How an Early Adopter Mindset Can Make You Millions
Niche Trends, Early Adopters, and Future Millions - November 24, 2021 (over 3 years ago) • 11:19
Transcript:
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Shaan Puri | I would also say there's been a big lesson I've learned: anytime you discover a group of people who are very interested in and living a lifestyle that is different from yours, it's very easy initially to write it off and just say, "Oh, that's frivolous. That's just kind of like whatever. You know, they're out of touch or they're weird," or whatever. It doesn't really matter what category it is.
When I saw gamers and people who stream video games and watch other people playing video games, it was so strange to me. I remember making fun of this kid in college because I walked in on him and he was watching somebody else play a video game on a live stream. The guy was playing in Korea, and I was like, "You're watching a dude in Korea play this video game? Why don't you just play? Better yet, why don't you get outside and let's go get some food?" I made fun of him for it.
Then, years later, I'm selling my company to Twitch, and I'm talking about how great this trend is. He called me and was like, "You mother... you made fun of me for this 10 years ago, and here you are now, like, now you're on board."
That's happened to me so many times in life that now I go the exact opposite way. I see somebody like you who says the same thing that our other buddy said, which is, "Maybe I should go to the Mayo Clinic and get these advanced scans done once a year." I think maybe that's something more people are going to want to do.
Why would he want to do this? Why are people choosing plant-based lifestyles? What is that all about? So now I lean in anytime we discover these things, and that's become some of the best discoveries—like either life changes I can make or investments. It's a great way to invest because you're actually on the cutting edge of stuff. You're in early, which is super important, obviously. | |
Sam Parr | There's a book, a famous business book, where he talks about it. I think it's "Crossing the Chasm" or something like that. He discusses early adopters and then there's basically this bell curve of people.
In the beginning of the bell curve, there are people who are late to it. Then, in the middle, you have the average Joe. There are early adopters and then there's one more group, the cutting edge.
You and I both have a handful of friends, of which I would actually say that I forget the names of them, but in that bell curve, there are people.
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Sam Parr | who are | |
Shaan Puri | Getting names because you got the idea right, but you like butchered all the names.
So, it's basically:
1. **Innovators** - the people actually figuring things out.
2. **Early Adopters**
3. **Early Majority** - that's the kind of like big chunk.
4. **Late Majority** - that's the other part of the big chunk.
5. **Laggards** - who are like, you know, people who still have AOL email addresses and are driving around looking for Blockbusters.
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Sam Parr | And for a lot of things, I would say you are on the right side. You're either an innovator or the one next to it, an early adopter.
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Shaan Puri | I'm trying to go... I'm intense. I'm intentionally trying to go that way.
So, I thought, you know, I'm just not that... I'm not like a futurist type of guy because I've been so wrong. I figured out the formula for it: have an ego, make a prediction, be wrong like five times, and have it rubbed in your face how wrong you were. Boom! You're now a futurist.
I remember the first time the iPhone came out. I was like, "Who the heck wants to read tiny text on a screen? That's awful!" I thought, "Nobody's going to watch a movie on this. You can watch it? Who would ever watch a movie on this tiny square? That would be the worst! It's worse than an airplane headrest." I remember saying these things to people.
You know, I was in college, a junior in college. Nobody remembers this, but I remember being that wrong.
Snapchat? I remember being that wrong. My username still has the word "test" in it because I was so certain. I thought, "Snapchat? This is stupid, right? This is just for kids and dick pics and stuff like that. Certainly, it won't go on beyond this."
Bitcoin? I was wrong early on. Guys in my office were telling me about it back in 2012, 2013, and I was kind of laughing, saying, "Guys, let's focus on something legit here." And now I'm like, you know, a freaking Bitcoin evangelist.
Twitch? Same thing. I was wrong about streaming. I've been wrong so many times that I've actually flipped the script. Now, I kind of had to reassess my life and say, "I'm not going to be very good as a technology entrepreneur or a technology investor if I just continue to write off the big things as dumb and stupid early on."
I need to go the exact opposite way. Okay, what would it take for me to do that? I just inverted. So instead of, you know, anytime I see that same feeling, I instead lean into curiosity. What's making people want to do this when I think it's so strange? And now that's flipped the script for me.
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Sam Parr | And we either had Justin or Emmett on at HustleCon or here, and they were talking about Justin.tv, which was the site before Twitch became a thing. It was basically a platform where anyone could log in and create their own live TV channel.
Emmett, I believe you could tell me if I'm wrong, but I believe the story was that there was a small corner of the site where these guys were watching video games. It wasn't a lot of people—just thousands of viewers—but they were spending... | |
Shaan Puri | 2% I think of the traffic at that time | |
Sam Parr | On Snapchat, a significant amount of time was spent watching, and he was like, "This is the one that we gotta go to."
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Shaan Puri | And I don't even think it was that data-driven. Actually, the data pointed against it because, again, I remember it was a small trap. It was a small amount. They had a combination of two things working in their favor.
Number one, Emmett was like... I guess actually the number one factor was they were in a tough spot. The current thing wasn't working, and they had nothing to lose. They were going to run out of money and fail, or they had to try something dramatically different.
When you feel like you're in a tough situation and have nothing to lose, you actually have one of the greatest assets on your side. You know, when you have nothing to lose, you play completely differently than when you feel like you have something to lose.
So that was the first thing they had to change. The things that were popular were all illegal streams—illegal streams of sports. So they knew, "Oh, people want to watch this," but we can't ever build a business around this.
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Sam Parr | yeah | |
Shaan Puri | So, what 90% of people are doing on this site, we can't use the 2% thing.
Then the other one was, he was like, "I personally like watching these." So he's like, "I'm gonna go with that. These are my favorite things to watch on the network."
If I'm gonna work on this, I'm gonna work on the ones that I personally find, you know, the most interesting.
Actually, most of the company wanted to work on the hotter, sexier idea, which was called... what was the thing called? The video thing they had? Not Viddy, their version of it called...
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Sam Parr | social cam social cam | |
Shaan Puri | So, the company split in half. They said, "Alright, Justin.tv is not gonna work. Abandon ship, and we gotta figure out what's the emergency ship."
They had this idea. I think Michael Siebel, who now runs Y Combinator, and Justin Kan wanted to do SocialCam. It was like Instagram for video. Instagram is the hottest startup in Silicon Valley, but it's for photos. We’re gonna do Instagram for video. They were able to instantly raise money. They got tons of initial hype, traction, and press. All the talented people in the company wanted to go work there.
I talked to this guy, Jacob, who is the original designer at Twitch, and he's still there today. I asked him, "How'd you know to bet on Twitch instead of SocialCam?" He goes, "Oh no, dude, I wanted to be on SocialCam. They just said, 'Nah, like, the team's full, bro. You go work on the thing with Emmett,' because Emmett is his childhood friend. He said, 'You gotta go do that one.' He was like, 'Oh, fuck, alright, whatever.'"
And you know, that was what seemed like the great idea. But actually, what Emmett did was lean into this really weird behavior and unique lifestyle that these gamers were doing. | |
Sam Parr | streaming themselves playing for 8 hours a day that turned out to be the thing | |
Shaan Puri | and that's kind of the playing for 8 hours a day that turned out to be the thing | |
Sam Parr | And that's kind of my point. I think that there are these communities, particularly on Reddit, but you can also do it on Twitter. You could just type in any idea or hobby and add the word "forum." You could find these niche communities of people that are kind of "freaks," and it's fun to learn all about it.
For example, intermittent fasting is something we all talk about now. I remember about eight years ago, Business Insider wrote an article about a Microsoft executive and mocked him for the idea of intermittent fasting. They were like, "What is this?" But there have been communities online where I've read about people doing this forever. You're like, "Fasting? No! Breakfast is the most important meal of the day!" | |
Shaan Puri | Just look at anything they make fun of in Silicon Valley. At the beginning of the coronavirus, it's like VCs are so paranoid about the real world that they're wearing masks to conferences. Guess what? Everybody's doing that now—wearing masks.
Oh my god, intermittent fasting is Silicon Valley's latest craze: not eating until noon every day. You know what Google engineers are doing, right? The media loves to make fun of it, but guess what? That's what everybody's going to be doing.
What are some other things that are like that? I think, you know, some of them are meditation. By the way, that was like that too. People made fun of it, and then, you know, boom! It's like the new yoga.
The other ones I think that are happening are like stem cell treatments or any blood platelet spinning stuff. It's like, "Oh, you have knee pain?" Well, these guys go to Puerto Rico and Germany to get this blood spinning treatment and get stem cells injected in their knees. That and gene therapy.
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Sam Parr | feel good | |
Sam Parr | and gene editing I think is is | |
Shaan Puri | Gene editing is one. Another one is breathwork. I think breathwork is where meditation was. I invested in this thing called Othership; they just actually launched their app. I use it every single day and I use it religiously because it makes you feel so good.
To the average person, I do it outside now after Huberman was like, "Get sunlight on your eyes first thing in the morning." So I do it outdoors, and I'm sitting in my driveway basically doing it. Neighbors are walking by, they're walking their dogs. What they view as a very normal behavior is going for a morning walk, and they see me doing breathing techniques on my driveway. They think I'm a nut, and I love it! I go louder as soon as somebody walks by because I want them to know they live next to somebody from the future.
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Sam Parr | Dude, there's this guy. His name was Bill.
Well, we'll also start with there's this guy named Arthur Leonard. He's dead now, but in the sixties and seventies, he was a New Zealand track and field coach. He had runners like John Walker.
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Shaan Puri | faster and furious actor | |
Sam Parr | yeah yeah | |
Sam Parr | Peter Snell and all these New Zealand guys who started winning the Olympics in the 1500 meters, 5K, and 10K. Everyone's like, "Dude, what are you doing with your runners?"
He goes, "We run like 120 miles a week. We do long distance running, and we go slow. We just do a shitload of it."
This one coach from Oregon got really interested. His name was Bill Bowerman. He said, "Well, I'm the track and field coach at Oregon University. I have all these great runners. What are you doing?"
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Sam Parr | and he goes over to in the 19 seventies in new zealand and he learns from arthur leonard | |
Sam Parr | And he comes back and he starts making it popular. Two things happen: the University of Oregon gets really good at track and field, and he ends up making shoes for his runners so they can run a little bit faster. He calls that company **Nike**. He starts it with another runner, **Phil Knight**.
The other thing that happens, and this just worked out perfectly, is he starts talking about it to all of his friends. He even writes a book about it, and I believe it's called *The Joy of Jogging*. The idea of jogging wasn't even a thing in the seventies. People were like, "What do you mean you're just going to run? Are the police going to go after you?" It was astounding, especially prior to the 1970s.
There was a jogging craze in the seventies. Prior to that, people didn't go out and run; that just wasn't a thing. So anyway, that's another example where running became popular, and Bowerman created Nike to kind of capitalize on it. |