, what they're liking, things like that. So it's like they're asking fashion people, I guess. The people who are like, "Are you a hipster? Are you a gay guy who lives in Fort Greene, Brooklyn?" Whatever the qualifications are for what you think is cool. The normies, you know, like me, are going to start wearing what you’re saying, like 10 months later. Yeah, yeah. Oh, are you an 18-year-old who has 100,000 followers on TikTok?

Shaan Puri

check oh okay so

Sam Parr

Like whatever they think is going to be cool, that's what they like. What they predict is going to be cool. A real-life use case of this is Starbucks. They're going to make 100,000 uniforms, and millennial pink is the new color. So, therefore, let's make sure our name tags are this color. It's a no-brainer to spend $25,000 to get this quarterly PDF, as well as the ability to DM someone who works at WGSN and say, "Which shade of green is the thing that we should be using?" So that's an interesting business in this trend predicting space.

Shaan Puri

I talked to somebody who runs a fashion company or whatever, and they were like...

Sam Parr

a fashion company or whatever

Shaan Puri

Yeah, as you can tell, I wear a blue shirt. My fashion sense is, you know, it's frozen in like the 3rd grade, right? Like, I was writing in cursive the last...

Hubspot

time I thought about fashion

Shaan Puri

They were like lemons. So, in this year, I was like, "What do you like?" I didn't understand what they were talking about. What does that mean?

Sam Parr

a lemon like I thought

Shaan Puri

They were talking about fruit, and I thought they were talking about literally what you eat. But they were like, "No, it's like a print or a pattern or a color." I was like, "Okay, it sounds like you're just making things up." They just pulled up their dashboard and said, "No, look at the difference between a lemon and a pineapple." It's like, "Lemon because pineapples were..."

Sam Parr

everywhere recently weren't they

Shaan Puri

It was so... pet up is a bad example, but it was like, you know, basically like, "You guys pick... is apples hot right now?" No! Apples are out, dude! Apples are like, you know, they're so out right now. Lemons are so in. Pineapples are so in. Llamas are so in. It's like...

Sam Parr

like a picture of a lemon on a shirt

Shaan Puri

Yeah, like a design with a lemon on it or a pattern or whatever, right? Alright, or you know, the same thing with scents and color palettes and things like that. I was like, "There's no way!" I was like, "This is all just, you know, isn't this just ad agency fluff? They're just fluffing each other with these random things." And they're like, "No, this stuff is like the Bible to us. We need to know what people are caring about in order to do that." I don't know if it's this exact WSN or whatever. I don't know if that's the exact one, but they're like, "This is it."

Sam Parr

could be

Shaan Puri

The concept of knowing which colors, which scents, and which styles are in.

Sam Parr

that's so that's so exhausting

Shaan Puri

yeah it sounds like a horrible business to be in

Sam Parr

If I'm going to be in the fashion business, I'm going to be in the men's tuxedo business. That hasn't changed for literally 100 years. Have you seen Jack on Titanic?

Hubspot

no I'm not

Sam Parr

even the best year

Shaan Puri

I'm going straight **big and tall** for men because literally the only criteria is, "Do you fit?" They're like, "You fit, if you fit you're in; if you don't fit, you're out." That's your only criteria. I was like, "That's what I like. I like a simple yes or no when it comes to fashion."

Hubspot

it's just do you fit or not

Shaan Puri

because I just can't find stuff that fits

Sam Parr

Dude, fashion's exhausting. That's not a business I want to be in. Although, I do think there are some brands that really crush it. You know what brand? Louis Vuitton. Their suitcases... Louis Vuitton, yeah! They've crushed it for like 150 to 200 years, and it's the same logo, the same colors. It's just timeless. I do love those timeless things; they really do.

Shaan Puri

There's like a little arbitrage going around. I don't know if you've seen this, but a few months ago, somebody said this: because the dollar and the euro got to parity, the luxury stores hadn't changed their prices. So basically, things were typically priced higher in dollars than in euros. I might get that backwards, but like, a Louis Vuitton bag, if you were in Paris, you could buy it in euros for a certain price. That same bag was selling for more that same day if you just sold it in U.S. dollars to a U.S. customer. In Paris, you would also get the VAT refund. So you'd be getting something like 30 to 35% under market, and that was like your spread that you could then go and sell.

Sam Parr

it for

Shaan Puri

In the United States, it was kind of crazy. There are whole businesses that revolve around a version of a drug mule. You can pay someone who is traveling to stuff a Louis Vuitton bag in their suitcase and bring it over for you across the border. This is because, you know, flying to Europe to do this yourself is kind of inconvenient. However, there are already people flying from Europe to the U.S. every day. So, there are entire businesses based around this travel arbitrage and flippers like that.

Sam Parr

I just did research on one of these that I discovered. It's called Grabr, so the URL is grabr.io. They went with the misspelling and the .io, so you know they're really a startup. But it's grabr.io, and their whole shtick is "Shop anywhere, travel everywhere." I guess that's a really bad tagline, but basically what it means is it connects you with people who are like these drug mules—these Louis Vuitton mules. It connects you with people who are going to overseas places, and they'll buy things for you. You'll give them the money, and it's like a marketplace for that. I've got this stupid example of that. There's this thing called a Wicked Laser because I'm like a grown-up.

Shaan Puri

Is the "wicked part" just like yourself describing a standard laser, or is it actually called that?

Sam Parr

I'm a 12-year-old with money. Basically, I found this laser pointer online that's so strong that they made it illegal in America. If you shine it on something like a piece of paper, it catches fire. You can't have it because it reaches jets in the air. It's from a Chinese company, and obviously, I saw this laser. It's a $300 laser, but you can only ship it to someone in Canada. I'm like, "I want a laser that can light stuff on fire! Why would you not want that?" That would go perfectly in my collection of things like tasers. Just one laser. I have a BB gun and a blazer.

Shaan Puri

a blazer from men's wearhouse

Hubspot

a blazer and my laser

Sam Parr

So, I had to find someone who would buy this in China for me and get it from Canada to America for my $300 laser. Wow!

Hubspot

you should

Shaan Puri

go work at grabber io that's what you should go do

Keralanka

Yeah, we're just going to sponsor every incel-like subreddit.

Sam Parr

do you like lasers

Shaan Puri

Tired of not getting your laser? Tired of driving to Canada for your favorite lasers? Use Grabber!

Hubspot

someone will grab it for you and bring it to you

Shaan Puri

you're a 12 year old with money

Sam Parr

this is so stupid

Shaan Puri

Speaking of cool lasers, I saw this TikTok of a laser pointer. Somebody was in their bed and they were pointing it at their light switch. They said, "Watch this," and they just held it on the light switch. Then, they applied just enough pressure to turn it on.

Sam Parr

and I'm like this

Shaan Puri

is not real I was like I don't know

Hubspot

how this is edited but I was

Shaan Puri

like the comments were like bro it's not real but like how

Keralanka

does it work

Hubspot

and then yeah is

Shaan Puri

it how does that

Hubspot

work though

Shaan Puri

I know this one isn't real, but could it happen? Because imagine not having to get out of your bed to turn your light off at night... just grabbing your laser pointer off the bedside stand and turning your light off. That's [convenient].

Hubspot

dude

Sam Parr

So, just imagine getting an Instagram ad where you see a guy say, "Watch this," and he shines something across a room and it lights it on fire. That's what I got caught with—these wicked lasers. Wait, so how did the light switch go down?

Shaan Puri

No, man. I never got to the bottom of it. I liked and followed to find out what part two they got me. They said if I didn't forward that TikTok to 10 people, my family would die of lasers. So, I had to do it.

Sam Parr

oh god that's so stupid

Shaan Puri

I want to tell you about another thing that's kind of interesting. So, you know, like I think you met up with this guy. I think his name is the "strip mall guy" on Twitter.

Sam Parr

Or real estate trend. I know he's really like a dead guy. I'm one of those few people. Yeah, no, well, "strip mall guy" is his fake name. It's supposed to be Trent.

Shaan Puri

no there's another guy who's real strip maybe they're 2 different guys alright I think strip mall guy

Sam Parr

I met up with the strip mall guy, and we became friends. I have to make sure I don't accidentally say his name.

Shaan Puri

So, one of those guys—I forgot which one now, sorry—tweeted about private security. It caught my eye because he said, "Man, private security is booming right now. I know so many, or like, I've seen so many cops who've retired and are just doing this because it's better money." I was like, "What? Okay, tell me more." So, I started looking into this. Basically, very, very, very briefly, do you know much about this private security trend or industry?

Sam Parr

I know that we used to hire them for our events because the insurance made you have one. You and I had a buddy, or a friend of a friend, who started a security business.

Shaan Puri

He started like an Uber for bodyguards, right? Did it work? He tried. No, that one failed. But he tried to make it look sexy. It's like he just needs to do it, not sexy. So basically, there are some big players in this thing. For private security, there are companies like Securitas, or if you just go to AUS.com, it's Allied Universal Security, which I think...

Sam Parr

is are multibillion dollar companies

Shaan Puri

Yeah, so one's $11,000,000,000 and the other one's $7,000,000,000. I think they do everything from mall cops to airports to events and whatever else. But it goes smaller and smaller and more niche as you go down, like corporate security. For example, I remember when I was working at a company, I saw on the CEO's calendar a meeting with the private security detail to go over the latest updates to their private security. I was like, "You got private security?" It's like, "Well, yeah, I'm rich. I'm worth a lot, you know? Worth a lot to this company." So the company literally pays for private security for the executives to be able to go out and do their thing and be safe. I found this kind of interesting, and it makes sense to me. It also makes sense that there's a private world out there for kind of like retired military or police that might be higher paying and potentially an easier job than what they're doing today.

Sam Parr

who who are the executives that had security

Shaan Puri

I don't wanna say

Sam Parr

but are you but which company did you say the company I didn't hear you

Shaan Puri

no because that would be easy to figure out at that.

Sam Parr

Yeah, you know, like Zuckerberg and Bezos, they release what their security budget is each year. I think Bezos was $6,000,000, which to me is not a lot of money.

Shaan Puri

Right, for Facebook, they said last year $26,000,000 was spent on Zuckerberg and his family, which was 6% higher than in 2020. So that's kind of crazy, right? $26,000,000 just on his personal security.

Sam Parr

You know how many people work for the Secret Service? No? 6,000. You know how many people they protect? Yeah, you know how many people they protect? 25. 25 people.

Shaan Puri

spoken like a man who owns a taser and a laser

Sam Parr

To know this information, no. I met a Secret Service agent at a wedding this weekend, and I just asked them everything. I said, "Tell me everything." And, you know, they couldn't tell me anything really.

Shaan Puri

yeah I was gonna say pretty shitty secret service guy

Hubspot

he's like

Shaan Puri

big fan of the plot happy to share

Sam Parr

They just read out the Wikipedia to me, but it was pretty interesting. That's cool. No, I don't know anything about security, but I think it's... but I think.

Shaan Puri

It's speaking of TikTok. There was a TikTok of a guy who saw Jeff Bezos on the corner in Seattle, just waiting to cross the street. He was like, "Hey, Jeff!" and he had his TikTok recording or whatever. He asked, "How's it going today?" and Jeff replied, "Going fantastic." As he was ready to walk across the street, someone in the comments pointed out the top comment: "Check out the hand of the security guy." You look, and he had basically a false hand. I think it was like a false hand, and his real hand was in his pocket, probably holding a gun, taser, or some kind of weapon. He just had a kind of fake hand out. I saw that and I was like, "That's awesome! That's awesome, dude!" You know what's even...

Sam Parr

Weirder is there was a... I'm a UFC superfan. There was a fight backstage among the UFC fighters, and security got involved. I kept wondering, "Who the heck is doing UFC security to keep the UFC fighters from fighting each other?" You know what I mean? Like, what type of job are they getting into? They just see something happening, and then what are they going to do?

Shaan Puri

Well, you saw the woman that Dana White hired, the Best Buy lady. Did you see this?

Sam Parr

She was a football player. She kept the woman, or someone, who was trying to rob the Best Buy, and she got down low in like an offensive line position, as if she was pushing her out of the way.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, the robber was trying to run out of the store, and the security guard from Best Buy just starts blocking this person from getting out. This guy is desperately trying to escape because he can't just be stealing and get caught inside the store. She ends up tackling him into a bunch of boxes. She gets fired from Best Buy because they say, "Hey, liability! You attacked someone in our store." And she's like, "Oh my God, I'm doing my job! I'm a security guard at Best Buy. What did you want me to do?" Dana White was like, "That's bullshit!" He went on Instagram and said, "Who is this woman? I want to hire her." Now, she's like his personal security guard or something like that. She works for him.

Sam Parr

With him? Really? Yeah, dude. I always see those guys and I'm like, "Who?" You need like an Israeli-trained secret service agent to... I mean, who are you going to have to protect a UFC fighter from hitting another UFC fighter?

Shaan Puri

jerry springer security guards they have years of experience breaking this up

Sam Parr

This episode is really good. Off on a tangent, do you remember Steve, the security guard from *Jerry Springer*, who also had his own fan, Jimmy Choo?

Shaan Puri

yeah probably like the top earner on cameo right now

Sam Parr

Yeah, he's actually Kevin from *The Office* or Gilbert Gottfried. Oh shoot, I think Gilbert just died actually. Rest in peace. But whatever, I guess I'm...

Shaan Puri

getting upset did you know that dmx died

Sam Parr

yeah dude yeah I saw that

Keralanka

I you you treated out why didn't

Shaan Puri

you tell me you knew this information you went elbit

Sam Parr

That reminds me of when Dave Chappelle left my house. Dave Chappelle was talking about celebrities and how it's weird that they talk to them during tragedies. He's like, "Just imagine 9/11, and Ja Rule was being interviewed." Actually, they're like, "We need Ja right now to make sense."

Keralanka

of this tragedy where's ja

Shaan Puri

where's ja

Keralanka

Someone go get me Ja. We need Ja to make sense of this tragedy. That's what... that's like, you're wondering, "Why didn't anyone fill me in?"

Sam Parr

in that that dmx had passed but yeah he's he's dead by the

Shaan Puri

way did you see this this blog post we'll we'll close on this little last random thing but check out this blog post so this guy listened to the episode that we did with rob dyrdek which is probably I don't know if not the most popular episode we did one of the most popular episodes we've done people love that one and one of the things that rob one of the reasons people love it is because turns out the kind of fun loving skater guy from mtv like turns out he's like an absolute nut when it comes to personal productivity and like personal efficiency you know his quote on there was I am human optimization and one of the things he had said was that he writes his wife a handwritten note every day and so this guy wrote this blog post it was like the top post on hacker news over the weekend and it's called write a note to your spouse every day a note a note a day keeps the divorce attorney away and he goes you know I was listening to my first million and rob dyrdek was on there he says that he writes a note to his wife every day because sometimes otherwise she would be the last person to hear from him at the end of the day about what he was working on how he's feeling he was usually tired by then and wasn't really giving it you know his a + so he goes for the last 6 months I wrote a note a note to my wife every single day he goes alright that's a lie you know I did it most days but like whatever here's how it went and he goes it's amazing like we're on the same page about like what's going on in our lives our kids our finances how we're spending our time we talk more than ever now you know we have more trust we feel less stressed we're less aggravated with each other and like we're better parents because we're kind of like more in communication with ourselves about parenting and he goes you know here's why writing is thinking so just writing helped me clear my mind it wasn't just me dumping my thoughts onto her it was me like getting my own mind clear and he gives this outline he goes here's what I write first I write gratitude like something about her you know for her for how hard she works for her looks whatever then what I'm working on today and like my goals or my deadlines anything I'm excited about anything that's bothering me any ideas I have just like random ideas on my head about parenting or fixing stuff around the house transactional stuff like oh we need to remember to do this we have to do this don't forget that questions like hey are we going to that thing or hey did we ever book that you know hey do we have an event coming up and lastly again gratitude for the life we have the the things we have the time we have the kids we have etcetera because I don't do all these sections every day but those are the general categories of things I try to write it takes me just about 30 minutes if I'm not distracted and you know turn yeah it's been a huge like win for me

Sam Parr

is it like a physical note or a email

Shaan Puri

I think it's a physical note not a 100% sure

Sam Parr

I guess I should start doing this that sounds pretty cool right

Shaan Puri

And then he did this YouTube video with his wife where they both talked about it afterwards. The post blew up on Hacker News; it got probably around 100,000 views or something like that. So then they did an interview together discussing this little habit. It's pretty cool, right?

Sam Parr

Yeah, this is awesome! I just DM'd him while you were talking, saying, "This is amazing!" This is a really good headline: **"Write a note to your spouse every day. A note a day keeps a divorce attorney away."** This is a really good title. This is a beautiful find! I think I guess I'll start doing this. Right? This is pretty sick; it sounds smart.

Shaan Puri

maybe I'll start by talking to her then I'll

Hubspot

start this

Sam Parr

No, that seems like a no-brainer. I'm reading this and I'm like, "All upside, pretty much no downside. Why am I not doing this?"

Shaan Puri

right good for me

Hubspot

you know

Shaan Puri

How can I weasel out of doing this? Sorry, my brain's not coming up with a valid reason not to do this.

Sam Parr

no like the calculations are like going in my head I'm like

Keralanka

yeah I guess I'm

Shaan Puri

you seem like a good husband do you you probably already do this you probably leave a sticky note on our pillow every morning

Sam Parr

No, not at all. As I was reading it, I thought the same thing: "Why would I not do this? It seems really obvious." But apparently, no one does it. My first exception is Rob Beard.

Shaan Puri

Husbands, one episode at a time. I feel like we had to leave him with something useful because we've definitely gone off on, like, you know, a tangent's tangent during this episode.

Keralanka

dude it worked for rob

Sam Parr

I mean, Rob is like successful. Have you seen his wife? I mean, she's very beautiful. I'm pretty sure she was like a playmate, like a... I don't know what the word is... Playboy model or something. I mean, she's pretty amazing. Oh yeah.

Shaan Puri

wow I'm definitely doing this

Sam Parr

Now, yeah, I guess I'll do that.

Shaan Puri

why did this guy write so many words

Hubspot

put a picture of it

Sam Parr

To be done well, anyhow, it's like if you Google... here's one of the ways that I knew that Rob was like crazy rich. If you Google "Rob Dyrdek home," there are like 13 different articles, and it's all about a different side of a $10,000,000 house.

Shaan Puri

did you mean homes did you mean mansions yeah

Sam Parr

And he buys all these houses. He seems happy; he's got his act together. So, yeah, I'm on board. I guess I'll do this.

Shaan Puri

fine alright bro