"We're in a TikTok gold rush" - 5 Business Ideas To Start Before 2025
TikTok, Millions, Creators, Business Ideas - November 21, 2024 (4 months ago) • 44:24
Transcript:
| Start Time | Speaker | Text |
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Shaan Puri | Alright sam in the next hour I am going to flood you with business ideas I am going to create an absolute lunchroom food fight slinging business ideas at you you are gonna be drenched and covered with ideas are you prepared for this | |
Sam Parr | great analogy the lunchroom one did you just shut up | |
Shaan Puri | yeah | |
Sam Parr | that was very good I'm ready | |
Shaan Puri | and by the way all of these ideas very half baked came to me you know I would say 75% of them I thought of this morning because we had a guest cancel and we said let's record anyways and how about we do some business ideas let's give the people what they want tis the season of giving and we're gonna give the people what they want which is fun business ideas | |
Sam Parr | well the first one you actually have a lot of intel on right you actually use this thing the first | |
Shaan Puri | one I have some bets I have some bets on horses and those horses are are currently paying out and I haven't been talking too much of about it but I think it's time so tiktok let's talk about tiktok tiktok right now if you open up your phone do you have tiktok on your phone no okay for some of you you might have trouble opening the app because there might just be 1,000,000 of dollars jammed in the app and it's a little bit like stuck so it might be hard to open up because there is so much money available in tiktok right now do you | |
Sam Parr | use tiktok as a user | |
Shaan Puri | of course I'm I'm a tiktok addict | |
Sam Parr | oh that's why I don't use it I I had it and I deleted it | |
Shaan Puri | I I love tiktok I have a lot of fun on it but I also have a couple of business bets that are doing really well in this space and I think right now people are sleeping on it | |
Sam Parr | when you say business bets do you mean things that you own or investments of other people | |
Shaan Puri | I own equity in companies that are doing this | |
Sam Parr | that's what I'm asking okay so you invested in companies that are doing this not something you fully own and are operating correct because because I'm not to | |
Shaan Puri | operate anything at this. Yeah | |
Sam Parr | because that like insight is a little bit different | |
Shaan Puri | yeah yeah but these are all like there is something in between so there's like angel investing which is you write the check sort of passive you're on the outside I would say you're on the other side of the fence they lob you updates over the fence and then there's things where you own you know 10 20 30 40% of the company and you're active you're more actively in the loop you're not active day to day with your hands but you're active with your ears and your mouth alright so anyways right now on tiktok tiktok today is a little bit like facebook was maybe 2012 to 2014 and if you remember you at that time were working at a place called founders dojo and there was a guy who used to work there named moiz ali and moiz ali today is more famous because he started a brand called native deodorant you wanna give the like 2 seconds of what it was like being at the founder's dojo when he was creating native | |
Sam Parr | basically it was this guy who went to harvard harvard law I think and so he was like clearly smart and he had a small ecom startup that he sold for like $4,000,000 or something like that so very promising but still like you know he he was young and he's like what am I gonna do in the founders' dojo which was like my little 10 person office that I shared with some other guys he was looking for something to sell he thought mattresses he thought a few other things eventually he landed on deodorant and right in front of us literally every day he learned how to use facebook ads and in a very short amount of time scaled his deodorant business from 0 to just an idea to something like 30 or 40,000,000 in revenue in literally 18 months eventually sold it for a $100,000,000 in cash in like 24 months all right in front of us | |
Shaan Puri | yeah two and a half years end to end from time of start to time of exit a $100,000,000 sold to procter and gamble okay so why did he do that one he picked interesting category but he was doing something that not every not a lot of other harvard graduates smart people were doing and at that time on facebook you could get traffic for very cheap you could get sales for very cheap and he was able to build up a consumer base at the right place at the right time | |
Sam Parr | basically by the way I saw his sheet we wrote an article on it and he like sent it to me I think he was spending $4 and the each customer who we spent $4 to acquire was then spending $16 with him I believe that was the number so it was like a money making machine | |
Shaan Puri | okay yeah I'm not sure of the math but it was something like that it was sort of like you know 4 to 1 5 to 1 6 to 1 payout on on every dollar okay so which is very hard to achieve today today you know 1.5 is the new 4 to 1 right so basically you put in a dollar you get a dollar 50 oh that that same machine used to give you $4 for every dollar man those are the good old days well the good old days are right now on tiktok and so what's actually happening so here here's the breakdown of how this actually works so you create a product of whatever type it could be digital it could be physical great product now I want you to look at something go down on our sheet there is on page 4 there's an infographic and it's from a brand called goli you know what goli is it's apple cider vinegar gummies so they just sell gummies like gummy vitamins but specifically acv apple cider vinegar which was kind of like a health wellness trend and craze now goalie | |
Sam Parr | dude first of all you could put anything in a gummy I guess like it it like it started with weed understood then like I do creatine that way now you could do the last thing that I thought you could possibly do in a gummy which is vinegar yeah | |
Shaan Puri | yeah and actually if you drink apple cider vinegar it tastes horrible the yeah goli gummies taste great it's like you know it's apple cider vinegar without the pain okay so goli itself was a business that grew like crazy from 0 to 100 of 1,000,000 in revenue I think they ran into financial trouble they think they had to sell bankruptcy something like that they were like they got way out of their skis the group that bought it has basically restarted it and one of the main things that they're doing is this tiktok creator method that I'm talking about so look at this infographic this is a rewards program for tiktok creators so if you're a tiktok creator not only do you get a little kickback on what you sell but if every month you hit a certain sales target you can get something so low tier you know 1500 gmv you can get an ipad alright cool 4000 gmv meaning you sell $4,000 worth of product you get an iphone alright let's keep going up 15,000 in gmv you get an all inclusive trip to aruba 50,000 you get a rolex 2 and more you get the aruba trip the ipad and you get the rolex right they're stacking now let's go to the high tiers there are people that have done $1,000,000 they get a condo in miami if you do a $1,000,000 I think this is in a month of your your gmv target and so they're going to creators and say hey do you want this condo in miami it could be yours so creators is one way that you can make money on tiktok so you don't even have to do the brand or service you could just say I am going to sit here and figure out how the fuck to sell apple cider vinegar gummies | |
Sam Parr | and if I do this dude if you get a if you get a 1,000,000 they give you a lamborghini yeah oh my god | |
Shaan Puri | and and there's people who've achieved these targets okay so this is their program right now so this is who you're competing against if you're going and trying to recruit these creators it's like you're a division 1 college basketball program and you're trying to go get mcdonald's all americans to come play at your your program like there are guys that's like oh man there's this kid in wichita this guy's just a creative genius he's he just sits in his bedroom and he just figures out the best hooks the best angles and brands are putting him on retainer 10 20 $30,000 a month in order to get this guy to create for them this is what's happening right now in the creator space | |
Sam Parr | how many views do the big videos have | |
Shaan Puri | I mean millions tens of millions of views they can get they can get like a 1,000,000 likes on a video so you get a 1,000,000 likes you might have had 5,000,000 views or 6,000,000 views | |
Sam Parr | this is crazy like there's a guy dressed up in scrubs talking about it I have no idea if he's actually works in the medical industry but because he's wearing scrubs I'm like alright what do you what do you gotta say alright my friend so a lot of you guys who listen to the show you listen because you wanna start a company but you're not sure what idea to choose or you may not even have an idea and you like our podcast my first million because we've done a lot of the work for you on researching all these business ideas well my friends we've made life a lot easier for you because hubspot they just put together an entire list of all the resources that you can use to find a market opportunity to validate for your next business idea so if you're looking for a market size calculator or tools to identify market trends or a huge list of ideas to get started so so if you're interested there's a link below click it and you can have access to the whole thing it's completely free now back to the show | |
Shaan Puri | okay so golgi did this gurunanda teeth whitening are you familiar with this | |
Sam Parr | I think the teeth whitening area is full of scammers and I think that you are not a scammer for using tiktok shop but I think a lot of these scammers use this shit this like tiktok thing like this way and so it doesn't surprise me that a teeth whitening company would be using it | |
Shaan Puri | I'm not | |
Sam Parr | by the way I'm not saying these guys are scammers at all but do you know what I mean | |
Shaan Puri | yeah but but I'm also not saying they're not | |
Sam Parr | no no no no no no I have no idea about this brand but I know I've seen a lot of like bullshit teeth whitening companies and I like like in the research I'm like oh this does nothing | |
Shaan Puri | yeah I I don't know the effectiveness of any of these things all I know is that these they're selling a lot of product I think the guru nanda teeth whitening is the number one selling product on all of tiktok and tiktok is the number like kind of the most used app in the country basically right so you have this like top selling product on the top selling network it's pretty insane | |
Sam Parr | and so if they're the top on tiktok how much revenue do do you think they do | |
Shaan Puri | I have tried to back into this I don't I don't know the exact I don't wanna say a number that's gonna be way off on this | |
Sam Parr | podcast crazy to say like $5,000,000 a month | |
Shaan Puri | I don't think that would be crazy now okay let me put it that way the brands that are doing this strategy well are doing really well and you and and by the way this creates a halo effect right so you you sell the products directly off that one video but then people hear about it and then when they see their ad the the ad performs better because I've heard about this product before oh yeah I've seen 10 10 videos of this product so now when you put the paid ad in front of me those 10 organic impressions paid off or I go search for it on amazon amazon then takes that signal and says wow people really are searching for this name maybe we should surface it higher or Google says wait we should surface this higher people are searching for this keyword brand so with that product category so in that product category give it more rank so there's this multiple multiplier effect of this | |
Sam Parr | I have to imagine this is fairly mainstream though because marketers are like piranhas like when there's like flesh in the water like they all like one person tells one person and they all flock to it and they eventually ruin it so how much life does this still have and how mainstream is this amongst brands | |
Shaan Puri | let's say it's in the red zone still so basically it's not as good as when I first discovered it and I didn't wanna talk about on the pod because it's too good right like when something's just like absolute gangbusters right and it's unfair advantage you feel like you know a secret nobody else knows it's not there however more importantly it's still at a spot where you can go do this today it would still work if you just go and do this today so still works but you're not the only one doing it right both both are true | |
Sam Parr | I have you and like 10 other friends in the ecom world and every business they complain about a variety of things with software it's churn whatever with ecom the complaint oftentimes is cash flow and inventory you're saying huge numbers let's say hypothetically 5,000,000 a month $60,000,000 a year but is that actually a good business when you're doing this or is this one of those things that if you get big you still are broke | |
Shaan Puri | look if you're bad at business you'll find a way to lose money in any business the goal example I gave you right 100 of 1,000,000 of dollars and basically went bankrupt along the way so there are ways to lose to to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory there are also people that are absolutely printing profitably with this and so I've seen both I've seen both examples I don't think it's about the model I think it's about how well you actually run your business and how much common sense you use one of the great things about this from a cash flow perspective is normal ecom business you put up the money for the ad you put up the capital at risk in order to get users with this you only put up free product at risk so you send inventory | |
Sam Parr | yeah | |
Shaan Puri | to the affiliates the affiliates create the content you pay nothing for that ad until it does a sale is generated | |
Sam Parr | dude so if you're a digital product you crush it here | |
Shaan Puri | exactly so I have a couple of examples of of digital products as well in my list so okay here we go that's a long setup for 5 ideas that I think you could take on to tiktok and crush with right now number 1 so I want you to watch this video it's go scroll down and look at this link that says botox so the video starts says face taping is my jam and then the other podcast goes tell me about this and she goes if you had told me 14 months ago that I would not be doing botox and I would be taping my face instead I would have said you're effing out of your mind and so what a hook right so this girl's basically saying I used to use botox and now I use this and I would have thought this is crazy and then the other girl's like tell me more so this video itself has a quarter million likes | |
Sam Parr | I don't know | |
Shaan Puri | how many views this thing has | |
Sam Parr | by the way they have it so usually it's like bros it's dudes like discussing stuff in a podcast setting and then that becomes like the meme this is like 2 pretty women is this even a real podcast | |
Shaan Puri | or are they like one is a lot of people fake these but | |
Sam Parr | this is the wellness | |
Shaan Puri | process podcast so that video has 55,400,000 views okay so and they're not selling a product to be clear a lot I mean look at the comments every single comment is what's the brand anyone know the brand because she says there's this japanese face tape and then did you say japanese face tape versus just face tape already elevated and everybody's asking for the brand nobody knows what the heck's going on some people are criticizing it's a polarizing thing it's a visual thing these are good things when you wanna sell on tiktok so idea 1 is botox face tape either you can make $50,000,000 in top line revenue I'll say 15% margins so you know whatever that comes out to in the next 18 months okay okay let's be more conservative 24 months if you hit this well so you can make you know 7 a half $1,000,000 profit you could build a brand because there's a lot if you look at the market there's a lot of people that are on tiktok that obviously care what they look like aka everybody there's a lot of people who are botox curious but never gonna pull the trigger because it's either too expensive like individual botox treatments are like 1,000 of dollars or they just feel like it's too extreme and they're crossing that threshold into plastic surgery and they don't wanna do it for that reason maybe some maybe they'll be judged maybe self respect maybe they have to go somewhere it's uncomfortable it's like himss right there's a bunch of barriers reasons why you wouldn't do it | |
Sam Parr | dude I looked up if this works on chat gbt the answer is no | |
Shaan Puri | who knows right health and wellness is like one of these things right like I don't do those little do those little like fade jade face rollers work you know do just putting cucumber slices on your eyes and and doing this like ari came on here the other day I was like ari you're glowing she's like I did a chemical peel and I was like I don't know what that is tell me more there's a whole world of beauty treatments that like have some on the spectrum of effectiveness and cost they you know they land somewhere all I'm saying is that I think this could work I don't know if red light therapy is gonna change your skin and your hair but you know it's it's selling and that's kinda my. Right now I'm not a doctor I can't make health claims | |
Sam Parr | I have a friend who is went is a doctor and anyway she does botox for people and she was at my house and she had her kit with her and she was like I need to like test this out and we were like | |
Shaan Puri | did you get botox curious | |
Sam Parr | I was like looking at her I was like whip that whip that sucker out baby let's do this and so she gave me a little injection like 6 weeks ago | |
Shaan Puri | where | |
Sam Parr | in my forehead like like I was like you know I was like I don't even know if I wanna do this but like I'm a guinea pig you know you got a needle you got drugs like I'm gonna try it | |
Shaan Puri | I would love to hear this excuse you're about to make right now you're like I like science and I just thought you know I wanted to be a supportive friend of hers and I wanted to support small businesses what are your other reasons that you did botox tell me | |
Sam Parr | let's make | |
Shaan Puri | a list of sam's reasons you did botox besides I wanted to look better go ahead | |
Sam Parr | looking dope naked I mean there's like that's the only reason why anyone does anything right but it was I got so many compliments afterwards | |
Shaan Puri | did you really | |
Sam Parr | yes I got so many compliments and it was free forehead they someone says you look really young people kept saying I look young and I was like and it made me self conscious on how I used to look like and dude you're hooked have you ever you would never do that you're not into that | |
Shaan Puri | no dude come on | |
Sam Parr | would you what would you say if your wife wanted to do it | |
Shaan Puri | I think my wife does wanna do it but she's in that that boat where she's like I don't really wanna do it but I wanted to I'm curious like it's the same I bet you if somebody was at the house and had the kit and was like yeah I can do it right now I think she would be like you and I I think her forehead would start looking yeah smooth or whatever it does | |
Sam Parr | yeah like she was right here and I was like yeah I mean if the needle is right there like just stick it in me like let's let's do the damn thing | |
Shaan Puri | so it was awesome to taco bell right now but like doordash if it brings it to me I wouldn't not eat it yeah | |
Sam Parr | if it's there so yeah I guess you could say I'm botox curious | |
Shaan Puri | I think I'm best beyond curious I think I'm botox activated | |
Sam Parr | alright what's the next one | |
Shaan Puri | alright next one another one in the beauty space and this is a theme here beauty things are tap into a core human desire they are visual by nature they can have before and afters and they obviously are you know high margin great businesses when you can build them and so I wanna take anything that worked in the d two c in the in the prior waves of ecommerce and I wanna see if I can build a tiktok native distribution strategy around it that's a lot of fancy words to say if it worked with facebook ads I'm gonna see if it worked with tiktok videos okay so one of the big winners I think she spoke at your conference was a brand called madison reed | |
Sam Parr | dude there's a location right out the street from my house I think they do really well yeah | |
Shaan Puri | so madison reed has built a real empire around hair color and I don't know the full story but basically you know hair color is not a new idea they you know there were many brands that existed my mom has been buying this ever since I was a little kid you know she would go to target and buy you know dark browns because she didn't want graying hair or my sister if she wanted to try it damn | |
Sam Parr | you're gonna do your mom like that | |
Shaan Puri | oh dude dude if I'm great up you don't think my mom's great up like obviously obviously and so you know my sister would if she wanted to try having lighter hair for a season whatever go buy hair color so madison reed basically built a you know kinda online first distribution strategy so a bunch of facebook ads and built a huge brand in this space I think madison reed I don't I don't know what they're worth but I would not be surprised | |
Sam Parr | I just looked it up top line revenue grew 20% last year to $150,000,000 in revenue | |
Shaan Puri | yeah so the valuation something like 500,000,000 + so huge success I think you could do a new madison reid on tiktok I think that's just a bet worth taking which is same idea maybe you have some new novel angle maybe it's that it's easier to apply maybe it's that it's less messy in your cleanup maybe it's it's less harsh chemicals so it doesn't damage your hair the same amount whatever come up with your your reason why this is new and build a brand off of tiktok and I think you could do this again with creators who are gonna use the product show the customers build trust build your brand get people searching for your brand because there's not there's always gonna be a new wave of people who are interested in this right so there's either people who are whose hair is starting to gray there's always gonna be a new generation and so whatever the old whatever whatever media they consume is where you need to be in order to sell that right like remember like touch of gray or whatever like men's whatever the men's hair color one yeah you know they did it on tv ads and then madison reed did it with facebook ads whatever the next generation is they're probably gonna get sold to over tiktok and instagram reels | |
Sam Parr | and you know what's funny is you said there's a new generation that wants this stuff but you know what has not changed and will always be the same is the hooks that worked in 1910 will still work today so for example there's this wall street journal ad that tells the story of 2 young men 1 young man when they both when they both graduated college one young man got a wall street journal subscription and because of that he got a better career whatever and it tells a story there are so many ads that replicate that story or that idea successfully because if you Google like best wall street journal ad of all time they cite that ad and so what I like to do is find old ads from as late as the thirties to forties like it could be like print magazine ads and just see like what's like an interesting line psychedology yeah what's like the human nature vibe of this and just rip it so like for example there's this one very famous ad where it says they laughed at me sit when I sat down but then when I started to play the piano... | |
Sam Parr | And that's called the curiosity gap which is do you remember the brand you know buzzfeed and then what was the other one called upworthy | |
Shaan Puri | upworthy I remember it | |
Sam Parr | it was like you know 10 reasons why blank you're not gonna believe number 7 that's the same hook as that piano ad and so it's really fun to find old ads and just be like what's the human nature element of this and just replicate it on tiktok | |
Shaan Puri | exactly exactly great way to find hooks okay here's an here's a different different category so I did beauty let me give you a different one self help so one of the top selling products in the last year is something called the shadow work journal have you heard of this | |
Sam Parr | no but that's a great name shadow work journal | |
Shaan Puri | so you get a if you if you go look on amazon or | |
Sam Parr | tiktok I've seen this I have seen this | |
Shaan Puri | so these the amazon listing for this currently has over 5,000 ratings and this is like a self published type of book and this journal on tiktok has sold over a 100000 copies you know you know how rare it is for a book to sell a 100000 copies in like the 1st year that it ever existed with no other promotion so this was a it was a huge success and basically it was like people on tiktok would they'd have the book open they'd be like like the gasp I gasped when I read this line anyway alright what's the line and then they'll read you this like kinda heavy quote from this journal and then it's like emo they'd be like you know I finally figured out my this like my my true shadow and you're like what and it's like you know kinda gets into like this whole like you know like the gypsy girl type of vibe it's like there's a whole like group of people that love therapy that love like horoscopes it's like these like weird venn diagrams that you can find where it's like people who are really into sort of the mystic self and so this book capitalized on that I think today if you were to write I don't know why I said you I should've said me if I were to write a modern day version of you know tony robbins' book at least of heart within or mark manson's book the subtle art of not giving a fuck I think if I wrote a modern version of those and I just pumped let's say 9 months and a quarter $1,000,000 of effort into seeding it on tiktok I think I could have a by far a best seller I think I could sell you know millions of copies of a book | |
Sam Parr | this isn't a book right is this like one of those things where it's like | |
Shaan Puri | a journal | |
Sam Parr | it's like 2 word or 2 pages 3 pages of of of writing and then a week's worth of like notes | |
Shaan Puri | no no no this is not like a planner it's not like a daily planner it's I mean I haven't read the whole thing but like it's basically it's a lot of text content but then there are like fill in the blanks or like what's that for you in a box and you write it in your box but it's not like it's not like just it's not just days and you you you need a journal and it yourself | |
Sam Parr | have you seen design your life is that what it's called yeah designing your life it's like a book by like you know it hits all the check marks or it's like a harvard psychologist who spent 30 years studying happiness and lifestyle design | |
Shaan Puri | stanford I think yeah | |
Sam Parr | yeah like writes a book on this and then it's a it's a cool book I read it and then now they have like a journal that goes along with it and you could just look at this and be like what works and what doesn't work but yeah and by the way the I don't know if this angle would work with you because did you have you googled the author of that shadow | |
Shaan Puri | yeah yeah she's | |
Sam Parr | very aspirational aspirational | |
Shaan Puri | she's darn different to me | |
Sam Parr | very aspirational look | |
Shaan Puri | at that nobody knew nobody could see that when they're buying the when they're just watching a tiktok because it wasn't like it didn't look like a commercial for the book it was just somebody saying how this line in this book really spoke to them or how this book changed the way they view things like there's a whole hook on tiktok that's very famous where they say it starts with somebody saying do you have any book recommendations and then they zoom the camera in really closer to their nose and their eyes they go I have books that will change the way you even like look at the world I have books that will be so good you will never be able to look at a man again and they're like romance books or whatever like I have books that will melt the frontal lobe of your brain and they go like really intense with it and that's a that's like a common like memed hook that they use | |
Sam Parr | so the first it's like the first video by | |
Shaan Puri | the way I like how you were like I don't know if you could do this this girl's hot was the thing you basically just tried to tell me | |
Sam Parr | well she's a 25 year old like I'm looking at this new york times article by the way she's 25 which is just amazing she's like a 25 year old like really pretty woman and that's like tiktok's demographic like you know you're like you're a great voice you're a great voice at tiktok world the | |
Shaan Puri | videos are not her the videos are whatever the videos are from the creator the creator just looks how the creator looks they they don't look like her | |
Sam Parr | and this is amazing by the way you know I think at one. You were like I feel like I'm riding a horse like a few years after henry ford invented the car like it's just like it's you you can't compete when I see these videos and these plans I think to myself I can never compete in this world of ecom this is just insane like the way that they stu like the way that you were describing zooming in on someone's eyes if I were in that meeting and trying to figure out how to do it or in my bedroom like at night trying to like figure out like how do I write this script I would have been like this is like this is like cringe like I can't do this | |
Shaan Puri | do you | |
Sam Parr | know what I mean be able to push post yeah I'm like I I can't you you know what I mean it's really hard | |
Shaan Puri | I totally get what you mean and I'm by the way I'm not saying that these are easy to do I don't I don't mean to say that I just mean that somebody's gonna do these and I think the way to think about this is what are your attributes so for you and me at this. | |
Sam Parr | If we wanna do something that's gonna be you know | |
Shaan Puri | successful we have other attributes like well I could just use capital I have a lot of capital I could just invest in things that are already working that's a easy way to make money I have a good network I have a unique network where I know a lot of people who are doing interesting things and they will uniquely let me into something okay that's cool maybe I have this audience from the podcast so I have attributes if your attributes are I got a shit ton of time I have nothing to lose and I'm pretty shameless with my phone right | |
Sam Parr | and I'm 24 and I grew up like mastering this stuff | |
Shaan Puri | yeah I just been effing around on tiktok or I understand the meta game here better than whoever is the brand marketing manager or the head of paid acquisition for madison reed or whatever these things are then you're the one right moise it's like I get that I can go to facebook ads and tinker on this all day in a way that procter and gamble's head of act head of marketing is not gonna do they're gonna be buying super bowl ads they're not gonna be sitting here in facebook ads manager every day and doing that but you know you get what I mean right like you have different advantages than the incumbents do and I think if your advantage is that you're you grew up on these networks or you're willing to hustle with with in a way that they're not you're willing to sit there and slide into dms and send out free product to do all this stuff you can win and you can win in in in these categories that already exist | |
Sam Parr | when I was with moiz during that I mean when I say with him like he was just you know we weren't like we were just acquaintances but I would just see him on his computer and he's like everyone check this out and he's like he he would track the numbers every single day in this spreadsheet and be like we just changed this number from a 1% to a 1.25% and then it was like now that 1.25 that's the standard for that day now we're gonna add in this one new change we're gonna add a yellow or a red arrow pointing at this one thing boom we just got that 1.25 to 1.4 tomorrow we're gonna do that like it was like a methodical like it was basically like I would joke I just come I was like dude we're all just spreadsheet monkeys because like all we're trying to do is he was just doing was just staring at the spreadsheet turning 1.4 to like 1.6 you know what I mean | |
Shaan Puri | right well I think by the way he's not he wasn't just like that kind of at the beginning and now he's like oh he's made it so he's different | |
Sam Parr | no he's | |
Shaan Puri | he's still the same way dude I had a question for him about our ecom business like hey here's how we're keeping track of this we're trying to use this I don't know if I should trust this or if I should trust Google analytics or if I should trust triple whale or if I should trust shopify analytics they're all giving me slightly different numbers like how do you how did you do it and I just figured I just figured he'd be like you know I just you know I just kept it simple I just did this and he goes he did say I just kept it simple and I was like oh okay cool so which one did you just you just picked 1 and he goes no I just kept it simple every day I went in and I wrote down the numbers for all the platforms every single day here's my sheet and he was still doing it now this is like 10 years later the guy's at a $100,000,000 in the animal yeah a $100,000,000 later and he wakes up in the morning and he sits down and he triangulates and he tracks he goes yeah they never drift between me I'm more than 4% but I just do it anyway so I'm just like it's kinda like almost like a daily practice almost like a like a almost like a religious act he would do every day a spiritual act he would do sort of an offering to the economic gods | |
Sam Parr | if you're a chef at a bakery and you've worked there for 20 years you know that if you leave the dough out for an hour versus 45 minutes before you put it in the oven you're gonna have a very minor difference because you've done that thousands of times and that's basically like the same thing yeah you know what I mean like you notice these very small differences | |
Shaan Puri | I I admire his tenacity towards things I don't think he does anything in a not tenacious way alright let me continue I got 2 more ideas for you okay so I did beauty stuff I did a book or self help and by the way that's how mark manson made subtle art of not giving a f like tens of millions of copies sold he was blogging before that and built a blog audience and he used the blog audience to launch the book and that was | |
Sam Parr | dude a blog audience too seems like so old school like when I'm hearing this because a blog takes 10 years and hundreds of thousands of words and potentially hundreds or thousands of posts | |
Shaan Puri | dude I've told this story before but I'm gonna tell it again because there's a lot of new listeners there was a time when I was building an at about you know 5 to 10 years ago where I was building an app that we thought would be a big hit in high school oh dude teens teens will love this app so I said well what are we doing we're all just 20 to 30 year old guys sitting in this office you gotta let's let's go show this to some teens so we went 1st we stood outside of a a chipotle and we said free burrito if you test our app they looked at us like we were creeps but they took our free burritos tested the app so alright we we need to get more people saying yes right now only 1 out of 10 is willing to take a risk I said how do we just go to where they're a captive audience they're trapped so we went to a school we said hey I'd love to come in and teach a class on business and and at the end I'm gonna tell them about our new app is that okay they said yeah sure we came in we basically got to be a substitute teacher and I remember going up in front of the class I think this is like a 9th or 10th grade class and I was like we're telling about their app they're like alright like we'll try it like just give us the app I was like cool so you just gotta get the test flight and we put a link on the so can we just pull up the link and then you guys just go to this go to this url just go to this link and then you'll get the app and there's this get back | |
Sam Parr | was it was it like sean.com/8jl498 | |
Shaan Puri | whatever I was just like yeah just write it down it's just a just do this link and the guy in the back just looks up and his phone was all like cracked and whatever he just looked at me and he just goes links are gay and I could tell you there was no recovering from that and he said that the whole class just stopped typing they're like yeah he's right links are gay | |
Sam Parr | links are gay | |
Shaan Puri | that's what's like today's blog it's like if I said hey I'm starting a blog because I really wanna use this as kinda like building my audience to promote what I booked I'm gonna do they'd be like blogs are gay it's what like that 9th grader would have shouted at me just like absolutely humiliating me | |
Sam Parr | dude but what's old is new again it'll come back eventually | |
Shaan Puri | hopefully hopefully alright so 2 last ideas candy candles click this link and if you're on youtube you'll see this on on our video screen it's important to look at these because these are you're selling a visual product so go down and see where I put candles just watch that video right there | |
Sam Parr | oh my god it's alright a mason jar holy crap wait those are not are those real oreos so it's a mason jar with a lady dipping what looks like oreos and animal crackers as if she's making like a oreo smoothie with whipped cream in a mason jar | |
Shaan Puri | exactly but the but instead of the smoothie it's wax that's wax | |
Sam Parr | I thought that was real | |
Shaan Puri | because this is a candle no this is a candle so these these that's wax I don't know if the oreos are real or not I can't tell | |
Sam Parr | but that's what I'm saying I can't of course it's not real | |
Shaan Puri | look at the numbers on this video | |
Sam Parr | alright it has 600,000 likes holy shit how many views does this have | |
Shaan Puri | I don't know this so this woman has and she's just like a lady she's just like a baker she just made that video so I saw that video and I was like oh man this could be a product why do I believe this so what just like I said I wanted to take things that worked in the facebook ads heyday and be like could I translate this into with a new distribution engine another version of that is take anything that sells well in an mlm because tiktok kinda works the same way tiktok is basically you you give your product to a bunch of people they go and then shell it to their network and their community that's how an mlm kinda works without the the pyramid part of the the scheme but this lady's worked | |
Sam Parr | so good like I'm clicking their stuff it's like it's like frappuccinos and shit like coffee that looks like it makes me I wanna eat it I wanna drink it but it's a candle | |
Shaan Puri | I wanna eat it drink it smell it I want all of it right and that's what I'm doing it's basically a sensory overload and that's if I see that I think this will perform this will perform if we if we armed creators with this and we had enough volume this content will always perform it has this oddly satisfying sort of delicious thing and people who like candles love candles there's actually I said that wrong there's nobody in between you either don't use candles or you love candles there's nobody who just kinda likes candles that's a candle purchaser and so that's why if you go look up successful mlms and I did this one night I should've done an mfm episode on it but like you can go break down successful mlms and you could try to figure out what product categories are they in because those are categories that you could go into and be successful with if you just took out the mlms same product has the same desire but | |
Sam Parr | you use a new oils | |
Shaan Puri | yeah there's a bunch of them and so like candles is a huge one so I think I think candy candles could be a category that somebody goes into and I'll give you one last one 23andme so 23andme was this like really interesting company it got really big but the company has blown up it is like self imploded it still does $300,000,000 a year of revenue but they've basically the board all resigned they quit the company's losing money the stock is in the tank it's like worth nothing now | |
Sam Parr | dude they had a major hack too I remember | |
Shaan Puri | they lost 6,000,000 people's dna dude | |
Sam Parr | my dumbass I did it when they first launched and like it's been on there forever and I get an email saying your shit's like hacked like someone else has a | |
Shaan Puri | weird to email yeah yeah | |
Sam Parr | it was horrible like it was like the that's probably it has to be the 2nd worst hack behind besides your bank account | |
Shaan Puri | yeah it's terrible but I think and there's others in this space ancestry has a ancestry dna product I think you could sell that through this network and so I think a new way of acquiring customers I think that type of product which is a kind of a mix of a digital and a physical product a subscription product | |
Sam Parr | have you seen the food ones | |
Shaan Puri | no what is it as an allergy or what is it | |
Sam Parr | yeah so you can so the science behind this stuff is iffy it's not you know a lot of people debate if it's legit but that never sensitivity | |
Shaan Puri | is what's wrong | |
Sam Parr | where it's like yeah where it's like which foods are you sensitive to based off your dna and based off your saliva which like it might be bullshit I actually think it is but a ton of people do them myself included | |
Shaan Puri | I think it's bullshit that's why I do it that's why I'm a 2 year annual subscription yeah yeah so I think there's a huge opportunity this is 5 ideas I thought of this morning but I do think that the the upside of it is I think that unlike the cliche you know people the cliche is that you can't get rich quick you know blah blah blah there are actually ways that you could get rich quick you know moi selling native for in two and a half years for a $100,000,000 that's pretty quick it's the best way to get rich is quick as moiz says and so I think that it is not and I and by the way I've seen this firsthand in a couple of the companies that we've started or or incubated that have been in this space I guess what I'm saying is the growth here is quicker than I've seen pretty much anywhere else I don't think it's easy to do I think it's I think you're competing in like you said sort of sharky waters it's not that a lot of people are competing but all the people who are competing here are very smart and very very scrappy but there's a lot of categories out there and if you can find a category where the traditional incumbents aren't doing this I think there's a lot of money to be made | |
Sam Parr | dude listen to this story really quick so do you remember there's this company called elite daily do you remember elite daily | |
Shaan Puri | it's it's like a blog right | |
Sam Parr | yeah so elite daily was a blog launched maybe in 2012 and within 1 year they scaled elite daily it was basically a blog that said like a lot of stuff they said was like controversial so it was like you know why men should do this or women should do that you know and that which is a controversial take and then sometimes it was like just a variety of lists but the the guy who started it his father was jacob the jeweler you remember jacob the jeweler the rapper | |
Shaan Puri | the | |
Sam Parr | guy who like yeah that was his | |
Shaan Puri | supply the rapper right | |
Sam Parr | yeah supply the rapper that was his kid and so he started this blog when he was 22 and this was when millennials were the gen z ers so millennials were the young guys and within 1 year it got to be the most popular blog on the internet when it was getting something like a 100,000,000 monthly uniques he did it in 1 year about 18 months in or something like that I went to their office in new york city and their office was a bunch of like new york kids like 22 year olds who are being paid like 15 or $18 an hour something like that and they had just rows and rows of cheap ikea tables and everyone just sitting there on their computer just like banging out headlines to articles and then they would like write just a couple words they would see which ones like they would post it on elite daily because they had so much traffic they would see which ones get a little bit of traffic and then they would go and write out the articles and then eventually the company sold for $60,000,000 which in the media world it was like the biggest thing on earth and so elite daily if you Google like elite daily acquired it was like the it was just like a massive | |
Shaan Puri | fast was that how many how many years | |
Sam Parr | this was like 10 years ago so I don't remember but I think it was something like 2 years like it was like really fast like they were doing like tens of 1,000,000 in revenue literally within 12 months like it was almost overnight and I remember going to their office and I thought that this was like a legit publication it was just like these like they built like some software that like could guess what was gonna go viral and they were just banging them out in this room and it was crazy because it was crazy it was an example of people who find one little hack and they go all in on it they dedicate their lives to it and they end up building a business that is huge like this is kind of what this tiktok thing which is like oh you're telling me if I just like get this one mom to share this thing oh I'm gonna build a whole infrastructure all around this where a lot of outsiders look at this and like that's crazy like what are you doing that's like ridiculous like you can't do that and they're but why can't I like the math says that this one worked therefore I'm gonna go get 300 of them and this elite daily thing it was insane to see this firsthand and I got to talk to those guys it was all wild this is like the new version of that and so I got to see these guys sorta like I I wasn't particularly friends with the founders I was friends with some of these employees so I get to see it from that angle they got rich overnight basically and it was like the exact same thing of just like finding a little tiny thing and going all in on it | |
Shaan Puri | yeah I think it's not it's not for everybody and it's not easy and all that my disclaimers would be why why am I not doing this well besides the fact that I don't really wanna be you know running businesses anymore but but even if I even if I could even if I wanted to here's why I wouldn't do this it's a really frenetic and stressful space to be in that's changing like every day and so I don't like to I don't know what the right analogy would be but it's sort of like sprinting on quicksand and I just I wouldn't really wanna do it right but but if I had no other choice or if I was wired that way where that's fun for me I okay great I'm not really wired that way | |
Sam Parr | it's also age age age makes you different | |
Shaan Puri | yeah the second thing is that most businesses like the terminal value you know the exit value is in how durable how sustainable how sticky is this and by definition this is not super sticky super durable super sustainable you get the upside which is a fast spike that's sort of more than you could otherwise get organically but the downside is 18 months from now I don't know if any of this will work you might fall off a cliff and so I think that's the the upside and the downside of this and then also for a lot of these it's physical products it's ecommerce which is just its own beast in and of itself you have supply chains you have fulfillment you have inventory risk and you have shitty margins generally and so like I think digital products and software even if it doesn't grow as fast can still be a better bet to make | |
Sam Parr | if you're | |
Shaan Puri | able to go there | |
Sam Parr | so and getting big fast is not necessarily bad as long as you have the right mindset so for example a lot of people don't talk about this but jeff bezos amazon they got huge very fast they were also google's biggest advertiser when Google first released advertising and they got big on the back of Google and it worked because they were like we're gonna use this to make ourselves huge and also we know that the customer is always first we have to provide the best customer service with the best product so if you combine all those things you can create something amazing | |
Shaan Puri | yeah yeah exactly I I do think also one last I guess like important caveat on this is if you do this there's sort of a better and worse ways to do worse way to do it and I would say the most important variable in something like this is just the repeat purchase so how much how much of a true brand and long term customer can you build there's a lot of people that I see doing this for products that you would only ever buy once it's like man you're gonna go through all the mental gymnastics to get somebody to buy one time and then the product is not a consumable it's not something you're meant to buy again and you're gonna have to release a new product in order another a second product or a third product of a whole different type in order to get there that's playing the hard game on extra hard mode don't I wouldn't recommend doing it | |
Sam Parr | I think that reason is if I remember correctly I'm just remembering this from like years ago I think that's why moyse said he didn't do mattresses I think he was like looking at mattresses and this was right when casper became a thing but he was like yeah like a mattress is $400 and literally everyone in america needs it which is great but you only buy one every 8 years right | |
Shaan Puri | so like of the products I mentioned the botox thing the it's that's a constant once you get on that treadmill of you know sort of like face improvement it's hard to get off | |
Sam Parr | tell me about it | |
Shaan Puri | yeah I know I know you're feeling burned right now come a little closer to the camera let's take a look at that puppy hair color you gotta keep doing it candles you burn them they melt you gotta get another one right so like these are things that are consumables that that that have repurchase in them | |
Sam Parr | do we wanna end there and save your last one for another one | |
Shaan Puri | yeah I had a bunch of other ideas not in the tiktok game but I think we got excited and used the whole episode for tiktok so if you like this we probably have 2 more episodes worth of just pure ideas go on youtube or tweet at us and just comment on if you're gonna comment on youtube just be like yo more ideas and tell us your favorite idea of these | |
Sam Parr | alright thank you that's it that's the pod |