How Virtual Horses are Making Millions & A Potential 9-Figure Company | My First Million #181

Sam Parr

Do you own dogecoin you tweeted out that you owned it do you is that real

Shaan Puri

yeah

Sam Parr

fuck I mean that like it's a huge thing for you

Shaan Puri

well okay so the part I didn't tweet out was that I took gains along the way

Sam Parr

Alright everyone, welcome to the episode! Do me a favor: visit **mfmpod.com**. That's my first million, but abbreviated—so **mfmpod** like podcast. If you go there right now, you're going to see an inbox, an email form. Enter your email, and each Thursday, Sean is sending out an email that summarizes all the episodes we've discussed and/or launched that week. So make sure to sign up! You'll get a description of every single episode along with all the links to the cool companies we've mentioned. Also, we're doing a tour, which will be announced soon. This June, we're going to Austin and then Miami, and we'll announce those dates and everything like that. So go to **mfmpod.com** and sign up to be notified when all this is happening. You'll also receive your weekly email that discusses the podcast. Sean, what are we talking about today?

Shaan Puri

Today we talk about: 1. **Peak**, a testosterone subscription company 2. **B Roll**, which is a small, kind of bootleg company that I think could be big - could be bigger - but it does have some problems 3. A couple of gambling websites and products that I think are cool: - **Zed Run**, which is all the rage right now (people are selling digital horses for $20,000,000) - **Polymarket**, a place where you can go bet on anything We talked about all of these topics.

Sam Parr

And make sure to listen to it towards the end. I'm not trying to trick you; you could just skip ahead. But we shared our feelings on today's episode, and I think a lot of people are going to like what we had to say. You might need to listen to the first bit, at least the first half, to understand the context. So, give it a listen.

Abreu Andrade

do you guys wanna do the intro

Shaan Puri

yeah let's do the intro I feel like I kinda fucked

Abreu Andrade

up that episode I don't feel like I did a good job but

Shaan Puri

Leave, leave, leave this. Leave this part in too. So, I think it's worth...

Sam Parr

why do you think it was a dud

Shaan Puri

Sometimes I just look at the clock and I'm like, "Oh, fuck, we're halfway through the episode." I feel like, what have we said so far? You know, and then like, that's how I judge it.

Sam Parr

abray what did you think

Abreu Andrade

Yeah, I thought it was a B. I thought we spent too much time on things that weren't ideas. Some of the ideas that we did talk about were things that we've talked about before, like Peak and Zedron. I thought B-roll was actually really cool. I'm glad we spent time on that, but overall...

Shaan Puri

b alright and you and you guys

Abreu Andrade

just didn't have the energy sam you didn't bring the energy today man

Sam Parr

Is that... that's crazy how you could tell I don't feel well at all. But I didn't think that I was low energy.

Abreu Andrade

Dude, some days I'm just having a sluggish day, a bad day. I get on this call, and then I just get your guys' energy. That helps me.

Shaan Puri

get through the day

Sam Parr

And that's funny. No, I feel horrible. I didn't sleep at all. I mean, I just feel sluggish. I just had a bad night's sleep. That's so funny that that radiates... that sucks.

Shaan Puri

I thought you were fine, but you usually have one or two moments in the episode that are like the Sam moment where you get really either excited or you think somebody's really dumb. Yeah, so... that didn't happen.

Sam Parr

but let's talk about some stuff you wanna talk about pete did you invest in pete

Shaan Puri

I did

Sam Parr

when

Shaan Puri

Over the weekend, I talked to him, maybe Friday. On the first call, I was actually quite skeptical of this. So, this will give people some context.

Sam Parr

this is one of the first ideas that we've ever discussed as this new scheme moves

Shaan Puri

I think literally in episode maybe 1 or 2, when we started doing the brainstorm, Sam goes, "TRT subscription." I was like, "What?" He's like, "So I've been taking testosterone. TRT is testosterone replacement therapy. I've been taking testosterone, and I think this could be a great business because, you know, if you take it, it helps you. You're gonna keep taking it on a subscription." Like we were talking about why the business might be great, and we were both like, "Dude, that's a great idea! Why doesn't somebody do this?" Obviously, people were already doing it. So you recently were like, "Hey, there's this company, Peak, that I'm investing in that does that testosterone thing. You should talk to them." So I did, and I went in with honestly kind of lukewarm expectations. I don't know why. I just didn't know how big it was gonna be. I didn't really know. Like, I myself don't take it because I had some concerns like, "Is this really good for you or bad for you?" Then I was totally convinced on the call. The guy, Saad, who he introduced me to, is an amazing communicator. This guy was so good at selling me on the business. I was like, "You're gonna sell everybody your product if you can sell me this well on your business." He was a really, really talented guy.

Sam Parr

Yeah, he is talented. It's a really... I think it's a pretty safe bet. That's what I think. I believe it's a safe bet. So basically, TRT is, I believe... you know, I should know; I put it in my body. But it's, I believe, synthetic testosterone. You can put it in via... like you can rub it on your body.

Shaan Puri

We should explain the problem, right? Which is that, yes, males, you know, as you age, in general, your testosterone levels go down. In your twenties, you're the stallion, and then by the time you're in your forties, your testosterone levels are, you know, I don't know, multiples less than they were in your twenties. Okay, that's just nature taking its course; that's father time. But there's also other issues. Today, a guy in his twenties or thirties has the testosterone levels of like a 70-year-old man from 50 years ago or something crazy. There are some stats here.

Sam Parr

There are a lot of reasons why that's the case. Although doctors and scientists say, "Well, we don't exactly know," it could possibly be that we live pretty soft lives. There's not that much fear compared to the past; we don't have a death threat on a regular basis or worry about dying from different diseases. Although, maybe that's different for the last few years. We drink out of plastic. What else did they say? We smoke less, which a lot of people think is correlated with nicotine and testosterone levels. There are a variety of other reasons, but basically, the average person's testosterone level—the average boy or man—at 25 years old is like that of a 56-year-old. What that means is a lot of guys think, "Well, testosterone? Okay, so you're just going to have big muscles and look good naked." That's actually kind of a secondary thing. The first thing is that you can become incredibly depressed and just feel bummed out. You don't feel like yourself. I call it "aggressiveness," but it's not really like "I want to fight you" aggressiveness. It's more like, "I can be a little bit more confident and have a purpose." Anyway, I got tested for this and I had low testosterone. I've tried a lot of different solutions. I tried this company; it's pretty great. I think it could be pretty cool. I think they're doing pretty big numbers already. We'll see if they can pull it off. I think a company like a testosterone business is one of those companies where, as Sean said one day, "There are a bunch of different risks here." There are technological risks, like can you actually build it? There are market risks, like does the market actually want this? In this case, those two things aren't risks. The third risk is operational excellence: are you competent enough to pull this off? I actually think that's a pretty easy risk to manage because, I mean, if you overpay a handful of Uber employees, they're going to figure out the problem.

Shaan Puri

yeah you go find the guy who opened up uber's like atlanta business and you're like hey I need you you're you are an operational person I need you to come here and solve this problem which by the way I think I've invested in 4 companies and like on the founding team of each of them was like I opened up uber in I ran uber's canada business I went there first to open it I became the gm or like there's an uber competitor uber for flowers right bloom that I invested in a guy who like ran that because it's like these guys have operational excellence they just needed to find a good market that really wants products so I think you're right that the market does want this but there is you know an education step that has to be done product yeah they have almost zero product product risk but it really is about regulation and operational excellence so do they have regulatory risks and do they have operational excellence because you have to properly handle it right the flow is they don't just give testosterone to anybody you take a test so you at home finger prick you send the blood to the lab the lab gets you know gets reviewed by a doctor and the doctor says yeah your your levels are great or your levels are low and if your levels are low we can offer you a prescription if you want and and then when you get the prescription they need to keep measuring over time to see if your levels are improving or not and that sort of thing and so there's a big kind of like time lag it's not just like you know buying a thing off amazon or tuesday's litter it's at your house and there's no risk in playing with that toy it's like no there's risks this is actual medical it's a medical it's a digital medical workflow and those are new so like all of the telehealth products are like this himss and roe are probably the most successful versions of these where they took viagra and they said okay how do we market to people who might have erectile dysfunction how do we get them a prescription how do we so how do we pair a person on facebook who sees our ad to a doctor who can prescribe them you know that they that they had diagnosed them with erectile dysfunction prescribed them a medicine then how do we create the generic version of viagra how do we take this product and how do we sell it and then how do we do that whole thing profitably right so similar similar mindset those have become multibillion dollar companies and I think that there's more to come in that vein I've invested in a couple peak being the latest but yeah I think this is great and like you said the thing I would have been worried about was 2 fold 1 does this really work and what are the side effects and and as he was talking me through it I was like okay well you're very convincing but obviously you're somewhat biased right you're like the owner of this company but he started as a user of the product so so I think it is somewhat organic but I was like okay that sounds good I'm gonna do some independent research and I'll figure this out for myself too the second thing was I didn't like the idea of injecting myself in the butt or I don't know where do you where do you injure yourself the thigh

Sam Parr

I put it in my thigh and it doesn't hurt at all I do it 2 days a week and

Shaan Puri

So, why don't you take the gummy or like the cream? That seems like a gummy is way better than a shot.

Sam Parr

I got used to it and I didn't want to deviate. I had a provider that only did the shot, and I was just like, "Yeah, I'm used to it." It also feels like it's going to work better. I don't actually know if it does, though.

Shaan Puri

I asked him this I go I

Abreu Andrade

go he he said he has all 3 and I go

Shaan Puri

Why would anybody choose the shot? He goes, "Actually, if you look at popularity, our shot is the most popular. The second is this, and the third is this." I said, "Is that because it's more effective?" He goes, "No, it's not more effective. In fact, the cream is the most effective." But people believe there's a perception that the shot is the real thing. I'm getting the full effect of this. I thought, "Oh, that's funny how that perception is reality."

Sam Parr

Yeah, so I like it, but I've been doing it for a while. This isn't like a peak commercial because, and so we'll just be explicit about this: Sean and I both have a financial incentive in this company. We are both investors in this company. But it's sick! We've been talking about TRT (testosterone replacement therapy) for a while. I'm a fan, and I've been taking it now for 2 or 3 years. It changed my body. I didn't take it for my body, but it changed. I think there'll...

Shaan Puri

I think there'll be **$100,000,000** in sales in the next 3 years. That's my prediction, my bet.

Sam Parr

Yeah, I believe that the question is, "Who buys it?" I don't know yet. I mean, it's a pretty taboo thing, so they have to fight some taboo stuff. But yeah, we'll see. I mean, when people say, "Oh, you're taking steroids," I joke and say, "Yeah, I take steroids." It's not actually steroids, right? It's not an anabolic steroid. But they do have a little bit of a cultural uphill battle to fight. However, I think people are going to be open-minded to this, actually far more than I ever thought. I know a lot of people who take TRT, and I was shocked that that many people do. I thought I was going to be the only one.

Shaan Puri

Especially because Joe Rogan, aka the male Oprah, does it and vouches for it. I think those dudes are a big way. That guy has a pretty massive mainstream following, and when he normalizes something, it's just a matter of time. First, his die-hards will go do it, and then the other people will get curious and check it out. Eventually, as it gets more popular, people will remember that Joe vouched for it. Joe does it, so I think that goes a long way. Just like Oprah had a big effect on a lot of businesses, I think a person of Joe Rogan's magnitude is actually not just any other influencer.

Sam Parr

Do you want to talk about some of these ideas that you have? You've got some amazing ideas. Do you want to talk about Zed? That's crazy!

Shaan Puri

Let's talk about Zed. Okay, so we've both mentioned Zed on the pod before. Why don't you explain what it is? And then... no.

Sam Parr

You do it. It's so... this is like perfect for you. This is like a "you" thing. This is like a Sean company.

Shaan Puri

okay it's it's really simple zed is a it's digital horse racing so if you've ever been to a horse racing track super fun you know saturday sunday experience you go to a track there's a bunch of horses you don't know anything about horse racing or you don't know anything about the strategy you look at the sheep you know what do you do at a horse racing event you sort of drink and you bet and so the betting part is there's 8 horses that are about to run you don't know anything about any of the horses you look at the names and they all got funny names like you know you know mother's last hope or something like that and then you're like you know what I think mother's last hope might win I'm gonna bet $50 on mother's last hope 90 on you know sam parr's ponytail and then the last one you know is like whatever me lucky charms and so you bet on 3 horses out of the 8 the horses run across you're cheering like crazy you just want your horses to win they maybe they do maybe they don't and and whatever it's a good time and so horse racing is almost like the purest form of gambling because you really don't there's really no strategy that you don't need any skill or strategy but you're safe because really the other people also don't have any skill or strategy so it's not like a poker table where if you don't know what you're doing you'll get taken advantage of horse racing is very simple in that way so what zed did was they brought that online okay well that's that seems kind of niche the smart thing was they brought it online in the crypto format so the way it works is it is a crypto project it is an nft project which we've talked about before so you go on zedd and you can buy a horse so you can you could buy a horse or you can breed 2 horses together and and so you'll have a horse and then you can race your horse and then your horse can win for you or it can lose for you it's sort of like a little tamagotchi pet of yours and and every horse has like these characteristics so there's like a probability when you breed your horse or when you buy your horse there's like a probability it's gonna be like a small fraction of chance it's gonna be the lebron james of horses it's so athletic it's just gonna win every race and then there's a probability it's gonna be average or below average and so there's a gambling aspect just in the breeding and buying of horses not just the races themselves and so people are going on there they're they're buying and collecting horses like they're pokemon and they race them against each other and they win money and these guys are crushing it so yeah

Sam Parr

So, this is what Sean just said. The URL is **zed.run**. What he just described sounds kind of silly, and it looks like it is silly. I guess gambling is silly, but whatever, it's fun. The artwork is cool. What he just said sounds like a small idea, but their numbers are astonishing. So go ahead, what are the numbers?

Shaan Puri

They sell horses in batches. For example, in June, they'll do a drop of new horses that you can buy. They just did a drop a few days ago—about 2 or 3 days ago. In this drop, they generated **$18,000,000** in digital horse sales, selling to **2,400 buyers**. The top spender paid about **$800,000**, and the top 100 spenders collectively spent **$8,300,000**. What's happening here, under the hood, is that there's a group of people who are investors. They believe in NFTs and love to gamble. What happens... one...

Sam Parr

of my friends is those guys well joe we'll just say joe he he spent 6 figures on it

Shaan Puri

That's amazing! We're going to have one of the biggest whales on the pod. I forgot to tell you this: one of the biggest whales in the whole NFT space reached out, and he has a crazy story. He's like, "I'd love to come tell the story on your pod." So, we should have him on. He will go more in-depth with us there. But my understanding is that there are these people who were really big into daily fantasy, like they played DraftKings and FanDuel. These were the whales there. Then, you know, they were doing daily fantasy for a while, and then NBA Top Shot came out. They went heavy into Top Shot; they bought a bunch of Top Shot items, buying and selling from each other, which was driving up the prices. They have these huge Top Shot collections, and now Top Shot is worth a lot more money. They did well there. Then they said, "Alright, great! What's the next Top Shot?" They went to Zed Run, and Zed Run is the next Top Shot. So, now back at 18,000,000.

Sam Parr

where do the proceeds go

Shaan Puri

So I think it goes to Zed. I don't think there's anybody else to go to here. I think Zed basically mints the horses and they buy them. Alright, so Zed gets the sort of initial sale, and then from there, you know, if I sell my horse to you, I can get the proceeds of that sale. Then from there, there's maybe some transaction fee. So I think that's it. I don't think there's any other... like I don't think there's miners and other stuff involved, but I could be wrong.

Abreu Andrade

who puts up a and and then we

Sam Parr

Buy our horse, and then what's the likelihood that your horse is going to want to race? Do they establish... you basically, when you're buying a horse, you're buying that probability that it's going to win.

Shaan Puri

I'm out of my pay grade here. I don't know exactly how the horse racing probabilities work. You know, how does the slot machine work? I'm not exactly sure. I just know I pulled the lever and I'm looking for cherries. So...

Sam Parr

It's crazy! So let me tell you, I'll give you some insight into baseball here. Sean talked about this with me maybe 60 days ago.

Shaan Puri

like you our friend narendra told us about it told both of us about it

Sam Parr

Yes, and you brought up a podcast. Was this 60 days ago, maybe 2 months ago? You guys described it and I was like, "This is silly." But Sean's been pretty spot on with some of the stuff. Narendra has been spot on as well. He was early in Clubhouse even.

Abreu Andrade

if you know he he he he

Sam Parr

He sees things, and I contacted the founders of Zed. I got him on the phone and spent like an hour talking to him. They're raising money, and I was like, "I'm in!" They were going to let me invest. However, they took a week and then said no. It was a vague "either"—like they don't have room or they're not sure if they're going to raise. Regardless, that's cool, but it's pretty nuts the amount of interest that they had been getting. The founders were really cool guys, and I was devastated I didn't get in. If you guys are listening, call me! It's pretty crazy how much interest this company is getting.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, exactly. So, you know, I almost bought a $10,000 digital horse over the weekend because I wanted to get in before this drop. I just got busy with Mother's Day stuff and then didn't get around to it. But I think, you know, I don't know if this is a good investment or a bad investment. My personal opinion is that this is going to have a hype cycle and the prices are going to go up. It's going to be like, "Oh my God, this company has done $300 million of digital horse sales." Then, you know, 400 days from now, we're going to be like, "Remember that? That was a fun four weeks."

Sam Parr

kinda like kinda like the bitclout

Shaan Puri

Kinda like BitClout, kinda like Top Shot, kinda like Clubhouse, right? This is not uncommon, and it's not really even a knock on them. Look, they did better than 99% of startups that don't get a hype cycle. But I don't see how much longevity there is here because the trick is, when the primary value is speculation, then it's hard for something to sustain. In this case, the primary value number one is speculation: "I'm gonna get this horse, I'm gonna sell it for more." Primary value number two is a game, and both games and speculation sort of fade over time with everything, except for Bitcoin. Because for Bitcoin, the speculation is actually what makes it valuable. You know, people speculate that the price will go higher. The higher the price goes, the more it actually is a store of value. So the speculation actually creates the product, whereas that's not the case for Zed.

Sam Parr

Do you ever ask yourself, "How are we going to build, or how, you know, individually, how do we make stuff on the internet that can actually last 20, 30, 40, 50 years?" Because you think of the things that are in the top 50 companies right now. Most of them, I bet, that are tech-based, were launched in the last 15 years. How old is Google? About 20 years old, right? The year 2000 maybe, or '96? Everything's so new and changes so rapidly. Do you ever ask yourself how you’re going to create something that can last a long time, or you don't care about that?

Shaan Puri

I don't really care about that. What I do care about, I guess, is my view that you have to go on either end of the spectrum. Either you try to build something that's going to be really defensible and valuable. What I mean is, for me, it's not about something lasting over time. It's this one theory: does it have a positive flywheel? This means that the more people who use it and the longer it's around, does it become more and more valuable? There's something called the law of increasing returns, and so I want to be in a business that's like that. It might be hard to get the flame turning.

Sam Parr

explain that what does that mean

Shaan Puri

yeah so like an example of it is there's many but let's say amazon or amazon is the classic example of this so what makes a shopping store valuable a store is valuable if it has large selection low prices and fast delivery so with amazon for every single customer that comes on for every single product that they add to it they're increasing the variety available to that customer because they have so many customers they can offer the lowest prices and because they have so many customers and so much like built up you know sort of supply chain infrastructure to behind their thing they can offer the fastest delivery and so for them every new customer or every new merchant is just like it's kinda like you used to say with the the hustle every email is a wind you know we're a pirate ship and every email subscriber is a little wind in our sails it's that but basically it makes it better for everybody else the classic example of this is facebook right so every person who joins facebook makes facebook more valuable to all the other people on facebook and so in in the beginning when facebook has 0 people on it it's not very valuable to anybody even the first ten people it's not very valuable to anybody but once it gets every additional person the thing gets more defensible over time it gets more valuable to its existing customers which makes it harder for anybody to compete and they don't have to do a new thing they don't have to come up with a new idea or a new business line like all they had to do was just get more people using it because the people were the value and uber same thing every additional driver on the road makes the the the service more valuable to everybody because you get faster pickup times and faster pickup times means more people will take rides more people take rides means more dollars available for drivers which means more drivers on the road which means faster pickup times again right so like that's the law of increasing returns so so that's what you really want is what's called a positive flywheel so I care about that a lot because business is really hard anyways but when you don't have that you're just always working harder and harder to get more whereas with those businesses you work extremely hard at the beginning to get it going but then momentum starts to be on your side and I like that

Sam Parr

I used to be... and I have to fight this. You and I are quite... or I don't know if you are, but I would... you might be. I like to take shortcuts when I first start stuff, or at least I used to.

Shaan Puri

going here

Sam Parr

yeah yeah like let me like because I was always really good I'm like I can blunt I can blunt I can I can brut force

Abreu Andrade

you know

Sam Parr

Brute force this. People always just say, "Well, you know, if you want to chop down a tree, you should spend most of your time sharpening your ax." I'm like, "Fuck that! Give me a sledgehammer. I'm going to start banging." And by the time you're done with your sharpening, I'm going to knock your...

Shaan Puri

strap off through yeah

Sam Parr

Yeah, I'm like, "Just get out of the way. I'm gonna use strength and just will... you know, force a will, and I'm gonna get it done." That actually is super effective a lot of times, but it's incredibly harmful some of the time. I've taken shortcuts where I'm like, "Man, had I done this the right way and just slowed down, I would have paid huge dividends 8 months, 10 months, or 14 months later." I wish I would have done that. When I hear these stories, I definitely think, "This is definitely the right way." You have to put faith that you are gonna be happier 2 years from now than you are if you do this one way, even though it sucks now.

Shaan Puri

And that is so... I think the important thing is to recognize the companies or businesses that don't have this advantage. Let's take e-commerce. E-commerce is actually quite easy to get going, right? You don't even have to have a product; you can drop ship or just start doing ads. You can spend $1,000 on ads and make $2,000 in revenue. Great, you're in the game! It wasn't that hard to get started. You didn't need a license or anything to get going, maybe just some initial inventory. That's kind of like the biggest barrier. But e-commerce doesn't ever get this law of increasing returns, I don't think, at least not significantly. If you're at $1,000,000 in e-commerce sales, getting to $2,000,000 means you're going to have to do more work. You don't get less work over time. You have to keep manufacturing the product. Whatever you did last year doesn't really benefit your growth. You keep having to spend money on advertising and marketing. It doesn't get cheaper over time; it gets more expensive the bigger you try to scale it. So those have almost negative effects over time. At the very minimum, it's neutral. Basically, I'm just trying to describe kind of like a network effect or a flywheel-style business. How is it that when you draw an arrow between all the different parts of your business, you get customers? They do X because of Y, and then Y happens because of X. You get more customers. That's what you want. The circle has to connect. If the circle connects, it doesn't matter if it's hard to get off the ground. Once you do it, it's going to start spinning faster and faster and get more and more valuable over time. That's how you get a long-lasting company. The other thing I think about is the exact opposite: what's something that's super disposable? This arbitrage opportunity may not be around forever, but it's here now. So when I look at opportunities, I try to go to one end of the spectrum or the other when I'm being smart. And then sometimes I'm not being smart, and I go...

Abreu Andrade

in the middle and I I hate my life after that

Sam Parr

And I actually think that it's important to acknowledge that there's room for that second one. Everyone says, like, or myself as well, I'll look at something like that and I'll say, "Oh, this is like a get rich..."

Abreu Andrade

quick thing this is just

Sam Parr

Some stupid, meaningless arbitrage. And the answer is, yeah, it is, right? Exploit it. It exists. Have we talked about B-roll?

Shaan Puri

We haven't talked about it before. Okay, so B-roll is a website that is not very well known, but it's useful in the e-commerce world. So, what is this? One of the most effective forms of advertising is what's called UGC, or user-generated content. Why does this work well? Most people are advertising on platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat, Pinterest, and places like that. What are you competing with? You're not actually competing with other advertisers; you're competing against the feed. You're competing against the scroll. If somebody is just going to scroll right by your ad to the next piece of entertaining content, right? Because you're here trying to sell a product, and the next person is trying to make the person laugh or click the like button and then keep scrolling. So, you know, you're competing against a meme. You're competing against an influencer. You're competing against, like, you know, some model in her bikini on Instagram. So how is your ad going to compete in that environment? Well, it turns out the best way to compete is actually not to stand out but to blend in—to look like Instagram content. Well, how do you do that? So what people started doing was they began paying influencers. How do I get the Kardashians? You know, it's like that brand Sugar Bear Hair. They went and they paid the Kardashians, you know, silly money to post a picture of themselves with the little blue gummy bear in their teeth, you know, in their mouth basically. They're holding it; they're like biting down on it, and they took a picture doing that while holding the bottle of Sugar Bear Hair. Right? And so they go and you pay a lot of money for influencers to do things, and influencers are kind of hard to deal with. They're divas; they have managers and, you know...

Sam Parr

And this is B-roll.

Shaan Puri

And so, what does B-roll do? Alright, B-roll basically says, "Hey, let's give you content that looks like a person on Instagram just using your product." It looks like someone posting a review, you know, a video review where they say, "I bought this hat. I found this hat. I really love it. Here's why." They might say, "I have this problem with the sun getting in my eyes, so this hat is amazing for X, Y, Z reasons." Or they'll be like, "You guys, I just got my package from blahblahblah in the mail! I'm so excited to open it! I've been waiting for weeks for this thing." And then they open it up and they're like, "Great! Here's this eye wrinkle cream. You know it's gonna be so good! I'm gonna try it on..." blah blah blah. They make this video out of it. So, B-roll is basically a way to push a button and get a bunch of average-looking people to create the content that fits your story. You want to almost write a little script, a little storyboard where you say: 1. First, say that you got the package in the mail and you're so excited. 2. Second, open it up while you're in your bathroom and show your face in the mirror. 3. Third, put the cream on. 4. Fourth, do your makeup, do your hair, improve the lighting, and then show how much better you look now that you put our cream on. Then say, "Guys, you gotta try it! If you follow me, you guys gotta try this!" Or whatever.

Sam Parr

so how do how do they make money

Shaan Puri

They take a cut. So what they've done is they went and got all the wannabe influencers of the world—micro-influencers. This is like, you know, some mom in Florida who wants to make $40 or $50 for making a video while she's at home, like while her kid naps. Or it's like, you know, some girl in college who's in her dorm room and wants to make $100 this month to pay for whatever, you know, a manicure and a pedicure. What they get is your product for free, and then maybe they get a little bit of cash. In return, what you get is content for your ads that looks like real human beings making content—because it is real human beings making content for you.

Sam Parr

is it a big business

Shaan Puri

It's a good business. I don't know, it's not a big business yet, but I think this could be a big business. It's sort of criminally undermarketed. Right? Me explaining this is probably the best marketing they've had. And ironically, this is actually like a B-roll. Like, if they...

Sam Parr

I know

Shaan Puri

if they don't use this

Sam Parr

Did you see there's an app called Parcast? I think it's something like that. No, it's not called that. I forget what it is... oh, Pinata! They're using your voice and me commenting as an ad. I got kind of angry at them. So, what's this company called? Beehive? Beehive.

Abreu Andrade

beehive beehive

Sam Parr

beehive

Shaan Puri

I talked to the guy who owns it. I actually would like to buy a business like this. I think this is a really good business that can make... I don't know, it can make a lot of money. So here's what I relate this to: there's a business called UserTesting, which we've talked about on here.

Sam Parr

I like user testing

Shaan Puri

User testing did the same thing. They activated the stay-at-home mom workforce. There are a whole bunch of people who are staying at home and want a little bit of side income. They don't necessarily have specific skills, like coding or designing, and they just want to make a little bit of money. They're willing to trade half an hour or an hour of their time for $10 to $15. They have flexibility; they do it when they want and don't do it when they don't want. So, what user testing does is basically match that stay-at-home workforce with companies that want feedback on their websites. For example, they might say, "Go to my website, try to do X, Y, and Z, and record yourself while you do it. If you get confused, I want to see that so I can improve my design." User testing has become a very large company, generating over $100 million in revenue, and is expected to go public in the next 12 to 24 months, in my guess. User testing became a multibillion-dollar company by doing this. I think this activates the stay-at-home workforce in a different way, which is to say, "Hey, do a review or a testimonial of my product that I can put on my website or in my marketing." Why wait to pay influencers or wait for customers to take the time to do this? I'll pay you; I'll give you some free product or a little bit of money to create a testimonial, a review, or a short video clip. That's what I need to be advertising on TikTok or anywhere else.

Sam Parr

Great! Can I explain to you what I would do if I wanted to make money off this? Yeah, I used to have like a little e-commerce thing, and I would go to Fiverr.com. I hate admitting this because, frankly, I don't think it was a good idea, but I would write a script and pay someone $5 to $100 to record a testimonial. Really, it wasn't even that good because they made it look too professional.

Shaan Puri

yes too professional yeah

Sam Parr

It was a testimonial nonetheless. Now, I have no idea if this is what it's called, B-roll. I have no idea if this is what they did, but basically what they're doing is taking a very specific niche of Fiverr. Fiverr.com is probably the leader in this space. It's a publicly traded company, and their whole shtick was $5 things that you could do. Now, like, you can draw a logo or make a 30-second video, and people would game it. I used Fiverr.com to get 10,000 Twitter followers, and it automatically looks like 10,000 Twitter followers that made me look legit. Yada, yada, yada. People use it for scams. What I would do is look at Fiverr's annual report, and they'll actually tell you more likely than not what some of the fastest growing categories are and what the fastest and most popular services are. Or you could just go straight to Fiverr.com and rank by popularity. I would just rinse and repeat. I would look at what B-roll in and which category is the most popular, and I would cater a website just for that. I think you could probably build a pretty good business doing that.

Shaan Puri

We should do that. We should dive into Fiverr's public reports and see what we find because Fiverr is a pretty interesting business. We could do Fiverr and maybe like Upwork or whoever. I'm going to show you... oh, you can't see my screen.

Sam Parr

You could do something like this: "I'm just on Fiverr.com, focusing on voiceovers. For $500, we'll read whatever you want for a 60-second piece. I sound like a movie guy, or you can get this other person who sounds like a commercial lady from a credit card commercial, yada yada yada. What you can do is something like that."

Shaan Puri

I'm going to send you a screenshot of the storyboard that I submitted to use for this thing. I mean, the design looks a little bit crazy, but it is pretty cool. You'll see how this works, and I think it makes it very real in your mind how powerful this would be. So, for example, if you're an e-commerce store owner—there are a lot of these, right? Shopify has exploded in popularity. You book a professional photographer, you go to a studio, and you look at all your favorite brands: Lululemon, Nike, Gap, whoever. You say, "We want to make commercials like them. We want to have our photos like them." That's the way this should work. We want beautiful, clean, perfect lighting, cute models wearing our stuff, smiling, and holding hands. Then you go put that on Facebook. Next to it, you take out your iPhone and record your face. You're basically holding up your product in poor lighting in your bathroom, and you say, "Guys, I just got this... whatever lip gloss." I don't know why I picked lip gloss; I wouldn't even know the first thing about what to say about lip gloss. Let's pick a different one: "Guys, I just got this hair product for my men's long hair that I have." I don't...

Abreu Andrade

know about you guys but I wake up in

Shaan Puri

The morning looks like this. Then what I do is I just squeeze this on, put this in my hair, and bam! I look fantastic. You know, whatever, even less salesy than that. It's just like, "Guys, it looks so good," except for this little part here, but I gotta work on that. Anyway, you guys get the idea... blah.

Sam Parr

blah blah

Shaan Puri

That ad will kick ass compared to the studio photographer's official high quality, you know, professionally done.

Sam Parr

have you even seen that the commercials on tv people are doing this now too

Shaan Puri

Yeah, because they saw... before you could measure TV well enough, right? TV was hard to measure. You couldn't figure out what works and what doesn't. Now, you throw both ads on Facebook. You throw 1,000 ads on Facebook and you'll see this one gets the most clicks, this one gets the longest views, and this one results in the highest number of purchases. So then they probably did that, spent $100,000,000 on Facebook, and said, "This is the best way to communicate our product to our customers." Now, hey TV guy, roll this instead. And then they're like, "Are you sure? This looks like shit." And it's like, "No, no, no, trust me, this works." So this lifestyle type of content or user-generated style of content works so well. So then the question is, you're basically feeding into Facebook's ad engine. So this looks like a small business, right? It even sounds like a small business. B-roll, you know, like a little bumblebee. The website looks like shit, you know? It seems like...

Sam Parr

revenue do you think they make

Shaan Puri

I think they're probably doing a couple million... 1 or 2 million a year is my guess. I think that this could easily be a 9-figure business. Why? Because you're taking a subset of the Facebook ad engine. Right? Facebook people are spending $1 billion and $1 billion on Facebook advertising. If you have a way for them to create more ad creative that converts better at scale, without hiring their own people and doing this stuff in-house, people are going to take you up on that bargain. But you'd have to, like, you know, basically market yourself as well. You'd have to go and figure out how to get them all to use you.

Sam Parr

You know what would be kind of cool? I'm just thinking about this as we talk about so many things that I would love to do. I'm like, "Oh, this just seems exciting!" A lot of people think that way. We should do an episode one day or make a list of the types of headaches that each business comes with. I think the issue is that we make things sound easy. In some regard, they are really simple, but they have issues. Everything has issues. So, like with media, the issue is you have to deal with people. Personnel is key because your people make your stuff. With e-commerce, you have to deal with shipping and logistics. You have to manage cash flow issues, which includes the whole supply chain. With B2B software, you have to deal with enterprise sales. It can feel like it is a little slow sometimes; it can be a slog.

Abreu Andrade

yep

Sam Parr

Like there's issues for everything. I would love to hear what the headaches are for this and some of the other stuff that we talk about. So, what are the issues with this? Probably... maybe people, because you're dealing with...

Shaan Puri

**Sale, it's quality control.** So, the biggest issue is I'm an advertiser. You did all the hard work to convince me to start using B-roll to get some videos made. I put up my brief, but I kind of wrote it in a **shitty** way because I don't know how to do this right. I wrote my script, and my script kind of sucks. It was unclear and open-ended... blah, blah, blah. That goes to some person in Tennessee who's just doing this for fun on the weekends to make a little side cash. They half-read the thing, they record the thing, but there's background noise behind them to the point where you can't hear what they're saying. Or they didn't follow the prompt. The client really said, "Start the video holding up our product," and the person just didn't do that. Now the video is in, the client expects to get the video they wanted, the video creator expects to get paid, and nobody's happy. The client didn't like the video, and the creator said, "I did the work, what's up?" And you're in the middle, having to figure out how you're going to ensure quality so that my advertisers don't get fed up and leave throughout this process. This is the problem for user testing as well. User testing has a whole fleet of humans and robotics to make sure that the tests submitted are going to make the client happy. The client’s not going to say, "Hey, I want a refund. This person didn't even follow our directions," or, "They didn't speak; they just clicked. They didn't even give their thoughts out loud." Right? So, like, we can't... I don't want to pay $15 for this test if I didn't get what I wanted, and you still owe the guy $15 because they did the work. If you don't pay either one, they're going to leave the platform. If you don't give either one what they want, they leave the platform. Now you have a churn problem. So, **quality assurance is the number one issue** with a marketplace like this, in addition to the normal headaches of getting people to join your platform in a two-sided market.

Sam Parr

Yeah, I just want... I want like a Glassdoor for different business ideas. Like, what's the downside? Just because everything has it, just tell me what the downside is, what I gotta deal with. Yeah, do you wanna do one more or no?

Shaan Puri

Let's do one more because I feel like I was long-winded and not that interesting today, so I'm gonna try to make up for it. Alright, let's do one. Okay, this is cool: Polymarket. Have you seen Polymarket?

Sam Parr

no tell me

Shaan Puri

Alright, I'm gonna screenshot what I do on this thing. Polymarket is a betting network. It's a place to bet on the future, so you can bet on anything. So if you go bet...

Sam Parr

**On your beliefs, the name is called, or the phrase is "Bet on Your Beliefs." They're trademarked.**

Shaan Puri

So, it's similar to any betting platform. Like, "Oh, I can go bet: will the Lakers win tonight or are they going to lose?" Right? But you bet on different types of stuff. So, here are the top bets right now: 1. Will Dogecoin reach $1 at any point before June 15, 2021? 2. Will Andrew Yang win the Democratic primary of New York City in 2021? And so, let's take that Andrew Yang one.

Sam Parr

By the way, really quick, do you own Dogecoin? You tweeted out that you owned it. Is that real?

Shaan Puri

yeah

Sam Parr

fuck I mean that like so it's a huge thing for you

Shaan Puri

Well, okay, so the part I didn't tweet out was that I took gains along the way. I bought 1,000,000 Doge at 3¢, and so that would have made me... I don't know, like half a million to a million dollars or something like that if I just held the whole thing. But I sold at 8¢, I sold at 15¢, I sold at 30¢. So now I still have a slug of it left, and I'm just letting that ride. It's at like 50¢ now or something like that.

Sam Parr

yeah only tweet the good stuff sorry go go ahead

Shaan Puri

Yeah, okay, so... anyways, this... so you could bet on something. For example, there was a bet, or there's a bet right now: "Will New York City be fully reopened by July 1?" And then there's a price on it. It's all simple, yes and no. If you just look at this site, it'll show you that $60 has been bet on this bet, and most people are betting no. Out of 100% of people who bet, 73% said no and 27% said yes. So when you go to bet, you get better odds. If I'm betting on the yes side and only 27% of people have said yes, I get paid more if that ends up being correct. If you take one of these other bets, like... you know, we'll both like this one. I bet on this one: "Will Floyd Mayweather beat Logan Paul in their upcoming boxing match?" To me, this is like a 100% probability that if the fight happens, Floyd Mayweather is going to beat Logan Paul.

Sam Parr

yes

Shaan Puri

But on here, you know, it's 94. You get 94¢ basically. It's 94% I think. Yes, and there's 6% if you bet the other side, if you bet Logan Paul is gonna win. And so to me, that's free money. That's gonna happen in 1 month, right? And so I can make like a 6% return on my money this month just by putting it into that bet.

Sam Parr

Well, no. So, I put in $10, and if he wins, I make $10,161. No, it's only a 1.6.

Shaan Puri

Well, so the problem is... there's slippage if you bet more. There's only been $6,000 bet into this bet, so if you bet $10, you would have moved the market. Put in $100 and you can see what your return is. For the bigger, more popular bets, you can bet $10 and it's not going to move the market. The Andrew Yang one has $260 in, so your $10,000 is not really going to move the prices that much.

Sam Parr

That's interesting. I'm going to bet on this Floyd one. By the way, Floyd's going to win; it won't even be close.

Shaan Puri

Of course, it's not even a question to me anyway. So, there's a bunch of these things that are like this, but I think this is really cool. It's a really cool product. It's a prediction market. People have been talking about these prediction markets in crypto for a while, and this is a crypto-based thing. So, the problem is who...

Sam Parr

who created this

Shaan Puri

Just like, I don't know, some group, some team of people in the crypto world. What they say is, if you see at the bottom, there's a disclaimer: "Polymarket is only for informational and educational purposes. We do not custody your money, we do not take profits, and we don't host these bets themselves." So what they say is there's a betting protocol. Bets get made on there, and this is just a website displaying the bets and letting you bet into those markets or not. These bets are all made on the Ethereum blockchain. The whole bet is made there, and then they have a system for validation. So, how do they decide, like, if Floyd Mayweather beats Logan Paul? Well, there are details in there of how they're going to decide. Then there's what's called trusted oracles or whatever. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Sam Parr

there's a group there's

Shaan Puri

A decentralized group of people will all submit their answers: what happened, yes or no. Once there's a consensus, like if there is consensus, then the bet finishes and closes. If there wasn't consensus, like, you know, "Is New York City fully reopened by July 1?" That's something I'm curious about. I don't know how they're going to resolve that. It says it needs bars, restaurants, blah, blah, blah, but what if there's some gray area? I don't know how they resolve these bets in that case. But I find it really fun. If you've listened to this podcast by now, you know I'm kind of a gambler. I find this to be a fun way to gamble on things that you're betting are going to happen. So, I put $5,000 into this thing, and I started betting on different bets. I'm having a blast, and I'm going to keep doing it.

Sam Parr

I I I think this is gonna be quite large

Shaan Puri

I won a bet for the Saturday Night Live thing. It said, "Will Elon Musk mention Dogecoin on Saturday Night Live?" and "Yes" was paying out at like 94 cents. But I was like, "I'm pretty sure he's gonna do it," so I bet yes. I bet $250 and I made $330, something like that. So I made a profit of... I don't know, I forgot what it was, like $80 or something like that on the bet.

Sam Parr

dude this is badass so how did you find this

Shaan Puri

People in crypto talk about this thing. I've heard the name before and I've been to it before, but this was the first time I actually started betting on it.

Sam Parr

like you on twitter they talk about it

Shaan Puri

Yeah, I don't even know, man. I'm just like so knee-deep in the crypto world. I don't even know when I hear about things. Maybe it's Twitter, maybe it's a friend.

Abreu Andrade

I I have no idea

Sam Parr

oh they just raised money

Shaan Puri

Yeah, they've raised money. They're kind of... well, they're like a well-considered brand, I think, which is kinda weird because this thing... if you go to the website, the "How it Works" and stuff is pretty skimpy. They don't really do a... like, for a financial betting website, you would expect them to have way more legalese and fine print and everything. And they really don't. It's very bare-bones. But yeah, it's pretty cool. It's like a Las Vegas betting system built on top [of a platform].

Sam Parr

of ethereum

Shaan Puri

Right, so if you wonder what the value of something like Ethereum is, is it just speculation? Like, no. People are building essentially casinos on top of Ethereum, right outside of the financial system. It's pretty cool.

Sam Parr

Do you want to do for the next episode... do you want to do the first segment on "how to"? We can do that because I think I've got good research methods, and I could explain mine. But would you be interested in explaining yours? Do you have a particular way that you find information? Because, I mean, a lot of stuff that I've invested in or that I invest time or just curiosity into, I learned from you. Do you want to share how you do that, or is that not even a shareable thing?

Shaan Puri

Well, I have an idea of something I could share. When you started talking, my brain began to think about how to win inside a big company as an entrepreneur. How to make a mark inside a big company. I've done a couple of things since joining Twitch that I think allowed me to. I just didn't do the rat race. Instead, I put a little effort into these four or five other things that nobody else in the company does. Because of that, I got an outsized reward. I basically made a name for myself in a good way, you know, by doing X, Y, and Z. So, if you're somebody who's in a big company and you're thinking, "Well, I'm just another fish in the sea," or "I want to get promoted, but I have to climb this ladder the way it's currently constructed," my answer is no, you don't. There is a way to be interesting inside a big company and do a few interesting things that will let you leave a larger footprint than just your job. If you do it the way everybody else with your same job title in your company does, it will limit you. So, I'd like to share some of those things—how I made my mark inside a big company—and I'd like to share that for others to do in their company.

Sam Parr

So, how to... I don't know what we're gonna call it, but "How to Succeed in a Huge Company as an Entrepreneur." How to... What I want to do is like: 1. How we do research 2. Maybe a third one that I want to learn from you is how do you manage this small team of people Because you have like a personal crew, and I'd like to know: - What do you pay them? - What's the cost? - What's the ROI? These are things that I would love to learn from you.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, I'm down to do that one as well. Some people have asked me about that, so we can do that one. I think more people want to know... I think people want to know that one, and there's a lot of people who listen to this that have a job. They're not ready to go quit their job and start [their own business].

Sam Parr

A company doesn't want to tweet out whatever you want to tweet out. Those are three ideas. I can do it, and we'll see what the people say.

Shaan Puri

yeah let's do it I think we should do all 3 it's just in what order we'll do we'll we'll do one each time

Sam Parr

It's okay. June 3rd. Did I say June 3rd to you? Sean and I are doing a meetup. Well, I guess it's Trends and the Hustle. Sean and I, whoever's doing it, we're going to be there. We're going to host an interview. I think we can do our thing in front of everyone. Also, Noah Kagan will be there. Do you know Noah?

Shaan Puri

never met him in person just on the pod

Sam Parr

So, he'll be there. We're going to do it at his office. He's been kind enough to let us use his office. You can go to **mfn** like **My First Million** at **mfm pod dot com** and enter your email. You'll get notified when that's being released.

Shaan Puri

in austin your town

Sam Parr

yeah when we come to like we're gonna

Shaan Puri

with austin

Sam Parr

Yeah, we're gonna start with Austin. That's on June 3rd. It's likely... I'm almost positive it's completely free, and we'll have room for a small group of 50 people. Then we haven't settled on this yet, but not the day after, but likely the day after, we might go to Miami. We haven't... we gotta lock that in. If you have an office that could host 100 people [that would be helpful].

Abreu Andrade

lock it in what are we waiting for

Shaan Puri

let's lock it in it's done

Sam Parr

we haven't

Shaan Puri

we haven't found the venue but the decision is done

Sam Parr

yeah like I'll I'll I'll plan to go but we don't have a place to be so sorry

Shaan Puri

we'll figure it out

Sam Parr

If you want to host us, basically if you want to provide light drinks and light food and you want to have 50 to 100 people, tell us. It's going to be in the evening, it's going to be like a 7 o'clock thing.

Shaan Puri

Maybe 500 people... Mayor Suarez, if you are listening to this: Hey, we've traded a couple DMs. Hey, you know I've been seeing you talking to my friends. Let's do this!

Sam Parr

I think we could get 100 or 500 people. I just don't know if I personally would want to. Would you want to like riff in front of 500 people?

Shaan Puri

yeah if I'm gonna do 100 why not 500 this doesn't make any difference to me

Sam Parr

Well, I don't even want to do 100, let alone 500, but... yeah, whatever. I'll go with the flow. But we need a place, so if you want to host us, you can. I've got a couple other updates: 1. We're going to talk... Sean actually did most of the research for this one. We got a ton of cool ideas. 2. Do you want an update on some podcast stuff? I've been working with...

Abreu Andrade

our team

Sam Parr

Okay, so in March, we did 338,000 downloads. In April, we did 436,000 downloads, which is about a 30% gain. In May, it's tracking towards around 520,000, which is another 20% increase. I think we can keep going. I want to tell you what I think is causing all this. The first is Balaji. The Balaji episode... So, guests typically, we have found, don't work that well. But a really big name guest or someone that has a cult following, like Tai or Balaji, that works. Tai... who's Tai Lopez?

Abreu Andrade

oh ty lopez okay gotcha

Sam Parr

when we did that one because he's got like a

Shaan Puri

cult following and a cult unfollowing he's got both

Sam Parr

Yeah, yeah, so that worked. The biology episode is probably going to be the most listened to one ever. So that worked.

Shaan Puri

How much more is it than the usual? Is it like 20% more, 50% more than a typical episode?

Sam Parr

It got to 30,000, like, in the first week. Typically, our episodes get to 30,000 over, like, 2 months.

Shaan Puri

gotcha okay

Sam Parr

So, it did that in like a week or whenever it was. When did it get released? A week ago? Five days? Last Wednesday, I talked to him.

Shaan Puri

On the phone, he said, "Yeah, good episode. I shared it, so hopefully that helps." Then he's down to share more. We only tweeted out, I think, one clip from it, so he's down to share more clips. He liked the animation; he was like, "Oh, looks like production value is going up." I was like, "Sweet, yes it is!"

Sam Parr

Yeah, so that worked out well. Do you want to know what's working really well? It's "how to's." Anytime a title is called "How to Build a Paid Community," "How to Build Paid Events," or "How to..."—we've found that those rank the highest. More often than not, in our top ten most downloaded content, it's either an interview with a huge, well-known person, like Andrew, or a "how to" topic. So, we have to do some more "how to" content.

Shaan Puri

Almost like they don't care about us and our great ideas. They care about themselves, learning something, and being able to do something they want to do.

Sam Parr

I think that's exactly what it is. And then it's ourselves, peppered in there. We are the spice, but the meat is the "how to."

Shaan Puri

right and then

Sam Parr

Finally, I got a last update. We're running some ads on... do you know this thing called the "Billionaire Investors Podcast"? Or what's it called? It's like a famous thing.

Shaan Puri

is it we study billionaires is it that one

Sam Parr

yeah I love that podcast have you listened to it yeah

Shaan Puri

they're good

Sam Parr

Yeah, so we're running an ad on their network, on that podcast. I think we bought it last week, and I think it's going to go live this week. So, there are two types of podcast advertising that I'm learning about. The first is what we do: people advertise. Now, HubSpot advertises on our podcast, and people go to hubspot.com/mfm. The other one is podcast platforms. Have you heard of Overcast?

Shaan Puri

yeah like these clients these apps you can use to listen to podcasts

Sam Parr

Yes, and on those clients, those users click "subscribe." The strategy that I'm doing, or what we're doing, is we are going towards niche ones. These niche [audiences] typically have a far more loyal following, and we get low cost-per-click to download and subscribe.

Shaan Puri

So we're doing Sense because those people... if you are... you've got to be a real podcast junkie to go get like a new podcast app because it has these extra five features about podcasts. It's actually a really good audience that's probably really cheap because nobody else really goes for them. So I... I like the strategy a lot.

Sam Parr

And they're like... they're techie. They're like tech-tech, they're early adopters. Yeah, and so we're running ads currently on Castbox - I've never even heard of them, but it looks cool - and then Overcast. So those are some of the updates. It's going well.

Shaan Puri

Okay, what about the ad on the "We Study Billionaires" podcast? What is it? Because I'm always like, if I'm listening to a podcast, what's actually going to make me go subscribe? One reason is if a guy or a girl comes on as a guest. This happened with Elaine. Elaine came on our podcast, she did ideas, and she said it was like, I don't know, one of her biggest spikes. Her newsletter got a huge spike in subscribers. Her next email sent was, "Welcome all my new subscribers! This is amazing!" She said she got thousands of new subscribers from her appearance on the pod, which is great. So that one makes sense. If I go and guest on somebody's podcast, you listen to it for 45 minutes or an hour because that's your favorite podcast or that's what you listen to regularly. You might be like, "Oh, that guest was cool. They said they have a pod. I'll go check it out." I like that method, and I've said I gotta do this. I still have to go do it, which is I want to guest on as many podcasts as I can. That'll be part of my contribution to this growth strategy. But this ad is a little bit different. It's just like a 30-second sound clip. What are we saying in that 30-second sound clip that's going to make somebody want to subscribe?

Sam Parr

Unfortunately, it's not a clip. I think it's going to be Stig, the main guy, reading. But frankly, I don't know. We just closed the deal on Friday.

Shaan Puri

okay fair enough

Sam Parr

So, I have to figure it out, but we have our guys. We got this team, Henry and Dylan. They're making a hype, like a sizzle reel.

Shaan Puri

right

Sam Parr

And we might be able to use that, but I don't know. I agree with you; in theory, I agree with you. I just don't know what's available at the moment.

Shaan Puri

And we're doing some other stuff to make it easier to follow. So, I'm emailing. I've grown my email list this year from 0 to 26,000 subscribers. Now, at 26,000, I just sent it out for the first time last week. It's just seanpuri.com, so if you go subscribe there, you get all my emails. One of the weekly emails I send now is a podcast recap. So, if you don't have time or you listen to the pod while you were on the go, I basically take the best three bits from the last week of episodes. I say, "This was the best idea, this was kind of the second most interesting idea, and here was the third one." I sent that out for the first time, and I think that will also make it easier for people to follow along. If you were kind of on the fence or you were in and out—listening sometimes and not listening other times—I think that'll keep you on the hook.

Sam Parr

Because sometimes, I copied your email from Sean and sent it to about 30,000 hustle people who clicked on my "First Million" link in the past two weeks. We're actually going to increase that to around 100,000 people. My takeaway so far is that it might actually be good for the user but not great for our numbers. They just get the information without having to listen, which kind of sucks that it has to be the case.

Shaan Puri

Yeah, I thought about that, but I don't think that's actually how the world works. I think if you keep giving people value in every form that they want it—short form text, long form clips on Twitter, clips on YouTube, video on YouTube, podcast audio—if you just keep giving people value, they will learn that whenever they want ideas, whenever they want to feel their wheels turning, if they want to get that juice, that energy, Sean and Sam are the place to go to get it. And our best raw source, the real deal, is in the podcast. So I think over time, those clips just bring people who are on the fringes closer to the core.

Sam Parr

I hope that's the case, and I'm betting that's the case. I'm putting my money on that. But yeah, it's a fear. I want to bring this back to one thing, which is a lot of times we talk about this inside stuff, and I hope it doesn't sound like a circle jerk, like "oh, we're awesome, yada yada yada." I'm revealing this because a lot of people like this. I like it when I hear other people say the numbers. But also, I want to emphasize that I think we're doing really good, but I actually don't think that we are good. I think persistence is good, and the reason why this is working is because persistence works quite well. So we're actually close to episode 200. We've been doing this for... is it going to be 2 years?

Abreu Andrade

that was

Shaan Puri

2 years yep 2

Sam Parr

years maybe in september or august

Shaan Puri

july something like that

Sam Parr

July... I would say that we miss things sometimes. I get sick, and Sean will miss stuff because he had a baby. But we're pretty much always on. At worst, we're mostly at least good. It's typically always at least okay. Sometimes it sucks, sometimes it's really good, but mostly it's good. That consistency is actually really important. We're going to AppSumo in about three weeks, and there's a great story that Noah told me. Noah Kagan runs this company called AppSumo. It's a weekly email where you get deals on software. This year, they're going to do $100 million in gross revenue, of which $50 million is their revenue. It's a great business; it's 10 years old. He was like, "You know, I realized something. This business that we're running has done really well, but it didn't do well at first. Everyone wants to know why it's doing so well." He goes on to say, "I really just put in 40 hours a week, but I just did it for 10 years, and it has finally started to pay off and done really well. It's just a job, but I do it all the time, and I treat it like a job. That has paid dividends." I think that more people who listen to us could kick ass a lot harder if they treated their side hustle like a job.

Shaan Puri

yeah I I would so I agree with you persistence is great the one thing that this reminds me of is I got some advice from the ceo of twitch emmett and we so so when I got acquired when when our team got acquired our company got acquired we were put on a special project inside twitch and it was kind of like one of the like most people at twitch are working on something that already exists hey there's you know people already use us we're already the category leader you gotta make it better make it more profitable make it smoother make it whatever it's more like maintaining and improving an existing winner and we were put on this little we're on the edge of the island and we're the only team in the company basically or one or one of 3 teams that was working on something that where we weren't the winner wasn't proven and so we and it was considered like a kind of a top priority so we did this thing every week the top my team would present to the ceo the coo and the chief product officer we had an hour with them every week and in a big company you don't really get an hour with those 3 people every week that's like a very expensive meeting as they say and because it was important and I used to go in and I would try to basically every I feel like every 2 weeks I was pulling a a rabbit out of my hat trying to be like and here's the new genius tactic that we're gonna do and this one is gonna be the one that works and like some of them did make an impact but emmett had this observation where he was like you know I feel like you have a lot of good ideas and then every month we're we're like sort of like on a weekly or monthly basis when we sit here it's always like yeah it's good but it's not as good as we want it to be we're still like we're so small we wanna be so huge and he's like you're impatient with the results and so so I so I change one thing at the top of every every update that you have to bring in a memo at the top of every memo I was the only person in the company that was doing this everybody else their memo goes straight into like here's the weekly update here's how it's going here's what here's what we're doing next at the top I wrote in bold impatience with action patience with results I said that's our team motto I'm putting it up here mostly for myself to remember impatience with action that's when impatience is good is when it's you're being impatient about taking action but impatience is bad when you're impatient about results so I'm putting it at the top of this fucking paper every week so we're all gonna see it so that was cool then the second the the second lesson came like 6 months later 9 months later when he was like by the way you guys notice like we got the results like it's actually coming to fruition now and if we look back we can't say which one thing we did was like the big growth mover and he goes because there's this phrase that I think andreessen horowitz uses which is or they made it more popular I guess I don't know if they invented it but ben horowitz has it in his book which is there's no silver bullet there's only lead bullets and this is about say this is basically what that means is there's no silver bullet strategy there's no one thing you're gonna go do that's just gonna magically like make everything okay make everything work the only growth strategy that truly works over time is a many lead bullets strategy which means you fire you do a bunch of things and you keep firing keep firing keep firing until the you know the thing falls over and finally finally you break through and and so I would say this is a good and so that became the second motto which is remember only lead bullets and so that was at the top of every weekly update was those 2 days

Sam Parr

that's pretty good

Shaan Puri

To catch myself because I'm good, but my... what's my leak? My leak was impatience. My leak was looking for the genius tactics when all it took was lead bullets and patience. So, you know, if you take away one thing from us talking about our growth numbers, I think some people will like it because they enjoy hearing the actual numbers. It's great when somebody is transparent about things. Cool, we're at over half a million downloads this month—monthly now—and we're trying to get to a million. Some people will be like, "Ah, why do they talk about their podcast numbers so much?" But I hope the takeaway is: forget about how our podcast is growing; that's probably irrelevant to you. You probably have a project you're trying to grow, and hearing how Sam thinks and talks about how he's growing this podcast is going to be beneficial for how you do it. AKA, how to grow a thing. You know, back to our how-tos.

Sam Parr

I think that, and we'll move on, but the last phrase that I've been thinking about a lot lately is: **"People overestimate what they can accomplish in a year, but they underestimate what they can accomplish in 10 years and decades."**

Shaan Puri

right absolutely

Sam Parr

And that's kind of an example here. We've been frustrated on a month-to-month basis or week-to-week basis, but it's kind of cool seeing these numbers really start to pay off.